Chapter 116: Winner
The Abyssal Sovereign lasted longer than anything before it, but not nearly long enough to matter. Anrita’s lightning found its nervous system through a dozen barnacle-crusted gaps in its armor, and Aidan finished it with a single close Fist of Judgement that ended the fight before the creature finished its second charge.
By the fourth hour, their waters sat picked clean, tally past sixty tokens and climbing, and the whole group surfaced dripping and satisfied.
"Bram’s island next," Aidan said, shaking water out of his hair. "Let’s see how the dwarf’s doing."
...
They crossed the open water fast and found Bram’s group already gathered defensively near their own shoreline, weapons half-raised at the sight of new arrivals cutting through the waves toward them.
Bram lowered his blade first, recognizing the crimson-gold shape wading up onto his sand.
"Garen." He didn’t sound surprised so much as resigned. "Here to collect our loot, I suppose?"
"Not quite." Aidan rolled his shoulders, easy and unhurried. "You’ve got, what, a dozen tokens? Maybe fifteen? You’re not winning this trial. Neither of us needs to pretend otherwise."
Bram’s jaw tightened, pride warring with sense.
"So here’s the offer," Aidan went on. "Keep every treasure your people pulled out of that ocean. All of it. Just hand over the tokens, and nobody has to bleed for a contest that’s already decided."
Silence stretched a moment while Bram weighed it, glancing back at his own tired, sand-caked crew.
"No trick to it?"
"No trick." Aidan shrugged. "I don’t enjoy killing people who’ve already lost. Where’s the sport in that?"
Bram studied him a long moment longer, then barked a short laugh and waved his group forward.
"Hand them over," he told his people. "We keep our haul and walk away with our skins intact. Good trade."
Fourteen tokens changed hands, gathered into Aidan’s Inventory with quiet efficiency, and Bram extended a hand once the exchange finished.
"Next time we meet," the dwarf said, gripping firmly, "I’d rather it not be across a battlefield."
"Working on it," Aidan said, and meant it.
Bram’s group withdrew to their exit node without further ceremony, gold light swallowing them one by one, forfeiting the trial with their dignity and their earnings both intact.
...
That left one island unaccounted for, and Aidan felt the answer before he saw it, a distant, violent pressure rolling across the water from the direction Vyra’s group had claimed.
"That’s not clearing monsters," Ordun said, tracking the same disturbance. "That’s a real fight."
They crossed the distance fast, and the scene that greeted them explained everything at once.
Vyra’s people fought in a ragged, retreating formation against a group that had clearly invaded their waters uninvited, the Final-stage Divine-rank elf at its head cutting through the ocean itself with casual, contemptuous ease.
Elyndra, Aidan’s senses supplied, the name surfacing from wherever Jovan or Ordun had murmured it earlier. Her blade carried an aura that folded light strangely around its edge, and every swing she landed opened wounds that didn’t close cleanly.
Vyra met her directly, space folding around her own blade in the same tight, economical arcs Aidan had watched dismantle a Divine-rank construct in four seconds flat.
It wasn’t enough here.
Elyndra read the folds before they completed, meeting Vyra’s reappearing strike with her own blade already in position, and the clash sent a shockwave rolling across the water hard enough to flatten waves for a hundred meters in every direction.
Vyra pressed twice more, folding faster and cutting harder each time, but each attempt found Elyndra already waiting, already answering. The gap between Final-stage and freshly-ascended Divine-rank showed itself in ways raw skill alone couldn’t close.
The third exchange ended with Vyra’s guard cracked open and a shallow wound opened along her ribs, and her own group’s formation collapsed entirely in the same moment, Elyndra’s people breaking through and seizing tokens from Vyra’s retreating Hunters one by one.
[Vyra Ashgrove has forfeited the trial.]
Vyra vanished through her exit node a moment later, bitterness plain on her face even at this distance, storm-grey eyes burning with the particular fury of someone who hated losing more than she feared it.
Her whole group followed within minutes, tokens dropping loose into the water the instant each Hunter gave up, and Elyndra’s people gathered every last one with brisk, practiced efficiency.
"That’s the whole trial, then," Aidan said, watching the last of Vyra’s people vanish. "Down to them and us."
"They just fought a real battle," Anrita observed, calculating fast. "Injuries. Fatigue. We haven’t."
"Then let’s not waste the advantage."
...
Aidan surged forward first, wind carrying him low across the water’s surface, and the enemy formation noticed him coming with enough time to brace but not enough time to properly prepare.
Four Final-stage Divine-rank powerhouses anchored their line, Elyndra at the center, and Aidan went straight for her without slowing.
She met his first strike with genuine skill, blade catching his knuckles in a shower of sparks, and her free hand wove a burst of compressed light that should have ended most Legendary or fresh Divine-rank fighters outright.
It caught him square in the chest.
The Ebon Sovereign’s Mantle answered before Aidan finished registering the impact, ancient plating flaring with a slow, patient light of its own.
The attack that should have punched clean through him simply stopped at his sternum, absorbed into armor that had waited five hundred years for exactly this kind of test.
Elyndra’s eyes widened, genuinely startled for the first time.
"That armor-"
"Found it," Aidan said, grinning through the smoke still curling off his chest plate. "It liked me."
He didn’t give her time to recover from the surprise. Halcyon’s Joy laced fire through both fists, and he pressed the opening with a combination that had her backpedaling for the first time all fight, blade rising to answer strikes that came faster than her considerable reflexes could fully track.
Around them, the rest of the battle sprawled across open water in every direction.
Jovan met the second Final-stage powerhouse alone, black-gold misfortune wrapping the man’s every technique in a curse that turned his own strength against him.
The man’s own spirit blade rebounded off empty air twice, once from a wound of its own creation, forcing errors out of someone who hadn’t made a tactical mistake in decades. By the third exchange, he was fighting his own weapon as much as Jovan, and it cost him everything.
Finn simply rained aurora light down on the third Final-stage powerhouse, axioms overwriting whatever defense the man tried to raise.
His shields cracked, reformed, and cracked again under a barrage that never once repeated the same pattern twice. By the time the light finally faded, he’d already turned and fled toward his own exit node rather than face a second wave.
Anrita cut through the fourth in a duel of pure precision, lightning against lightning, and won on the strength of thinking faster than a human mind physically could.
The lesser Divine-ranks fell to Ordun’s crew in a running, chaotic melee.
Veshan traded blows with a late-stage opponent twice his mass, absorbing hit after hit that would have folded a lesser man.
He simply outlasted him through sheer stubborn endurance until the man’s arms gave out before Veshan’s will did.
Kyrsa’s chains found three separate throats across the fight’s opening minute, silver links whipping between targets faster than any of them could track her position.
Sella and Elowen worked in tandem against a pair of mid-stage Hunters, blade and root closing every gap the other left open, roots erupting from the water itself to bind ankles while Sella’s twin blades finished what the roots started.
The enemy formation began to unravel from the edges inward, panic spreading faster than any single wound could.
Elyndra fought like someone who understood exactly how bad her position had become and refused to acknowledge it out loud.
"You shouldn’t be this strong," she said, parrying another strike that nearly took her arm off at the shoulder. "Fresh Divine-rank. It doesn’t work like this."
"Soul Spirit Ascension." Aidan grinned, wide and unbothered. "Turns out it changes the math a bit."
Her eyes widened again, faster this time, understanding arriving a half-second before the confirmation did.
[Conceptual Technique: Fourfold Cataclysm.]
The burst caught her mid-guard, four aspects compounding into a single overwhelming verdict, and even her considerable defense buckled under the weight of it, driven back across the water in a spray of displaced sea.
She didn’t fall. Final-stage Divine-rank pride alone kept her upright, blade raised in a guard that shook visibly now, breathing hard for the first time all fight.
Aidan closed the distance one last time, Metalektron Physique Phase’s borrowed speed still humming faintly under his skin from earlier reserves, and drove a final, decisive strike through the last of her guard.
[Conceptual Technique: Cross of Oblivion.]
The blow landed clean through what remained of her guard, close enough to end her outright, and Elyndra felt exactly how close in the half-second before her own instinct for survival overrode her pride entirely.
[Elyndra has forfeited the trial.]
She vanished through the exit node a heartbeat later, expression unreadable.
Around the battlefield, her remaining people followed in a scattered, defeated wave, tokens dropping loose into the water behind each one.
Aidan surfaced, breathing hard, and found his own group gathered in a loose circle, bruised and triumphant in equal measure.
"Tally?" he asked.
Anrita’s eyes flickered through a rapid calculation.
"We hold every token remaining in play," she said. "The trial has no one left to contest it."
Aidan grinned, exhaustion and satisfaction settling into his bones together, and looked out across the calm, empty water where a battle had raged only minutes earlier.
"Well." He rolled his shoulders one last time. "Let’s enjoy the view and islands while waiting. Clearly, the trial is giving us time to rest."