After A Billion-Year Torture, I Returned As A Transcendent Player

Chapter 69: Victory

The bracket burned down fast, and nothing in it surprised anyone.

Both Redtide cousins carved through their halves of the draw without breaking stride, and Aidan cleared his own matches fast enough that the crowd stopped betting against him somewhere around the quarterfinals. By the time the overseer called the semifinals, the whole basin already knew what was coming.

[Semifinal, Field One: Garen against Doran Redtide.]

Doran crossed to the line with his slit-pupiled eyes already narrowed, and instead of taking his stance, he raised a hand toward the overseer’s platform.

"A request," he called out, loud enough for the entire basin to hear. "Turn off the Spirit Armor array for this match."

A murmur rolled through the crowd.

"My family doesn’t measure anything by watching numbers fall," Doran went on, eyes never leaving Aidan. "I want a real fight. Blood for every hit taken. The match ends when one of us surrenders or can’t stand. Unless, of course, the Epic-rank kid is scared."

The overseer’s gaze shifted to Aidan. "Both parties must consent. Garen?"

Aidan’s easy smile drained away, and what settled behind it was colder and much older than his face.

"Turn it off," he said quietly.

Something in his voice made the nearest onlookers take an involuntary step back, and even Doran’s slitted eyes flickered for half a second before his sneer reasserted itself.

Spirit Armor array was disabled.

"Begin!"

Doran cut his own forearm open before Aidan finished his first step.

Blood leapt from the wound and hardened mid-air into a fan of dark red blades, each one humming with a resonance that set Aidan’s teeth on edge, and Doran’s whole body lit with a deep crimson glow underneath them.

[Bloodcall Edge, layered under a Legendary-rank Spirit Art.]

’There’s the family trick, and there’s the real problem stacked on top of it.’ Aidan felt the pressure of that crimson glow roll across the field, dense and heavy. ’He’s boosted to the same tier I am.’

Aidan pulled his own Spirit Art up in answer, Neonoir Lethal Flow washing over him in dark, silent wind, his Power Bonds layering their percentages on top of it.

Then the blades came, and there was no more time to think.

Doran didn’t fight like his arrogance suggested. He fought like a butcher with a system, blood-blades flying in coordinated waves while he read Aidan’s angles through those slitted eyes, and every blade that grazed anything drew real blood and called more edges out of the wound it made.

The first graze caught Aidan across the shoulder, shallow but hot, and the blood it drew twisted up off his own skin and sharpened into a hovering red needle pointed straight back at him.

’Oh, that’s nasty.’ Aidan spun away from his own weaponized blood. ’My cuts feed his arsenal. Every wound I take fights for him.’

He was faster than Doran. That much was clear inside the first exchange, his boosted speed letting him slip through gaps in the blade-waves that should have closed on him. But every trade of raw force favored Doran, the crimson resonance putting a weight behind his strikes that Aidan’s own attack couldn’t fully match.

A blade he parried too directly numbed his whole arm to the elbow. A second one he took across the ribs rather than lose his footing, and the wound burned as his own blood tried to leave him and join the enemy.

’Can’t out-hit him. Can’t afford to bleed near him.’ Aidan’s mind went cold and quick, the way it always did when a fight stopped being simple. ’So I take away the one thing his whole kit needs. Blood in the open air.’

He stopped dodging and started sealing.

Flame threaded along every cut he’d taken, cauterizing them shut mid-motion, cutting off the supply of loose blood Doran’s talent kept trying to harvest. Then he went further and turned the harvesting against its owner.

Electromagnetism reached out, not for Doran’s body, but for the iron in every drop of blood hanging in the air between them.

The entire floating arsenal of blades and needles shuddered at once.

Doran’s slitted eyes went wide. "What are you..."

"Borrowing," Aidan said.

He wrenched the whole cloud of hardened blood out of Doran’s control, every blade and needle reversing in the air like a tide changing its mind, and drove all of it back at its maker in a single converging storm.

Doran screamed his Spirit Art to full power and shattered half of them with a desperate crimson pulse, but half wasn’t all, and his own edges opened him up across both arms and one thigh as he twisted away from the rest.

Now he was the one bleeding in the open air, and Aidan didn’t give the blood time to answer its master’s call.

He crossed the field in a blur of dark wind and hit Doran like a landslide with a schedule to keep, fists wrapped in metal and lightning, each blow aimed with a surgeon’s disinterest at shoulders, ribs, and thighs. Nothing lethal. Everything painful.

Doran’s Spirit Art flared and cracked under the barrage. His talent kept trying to rally the spilled blood, and Aidan’s electromagnetism kept flatly overruling it, until the crimson glow guttered and the man beneath it was just a bleeding, staggering fighter eating hit after hit with nowhere to fall.

"Surrender’s still on the table," Aidan said, conversational, driving a knee into his midsection that folded him in half.

Doran spat blood and tried one last resonant blade, dragged out of the wound on his own thigh.

Aidan caught it barehanded, crushed it to red mist in his fist, and put Doran into the ground with a short, flat hook that bounced him off the field stone.

"SURRENDER!" The scream tore out of Doran raw and cracking, both hands up, all the Redtide arrogance bled out of him along with everything else. "I surrender! Enough!"

[Match over. Field One goes to Garen.]

The basin had gone very, very quiet.

Aidan straightened up, sealed the cut on his ribs with a lazy thread of flame, and looked across the field to where Kess Redtide stood at the edge of the crowd, watching his cousin get carried off by the healers.

Kess’s face had lost its sneer somewhere in the last five minutes. What replaced it wasn’t fear. It was something uglier, and it had Aidan’s name on it.

’Good,’ Aidan thought, rolling his numbed arm until the feeling came back. ’Bring all of it.’

...

The final started an hour later, and Kess didn’t wait to be asked.

"Same rules," he said flatly, before the overseer could open his mouth. "No array. And I won’t be as gentle as my cousin."

"Gentle." Aidan tested the word like it tasted funny. "Is that what that was?"

Kess opened his own forearms in twin cuts before the signal even finished sounding, and his Crimson Undertow poured out of him like something that had been waiting years for permission. Not blades this time. Tendrils, dozens of them, thick and fast and tipped in those hungry, lamprey mouths, backed by his own Legendary-rank Spirit Art burning dark red through every vein in his body.

He was stronger than Doran. It showed inside the first three seconds, tendrils moving with none of his cousin’s system and all of a predator’s instinct, and Aidan spent those seconds purely surviving a cage of red that kept trying to close from every direction at once.

A mouth latched onto his forearm and drank before he tore it off, and the drain of it hollowed him out in a way no clean cut ever had.

’He doesn’t harvest spilled blood. He takes it straight from the tap.’ Aidan put distance between them, his arm burning. ’Flame won’t seal that. So he never gets to latch on again.’

He stopped fighting the cage and started fighting the man.

Wind and Spin wove into a tight, screaming shear around his whole body, a rotating field of edges that cost any tendril its tip just for touching him, and behind that moving shield, he walked forward through the storm, patient and unhurried, straight toward its center.

Kess poured more of himself into the Undertow, tendrils thickening, and Aidan answered by threading Nether into his shear, decay riding every edge so that severed tendrils rotted to black sludge instead of returning to their master.

Every meter cost Kess blood he couldn’t reclaim. By the time Aidan reached the heart of the storm, the Redtide heir was pale, panting, and out of tricks.

"You should have kept the armor on," Aidan said.

What followed was not a fight. It was an itemized bill.

Aidan paid Kess back for every mouth that had drunk from him, for the sneer at the registration pillar, for "Epic-rank trash," fists landing in a rhythm that was almost bored, and Kess’s Spirit Art broke long before his pride did, which only made the pride more expensive.

He lasted longer than Doran.

In the end, face-down and shaking, one arm bent wrong, he still screamed the same word his cousin had.

"I SURRENDER!"

[Match over. The Legendary-rank Terrorized Dimension Contest concludes. Champion: Garen.]

Aidan stood over him in the ringing silence, breathing easy, bleeding from exactly two places, and looked up at a crowd that no longer had a single theory left about what he was.

Then, he walked towards the dimension door, a casual and carefree smile once again climbing on his face. "Alright, open the dimension door. I want to rest inside."

The overseer quickly unlocked the protective array over it.

Before he could ask if Aidan wanted any protective array to keep others outside, Aidan already answered.

"No need. I have my own means of protection."