At the head of the group walked a woman who immediately commanded all visual attention. She was built with extreme grace, her long robe finished with subtle, shimmering gold patterns that reflected the sunlight, and her gaze was a breathtaking balance between deep, spiritual serenity and sharp, cutting intelligence. Her pure presence radiated a natural, royal authority that silenced Silarias and Jeshua instantly. Their mouths were just short of falling open, but their arrogant posture vanished in a flash.
Without interrupting her tight, fluid walking pace by even a millimeter, the graceful monk stepped straight toward Malaka. Her steps were perfectly synchronized with his. A soft, mocking, yet deeply warm smile played on her lips, and her eyes sparkled with recognition.
“So, Malaka…” she began, her voice sounding as clear as pure crystal breaking in the thin mountain air, while she extended her hand with a matter-of-fact, intimate movement and grabbed Malaka’s hand firmly, their fingers interlaced. “Is your group finally ready? Or are you taking these children out for a stroll in the park?”
Silarias recovered from the surprise first, though his gaze remained fixed on the mysterious woman. He leaned briefly toward Jeshua with his shoulder, his voice muffled but loaded with suspicion. “What kind of setup is this, Jeshua? This wasn’t in any of the planning. That spiritual pressure of hers… that’s not normal.”
Jeshua stared with wide eyes at the white robes of the newcomers, his fingers drumming nervously on the hilt of his weapon. “This isn’t anywhere, Flamo. I’ve studied all the records of these mountain passes. Female monks in this restricted sector? This doesn’t add up at all. We are on our way to a training camp, not to a,”
“,A road trip?” Malaka interrupted them with a loud, rolling laugh, never letting go of the graceful woman’s hand. He turned his head halfway toward his two disciples. “I should have given you a few more details, young warriors. This is no simple walk to stretch your muscles. This is the prelude to a small, but ruthless tournament.”
The woman took a step closer to Malaka, the golden patterns on her robe lighting up from the pure heat of his proximity. A subtle, pink glow crept across her cheekbones, a rare break in her royal composure.
“And regarding this lady,” Malaka continued, his gaze softening with a deep kind of pride, “this is Kali. My wife. And also the mother of my children.”
Kali immediately recovered her royal posture and turned to the three young female monks who stood in a tight formation behind her. The girls, all between 15 and 19 years old, radiated a playful but dangerous energy.
“Haha, you haven’t told them anything at all again, have you, Malaka?” Kali laughed, her voice clear. She stepped aside and pointed with an elegant hand gesture toward the eldest of the trio, who folded her arms across her chest with a cool, arrogant gaze. “This is Vanya. Her ice-cold discipline freezes the air around her fingers before the enemy can even blink.”
Vanya stepped forward and immediately caused the surrounding mountain air to condense into a wreath of razor-sharp, shimmering icy needles that hovered threateningly around her knuckles.
“Next we have Tara,” Kali continued, as the second girl stepped forward with a wide, challenging grin. “She dictates the laws of the battlefield. No one escapes her gravity.”
Tara balanced on one foot and controlled the heavy, loose boulders around her feet with a subtle finger movement, causing the massive stones to begin spinning weightlessly in the air.
“And lastly, our youngest, Mayra,” Kali said with a proud look at the 15-year-old standing at the back. “Don’t let her calm gaze fool you. Her spiritual shield breaks even the most brutal attacks.”
Mayra nodded briefly and, with a fluid hand movement, let a razor-thin, geometric spiritual barrier flicker that literally bent the bright sun rays and distorted them into an impenetrable wall of light. “Come, get ready. We are almost there.”
With a fluid movement, Kali brought her hands together. Her entire body, along with that of her three disciples, began to glow intensely white. The contours of their figures blurred in a fraction of a second, until they disintegrated with a soft hissing sound into thousands of luminous butterflies that shot up the mountain pass with the wind.
Jeshua stared with his mouth open at the spot where the butterflies had just stood, his breathing completely disrupted. He looked at Malaka with a mixture of confusion and shock. “But Sage… you… we… Women weren’t even allowed in these holy sectors at all? The laws of the old temple dictate that,”
Malaka laughed boisterously over Jeshua’s protests and set the pace again with large, firm steps, forcing Silarias and Jeshua to follow immediately. “Come on, Flamo, Jeshua, keep moving. We are going to the tournament and there are a few hard rules that you need to know now.”
The old monk kept his hands behind his back as he began the descent of the path. “The concept is simple. You are allowed to work together. There is no limit to the capacity of your team, you can gather as many allies as you want. But here is the catch: in an absolute free for all, it is damn hard to create a stable team. Trust is a rare commodity when everyone wants to end up on the same peak.”
Silarias listened sharply, his senses on high alert due to the approaching battle. “And the arena itself?”
“As soon as the tournament starts,” Malaka explained, his voice becoming more serious, “you will all be teleported to random locations in a shifting tournament maze. The walls and paths constantly change position based on the spiritual pressure in the field. You can never camp in the same place. And believe me, the whole world is watching.”
Malaka pointed up at the clear blue sky. Between the mountain peaks flew mechanical birds carved from crystal that scanned the environment with silent wingbeats. “Crystal birds. Everything you do, every clash, every misstep, is recorded live. The energy projections send the images directly to various gigantic crystal screens in the capital and the temples, from every angle imaginable. You cannot hide anywhere.”
The monk stopped walking abruptly on a wide, flat rock plateau that looked out over a deep valley. He turned completely to face Silarias. His gaze became heavy as lead, filled with an intensity Silarias had not seen before.
“Flamo… I know that deep inside you are searching for yourself,” Malaka spoke, his voice carrying weight. “I know that you are holding back, that you are not giving everything that is inside that thunder of yours. That is why I am giving you this now. Behold: the secret technique. It is officially forbidden to use because the brutal strain can simply break the spiritual pathways of normal wielders… but for you, this will strengthen you to the absolute limit.”
Malaka brought his palms together and forced a compact amount of spiritual energy outward. From the rocky ground, a dense, compact cloud rose that remained hovering steadily at knee height.
“Listen very carefully to the steps, Flamo,” Malaka said, his voice taking on a heavy, resonant tone. “What is written in the forbidden scrolls defies the natural order. Step one: you do not breathe into your chest, but you pull the air deep down to the absolute zero point of your lower abdomen. Step two: there, you force your spiritual pathways to reverse the energy. You do not let your power flow clockwise, but you force it with brute strength against the current. It will feel as if your veins are being torn open from the inside by liquid glass. Step three: total surrender to the inner fire. You must not fight the pain, you must drown in it until your core releases control.”
Malaka looked at both of them intensely. “Flamo, go meditate on the cloud. You have until we reach the maze to integrate this. Jeshua… you focus as well. This is not just a sporty tournament. Every year, the Corrupted God manages to worm his way into this event via a proxy. We have to find out how he does it, and who his pawn is in the field.”
Silarias nodded silently. The Sage’s words resonated deep in his chest. Without hesitation, he stepped forward, took his place on the floating cloud in a tight cross-legged position, and closed his eyes.
No more filters. No more restraint, Silarias thought in an intense internal monologue. If this technique can break me, then I will let it break me until only the foundations remain.
He immediately began to follow the exact steps that Malaka had just explained with surgical precision.
First, he sucked the thin mountain air deep inside, all the way past his lungs, deep into the absolute zero point of his lower abdomen. The cold air compressed the pent-up energy in his torso into a lead-heavy, dense mass.
Next, he put step two into motion. With a mental effort that made his temples throb, he grabbed his own spiritual stream. He blocked the natural, calm circulation and slammed his energy with brute force in the other direction, perpendicular against the current.
The effect was immediate and terrifying. A suffocating, white-hot heat exploded in his spiritual pathways. Silarias clenched his jaws so hard his teeth gnashed. It felt exactly as Malaka had warned: as if liquid glass was being pumped through his veins, tearing his tissue open from the inside. His entire body began to shake violently, and thick drops of sweat broke out on his forehead.
Jeshua stepped back in alarm, his hand flying to his sword. “Sage… his energy is unstable! He’s boiling from the inside out!”
“Stay where you are, Jeshua!” Malaka commanded with an unwavering voice, even though his own eyes were fixed firmly on the trembling boy. “This is the breaking point.”
Silarias didn’t even hear it anymore. The ringing in his ears had become deafening. The pain reached a nauseating peak, but instead of fighting, he remembered step three: total surrender. He stopped resisting. He let his consciousness drop completely into the burning ash of his own core. He let the destructive heat overwhelm him completely.
Minutes slid by as the cloud moved slowly along the steep rock walls. Silarias felt how the forbidden energy continued to accumulate, an immense, trapped power pounding against the walls of his soul like a runaway volcano.
Until suddenly a deep, instinctive feeling, a pure, raw gut feeling, cut through his entire being. It was not logic; it was the pure survival instinct of the resurrected entity within him that refused to be dominated by the technique. The reversed energy current suddenly snapped into a perfect, harmonious acceleration.
His eyes flashed open. They were completely gold-glowing, the pupils gone entirely into a pool of divine light.
The pent-up heat in his body exploded with a brutal, deafening visual escalation. An immense shockwave of pure, white-hot light struck outward from his core. The floating cloud beneath him evaporated into nothing in a single fraction of a second. The massive rock walls around the path split open deep, leaving behind wide scorch marks and blackened grooves from the brutal, uncontrolled discharge that shook the mountains to their foundations.
The blinding flash of the shockwave slowly faded, but the intense heat did not linger on the outside. It struck inward with brutal force. It was as if Silarias’s entire consciousness was being sucked through a vacuum, torn loose from the rock walls and the voices of Malaka and Jeshua. Everything around him faded into an unfathomable, deep void. He was no longer on the mountain pass. Silarias found himself suddenly deep in the core of his own soul.
He looked down, straight at his own hands.
Whoa… I actually did it… went through his mind.
His fingers were trembling violently, but not from pain. Something completely new was flowing through his spiritual pathways, a bizarre and almost impossible sensation. It’s so warm and cold at the same time here. The newly awakened energy pulsed like liquid ice through his wrists, only to explode into a white-hot, burning glow just under his skin moments later. His hands emitted so much light that the contours of his fingers almost dissolved completely in the bright clarity.
Then the environment began to deform at a furious pace. The bright, all-encompassing light that had just been shooting out of his core began to dim slowly. The sharp, blinding radiation receded and contracted into a compact, manageable glow, so that it finally became bearable for his eyes to look around. The absolute darkness of his inner world took on a solid form. The ground beneath his feet turned into liquid, pitch-black crystal, in which the golden remnants of his newly awakened aura shimmered like flashes in a storm night.
Suddenly, the serene silence was brutally broken.
From the dense shadows in front of him came the sound of two laughing figures. It was not a hostile sound, but a deep, resonant noise that made his entire soul vibrate. On one side sounded a heavy, baritone-like laugh, something dark and mysterious, full of pure arrogance. Immediately next to it sounded a broad, powerful, lion-like laugh, a deep bass that sounded like rolling thunder over an open plain.
Silarias’s breathing hitched. He looked straight ahead, and his gaze finally captured a clear image of the beings who were sitting there laughing in the void and were now slowly starting to clap. The dry, rhythmic sound of their palms echoed hard against the invisible walls of his consciousness.
The darkness tore open even further and gave way to a tidal wave of pure presence. Details in the space became painfully sharp and visible. In the middle of the void, two gigantic, throne-like chairs materialized, heavy and carved from a material that seemed to soak up all the surrounding light.
On the left chair sat a lion-like god. His figure was massive, wild, and radiated a pure, untamed dominance. His mane seemed to be made of living gold and fire, shimmering with heat, and his eyes spat out a royal pride that made the space tremble with every breath he took. It was the Bansaday in the flesh, sitting with a brutal, relaxed superiority.
Directly on the right chair next to him sat a figure that formed the absolute opposite. It was a wingless angel. His back was bare, marked by raw scars as if the feathers had been torn out with violence, but his being lost not a millimeter of pure, divine authority because of it. On his head stood two razor-sharp, pitch-black horns that pointed proudly upward, and just above his forehead floated a dark, pulsating halo that cast a soft, purple-black glow over his pale face. Behind his back, a long, slender tail with a razor-sharp, dart-like tip glided slowly over the armrests of the throne, moving restlessly like a lurking weapon.
The two giants stopped clapping. They leaned forward simultaneously, their gazes focused tightly on the young warrior, piercing to the bone.
They spoke in unison, and their voices melted together into a massive wall of sound that made Silarias’s entire being wobble:
“Fine… we have reached a decision…”