Chapter 225 225: Gifts and Gitfed
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Time passed.
One by one, the contestants made their way back to Gaia.
In as much as those corrupt worlds were dangerous, killing people with so many resources behind them was genuinely hard. Each of them had arrived with divine beings at their backs, with equipment and preparation that most wouldn't have access to in ten lifetimes. Wiping them out entirely would have required something far more deliberate than what those planets threw at them.
Most came back.
Not all came back whole.
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The first to return was Talos, son of the prince of the left.
His spacecraft came down on the imperial tarp tilted hard, its outer construct severely damaged, landing on one leg like it had dragged itself across the last stretch on sheer stubbornness. The hull was scored deep. Whatever it had passed through on the way out had left marks that weren't decorative.
He stepped off it carrying the black ice lily.
He did not receive a good reception.
The divine being that had accompanied him on the mission had perished somewhere along the way. Gone completely. That kind of loss didn't register the same as losing equipment or a ship. These were beings with histories, with ties that stretched back further than most lineages. His father had lost something personal, not just strategic.
Longdan said nothing when Talos presented himself.
He didn't need to. The silence said enough.
Despite completing the objective, despite coming back with the lily in hand, Talos stood in that reception with no warmth coming from either direction. Not from the high god. Not from his father.
He stood there and took it.
It was around this time that the other factions quietly reassessed. The planets the high god had chosen were not what they had assumed. The damage on Talos's craft, the loss of a divine being, these weren't the results of a standard retrieval mission. Whatever was out there was operating at a scale they hadn't fully planned for.
The mood across the court shifted.
Just slightly. Just enough to notice.
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Following Talos came Thane, son of the prince of the right, and Wilder, son of the Dawn Sword.
Both arrived with their divine beings intact.
Neither arrived with a usable black ice lily.
To be precise, they had lilies. Damaged ones, deteriorated enough to technically pass the criteria but not intact enough to serve any real purpose. They had gone to those worlds, fought for what they could get, and come back with something that sat right on the edge of acceptable without crossing into it.
The high god received them briefly.
A moment. Acknowledgment. Nothing more.
Then Mitus arrived, and the room's attention shifted entirely.
By far the most successful of the group.
Mitus brought back the black ice lily, intact and viable. But more than that, the divine being that had accompanied him, in the place of Hardro the Grey, had received a divine echo during the mission. Growth during a retrieval. That wasn't something that happened by accident. That was the result of the kind of engagement nobody had expected these missions to produce.
The high god looked at him for a long moment.
'Fortune favors the bold.'
That was all she said.
It landed differently than praise would have. Heavier. More permanent.
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Then Raven stepped forward.
Her group came in behind her, spread out in a loose formation. Not a single death among them. Not one.
Who didn't know Raven? The new leader of the Freedom Party, sharp and visible and impossible to ignore in any room she entered. But among the core royals she carried another title alongside that one.
Daughter of the late dark emperor Cassius.
After the events of Varo King World, Cassius had joined hands with Gaia to build what became the ice kingdom. Gaia was the front, the face, the name everyone said first. But Cassius had been a strong backer, cementing his name into a long line of heirs and leaving threads of himself woven into the foundation of something that would outlast him.
Raven hadn't been born to the dark emperor directly. But her mother was the love child of him and Gaia, which made the bloodline complicated and the politics more so.
Raven went down on one knee.
"We have a gift for her majesty."
To her left, the canister holding the black ice lily.
To her right, a second preservation canister. Different shape. Different weight to it.
Mind root.
The source of the barrier that had surrounded the emperor's castle. It had been a gift from the monarch of life to Enzo, passed along quietly and kept carefully. Presenting it here, to Gaia, in this setting, was not a generous act. It was a message. A precise and deliberate one.
It said: we were there, we saw everything, and we know exactly what that place was.
Gaia would understand that. Of course she would.
This was Enzo buying his way into heaven, and not even trying particularly hard to disguise it as anything else.
The high god looked at what was laid before her.
"Good." She smiled and raised one hand, waving it in the loose easy way of someone who had received treasures so many times the gesture had lost all weight. "You are the winner of this round."
Dismissive. Unbothered.
But Raven was still kneeling, eyes slightly raised, close enough to see what the posture was meant to hide.
The glint in that woman's eyes was unmistakable.
Raven had seen it before. More than once, in more than one context. Gaia was many things and she performed most of them beautifully. But greed had a specific texture to it when it crossed her face, brief and real and entirely unguarded for just a fraction of a second before the mask came back down.
She caught it.
Said nothing.
Rose smoothly when dismissed.
Some things were better left unspoken, and Raven had learned a long time ago that knowing something and showing that you know it were two very different forms of power.
She chose the quieter one.