Chapter 66: Violet vs Auros: Culmination Arc [27]
Theodore tried to push himself up with his right arm.
His left hand wouldn’t close. The skin across the palm was gone entirely, the raw flesh underneath still smoking faintly at the edges, and every time he shifted his weight the whole arm shook. His vision kept tunneling at the corners and coming back.
A healer crouched beside him, hands already glowing faint green. "Can you continue?"
Across the platform, Auros stepped forward without being called. Calm. Unhurried. He stopped at the edge of the stone and looked at Theodore, waiting, like the answer didn’t matter to him either way.
Theodore looked at his ruined hand. At the healer. He set his jaw and started to nod.
A hand landed on his shoulder from behind.
Kreasial crouched next to him, grinning despite everything. "I got this one." She nodded at the healer. "He’s done his part. Let him sit this out."
Theodore looked at her. Then back at the healer.
"You’re certain?" the healer asked Kreasial.
"Completely," Kreasial said, already grinning again.
Theodore held Kreasial’s eyes for a second longer, weighing it, then he smiled and nodded once.
The healers got him upright, his bad arm slung carefully over a shoulder, and walked him toward the bench. As they passed, Kreasial leaned in close.
"Good job," she muttered.
Theodore’s face came apart and he cried the rest of the way off the platform.
Arthur watched him go. Something warm sat in his chest for exactly a second before his focus snapped forward to the platform.
Auros and Kreasial were already in position. Auros hadn’t moved from where he’d stopped, feet planted, hands loose. Kreasial mirrored him low, knees bent, weight forward on her toes.
"BEGIN!"
Kreasial didn’t wait a heartbeat. Both arms snapped wide and ten ice shards formed in the air around her, five at each hand, edges catching the sunlight in sharp flashes.
"VIOLET KREASIAL OPENS WITH A FULL SPREAD! THIS GIRL DOES NOT WASTE TIME!"
Auros moved before she fired.
Both hands lit blue and he closed the distance in two steps, refusing to let her use the range.
Kreasial’s grin widened. "Ha! You simple-minded monkey."
The platform under Auros’s feet turned to ice in an instant, a cage of frozen spikes erupting around his legs, and his front foot skidded out from under him mid-stride.
She launched all ten shards at once.
Auros caught his balance in a single beat and started swinging. Fist, palm, forearm. Each strike met a shard and sent it shattering off at an angle. All ten, gone in under three seconds.
The coliseum roared.
At the bench, Arthur leaned forward. "Her shots don’t have the density to get through whatever he’s got going on. He’s just shrugging them off."
"Battlemagus output isn’t strength alone," Roz said, eyes fixed on the platform. "It’s a layer over the entire body. Skin, muscle, bone, reinforced together, all drawing from the same reserve continuously. Hitting him with shards is like hitting plate armor with gravel." He paused. "And every second that field stays active, it’s burning through his reserve too. She just needs to last long enough to matter."
Kreasial’s hands moved again, faster. Water droplets scattered across the platform in a wide arc, and the instant they touched stone her left hand snapped down and the floor sheeted over with ice.
"FOLKS, CLASS F IS TURNING THE WHOLE PLATFORM INTO A GLACIAL FIELD! SHE ISN’T JUST ATTACKING HIM, SHE’S CHANGING THE GROUND UNDER HIS FEET!"
Auros’s footing went out from under him immediately. He dropped low, drove both fists into the ice, and launched.
Ten meters cleared in one jump. He came down hard, both fists smashing the ice into a spiderweb of cracks. The impact sent a shockwave rolling outward through the rest of the field, a visible ripple racing toward Kreasial’s feet. She jumped it at the last second, landing in a crouch on a strip of ice that hadn’t cracked yet.
Kreasial was already moving. The broken shards lifted around her in a ring and she fired the whole ring at once, converging on Auros from every angle.
He punched through it. Every direction at once, fists and forearms moving faster than Arthur could track, most of the fragments deflected clean. A few scraped his arms and left thin white lines that didn’t bleed.
His skin’s too tough, Kreasial thought. What do I even hit.
Then his palm came up, glowing orange, heat shimmering the air around it.
A fireball the size of a person’s head launched from it.
She didn’t see it coming. The orange light caught her shoulder and threw her sideways across the platform, her uniform burning away at the point of impact, blistered skin already going red underneath. She hit the ice and skidded a full body length before stopping.
Arthur’s jaw locked.
Kreasial’s eyes, half-lidded with pain, caught the wide ring of meltwater pooling around Auros’s boots from the heat of his own fireball.
She slammed her good palm flat against the stone.
The puddles flash-froze instantly into a ring of jagged spikes, erupting straight up from beneath him in every direction at once. He felt it half a second too late. One spike tore across the back of his calf, opening a thin red line through the fabric.
First blood. On him.
The crowd’s noise sharpened, surprised.
Auros looked down at the cut. Then back at her, jaw tightening.
That bastard switched to range without warning, Kreasial thought, dragging herself upright, grinning through split lips.
Auros gave her nothing. He leapt again immediately, faster this time, and Kreasial slammed up an ice wall and slid behind it, throwing spikes back over the top as she moved. Wall, slide, throw. Wall, slide, throw. She kept building, obstacle after obstacle, each one meant to buy a second of distance.
He went through every single one without slowing down. Through the ice, through the spikes, through the rubble she scattered behind her, like the whole platform was simply terrain he’d already memorized.
He closed the last gap and threw a straight punch.
Kreasial got a cupped shield of ice in front of her face.
It shattered with a hiss and a burst of fine mist, and his fist connected with her forearm through the wreckage. Blood sprayed across the ice. She flew backward and rolled twice before stopping flat on her back.
"AHHHH! FUCK!"
"No—" Arthur was already on his feet.
"AUROS BELKAN IS A MONSTER OUT THERE, FOLKS! PURE BRUTE FORCE!"
Kreasial looked down at her arm. It hung at the wrong angle, already swelling, already going purple at the wrist.
She wrapped her good hand around it and forced a layer of ice over the break, biting down hard enough on her lip to split it.
Auros was already coming.
She threw herself sideways and rolled. His fist hit the platform where she’d been and stone exploded outward in every direction, rubble skittering across the ice in a wide spray.
She tried to form a slab of ice beneath herself, fast, something to push off from and put distance between them.
He grabbed her by the collar before it finished forming.
He lifted her clean off the ground, one hand, like she weighed nothing. Blood ran from her split lip down her chin and dripped onto his wrist.
Her good hand snapped up and fired ice point-blank at his face. He tilted his head a fraction, almost lazy about it, and the shard hissed past his ear and melted in the air a foot away.
His other fist drove into her stomach.
She vomited blood across the ice. Coughed more, the sound wet and ragged.
"HEY, DUMBASS!" Arthur was screaming now, both hands on the railing. "CAN’T YOU SEE SHE’S ALREADY DONE?!"
Kreasial’s breathing slowed.
"HEY! YOU FUCKERS!" Arthur spun toward the healer bench. "STOP THIS! SHE’S DONE!"
Kreasial’s eyes opened halfway. Her lips moved, blood at both corners.
"I’m... not... done... ye—"
"AUROS BELKAN! TAKES THE WIN FOR CLASS A! VIOLET KREASIAL CANNOT CONTINUE! THAT’S TWO DOWN FOR CLASS F!"
In the family section, Welya’s hand was pressed flat against her mouth. Velja had gone still, wine forgotten on the railing in front of him.
The healers were already there, green light spreading across Kreasial’s arm and stomach before her eyes finished closing.
Auros set her down carefully on the stretcher. He turned and looked at Arthur. Said nothing.
Xavier’s eyes were on Arthur too. Steady. Reading.
"This bastard," Arthur muttered.
He reached up and lifted Roz carefully off his shoulder, setting him down on the bench cushion next to Theodore’s still-shaking bellus.
"Remember what you saw, brat." Roz’s red eyes didn’t move from the platform. "How he moves. The fire. Every opening he gave you without meaning to give it." A pause. "Don’t waste it."
"Yes, master."
Arthur stepped onto the platform. The ice from Kreasial’s fight was still melting in patches under his boots. His eyes went from Xavier to Auros and stayed there, moving between the two like he was deciding which one to deal with first.
’Let’s give them hell.’ Vexis settled in beside him, sharp-eyed, fists closing in the same motion as Arthur’s.
Arthur planted both feet on the cracked stone.
"TWO DOWN FOR CLASS F! ONE DOWN FOR CLASS A! THE ADVANTAGE SITS WITH CLASS A RIGHT NOW, BUT FOLKS, VEXIS LESTILAUT HAS ENTERED THE PLATFORM! THE SAME BOY WHO FORCED A FORFEIT OUT OF EVERRETH AND PUT CALVER DOWN IN THE SECOND CATEGORY! WHAT DOES HE HAVE LEFT IN HIM?"
Arthur’s eyes narrowed.
"You’re goddamn right."
