After the jet-black smoke and the terrifying images of the blood-smeared child vanished from the primary crystal screens with a hissing static, the amphitheater was left in an icy, heavy silence. But the quiet was brutally shattered. With a sharp, electronic click, the secondary, floating crystal screens suddenly flashed back on. The camera lenses of the mechanical birds deep within the inner ring focused on a completely different sector.
The atmosphere on the grandstands shifted instantly. Nicola, Apollo, Nyx, Jane, and Miki stood frozen, staring directly at the central screen, surrounded by millions of beings leaning forward like possessed souls. Show, don't tell: nobody spoke, their eyes were transfixed, their pupils dilated from pure adrenaline.
The booming voice of the Hype Man echoed through the millions of loudspeakers with a hysterical, cracking pitch, his vocal cords nearly tearing under the strain:
“OH NO!!! WHAT IS HAPPENING THERE!!! PHOTO, FLAMO, JESHUA, AND KAELID COMPLETELY CORNERED!!!?”
On the gigantic screen, the four warriors were visible standing in the middle of a massive marble square, fully encircled by a colossal, enraged overwhelming force of hundreds of rivaling dojo factions and heavily armed bandits who were eager to clash with drawn, gleaming steel. The circle squeezed painfully tight.
However, the disguised Silarias did not yield a single millimeter. He spat a streak of blood onto the ground, clenched his fists, and bellowed in a raw, cold voice that cut right through the roaring of the arena:
“COME ON THENNN!!! IS THIS ALL YOU HAVE, YOU WEAKLINGS?!”
Beneath the deep shadow of his sacred hood, his eyes suddenly flashed open like two scorching, otherworldly seas of fire. His hands ignited in a terrifying, pitch-black fire that licked upward along his arms with a hissing, frightening sound, scorching the marble tiles beneath his feet black.
Beside him stood the equally disguised Aurelius in his sleek Shinto Dojo outfit, a dangerous grin on his face. With a brute yank, he drew his sword from its sheath and activated his spiritual power.
“Let me clear the path for you, Flamo! Keep your eyes peeled!” Aurelius screamed over the hellish racket.
His sword ignited with such an intense, abnormal force that all surrounding light was literally sucked into it. At that exact moment, an echo of joyful laughter echoed through the entire space, a terrifying, psychopathic contrast to the approaching darkness. The image on the screen flickered once and everything turned completely pitch-black for a split second, as if the sun itself had been turned off, until all the lights shocked back on and Aurelius pushed all the absorbed light energy into his glowing blade with brute force. The sword vibrated with pure, compressed energy.
Jeshua and Kaelid looked at each other amidst the charging horde. Jeshua shrugged his shoulders, and in a fraction of a second, Kaelid made a quick ‘idk’ gesture with his hands.
“No clue what the plan is, but we’re going all in!” Kaelid roared.
Immediately after his words, Kaelid fell flat onto his back with a backward movement. The marble floor opened up like a liquid, churning whirlpool and swallowed him whole, only to spit him back out a millisecond later with an explosive, deafening crash. He stood there once more, but now fully armored in a heavy, solid stone samurai armor that glistened with spiritual pressure.
At the same time, Jeshua made a fluid, circular motion in the air with his hand.
“Holy light, guide our paths!” he called out in a loud voice.
Instantly, a perfect, intensely glowing halo appeared above his head, hovering motionlessly. As he dropped into a flawless fighting stance, his hands and feet began to emit a blinding, holy light that tore the shadows on the square apart.
The four did not group defensively to conserve their strength, but began launching themselves straight into the enemy lines at insane speed.
“Eat this, dogs!” an enemy commander screamed, as three heavily armed fighters from a rival dojo charged blindly with rage at Silarias.
Silarias spun on his axis with a fluid movement and burned through them like a jet-black vortex of fire. The black flames made the air sizzle. With a devastating spinning kick, he stomped all three of them meters backward in a single blow. The impact was so severe that heavy explosions in the background and right beside him shook the walls and kicked up complete clouds of ash and dust.
Aurelius, meanwhile, flashed through the lines with his sword full of compressed light at an insane, uncatchable speed right between a whole group of attackers.
“You’re too slow! And you too! All of you are too slow!” he laughed frantically while slicing through the ranks. It was pure annihilation; wherever he appeared, the enemy line burst apart in flashes of pure, blinding light and shattering steel.
Jeshua kept moving around them with his glowing feet circulating like a flashing treasure, firing beam after beam of holy light to clear the flanks.
“Keep moving, Kaelid! They’re surrounding us!” he warned.
“Nobody surrounds me!” Kaelid bellowed from inside his stone armor. He vanished continuously into the solid stone floor, shooting over it every time like a flying fish in an arc and striking large groups of enemies point blank with his massive stone sword, catapulting their bodies meters high into the air.
Within an impossibly short time, the complete overwhelming force of hundreds of fighters was utterly finished off. The wreckage was complete.
The camera of the mechanical crystal bird slowly and impressively zoomed out from the blood- and ash-stained battlefield toward the wide, floating screen.
In the stands, Miki and Nicola were going completely wild. Miki jumped up and down wildly, bouncing in her seat while waving her small arms:
“FLAMO AND PHOTO!!! DESPAIR!!! DID YOU SEE THAT?! THEY COMPLETELY WIPED THE FLOOR WITH THEM!!!”
Miki yanked hard and impatiently at the pants of Nyx, who was standing there alongside Jane, staring at the screen with open-mouthed, pure, dumbstruck astonishment. They didn't recognize the aliases Flamo and Photo, but the brute, escalating combat style held them in an iron grip.
Miki looked up with big, glistening eyes full of admiration and began shouting enthusiastically:
“Nyx… Sil would think he’s so awesome, right?! That Flamo with that black fire! He’s just as tough as him!”
Upon hearing his name, Nyx’s face turned pale in a fraction of a second. With welling tears in her eyes, she looked at the small, ignorant girl. Her heart contracted painfully at the thought of her missing loved one.
“That’s right, little one… they really would… they would probably be great friends…” Nyx whispered with a heavy lump in her throat.
But she couldn't let it show. Taking a deep breath, she swallowed her intense grief with brute force. She put on a big, fake smile and forced herself to hyper-actively join in. She began shouting loudly, waving, and jumping along with Miki:
“YES!! THAT FLAMO IS A ABSOLUTE BEAST!!! LOOK AT THEM GO!!!” Anything to ensure Miki wouldn't pick up on a single thing regarding the heavy emotional load resting on the group.
Nyx paused her jumping for a moment and turned her head toward Jane, who was still staring motionlessly with a wide-open mouth at the black fire and the flashes of light. Jane’s hair was standing straight up like a punk rocker due to the immense static electricity of excitement.
“Uhh Jane? Are you liking it? Are you still with us?” Nyx asked with a raised eyebrow, waving her hand in front of Jane’s face.
Jane reacted as if waking up from a deep trance, without shifting her gaze a millimeter from the crystal:
“YESSS! Woah Nyx, seriously smart idea to sit here and watch! That Photo is insanely fast… how does he even do that with that light?!” A light, deep-red blush suddenly appeared on her cheeks as she watched Photo’s fluid movements on the screen.
Nyx noticed the blush, grabbed her firmly by her shoulder, and shook her hard:
“Lock in, idiot! We need to find them! Yeah, maybe that Flamo is kind of cute with that dark vibe, but who cares? Not really important right now, is it?! We’re here on a mission, Jane! We’re here to look for Beat, Aurelius, and SILARIAS! Stay focused!”
Jane swallowed the lump in her throat, shook her head to drive away the thoughts, looked at Nyx with a deadly serious glare, and gave a sharp nod.
“You’re right. Focus. They must be here somewhere,” Jane said resolutely, after which they both focused back on the screen with narrowed eyes.
A few seats down, a bit lower on the stone edge of the grandstand, Apollo and Nicola sat next to each other. Nicola analyzed the visual data, the vibrations, and the physical laws of the fight on the screen, and cold sweat suddenly broke out all over him. He recognized the fighting styles, the combinations, and the dynamics instantly; his analytical brain made hundreds of calculations in a fraction of a second. He leaned toward Apollo with a tense face and whispered hastily:
“Apollo… by the laws of physics, that’s them! That’s Silarias and Aurelius up there on that screen! Should I just say it? Should I tell the girls right now?” Nicola’s breathing was heavy with tension.
Apollo looked at him extremely casually, took a slow, calm bite of his steaming meat skewer, took a sip of his drink, and coolly winked at the panicking Nicola.
“Or you could just wait a little bit longer,” Apollo said terrifyingly dryly and calmly, leaning back. “Ignorance is key sometimes, my brother. Let them stay in that illusion for a moment.”
Nicola’s brain nearly exploded with logical counterarguments, formulas, and strategic reactions, but he looked at the excited Miki and the focused Nyx, let his shoulders drop, and let out a deep, resigned sigh.
“Fine then. Let’s see where your calculations and your gut feeling lead.”
The heavy metal cups of the two men clinked together with a loud, sharp tink, and they drank their beverages in one gulp while laughing.
At that exact moment, Nyx and Jane whipped around, their eyes narrowing into slits as they caught the whispering. They shouted suspiciously and loudly across the grandstand:
“What is up with you guys?! What are you constantly whispering so secretively about over there?!”
“Oh nah, nothing going on girls! Seriously good fight over there on that screen! Those guys sure know what they’re doing!” Apollo said lightning-fast, keeping his face completely straight and casually waving his cup.
Nicola tried to back him up immediately with a nervous, exaggerated laugh, his voice an octave higher than usual:
“Yeah, really… insane amount of colors in that spectrum too! Very impressive visual spectrum of light and dark, truly fantastic to analyze!”
Jane and Nyx squinted their eyes, staring at the duo dead seriously, suspiciously, and distrustfully at first, as if trying to pierce through the lie. But the tension on the screens was too great. Their faces flipped back into the pure, wild hype of the tournament in an instant:
“YEAH SERIOUSLY!!! THAT ONE ON THE RIGHT IS AN ABSOLUTE MACHINE!!!”
The focus of the millions of spectators shifted entirely back to the central, colossal crystal. There stood the four victors in the steaming aftermath of the slaughter: Aurelius in his Shinto disguise with his gleaming outfit, Silarias in his heavy robes still emitting pulsating, jet-black fire like a living shadow, Jeshua with the intensely glowing halo above his head and his luminous hands and feet, and Kaelid as a full rock samurai, his stone armor rattling with every breath.
But the peace was an illusion. The remaining, severely wounded and mutilated enemies scattered across the square suddenly began dragging themselves toward one another in a bizarre, frighteningly coordinated manner. Their movements were mechanical, as if possessed by an external force.
Without a second of hesitation, they reached for their own razor-sharp blades.
“For the rebirth! For the master!” their voices shrieked cryptically in unison.
With brute, bloody movements, they collectively threw themselves onto one of their own surviving allies. They stabbed him to death in cold blood dozens of times, while the man didn't scream, but laughed. With raw, possessed strength, they completely tore his limbs and his body apart.
With the warm, thick, pulsating blood rushing in large streams over the marble tiles, they began drawing a gigantic, perfect circle on the ground with their bloody fingers. When they finished, they lifted the remaining, mutilated torso of the corpse and threw it with a heavy, wet thump right into the epicenter of the blood circle.
Those remaining possessed warriors fell to their knees simultaneously. They bowed their heads deep to the ground and began chanting dark, terrifying shanties with raw, deep, otherworldly voices. The chanting swelled at a rapid pace, pulsating through the arena's loudspeakers, until the drawn blood circle suddenly began emitting an intense, jet-black light that made the air vibrate and sizzle.
“What… what are those lunatics doing now?!” Aurelius shouted on the screen, physically gripping his sword tighter.
All around the four heroes, the entire battlefield began to sizzle, crack, and warp in a visually terrifying way. The solid stone walls of the labyrinth grew thick, black, pulsating veins that moved rhythmically like a living entity, and the hard marble floor beneath their feet began to melt and surge like a swamp of black, boiling mud.
Up on the central stage, the Hype Man grabbed his golden microphone with both hands, his face pale as a sheet while he began screaming over the millions of grandstands in a hysterical, terrified voice:
“WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE BETWEEN THE WALLS OF THE INNER RING?! THIS HAS NEVER, EVER HAPPENED IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE TOURNAMENT!!! THE LORE OF THE ARENA IS BEING BROKEN!!!”
The drawn blood circle on the marble tiles pulsed with a terrifying, jet-black light that cast an unnatural, icy pressure across the entire square. The air above the circle began to vibrate and sizzle as if reality itself were peeling away. Suddenly, a sharp, terrifying sound of tearing stone echoed out. The massive marble floor split open with brute force, precisely at the epicenter of the bloody geometry. A gaping, bottomless abyss opened up, from which a suffocating stench of decay immediately rose. Before the remaining possessed cult members could finish their dark shanties, two gigantic, ash-gray hands shot upward out of the hole. The fingers were unnaturally long, tipped with razor-sharp black claws.
Those claws grabbed the chanting men right by their necks and chests, digging deep into their flesh.
“No! The master claims us! The rebirth is here!” the cult members shrieked in a wave of insane ecstasy, before being violently yanked inward at inhuman speed.
A fraction of a second later, the space filled with the sickening sound of flesh being torn apart with brute force. Immediately after came dull, heavy snaps of breaking bones and shattered skulls echoing from deep within the bottomless pit. The shanties died out in a pulp of bloody debris.
Then, a chilling silence fell over the square. Until two massive, bloody arms slammed onto the edges of the chasm with a heavy impact. With an explosive leap, the monstrosity launched itself upward, leaving the marble floor behind in a cloud of rubble and dust. The creature was a pure, visual nightmare: its muscles were completely exposed, pulsating, raw, and deep red, while the rest of its gigantic, deformed body was semi-translucent, as if it didn't fully belong in this dimension yet. Thick black blood and viscous slime dripped in heavy strands over the marble tiles. The monster threw its deformed head, which had no eyes but merely a gaping maw filled with rows of teeth, far back and began screaming garglingly out of pure, cosmic agony. The spiritual pressure emanating from this scream was so intense that the air around them began warping in waves of pure heat.
Up on the central stage of the amphitheater, the Hype Man lost it completely. He grabbed his golden microphone with both hands so hard that his knuckles turned white. He nearly spat into the device as he began screaming like a madman over the millions of spectators, his voice cracking from pure panic:
“WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS?! THIS IS NOT PART OF THE MATCH! THIS IS NOT IN THE SCRIPT! WE NEED TO GET HELP! SECURITY, INTERVENE! OH NO, TIME IS UP! THE INTERNAL SYSTEMS ARE NOT RESPONDING! WE HAVE TO COUNT DOWN AUTOMATICALLY, THE AUTOMATIC ACCESS GATES ARE CLOSING IRREVOCABLY IN… THREE! TWO!”
The countdown nearly reached the critical one when the cloudy sky above the arena literally tore in half. An immense, deafening crack of thunder shot like a physical shockwave straight through the gleaming portal, followed immediately by three bright, blinding flashes of light that drove the shadows on the square away in a single instant.
The monster felt the approaching threat. With a loud, sharp scream, the creature discharged an invisible shockwave of pure negative energy. That wave hit the four heroes and completely canceled the spiritual powers of Silarias, Aurelius, Jeshua, and Kaelid for a split second. The jet-black flames around Silarias’ arms abruptly snuffed out, the light energy from Aurelius’ sword stagnated, and the halo above Jeshua’s head flickered painfully. The monstrosity took advantage of their paralysis and lashed out with its gigantic, ash-gray claw at brute speed to pulverize them into a bloody pulp in a single sweep.
“Watch out! Move!” Aurelius screamed with wide eyes, but his body refused to react due to the spiritual pressure.
But then he arrived. All the way from the absolute highest edge of the portal, Beat shot downward sideways like a living, electric comet with a brute, perfectly executed dropkick. He accelerated with every passing millisecond, his entire body surrounded by a crackling sea of white-blue lightning that cracked the marble beneath him before he had even touched the ground.
The Hype Man recognized the flashing figure on his monitors and screamed it out over the entire ecstatic grandstands:
“YASS! THERE HE IS! BETO JOINS THEIR TEAM AT THE CRUCIAL MOMENT!!!”
With the brute impact of a crashing meteor, Beat slammed his foot full into the monstrosity's head. The impact was so unnaturally hard that the creature's entire skull burst apart in a thousand pieces of exposed bone and muscle tissue with a loud, cracking noise. Blood and slime sprayed everywhere. But the kinetic energy of Beat’s attack didn't stop; he continued accelerating across the marble floor with a deafening hissing sound of crackling electricity, leaving a deep, smoking scorch mark in the stone tiles.
Before the four warriors could catch their breath to realize what had just happened, the monster’s head rematerialized with a gross, slimy, and liquid sound. The muscles wove back together in a fraction of a second, and the gaping maw opened even wider. Possessed by rage, the creature lunged forward, intending to snap its jaws shut to devour Jeshua point blank.
“I don't think so, ugly beast!” roared Beat, who was already hovering high in the air once again.
Above his head, a compact, cobalt-blue thundercloud formed in a fraction of a second, discharging a massive load of high voltage with an intense magnetic pull. Beat sucked the energy into his fist, dropped downward at breakneck speed, and struck with possessed force.
In pure, viscous slow motion, the image on the arena's gigantic crystal screens slowed down. The camera lenses focused razor-sharp on the faces of Aurelius and Silarias. Their pupils dilated, their mouths hung open as they saw the familiar lightning strike. In absolute slow motion, their voices deep, heavy, and distorted by the surging adrenaline, they screamed out in unison:
“BETOOOO!!!”
With a loud, bone-dry impact, Beat landed flawlessly on his feet, right in the center between Silarias and Aurelius. Electricity still sparked across his shoulders. Without a second of hesitation or looking around, he wrapped his massive arms around their necks at brute speed, pulling them into a quick, firm embrace, and said with a broad, arrogant grin on his face:
“So guys… did you learn how to fight properly without me, or did I really have to come do all the work again?”
Off to the side stood Jeshua and Kaelid, their faces rigid with pure mortal terror, frantically waving their arms and shouting across the square:
“Maybe we should postpone that reunion and small talk for a later time?!” Jeshua pointed a trembling, luminous finger at the monster behind them.
The monstrosity clamped its deformed jaws together while its cracking bones reset into position. The creature rose larger and more menacing than ever before, ready to pulverize the entire sector with its restored limbs.
But Beat was already finished with his sentence, and his gaze shifted into a cold, lethal focus. The moment he concluded his words, the entire atmosphere on the battlefield flipped.
“Now, Aurelius! Silarias! Finish it!” Beat commanded in a sharp voice.
Silarias’ entire body began transforming into a terrifying, jet-black sea of fire in the blink of an eye. The flames were so intensely dark that they devoured the remaining shadows. Simultaneously, all surrounding light was pulled back completely into Aurelius’ gleaming sword with a hissing, violent jerk, causing the blade to vibrate with pure, compressed solar energy.
What followed was a visual escalation of pure, coordinated destruction. A hellish inferno of strikes erupted. The dark, deep fiery hues of Silarias struck the left flank of the monstrosity simultaneously and at brute speed, seamlessly combining with the razor-sharp, blinding light particles of Aurelius that sliced right through the muscles and translucent tissue of the creature from the right side. The monster was literally torn apart from the inside out by the perfect synergy of light and darkness; chunks of flesh burned to ash while being perforated by the light.
In the middle of this visual chaos, Beat’s body suddenly flushed fiery red from pure, pent-up heat and inner electricity. His veins lit up like glowing, fiery threads beneath his skin, and the spiritual heat he emitted was so intense that the marble tiles under his boots began melting, turning into a viscous liquid. He coolly turned his back on the screaming, disintegrating creature and began walking away from the epicenter with slow, confident steps.
As he moved forward calmly, without looking back even once, he casually raised his right hand high in the air. He opened his palm and then squeezed his fingers together with a slow, powerful motion, as if grabbing the sky itself with brute force and crushing it in his fist.
At that exact moment, the complete cloud cover above the arena tore wide open with a terrifying, sharp noise. An unreal, meters-wide wall of pure, compressed high voltage activated in the upper atmosphere. Dozens of thick, bright blue lightning bolts shot down simultaneously, perpendicularly, and at the speed of light. It was a massive rain of pure, electrical violence that drilled directly into the pulsating body of the monstrosity. The immense electrical discharge flashed so hard that the crystal screens went white for a moment and the entire arena trembled to its foundations, as the lightning completely scorched away and atomized the monster's flesh, muscles, and remaining bones in a fraction of a second.
When the immense sea of light finally receded and silence returned, nothing floated over the melted floor except a razor-thin cloud of white smoke and a small pile of gray ash that drifted away silently in the rising wind. The monster was gone. Completely erased.
The Hype Man on the central stage wiped the sweat from his forehead, jumped onto his commentary table, and screamed at the top of his lungs, waving his arms wildly through the air:
“WHAT A SAVE!!! THIS IS UNPRECEDENTED IN THE HISTORY OF THESE GAMES! A TEAM MADE OF ONLY NOBODIES! We know absolutely nothing about their background, we don't know which dojo they originate from, BUT THE NOBODIES ARE SHOWING THEM TODAY! THEY LOOKED DEATH RIGHT IN THE EYE AND THEY WON!!!”
The entire arena exploded into a deafening, insane uproar. Millions of spectators jumped up from their seats in unison, stomping their feet on the stone benches so that the grandstands shook, cheering wildly, whistling, and chanting the names of the unknown heroes on the screen.
Down in the grandstands, Nicola sat watching Jane and Nyx with narrowed eyes. The two girls were still standing there with deep red, glowing cheeks and wide-open mouths, screaming and jumping from the pure excitement of the battle. Nicola leaned back against the stone wall with a sigh, looked at Apollo with a meaningful glance, and whispered while shaking his head, rubbing his face with his hand:
“Apollo… look at them. Are those girls seriously so insanely focused on the brute action of those guys up there… that they don't even remember who on earth they came here looking for in the first place? This is unbelievable, isn't it?”
Apollo looked at the jumping Nyx, who was loudly cheering on the black flames, and was just about to answer with one of his dry, sarcastic remarks. But his voice was abruptly cut off by the booming, amplified voice of the Hype Man slicing through everything once more with a heavy click. The gigantic hourglass at the edge of the arena had drained down to the very last grain.
“TIME IS UP!!!” the Hype Man screamed with renewed energy, as the gigantic, meters-high stone gates of the inner ring slammed shut definitively with a heavy, dull impact, sealing off the remaining sectors. “More than enough teams have been brutally eliminated! The selection is officially complete! The survivors are locked in! The grand finals can now… BEGIN!!!”
The Hype Man clapped his hands together with a theatrical, loud impact. The sound echoed like a whip crack through the entire amphitheater and instantly activated the mechanisms of the arena.
In a fraction of a second, a bright, purplish light flashed around all remaining candidates on the battlefield. Aurelius, Beat, and Silarias stood there coolly, their breathing steady, while Jeshua and Kaelid looked around completely struck by stupidity. Their mouths hung open, as if their brains still couldn't process the insane escalation and the sudden appearance of Beat.
“Wait, what is happening now,” Kaelid began, but his voice was abruptly cut off.
With a loud vwoosh, they were all flashed away at the same time, pulled apart into beams of light and teleported directly to their own private resting quarters deep within the arena complex.
Silarias’ resting room was cold and austere, constructed from heavy, dark stone blocks capable of withstanding the heat of his training sessions. The hissing sound of running water died down as he turned off the tap. After taking a long bath to wash away the blood, ash, and fatigue of the battlefield, he stepped into the room with a towel over his shoulders.
He sat on the edge of the wooden bed and raised his hands to his face. He stared intensely at his palms. The skin there was still faintly marked by the warmth of battle; the memory of the jet-black fire was burned into it.
I really unlocked something new today,
Silarias thought to himself, his pupils narrowing.
The way the flames responded to my pure will, the brute destruction behind it without losing my control… it was a goldmine. I have to exploit this. I need to isolate this power and expand it before the finals break loose.
He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply through his nose, and settled into a perfect, motionless meditation posture to force his spiritual focus straight toward that deep, dark source of fire inside him. The silence in the room grew heavy.
Tap.
Silarias abruptly opened one eye. His eyebrows pulled together tightly in suspicion.
Tap. Tap.
It was the unmistakable, sharp sound of small pebbles being thrown in a light arc against the thick glass of his room window from outside.