Chapter 155: Chapter 155: Alena Terra’s Match [1]
Elder Alder’s voice cut through the arena’s noise.
"Next match. Alena Terra versus Ren Swiftblade."
Damon leaned forward in his seat, his golden eyes tracking the two figures as they stepped onto the platform.
Ren Swiftblade was lean and wiry, his body built for speed. A thin sword hung at his hip, its blade narrow and light. His movements were economical, each step precise, his feet barely disturbing the dust on the stone floor.
He was a speed-type cultivator.
And he was fast.
Alena Terra walked to the center of the platform with measured steps. Her green robes swayed gently around her frame, her staff held loosely in one hand. She didn’t look nervous. She didn’t look confident either.
She looked focused.
Simply, quietly focused, her gaze fixed somewhere ahead of her rather than on her opponent, as though she were already running through a sequence of movements in her mind.
The crowd stirred around Damon, voices threading through the noise of the arena.
"An alchemist? What’s she doing in a combat tournament?"
"She scraped through the first round on luck, nothing more."
"Swiftblade will finish this before she even raises that staff."
Damon said nothing. He watched her instead, cataloguing the small details the crowd was too dismissive to notice.
The grip on her staff, relaxed but deliberate. The way her feet were planted, weight distributed evenly.
The faint tension along her jaw that suggested not anxiety but concentration, the kind that came from someone who had rehearsed their response to every possible opening.
His Incubus Celestial Eyes flickered to life.
He saw Alena’s Earth Spirit Realm cultivation, steady and stable at the eighth level.
He saw her Verdant Spiritual Roots, her Blood of Verdant Alchemist, her Body of Verdant Alchemist.
All mortal grade, every last one of them.
On the surface, nothing that would turn heads in a crowd like this, nothing that would earn a second glance from the commentators already writing her off as an alchemist who had wandered into the wrong bracket.
But her affinities told a different story entirely.
Earth: 80. Nature: 85.
Damon’s eyes lingered on those numbers. Those weren’t the affinities of someone who had scraped together a passable foundation and called it good enough.
Those were high, genuinely high, the kind of numbers that took years of deliberate refinement or a rare and fortunate pairing of bloodline and spiritual roots to produce.
For a cultivator sitting at the eighth level of the Earth Spirit Realm, they were quietly remarkable.
’She’s not just an alchemist,’ Damon thought. ’She’s a fighter who happens to know alchemy.’
Elder Alder raised his hand.
"Begin."
Ren Swiftblade moved.
He blurred across the platform, his body becoming a streak of motion that left afterimages in the air.
His sword extended in a straight thrust aimed at Alena’s shoulder.
Alena didn’t try to block it. She didn’t raise her staff to parry, didn’t attempt to sidestep the obvious angle of the thrust.
For a single, stretched heartbeat, she simply stood there, watching him come.
Then she moved.
She drove the butt of her staff down against the platform with both hands, the impact ringing out like a struck bell.
Green mist erupted from the impact, spreading in a wide cloud that filled the space around her. The mist was thick and heavy, carrying the scent of damp earth and crushed leaves.
Ren’s sword pierced the mist in a savage, straight-line thrust, the blade vanishing entirely into the thick green haze with the absolute certainty of a man who had never once considered the possibility of missing.
But Alena was no longer standing where he had aimed. The empty air swallowed his strike without complaint.
She had sidestepped, her movements fluid and practiced, her staff swinging in a wide arc that forced Ren to pull back.
Ren jerked back, his boots skidding across the polished stone of the foundation. His eyes, sharp and predatory with the thrill of the hunt, narrowed until they were mere slits, tracking her every shift with mounting irritation.
"Don’t flatter yourself, alchemist," Ren snarled, his voice vibrating with a jagged edge of disdain that sliced through the lingering scent of damp moss.
"You think a bit of parlor trickery and a cloud of herbal refuse will save you? This won’t save you from a real warrior’s blade."
Alena stood motionless amidst the verdant haze, her posture upright and undisturbed. She offered no retort to his aggressive posturing; she didn’t even provide him with the satisfaction of a glare.
Instead, her features remained carved in a serene, stony composure, as though she were merely auditing the quality of an ingredient rather than participating in a life-or-death struggle.
She didn’t seem particularly troubled by it either, her expression remaining composed, almost contemplative, as though she were tending to a difficult recipe rather than standing in the middle of a duel.
She simply raised one hand, fingers outstretched and unhurried, and the green mist that still hung thick around her began to shift.
A faint luminescence crept into it from somewhere deep within, soft and steady, like lantern light filtered through a canopy of leaves.
Tiny motes of light appeared within the green cloud. They were small, almost invisible, like fireflies dancing in the dark.
Damon, positioned at the edge of the arena with his golden eyes glowing with a faint, shifting intensity, watched the scene unfold.
While Ren remained blinded by his own arrogance and aggressive display, Damon’s Incubus Celestial Eyes pierced through Alena’s defense, identifying the true nature of the luminous motes dancing in the air.
’Spores,’ Damon mused to himself, his lips curving into a subtle, knowing smirk.
He recognized the tactical brilliance behind Alena’s composure; she wasn’t just stalling, she was setting a trap.
Ren, however, remained blissfully ignorant, his senses dulled by the fury boiling in his veins.
He lacked the high-level perception required to see the microscopic danger, continuing to lunge blindly into the heart of the verdant cloud, entirely unaware that he had already walked straight into a death sentence of Alena’s meticulous making.
He charged again, his sword cutting through the mist in a series of rapid slashes.
Each strike was precise, each movement faster than the last.
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