Chapter 55: Final
The other semifinal was already over.
By the time Aidan turned to watch, the second field held only one figure standing, and the name above it had stopped flickering and settled into something solid.
Dol Marrek.
’Peak Epic-rank,’ Aidan thought, weighing the pressure rolling off that distant figure. ’The one they all came expecting to lose to.’
He had heard the murmurs during the earlier rounds. Marrek was not from Earth, not from any world Aidan knew. He was an elite from one of the Alliance’s old warrior civilizations, ash-grey skin, silver eyes, calm as deep water, and he had crushed every opponent so far without once looking troubled.
He was the favorite. He had been the favorite before the tournament started.
"The final," the overseer announced. "Garen against Dol Marrek. Prepare."
The whole basin was watching now, the two fields merged into one great ring, and the crowd’s noise had a different edge to it.
An unknown SSS had beaten two Dragon Warlord pupils. That was a story. But a peak Epic-rank ranked high in Epic-rank Leaderboard was another tier of the sky entirely.
"The kid’s good, but this is Marrek. He hasn’t dropped below ninety armor in the whole tournament."
"That’s a full rank above the boy. Skill only carries you so far."
"Still. I want to see him try."
Aidan walked to the line, plain and quiet, and looked up at the ash-skinned man crossing to meet him.
Marrek studied him with those calm silver eyes for a long moment.
"You’ve had a beautiful run," Marrek said, and he meant it. His voice was low and unhurried. "I watched all of it. You solve people. You find the one thing they cannot do, and you build the answer around it."
’He sees clearly too,’ Aidan noted. ’All the sharp ones do.’
"So here is my gift to you," Marrek went on, without arrogance. "I have no one thing I cannot do. I am simply above you, everywhere, and I hold the ground itself." He settled into a loose, grounded stance. "Solve that."
[Tom: Master, this one isn’t lying. He’s heavy. Really heavy.]
[Arthur: Squish him first, ask questions later!]
’He’s a full rank up, and he controls the field. No seam. No specialty to exploit.’ Aidan’s mind went cold and bright. ’Good. Then the answer isn’t a trick. It’s everything at once.’
The Spirit Armor wrapped him at a fresh hundred.
"Begin!"
Marrek did not rush. He simply raised one hand, and the world got heavy.
Gravity slammed down across Aidan’s half of the ring, dragging at his limbs, pressing his blurring speed down to something slow and mortal. The air itself felt like wet stone.
’There it is. He owns the weight.’
Aidan tried his opening anyway, stirring Wind, spinning it, edging it into a Windshear Spiral.
The vortex formed and then sagged. Marrek’s gravity dragged the whole storm down out of the air, crushing its spin, flattening its blades against the floor before it ever reached him. The technique died halfway across the ring.
Then Marrek came in, fast despite his size, and struck.
Aidan, weighed down, was half a step slow, and the blow caught his guard full-on. Peak Epic-rank strength behind it. His armor cratered in one hit.
[Garen: 79/100]
’That’s a lot of points off one strike.’ He rolled with it, out of the heavy zone, gasping the weight off his shoulders. ’Voss took me two at a time. This one takes twenty.’
He tried a Spiral Drill, compressed and fast, aimed cleanly.
Marrek tilted his hand, and the drill bent. Gravity dragged it off-line in the last meter, curving it wide to bury itself harmlessly in the floor.
The crowd’s noise swelled with something, almost like grief for the underdog.
"He can’t land anything. The gravity just eats it."
"And he’s already under eighty. Marrek’s still at a hundred."
"That’s the run, then. Shame. He was fun to watch."
’They think it’s over.’ Aidan circled the edge of the heavy field, breathing hard, mind running faster than it ever had. ’The wind gets crushed. The drills get bent. The traps don’t matter because he never has to chase me. Everything I did to the others, he answers with weight.’
He looked at the gravity itself. At the way it pulled everything toward Marrek’s center. At the way it dragged his own attacks down and in.
’Toward him. It all pulls toward him.’
And the last piece of the whole tournament clicked into place.
’I don’t fight the weight. I use it. Same as the water, the shell, the cage. Turn the thing they’re proudest of into the thing that ends them.’
He stopped running from the heavy zone.
He stepped into it, deliberately, into the crushing pull, and let it drag at him. And instead of fighting the ground with his legs, he reached for Electromagnetism and made his own anchors, gripping the charged air, pulling and pushing himself through the field on lines of force that did not care how heavy he was.
He moved inside the gravity, weightless where he should have been pinned, and Marrek’s calm flickered for the first time.
"There it is," Marrek murmured, and pressed the gravity harder, well deepening, pull turning savage at its center.
’Harder. Good. Pull harder.’
Aidan drove in close, took a glancing blow that knocked him to sixty-one, and did not care, because he was where he needed to be now, right at the lip of Marrek’s own gravity well.
Then he laid the trap the way he had against the sister, Epoxy spilling out and setting hard around Marrek’s grounded feet, gluing the heavy man to the very center of the pull he had made.
Marrek shifted to reposition and found he could not.
’Now the weight is yours to keep.’
Aidan gathered everything into one point. Metal drawn dense and hard, Lightning coiled through it, Spin winding it into a screaming drill, and then he did not throw it at Marrek.
He threw it into the gravity well.
The pull that had crushed every attack all fight caught this one and loved it, seizing the spike, accelerating it, focusing it, dragging it down and in toward the well’s center with all the savage force Marrek had poured into the ground.
And then it went toward Marrek, who was Anchored. Unable to move.
Aidan guided it the last stretch with Electromagnetism, and named it in the half-breath he had.
’Wellfall.’
The gravity-fed spike hit Marrek’s Spirit Armor like a falling star, all of the man’s own crushing weight riding behind a single drilling point, and the armor could not spread a force that gravity itself was focusing.
It punched through in one long, roaring instant.
[Marrek: 100 to 0.]
The tally hit zero.
The gravity died all at once. The Epoxy released. Marrek staggered back a full stride, whole and unhurt, his Spirit Armor scattering into pale motes, staring down at the floor where his own well had turned against him.
For a moment, the basin was utterly silent.
Then it broke, louder than anything all day, a wall of stunned noise crashing across the ring.
"He won. He actually WON."
"An SSS took the Epic-rank final. Do you understand what that means?"
"Who is he? Somebody find out who this Garen is."
Off at the crowd’s edge, Aidan caught a knot of familiar faces, some of Earth’s own Hunters who had come for their own tournaments, staring at their unknown countryman with open disbelief.
[Congratulations. You have won the contested Epic-rank Terrorized Dimension.]
[Ownership rights transferred to: Garen.]
Marrek walked over instead of leaving.
The ash-skinned man stopped a pace off, silver eyes calm again, and looked at Aidan for a long, measuring moment.
"I gave you a wall with no door," Marrek said quietly. "And you made my own weight the door." He inclined his head, deep and honest, one warrior to another. "I have lost before. I have never been used before. Remember my name, Garen. I’ll want this again someday."
Aidan smiled. ’I’ll be way beyond your reach by then.’
[Jovan: A world of your own. Not a bad haul for an afternoon.]
[Tom: And now we farm it, break you through to Epic, and go poke the Devil Prince. Gotta see how prepared he is.]
’One thing at a time.’ Aidan turned toward the red gate at the far end of the basin, the Terrorized Dimension now his to open. ’But yeah. That’s the plan.’
Somewhere above him, hidden in Tom’s pocket space, Solenne had watched every second of it and was awed at his power.
Aidan rolled the ache out of his shoulders, looked at the gate that was his now, and let the ember settle low and ready.
’Alright. Time to go collect what I won.’
