chapter 258
Jacob watches Nimirea across the arena floor.
She is powerful. That much is obvious.
Yet, he smiles on and he cups his hands around his mouth.
"IT'S TIME FOR THE SHOW!"
His voice carries across the arena, amplified by Mana, hitting the upper stands hard enough to make students flinch. Fifty thousand people go still.
Jacob turns toward the stands. His eyes find a specific section, third row, eastern block, where a man in spectacles and a professorial coat is sitting very quietly among the students.
"Professor Kharzun! If you'd be so kind!"
The professor of Traps and Cracks 301 stands. He produces a small runic device from his pocket and presses it.
The floor around the arena ignites with massive mandalas blooming across the stone, each one thirty yards wide, etched in lines of golden light.
They appear in sequence, one after another, spreading outward from the center of the arena in a radial pattern that covers every square foot of the floor.
Every square foot except one zone. The space where the Dark Champions stand remains bare.
Nimirea's eyes narrow. She extends her senses into the mandalas and what she finds makes her go very still.
Affliction arrays.
Not simple ones. Layered, recursive, each mandala containing the full breadth of Jacob's Affliction catalog
"What do you think you're doing?" Nimirea says. Her voice is cold. "You've placed your traps everywhere except where we are standing. Are you stupid?"
Jacob grins.
"See, that's the thing, Nimirea. You and the Prophet would have been looking for tricks. Hidden traps beneath your feet." He spreads his hands. "So I went simple."
The sand around the mandalas begins to move.
It starts as a vibration, barely visible. Then a rumble. Then eruptions.
The arena floor explodes upward in several columns of sand and stone.
Bodies emerge.
Asterion comes first, launched from beneath the sand like a cork from a bottle. He lands on the nearest mandala and the Affliction arrays activate on contact. Golden light crawls up his legs, his torso, his arms, sinking through his skin and into his channels. His face tightens. Yet, his grin doesn't falter.
More Champions follow. They burst from the sand in rapid succession, each one landing on a separate mandala. Some of them hit cleanly, rolling into crouches, already bracing. Some of them stumble. All of them wince as the Afflictions take hold.
Nimirea is no longer amused.
Then two more figures emerge from the ground.
Lancelot hauls himself out of the sand with considerably less grace than the others, spitting grit, his sharp cheekbones caked in dust, his arms shaking. He lands on a mandala and the Afflictions slam into him and his knees buckle. He catches himself, barely, and plants his sword in the stone to stay upright.
Garros is next to him, now on his knees, the golden light pulsing through every channel in his body. His teeth are gritted so hard the tendons in his neck stand out like cables.
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Nimirea's frown deepens. She looks at the Champions, all of them. Every single one of Jacob's fighters is standing on a mandala, riddled with Afflictions that should be crippling them.
Then she understands.
She turns back to Jacob.
The Devil's Engine is burning at full capacity. The light blue circles in Jacob's limbs and chest spins so fast it emits a low, continuous hum that vibrates the air within ten yards. Heat distortion rolls off him in waves, thick enough to look solid.
Every Affliction he placed on his Champions is feeding him. Every weakness, every drain, every corrosion flows through the arrays and back into Jacob's body, where the Devil's Engine converts it into raw power.
"I needed the talent from the Star Metal I got and the First Seal to hold all this Mana," Jacob says. When he speaks, the stone beneath his feet cracks in thin lines. "But this is going to make for one hell of a fight."
He looks at his Champions. At Garros, shaking on his knees. At Lancelot, white-knuckling his sword. At all of them, carrying his Afflictions because he asked them to.
"They put their pride after the outcome of this fight," Jacob says. He rolls his shoulders. The air around him distorts. "They took a gamble on me."
Nimirea's water surges but Jacob's aura has pushed the physical manifestation of the Rainbow Skill away, making it evaporate on contact with his aura. And without touch, the Skill cannot drain his Mana.
Jacob vanishes from sight.
He reappears behind Nimirea, inside her defensive shell, the drops of water bending around him, unable to touch him, deflected by the sheer pressure of his aura.
His elbow connects with the back of her skull.
The sonic boom hits the stands a half-second later. Students in the first five rows cover their ears. The stone beneath Nimirea's feet craters. Her head snaps forward and her body follows, driven into the ground at an angle that would have killed most fighters on impact.
The crowd screams.
***
Nimirea rolls. The water catches her before she hits the stone, a cushion of compressed liquid that absorbs the worst of the impact and launches her sideways in a controlled tumble. She comes up on one knee, one hand pressed to the back of her head. Blood runs between her fingers.
She looks at it.
"Impressive," she says.
Jacob is already moving.
Nimirea parries the first slash with a wall of compressed water from her Rainbow Skill, hoping to catch Jacob, but his blade cuts through it. She deflects the second with her forearm, reinforced by Mana, and the impact drives her backward three steps. She blocks the third with both arms crossed and the stone beneath her feet shatters from the transferred force.
Jacob does not slow down.
He chains strikes in sequences, alternating angles, mixing horizontal cuts with rising slashes and short, brutal thrusts that target her center mass. The Devil's Engine hums louder with each exchange, the power loop from his Afflicted Champions feeding a reservoir that seems to grow rather than deplete.
Nimirea is strong. She is very strong. But Jacob is hitting her with the accumulated power of twelve Champions worth of Afflictions channeled through a True Diamond engine, and every blow lands harder than the last.
He catches her guard with a feint low and then reverses the blade upward in a cut that opens her defense from hip to shoulder. The edge of the silver sword scores a line across her torso.
Blood.
Well, blood and several Afflictions that now try to make their way through Nimirea's defenses. She shakes them away before they can fully take hold. Her power is still great enough that Jacob cannot land real Afflictions.
The crowd surges to its feet.
Jacob presses. Nimirea's water rebuilds around her in defensive patterns that he dismantles faster than she can construct them. He cuts through a water shield, sidesteps the retaliatory lance of pressurized liquid that punches a hole in the arena wall behind him, and drives a knee into her midsection.
Nimirea doubles over. The air leaves her lungs. Jacob spins the blade and brings it down in an overhead cut aimed at the junction of her neck and shoulder.
She catches it.
Her hand, wrapped in compressed water so dense it looks like glass, grabs the flat of the blade. The impact shudders through both of them. Her arm shakes. Jacob's arm shakes. The stone cracks in a circle around their feet.
"You hit harder than I expected," Nimirea says through her teeth.
"You can take a compliment after I put you down to sleep," Jacob says.
He wrenches the blade free and they separate.
Nimirea straightens. She wipes blood from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand. The cool amusement is gone. What replaces it is focus.
"Since you decided to summon your Champions to help you," Nimirea says, "I think it's only fair I summon one of yours."
She raises a hand and snaps her fingers.
From the Dark Champions' side of the arena, a hooded figure steps forward.