The intense heat of the clashing auras did not drop by a millimeter. Adrenaline surged like liquid fire through the spiritual pathways of the dojo. Aurelius still stood there, his feet pressed deep into the wooden floorboards, his gaze ice-cold and focused. Eye to eye, nose to nose with the three hardened students. Kaelid’s breathing was a sharp hiss that made the air vibrate, Boran’s heavy chest heaved wildly like a forge, and Zephra’s hunter’s grin remained tight on his face, pulsing with an icy pressure. No one gave way. The tension was so thick that reality in the room literally began to warp, the contours of their bodies overlapping in a constant dance of bloodlust and pure discipline.
It was a bizarre, frozen moment of absolute perfection. Aurelius could see the exact angle of Kaelid’s fingers, ready to pierce his vitals. He felt the vibration in Boran’s fist, a fraction away from a crushing downward strike. And at his flank lurked Zephra, like a snake in the grass, waiting for that one lapse in his breathing. A millimeter of movement from any of them would trigger a chain reaction of brute, deadly counters. It was a choreography of pure threat, in which every muscle fiber of the quartet was taut as a bowstring.
Until reality broke between them.
Without a single sound, without the slightest warning, a phantom flashed through the center of the tension. A figure moved with a speed that simply bypassed visual perception, a fluid motion that defied the laws of inertia.
Shinto jumped right between the warring parties. His timing was terrifyingly perfect. In a fraction of a second, he slid beneath the invisible lanes of their auras and landed in a deep, extremely low combat stance, his fingertips just above the tatami mat, his back parallel to the floor. The brute, massive displacement of air caused by his landing shattered the students’ suffocating energies in one blow, as if an invisible shockwave wiped the entire room clean. The gust of wind pulled the incense smoke into shreds and forced everyone to an abrupt stop.
The atmosphere shifted instantly. The hunter’s grins and the entire aggressive ego-act of Kaelid, Boran, and Zephra collapsed like a house of cards. The mockery made way for an icy, deadly serious look. There was no more room for their mutual test. They regrouped in a fraction of a second with military precision, broke their combat stances, and stood in a tight, closed circle around Aurelius. Their faces were taut with tension, their gazes directed outward. Time was up.
“We completely forgot the time,” Kaelid snapped at him hurriedly, his voice suddenly hoarse and heavy with adrenaline, completely different from that earlier disdain.
“Show us what you just fixed with your shield,” Boran shouted over him, his gigantic hand clutching his own weapon tightly as he looked at Aurelius with an urgent expression. “You’re going to need every gram of focus that’s in your gut.”
“Because if you fail now,” Zephra interjected, his cold eyes wide open as the blue glow around his knuckles flickered nervously, “you won’t even survive the next three seconds.”
He didn’t get any further. The sentence was ripped from his mouth.
The entire back wall of the dojo exploded in a harrowing violence of burning splinters and white-hot energy. The spiritual barrier of the temple, that age-old defense that had just effortlessly blocked every pressure from outside, was torn like cheap, tissue-thin paper by an unstoppable external force.
Through the sea of fire and flying debris, a female silhouette crashed straight into them. Her appearance was the absolute superlative of pure, destructive dominance. She was breathtaking, perfectly built with a royal elegance, but surrounded by an aura that glowed so intensely black and purple that the dry air in the room began to ignite spontaneously. Her long, pitch-black hair danced like living shadows in the upward gust of wind, and her eyes spat out a chilly, divine rage that drove the temperature in the dojo to the boiling point in one stroke. The massive wooden pillars of the temple began to crack, scorch, and char from her pure presence before she had even touched them. It was a visual escalation of pure apocalypse, a force of nature wrapped in the guise of a merciless warrior.
I have been too slow,
shot through Aurelius’s mind as the pure pressure of her approaching shadow flattened his spiritual pathways.
This is not an enemy… this is an execution.
“Everyone down, now!” roared Shinto, whose voice suddenly took on a heavy, echoing undertone that drowned out the vibration of the walls.
With a hard, decisive slap, Shinto slammed his palm flat against the central wooden floorboard of the dojo.
Instead of a normal impact, his touch activated an ancient mechanism. The floorboards began to slide into each other at a furious pace, and a heavy, deeply resonating metallic sound echoed from the deepest foundations of the temple, as if a giant hydraulic lever were being pulled that lifted gravity itself.
“Hold on to each other!” Kaelid screamed.
Without hesitation, the students and Aurelius grabbed each other tightly. Fingers clamped onto the sturdy fabric of each other’s clothing and arms were hooked together, a human knot that refused to give in to panic, determined not to let go in the chaos that followed.
A fraction of a second later, the bottom fell out from beneath their feet. The entire construction of the dojo plummeted downward at an insane, nauseating speed into the gaping darkness. Gravity pulled at their bodies with brute force, while the burning remains of the temple above them were reduced to a distant dot of light in an instant. The falling floor slammed with a massive, dull thud into a gigantic underground mechanism. Gears as large as entire houses began to turn with a terrifying grinding of iron on iron, and with a brute swiveling motion, the entire room was shot sideways.
They flew at a mad, flashing speed through a dark network of massive, pitch-black underground shafts. The walls flew past them like a blur of raw concrete and rusty iron, illuminated by the sparks that splashed off the sliding construction. The wind shrieked like a madman around their ears, and the mechanism around them roared with brute, pent-up kinetic energy.
In the middle of that chaotic flight, while sweat stood on his forehead and adrenaline surged through his body like pure electricity, Shinto looked up. His gaze was wild, his teeth bared in a surge of pure, unadulterated hype. The mysterious, calm guide had completely vanished; there stood a warrior whose spiritual pressure was only just beginning to awaken, a force that made the shaft around them tremble.
All this time… all those months that he trained me… he was holding back,
Aurelius realized with a shock, while trying to gauge the immense change in Shinto’s energy.
This is his true face.
“They always call me Shinto,” the man began, his voice carrying effortlessly over the brute violence of the thundering shaft, as if the racket of the mechanism didn’t even touch him. “But that lie is finally over from now on!”
He took a deep breath, his lungs filling with the iron-tasting air of the underground, his eyes flashing with a resurrected, golden fire, and he roared it out over the noise of the rattling construction:
“Listen well, Aurelius! IZANAGI IS MY NAME!!”
But the echo of his legendary cry hadn’t even grown cold before a terrifying answer sounded from above. The pursuit hadn’t stopped for a millimeter. The female apparition shot through the shaft behind them at the exact same insane speed, her dark, purple aura like a destructive meteor in the absolute darkness. She cut through the mechanical noise with a voice like a razor-sharp knife, full of pure, escalating rage that made the walls splinter:
“And you are going to burn for your sins, Izanagi! Because IZANAMI IS MY NAME!!”
As the dojo plunged even deeper into the bottomless darkness and the two powers made the shaft tremble until the concrete began to crack and transform, an immense, divine pressure broke loose from their voices. The darkest depths of the underground shook to their foundations when their voices fused into that resurrected legend, a brute promise that shrieked through the shafts:
“THE ERA OF THE GODS HAS FALLEN! AND THE PANDAVA FAMILY IS HERE TO START THE TOURNAMENT!!”
The words hung like a heavy, unshakeable verdict in the raging air. As the dojo continued to shoot sideways through the mechanical shafts at an insane speed, the entire space around them began to transform. Izanagi and Izanami moved synchronously, wrapped in a terrifying choreography. Their gazes crossed through the void. On one side, Izanagi pulsed with golden, liquid light that lit up the walls like a palace; on the other, Izanami spat out a purple-black apocalypse that made the concrete splinter and char. The pure, suffocating pressure that arose between them forced Kaelid, Boran, and Zephra even deeper into their defensive stances. The two powers were about to tear each other apart, and the dojo was the arena.
Aurelius felt cold chills running down his back. The spiritual density in the shaft was so intense that the oxygen simply evaporated. His breathing stagnated completely.
These are not normal warriors,
he thought, while keeping his core tensed with brute force to avoid fainting from the pure presence of the two giants.
What is this madness? What kind of monsters were standing above us all this time?
Kaelid noticed the mortal fear in Aurelius’s eyes. Even in this gravity-defying flight, his hurried, sharp tone fell away. A deep, almost religious gravity took over. He looked at the flashing gold flows of Izanagi and the approaching darkness of Izanami.
“You have no clue who you’re looking at, huh, Photo?” Kaelid whispered, his voice carrying over the brute violence of the thundering shaft, while his knuckles turned white from the tension. “You thought Shinto was just a strong guide who happened to manage a temple? Look at that energy. What you see there is the blood of the absolute elite. The Pandava Family is not a normal bloodline. It is a dynasty of the purest Divine Breed. Their foundations are not built on spiritual energy, but on the flesh and the living essence of the oldest Dragon.”
Zephra closed his eyes, while the icy, blue glow around his flanks flickered nervously, drowned out by the legend he now had to speak aloud to grasp reality. “For centuries they were the unshakeable shadow of this world,” Zephra took over, his words cold and cutting like diamonds as the wind sliced past his face. “When the sky tore and the city was about to drown in an ocean of blood, they were the ones who kept the gates shut. Invincible. An unbreakable unit that dictated the laws of nature. Until the day the order broke from within.”
Aurelius looked from Kaelid to Zephra, his eyes wide open as an explosion of purple light made the dojo tremble. “What happened? If they were so powerful, who broke them?”
Kaelid drew a bitter, tight line with his mouth. “A catastrophe that rewrote the history books, a cataclysmic event that tore the complete family structure apart. The Corrupted Prince made his move. In that total, suffocating darkness, they lost a brother. Their absolute anchor, the man who kept their powers in balance, was mercilessly cut away. And with that loss, the unity broke. The loyalty turned into poison, and the love into pure suspicion. Since that day, everyone has gone their own way, scattered to the deepest corners of the world, living in the shadow of what they once were.”
Zephra looked up, straight into the flashing purple rage of Izanami, who raised her massive, dark weapon against the golden barrier of Izanagi. “And now they are back. The tournament is not a game for a title, Aurelius. It is the ultimate, bloody reunion of a broken god-family. And we are right in the middle of it.”
As the sparks from the sliding dojo illuminated the shaft and the absolute escalation of their fight was about to erupt in a blinding flash, the brute sound of the underground faded into a serene, almost tangible silence.
Thousands of kilometers away, the dry wind dried an entirely different landscape.
The sun burned mercilessly on a narrow, stone path that worked its way upward like a winding snake along the steep mountain wall. Heat rose from the rocks, making the air above the abyss shimmer. The soothing silence of the mountains, however, was brutally disturbed by the constant, rhythmic sighing of two young warriors.
Silarias walked in front, his heavy footsteps leaving small dust clouds behind on the dry sand. His arms hung limp along his body, his shoulders hung low, and his face was set in a deep, frustrated fold. Walking directly beside him was Jeshua, who dragged his feet forward with the exact same exaggerated, weary posture as if he were pulling along an invisible burden.
“This is really taking way too long,” Silarias complained aloud, his voice full of pure, unadulterated frustration as he kicked a loose stone over the edge of the abyss with a hard kick, watching it disappear into the bottomless depth. “We’ve been walking for hours. Days. My legs don’t even feel like flesh anymore, they feel like they were cast from pure lead.”
“For real,” Jeshua agreed immediately, while wiping the sweat from his forehead with a theatrical gesture and slowing his steps even further. “If something interesting doesn’t happen within five minutes, I’m turning around. This isn’t training, this is a snail race for experts. My spiritual energy is just stagnating from the boredom. I can literally feel my aura dozing off.”
Behind them sounded a soft, deep sound that carried through the thin mountain air.
Monk Malaka started to laugh. It was a warm, rolling laugh that came deep from his chest and cleared the built-up tension from the air in one blow. He walked with a ramrod-straight back, his traditional, deep-red robe moved gracefully with his calm, imperturbable pace, and his heavy wooden prayer beads rattled against each other with a soothing rhythm.
“Right, right,” said Monk Malaka with a mild smile, while looking at the two complaining warriors with a twinkle of mischief in his eyes. “This is all part of the journey, young warriors. The road to the absolute top simply has no shorter routes or fast elevators. Every step hardens the foundation. But don’t worry, this particular part of the route will surely please you.”
Silarias opened his mouth to make a razor-sharp, sarcastic remark when the atmosphere on the stone path shifted in a fraction of a second.
From a narrow, until-now completely hidden side passage between the massive, meter-high rock walls, a new group of travelers suddenly joined them. It was a tight, perfectly coordinated formation of female monks. They were dressed in silky, snow-white robes that flowed with their noiseless steps. They walked so lightly that they didn’t even kick up dust on the path, moving with the grace of trained dancers. But the subtle, vibrating distortion in the air around them betrayed a terrifyingly high, almost perfect control over their spiritual energy. An aura of pure, restrained power hung around them like an invisible shield.