Chapter 12 - —12| Uder Pressure..
Chapter 12 — Under Pressure.
The colossal curtain of purple fire slowly dissipated, leaving behind thick, acrid smoke that clung to the broken yellow marble. The kinetic shockwave had drawn a natural boundary between the two fighters.
Kaelen slid back on his heels, his hands instinctively slipping into his pockets.
Through the dying embers, his eyes immediately lock on to the opposite side of the rift. Tsubaki-iwanome stood perfectly still, his hand lingering on the pommel of his silver blade. A piercing gaze from the prodigy pierced the mist, engraving silently Kaelen’s face in his memory before he slowly turned away.
Kaelen let out a slight sigh, a thin invisible smile on his lips. ’A welcome interference.’ he thought. But he wasn’t quite done yet.
Moving through the chaos with the calculated gestures of a panicked commoner, Kaelen made his way to a collapsed stone pillar. Below lay a high-ranking nobleman, his legs crushed, spitting blood as the last remnants of his life essence flickered.
To any observer, Kaelen simply looked like a distraught survivor looking for a way out.
In reality, his boot brushed slightly against the shadow of the dying man.
Discreetly, Kaelen activated his passive divine flow at exactly 1.9%.
A crippled wisp of black mist escaped from the nobleman’s chest, sinking directly into Kaelen’s shadow.
"Cling"
[ Mana Essence Absorbed: +50 Raw Energy.]
[ WARNING: The King’s suspicion gauge has climbed to 8.5%. The proximity of the Detection Limit is critical.
Turn off the stream immediately.]
Kaelen cut the connection instantly. The dark aura disappeared under his skin. It seemed risky, but taking a look at his internal interface, the raw energy surge was well worth it.
Suddenly a resonant and heavy grunt echoed throughout the arena, vibrating in the chest of each candidate still standing.
The magical circular saws stopped spinning, retracting into the walls with a sharp metallic click.
The huge stone pillars that had divided the battlefield began to sink back into the ground with a heavy, thunderous roar.
The traps were disabled. The human meat grinder had stopped.
From his high platform, the Director of the Academy stepped forward, his amplified voice echoing over the carnage with cruel amusement.
"The count is good. Thirty bodies now nourish the floor of this sacred arena. Congratulations to the twenty survivors. You are officially the new elite class."
At Kaelen’s side, Lyra let out a long sigh, her knees shaking slightly as the adrenaline finally began to subside. She lowered her wind-soaked bow, her joints whitened from squeezing her wrist so tightly.
"We did it," she whispered, her eyes wide open as she observed the bodies strewn on the ground. Kaelen, we’re alive.
"Just pure luck," Kaelen replied softly, adjusting his posture to look like an exhausted and bruised Commoner who had barely survived the ordeal.
In the center of the ruined arena, the twenty remaining candidates began to gather. Segregation was immediate, the surviving nobles, though heavily wounded and diminished at that, instantly regrouped with pale faces but eyes still bearing the remnants of their usual arrogance.
On the other side stood the few surviving commoners, beaten but not broken.
With a deafening groan of an old bell, the monumental doors leading to the Academy’s inner city began to open, revealing a path bathed in a bright, golden light.
As the group advanced, Kaelen felt a sudden, icy breeze pass by his right shoulder. Tsubaki walked by his side. The silver-haired swordsman didn’t slow down, and didn’t look back, but his low voice cut out the ambient noise, only intended for Kaelen’s ears.
"Luck only lasts for a while. Filthy rat. Inside these walls, there will be no chaotic explosions to hide your movements. I will eventually find out what you are."
Kaelen said nothing, keeping his gaze fixed straight ahead.
A few steps away, the red-eyed boy passed the group, laughing to himself like a madman, his clothes soaked in the blood of the victims. He cast a brutal and intrigued glance at Kaelen before sprinting towards the white light.
Step by step the twenty survivors crossed the threshold, leaving behind the blood-stained marble of Boucher’s arena. As the heavy iron doors close behind them with a definitive crash.
They all came back in the end.
For a second, the relief was almost palpable. The air in this new corridor no longer smelled of burnt flesh but the fresher smell of ancient stone and pure magic.
Lyra let her shoulders sag, her chest heaving to the rhythm of a breath she was trying to regulate as best she could.
But this respite lasted only as long as a heartbeat.
Barely had they taken ten steps down this corridor bathed in golden light when an invisible and monumental gravitational pressure fell on their shoulders. It was not a gradual increase in the heaviness of the air, but a real magic blow, a mass of several tons falling from the top of the ceiling without warning.
The knees of three commoners who were marching in front gave way instantly. Their kneecaps slammed into the pavement with a sinister crack, followed immediately by two nobles whose arrogance collapsed along with their bodies. They spat saliva and dust, their faces crushed to the ground, unable to lift even their chins.
An unknown, cold, distorted voice echoed from the moving shadows of the ceiling, amplified by a spell that made the eardrums vibrate until the blood flowed. The chopper is finished, but the selection continues, it seems.
"The dormitories only have real beds for first come. The others will sleep on the cold floor of the courtyard."
Let the race begin, said the divine voice. Everyone was astonished, the murmurs began to be heard in the corridor.
The sadism of this Academy therefore had no limits. Barely out of a bloodbath, the survivors still had to crawl to snatch a right as basic as sleeping on a mattress. It was an all-out psychological war, designed to break what was left of human dignity in the survivors.
Despite the gravity crushing the bodies and turning the blood into lead, the red-eyed boy let out a shrill laugh again, a mad chuckle that echoed against the walls of the corridor. His muscles swelled under his tunic, which was soaked in the blood of his previous victims. By the brute force of his murderous aura, he broke the magical resistance, ripping his feet off the ground with savage violence before leaping forward, leaving bloody footprints behind him.
Tsubaki-iwanome rushed right behind him. The silhouette of the silver-haired swordsman split the pressure as if nothing had happened, his posture remaining upright, fluid, almost insulting in its ease for the others who were dying on the ground.
Kaelen immediately sensed the danger of the situation. If he stood there doing nothing, his secret would burst in the eyes of everyone.
He had to blend into the crowd of the weak. Feigning to collapse halfway, he let his legs buckle, groaning in pain and planting a trembling hand on the ground to maintain his role as a commoner overwhelmed by the events.
He let his breathing become erratic, aligning his grimaces with those of the nobles swearing at his side.
Yet, beneath this act, his eyes remained perfectly sharp, deep and fixed like spears on the back of Tsubaki who was moving away at high speed.
As the swordsman leapt over the body of a fainted candidate, a sudden movement to counter a stronger wave of gravity slightly lifted his travel cloak. It was only a fraction of a second, but for Kaelen’s sharp senses, it was more than enough. An object concealed at Tsubaki’s waist had just appeared. It was not a backup dagger or a pouch. It was an eye-shaped pendant, carved from an unknown black stone, pulsing with a violet and sickly glow.
A glow identical in every way to the destructive energy of the King that Kaelen had narrowly avoided in the arena.
Suddenly the system interface appeared, lighting up violently in his field of vision, blotting out the golden light of the corridor with flashes of an aggressive blood red.
"Gling ! "
[ WARNING : Divine relic fragments detected on the subject Tsubaki-iwanome. ]
[ Analysis : The residual energy corresponds to the signature of the floating throne. High risk of resonance. ]
[ Mandatory Secondary Mission unlocked : Steal the artifact before the first sunrise at the Academy. Failures : Death of the host. ]
The shock was so violent that Kaelen clenched his teeth to the point of breaking his jaws, his heart skipping a beat under his ribcage. The system left him no room for maneuver. The mention
Failure: Death of the host shone with terrifying clarity.
At his side, Lyra was struggling with all her strength. Her fingers gripped the fabric of Kaelen’s sleeve, her knuckles whitened by the effort while beads of sweat rolled down her forehead.
Her eyes pleaded, her wind magic sputtering weak green sparks around her ankles to try to lighten her weight. She was at the end of her strength, on the verge of fainting and ending up among the last ten rejected in the courtyard.
Kaelen found himself facing a deadly dilemma. If he used his divine strength or his freshly absorbed mana to carry Lyra and run, he would blow his cover and Tsubaki, who was watching his every move, would have proof that he was cheating.
If he remained still to play the weak commoner, he would lose the right to the dormitory, leaving Lyra to collapse, and reducing his chances of approaching Tsubaki to steal the relic before dawn.
The invisible timer was ticking, the gravitational pressure increased by 0.5% every ten seconds and the first candidates were already crossing the bend of the corridor. He had to act, now, and find a loophole that the system and the eyes of the nobles could not detect.