Chapter : 879
Lloyd stood beside the small pile of pristine white ash, his breathing even, his posture steady. He looked at the purified remnants of the Jahl with the cool, detached satisfaction of a surgeon who had just completed a long and complex operation. The crowd saw an ending, a victory. But his [All-Seeing Eye], and the cold, hard data from the System, had shown him the truth they could not perceive. The final, spectacular act had not been for show; it had been a necessity. The destruction of the Jahl's spiritual form had left behind a tiny, invisible, and infinitely more dangerous parting gift: an Abyssal Seed of pure, concentrated malice that would have poisoned the very earth beneath the arena for centuries. The Mountain of Fire had not been an attack. It had been a cleansing. A necessary, brutal, and ultimately successful act of surgery on the soul of the land itself. He had not just slain the monster; he had cured its final, lingering disease.
From the shattered ruin of the challenger’s waiting area, the broken, bandaged form of Gias the Valorous was being helped to his feet by two grim-faced companions. His body was a wreck, but his warrior’s spirit, his pride, was a thing of stubborn, unkillable resilience. He had been defeated, yes. But he had been defeated by a strong demon. He could accept that. What he could not, and would not, accept was the idea that this… this fraud… had succeeded where he had failed.
His pain-filled, hazy eyes fixed on the colossal, silent, and now rapidly fading form of the Fire Knight, and his mind, the mind of a professional warrior, a man who understood the slow, grinding, and decades-long process of cultivating power, latched onto the one, single, glaring impossibility of the entire, insane spectacle.
The power. The sheer, overwhelming, and utterly mature scale of the power.
He was the first to find his voice, and it was a raw, ragged, and furiously incredulous roar that shattered the arena’s sacred silence.
“IMPOSSIBLE!”
The word was a physical blow, a stone thrown into the still, shocked surface of the crowd’s consciousness. Every head, every eye, turned to him.
“He is a fraud!” Gias bellowed, his voice cracking with a mixture of pain and righteous, professional outrage. He pointed a trembling, bandaged finger at the figure on the arena floor. “That… that is not the power of a young man! That is the power of a grandmaster, of an archmage! The kind of control, the kind of raw, elemental dominance he just displayed… it takes a lifetime to achieve! Decades of training, of meditation, of a hundred hard-won battles! No one, I repeat, no one under the age of twenty-five can wield that kind of power! It is a fundamental law of spiritual mechanics!”
He was right, of course. In their world, the cultivation of spiritual power was a slow, arduous process. The human body and spirit were like a vessel that had to be slowly, carefully, and painstakingly enlarged and reinforced over many years to contain a greater and greater amount of power. A young man’s vessel was simply too small, too fragile, to hold the kind of cosmic ocean of energy they had just witnessed. To do so would be to shatter oneself from the inside out.
“It is a trick!” Gias roared, his words now finding a purchase in the crowd’s confused, desperate minds. They had been looking for an explanation, any explanation, that could make sense of the impossible thing they had seen. And Gias, their fallen hero, had just given them one. “It is an illusion! An artifact! He is using some forbidden, ancient relic to channel a power that is not his own! It is a violation of the sacred rules of the Challenge! He is a cheat! A fraud!”
The accusation was a spark in a tinderbox of confusion and fear. The crowd, desperate for a logical, understandable narrative, seized upon it. A low, angry murmur began to ripple through the stands, a sound that quickly grew into a roar of a different kind. The awe was being replaced by a more familiar, and far more satisfying, emotion: a righteous, indignant fury.
They had been tricked. Hoodwinked. The miracle was a lie. The saint was a sinner.
The weary, one-eyed Royal Knight, who had been standing at the arena gate, his own mind a shattered ruin of disbelief, heard Gias’s words, and the cold, hard logic of them resonated with his own lifetime of experience. He, too, knew the laws of power. And he knew that what he had just witnessed was, by those laws, utterly, completely, and fundamentally impossible.
Chapter : 880
His duty, which had been momentarily obliterated by awe, now reasserted itself with a cold, iron-clad certainty. The rules of the Challenge were sacred. And the first, and most important, rule was that a challenger must fight with their own, innate power. The use of high-level, power-amplifying artifacts was strictly, and explicitly, forbidden.
His face, which had been a mask of stunned shock, now hardened into a grim, professional resolve. His hand dropped to the hilt of the massive, two-handed sword at his side. He was the guardian of this ring of judgment, and he had just witnessed a profound, and very public, violation of its laws.
He took a single, heavy, and decisive step onto the sand of the arena. He began to walk towards the small, unassuming figure in the healer’s robes, his every movement a statement of his purpose. The other Royal Guards, seeing their commander’s intent, followed suit, their own hands dropping to their swords, their faces grim and set. They began to spread out, forming a wide, semi-circular cordon, their movements the practiced, efficient ballet of a team of hunters closing in on their prey.
The hero had been declared a fraud. The crowd was baying for his blood. And the law, in the form of a dozen, heavily armed, and very determined Royal Knights, was coming to apprehend him. The greatest triumph of Lloyd’s life was, in a matter of seconds, about to become his most public, and most disastrous, defeat.
Lloyd stood his ground, the calm, still center of a rising, chaotic storm. He watched the approaching line of Royal Knights, their armor gleaming in the sun, their hands on their swords, their expressions a uniform mask of grim, professional duty. He heard the roar of the crowd, the fickle, hungry beast that had, in the space of a single hour, gone from mockery to worship and was now baying for his blood. And he saw the triumphant, vindicated sneer on the face of the broken champion, Gias, who was now the hero of a new, and far more satisfying, story: the story of the man who had exposed the great fraud.
The Major General’s mind, the cold, calculating engine that was always running beneath the surface, analyzed the new tactical situation with a dispassionate, almost bored, clarity. The gambit had been a success, perhaps too much of a success. The display of power had been so overwhelming, so far outside the established norms of their reality, that it had broken their suspension of disbelief. They could not accept the miracle, so they had defaulted to the only other possible explanation: a cheat.
It was a predictable, if inconvenient, development. He had, of course, anticipated this possibility. He had a dozen different contingency plans, a dozen different escape routes. He could, with a thought, unleash his spirits in their full, glorious, and undeniable Transcendent forms and simply slaughter his way out of the arena. He could use Fang Fairy’s conceptual speed to vanish, leaving them with nothing but a mystery and a pile of dead knights. He could use his Void power, the Black Ring Eyes, to simply turn off the minds of his accusers, leaving them as drooling, empty-eyed husks.
But all of those options were messy. They were loud. They would destroy the beautiful, perfect legend of the humble, saintly doctor he had worked so hard to build. He had not come this far, had not played this intricate, beautiful game with such flawless precision, only to end it with a crude, brutish display of overwhelming force. No. The performance had to continue. The story had to reach its proper, elegant conclusion.
He remained perfectly still, he is profoundly, deeply confused by the sudden, hostile turn of events. He was the innocent, the victim, the humble healer who had just performed a miracle and was now being accused of a crime he did not even understand.
The one-eyed Royal Knight, the commander of the unit, reached him first. He stopped a respectful, but also threatening, ten feet away, his hand still resting on the pommel of his greatsword. His one good eye was a cold, hard chip of granite, and it was filled with a look of profound, weary disappointment.
“Challenger,” the knight said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that carried across the now-hushed arena. The crowd had fallen silent again, eager to witness the final, dramatic confrontation. “By the authority of the Sultan, and by the sacred laws of the Jahl Challenge, I am placing you under arrest.”