Veil of Aether

When the tournament officially began, Kei Y already had many eyes on him.

Most assumed he was a Healing Force user. After all, they'd seen him casually radiate that energy before—healing someone he had just knocked out. So that’s what he let them believe. If they wanted to see a healer, then that’s what he’d show them.

Before departure, Auserre, Oceanna, and the Vendor had each taken turns drilling into him the sacred weight of what he carried.

His eyes—his Kaleidoscope Eyes—weren’t just rare. They were universal-class treasures. Tools, weapons, conduits—sources of power so valuable that even whispering their existence could cause a stir across entire galaxies. To them, they were relics. To him, they were just… useful.

And while Kei Y might not have fully understood the depth of their importance, he wasn’t completely foolish. He got the gist. So instead of using the Kaleidoscope Eyes to channel other forces—something they were uniquely capable of—he did what he always did:

He used his connections.

Auserre didn’t even realize that his “connections” were far more terrifying than the Eyes themselves. She assumed the Eyes were his biggest asset. That his ocular skill was the pinnacle of his talent.

But the truth was, the forces he accessed through his bonds were deeper. Stronger.

For now, though, Auserre didn’t push too hard. It unsettled her, how casually Kei Y treated his powers, how naturally he adapted to things that should’ve taken years to even understand. So before they left, she made one thing absolutely clear:

“Whichever force you show first,” she warned, “you’d better stick with it. Don’t switch. Don’t rotate. Don’t let anyone know what else you can do.”

She didn’t want his talents on display.

She didn’t want the Kingdoms to look his way just yet.

And Kei Y—reluctantly, with a little dramatic sigh—agreed.

So when the match began, and people watched him glowing faintly with golden radiance, pushing healing energy into his limbs, they simply nodded to themselves.

The moment Kei Y launched his projectile using the atlatl, a thunderous boom split the air. The sheer force behind the throw sent a violent shockwave rippling across the recruit class formation, scattering several participants from other kingdoms in a single motion.

It was overwhelming.

And unmistakable.

In that instant, more eyes turned toward him—both in the sky and down below. That one action wasn’t just powerful—it was a signal. The starter pistol that triggered the descent into chaos. Like a dam cracking open, the floodgates burst wide, and the recruit class challenge officially exploded into life.

Participants from the other kingdoms scrambled mid-air, reorganizing themselves. Force skills flared across the sky as aether surged in different colors and shapes, a dozen counters being prepared at once.

“Are you always this flashy?” Silvie asked mid-fall, her voice dry as she glanced sideways at Kei Y.

“Not really,” Kei Y answered casually while patting Olly's head, the panda cub who was snuggled up in his robes, as if he hadn’t just launched a spear that detonated an aerial formation.

“You have a unique way of not being flashy,” Kei M chided, clearly unimpressed.

Spinning lazily in the air, Inpu chuckled. “I think they don’t agree with your statement either, Khenu,” he said, gesturing toward the waves of force techniques now converging toward their position.

Mia, for her part, was completely unfazed. She twirled in the air with a delighted giggle, her mask glowing faintly as she spun in lazy circles like a falling leaf.

“Be careful, Mia,” Silvie called out, more out of habit than worry.

“Hehehe~,” Mia sang back, clearly enjoying the freefall more than any child should.

As their descent continued, each cultivation realm team drifted down their designated sides of the pyramid.

And then—

BOOM.

A burst of crimson flame from a Jerusalem participant. A wave of spiraling wind from Japan. A series of crushing stone fists from India’s team.

Explosions echoed across the massive structure. Participants who weren’t fast enough or skilled enough were struck mid-air—flung directly into the pyramid’s walls. A bright flash would flare where contact was made, and just like that—

[Eliminated]

One by one, contestants vanished from the sky, disqualified the moment they touched the pyramid.

Kei Y’s team, still weaving effortlessly through the air, didn’t break formation.

Even as the battlefield erupted around them.

Due to Kei Y’s explosive opening move, his team had instantly become a beacon—a high-value target. Nearly every recruit class participant across the kingdoms turned their eyes toward them, galvanized by the chance to earn glory by taking down the now-famous masked group. It wasn’t just about pride anymore—it was about making a spectacle of it. A statement.

And the biggest target of all?

Kei Y.

The Queen of Greece, however, appeared entirely unbothered. From her observation platform, she watched the chaos unfold below with a regal calm, her previous altercation with Kei Y seemingly erased from memory—as though the boy himself wasn’t even worth being remembered. In her eyes, a low-level cultivator like him was beneath notice.

In the skies, the momentum shifted.

Competitors from several kingdoms converged on the Amunar recruit class team like vultures drawn to blood in the water.

But none of Kei Y’s teammates were flustered.

Not even slightly.

Silvie, ever composed, simply turned her head slightly to observe the incoming swarm. Her eyes narrowed behind the mask—not in worry, but in focus. Rather than preparing brute force counterattacks, she calmly activated her Vine force. Unlike before, this time she made a deliberate choice.

“I want to train my Intelligence stat,” she murmured to herself.

Her vine force began to unravel and segment. Thread by thread, she separated its elements with practiced ease. Then, from among the tangled nature of her abilities, she chose water.

All of this was done quietly—before a single vine had been summoned into sight.

To any outsider watching, it looked as though the globules of moisture forming around her were the result of a standard Water Force technique. No trace of Vine Force remained.

She’d masked her force's origin.

To everyone else, she was just a Water Force user.

And that was exactly what she wanted.

The stillness of water. The clarity of it. The quiet suffocation of inevitability.

Globules of water began forming around her—dozens of them. At first, they hovered like harmless spheres, their presence subtle, even delicate. It looked like a soft rainfall gathering around her in midair.

The competitors charging toward her didn’t hesitate.

They charged straight through it.

From the stands, observers already began shaking their heads. Many of them scoffed, ready to declare Amunar’s recruit class overhyped.

Until—

DING!

The scoreboard updated with a quiet chime, displayed in massive floating panels above the arena. Text flickered across the screen.

Amunar Kingdom - Recruit Class: +3 Points

Participant: Sanu

Murmurs rippled through the crowd.

The system's projections zoomed in on the battlefield—just in time for the audience to witness what had happened.

As the enemies flew through Silvie’s field of rain, their expressions shifted. What was initially a confident approach turned into confusion. Then alarm. Their bodies shuddered. Their limbs twitched uncontrollably.

They felt it.

A slow, creeping weakness overtook them. Their life force—subtle as it was—was being siphoned. As if their strength, focus, and control were leaking away with each passing second.

They faltered in midair, flight disrupted.

Then—

CRASH.

Their bodies hit the face of the pyramid one by one, disqualified on impact. The system registered the eliminations instantly.

And all around Silvie, the floating water globules grew larger.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Denser.

Heavier.

Her aura deepened, and her field expanded. From something light and picturesque… it became suffocating.

In the air, Silvie turned around to face her opponents and floated in place, standing on a globule of water. Unmoved. Surrounded by rain, she turned around to face her opponents.

It wasn’t just a display of force.

It was a warning:

Do not come closer.

Her friends continued their descent, unfazed by her actions, as if her results were entirely expected and nothing out of the ordinary.

Participants continued to fly through the air, targeting each team and tower to rack up eliminations and earn more points for themselves and their respective Kingdoms. The arena buzzed with movement and light, system notifications ringing out one after another as names disappeared from the sky.

Among the front-runners was Japan.

All three of their class teams—Recruit, Soldier, and Specialist—were performing exceptionally well. With a combination of tight formations, ruthless coordination, and a mix of advanced force techniques, they created a brutal aerial blockade. Anyone attempting to descend past their position was met with overwhelming resistance.

Kei Y, watching from afar, narrowed his eyes at the Specialist Class members from Japan.

“I swear,” he muttered to himself, “if I find myself in a loop caused by those people, I’m gonna lose it.”

He gave the Recruit Class team a passing glance. Nothing about them stood out—at least, not enough to interest him. There was no tension in his gut. No pressure in the air. No sense of impending danger.

“Shame,” he sighed. “Guess I don’t get to choose my opponents.”

Unfortunately, not everyone shared Kei Y’s sense of detachment.

For the second time that day, he found himself dodging a surprise attack—this one a clean vertical strike aimed for his neck. Without so much as a blink, Kei Y rotated mid-air, slipping just outside the blow’s path.

The attacker?

Another participant from Greece.

“How do you always manage to avoid my lethal strikes?” the Greek participant growled, clearly frustrated.

Kei Y stared at him flatly, voice dripping with exasperation.

“What is your obsession with me?” he asked. “Is it because of the fat bitch you call a Queen?”

“You—!”

That was all the Greek participant managed to say before—

CRACK.

A heavy, blunt impact slammed down onto his skull with terrifying force, knocking him out cold instantly. His body went limp and began spiraling toward the pyramid surface below.

Kei M, floating just behind the scene, whistled.

“That really is an effective weapon… despite being incredibly weird,” he muttered, eyeing the object in Kei Y’s hand with fascination.

“Really is, huh?” Kei Y replied, proud of the oddly shaped projectile he’d just used.

It was a brick.

“Are you sure you should be doing that?” Kei M asked. “His Queen already doesn’t like you. This might just make her even angrier.”

Everyone nearby—participants, observers, and system monitors—watched as Kei Y casually floated downward and planted his foot squarely on the unconscious Greek participant’s back.

He wasn’t done.

Without so much as a second thought, he rode the unconscious body like a surfboard, letting it slide down the pyramid face while using it as transportation. Hands in his sleeves. Calm as ever.

Confusion rippled through the crowd.

Why wasn’t the Greek participant being eliminated?

He had made repeated contact with the pyramid’s surface—slamming into it with every bump and crack—yet the system refused to register him as disqualified. Observers and participants alike stared at the floating scoreboard, expecting a flash, a chime, something.

But nothing came.

Only Kei Y remained completely unbothered. He glanced casually at his status screen, where one line pulsed over and over again:

[Title: He Who Denies Fate]

It blinked steadily. Intermittently.

As if it was interfering with the system.

As if it refused to allow the elimination of the very person Kei Y was currently using as a sled.

He didn’t question it.

He just kept riding.

From her perch above, Queen Thalia watched the scene unfold with a twitching brow and barely restrained fury. Veins pulsed visibly along her temples.

She felt like that brat existed solely to humiliate her and her Kingdom.

But she couldn’t touch him.

Not yet.

Not unless she was ready to openly violate the tournament rules and slap him into the next continent.

So she sat. Seething.

Eyes glowing. Fingernails cracking the edge of her throne.

And Kei Y?

He simply yawned again—still using the unconscious Greek soldier as his personal sled—one hand resting lazily on Olly’s head as the little panda nuzzled against him, completely unbothered by the attention raining down from every direction.

During his descent, while most would have been scrambling to defend themselves, Kei Y’s teammates were already moving.

The other participants had naturally shifted their focus. Amunar’s recruit class had stolen the spotlight thanks to Kei Y’s stunt, and now they were enemy number one.

So the attacks came.

And Amunar answered.

Kei M, for his part, didn’t bother showing off. He reined in his Sound Force, breaking it down into its most fundamental element—vibrations.

When projectiles and force techniques were hurled his way, they didn't meet a barrier. They didn't get blasted aside.

They simply... destabilized.

The subtle radiating hum that surrounded Kei M unraveled their form on contact. Like air pressure canceling soundwaves, attacks simply dissolved as they neared him.

To earn points, he responded with short, precise bursts of focused vibration. Each blast invisible, near-silent—like a sniper’s bullet of frequency. Anyone who entered his range and wasn’t careful found themselves knocked off balance mid-flight or struck in weak points they didn’t know could be targeted.

Eliminations came quickly.

Inpu, on the other hand, wasn’t here to be subtle.

He wanted to perform.

So he did what he was best at—rune strokes.

As he fell, his quill never stopped moving. Rune strokes trailed behind him like ethereal ink, wrapping around the air and carving glowing patterns through the sky.

Those hit by his runes didn’t go flying immediately.

No, they just... started to make mistakes.

A participant would fly left—and slam into their own teammate. Another tried to launch a technique, only for their aether flow to backfire, detonating in their face. One poor soul flew directly into a flock of migrating birds and was immediately swarmed, sent spiraling out of control into the pyramid wall.

Inpu’s Force—Scale force—was robbing them of their fortune and adding it to his own.

And as their fortunes unraveled and his own increased, Inpu’s own speed increased. Wind wrapped around him, and he moved through the sky like a comet—dodging collapsed bodies mid-air, twisting gracefully through falling debris.

He spared a glance to the side—

And, of course, Mia was just... being Mia.

Small. Cheerful. Completely unaware of the carnage around her.

She spun in the air as if dancing, her koi-patterned mask catching the sunlight. To the untrained eye, she looked like a civilian who’d stumbled onto the battlefield.

And so, naturally, others targeted her.

A small girl in a mask, floating with no guard up? Easy points.

Or so they thought.

The moment a participant got close, Mia extended her arm.

There was no wind-up. No combat stance. No visible technique. Just a soft, playful stretch—

And then...

BOOM.

The sound was delayed. The impact wasn’t.

The attacker was blasted backward with such overwhelming force that shockwaves visibly rippled out from the point of contact. A crater formed on the side of the pyramid where they hit. The scoreboard chimed.

Then it happened again. And again.

Simple contact from her palm was all it took to violently eliminate anyone who got close. The system had to interrupt its own killfeed notifications to update medical protocols on the arena floor. Some of the fallen participants were teleported out in critical condition, a few unconscious, one barely breathing.

The crowd went silent.

Observers who once saw Mia as a target for Amunar now viewed her as a genuine threat. A masked terror floating through the sky with a giggle and a nudge that could crack bones.

The truth?

The strength behind Mia's attacks was an odd quirk that Auserre and the Vendor struggled to make sense of. It was only after they told Oceanna about Mia’s strange ability—and went into detail about her performance in the Fractured Zone—that Oceanna was able to shed a bit of light on what was actually happening.

And when everyone finally understood it, they couldn’t help but shiver in terror.

This little girl truly had the potential to become a powerhouse across the multiverse. And the fact that she possessed the potential of a God Spark only made her ability more terrifying—ironically, not because of her potential directly, but because of how her ability can ignore that potential altogether.

It was just a terrifying ability. One that existed solely in her hands, nearly impossible to replicate in anyone else.

And that’s without even factoring in her osteogenesis imperfecta—the condition that should’ve made her fragile.

When that was taken into account?

Mia stood in a position where she could single-handedly take on multiple God Sparks.

And possibly win.

And to make that scenario even more likely, Auserre had left Earth and ventured to other planets to gather resources—specifically to help draw out more potential from Mia’s bizarre ability.

Each planet she visited, she returned with a haul of force techniques and skills. High quality, refined, and even a few of Ancient grade. In Auserre’s own words, she claimed she “acquired them through fair trade”—for lack of a better phrase that could ease her conscience.

The planets she left behind might’ve said otherwise.

But rather than voice complaints, most chose silence.

Mostly because they were still dealing with the floods Auserre had caused during her “negotiations.” Entire continents had been waterlogged, archives soaked, sacred grounds submerged—for the sake of securing techniques they likely would’ve just handed over had she asked nicely.

In fact, from their perspective, the water damage was one of the better outcomes they’d imagined in the event of her arrival. So while they were certainly disgruntled, they weren’t particularly outraged.

Given what she could have done, they considered themselves lucky.

Still, they grumbled quietly: all she had to do was ask.

Oh well.

And that was how Mia found herself learning all sorts of Balance Force techniques and skills—most of which she would never use. But that was exactly what made her terrifying.

Each unused technique fed directly into her ability, enhancing it further. And now, she was the terror that the other participants were facing in the tournament.

The other cultivation teams only spared the Recruit Class side a glance. They had their own moments of glory.

On the Soldier Class side, the Crown Prince of Amunar had no intention of letting his own participants outshine him. As he descended the face of the pyramid, crackles of lightning sparked violently behind him. Any opponent unlucky enough to be caught within that radius was eliminated instantly and teleported back to the arena grounds for emergency treatment—some requiring high-level Healing Force users just to stabilize their condition.

To the Crown Prince, these were nothing more than probing attacks.

Just a twitch of a finger.

Another of his teammates was battling opponents with far less effort—using the pyramid itself as a weapon. Anyone who flew too close found themselves struck by chunks of stone, launched directly from the pyramid’s structure by his control. The participant showed no urgency, flying calmly downward with a blank expression. He seemed more focused on self-reflection than the match itself, as if he were meditating in motion.

The Specialist Class side, on the other hand, was chaos.

Domains littered the air, overlapping and clashing as participants fought to claim airspace. Those on the weaker side had no choice but to activate their domains early, forced to defend themselves against the more powerful competitors.

And even then, many were still eliminated by those who didn’t even bother to use a domain.

One person, in particular, didn’t use one—not only because he didn’t need to, but because he couldn’t.

He didn’t have one.

Oddly enough, he was the only Recruit Class participant on the Specialist Class side.

Even stranger?

He was theleader of Jerusalem’s Specialist Class team.

And yet, no one questioned it.

His presence alone made it clear—he had every right to lead.

Back on the Recruit Class side, Kei Y had grown so bored, he was now sitting on his sled—completely unbothered—as he looked around.

Multiple attacks flew toward him, but he casually deflected them with small projectiles hidden in his arm sleeves, knocking out opponents without even standing up. Even Olly, tucked in his robes, decided to get in on the action—launching tiny clumps of Earth Force that didn’t do much more than annoy the other participants.

Kei Y still cheered him on. “Nice one, buddy.”

In the middle of all this boredom, another participant suddenly flew past him at astonishing speed.

Actually, flew might’ve been the wrong word.

It was more like he fell.

“I don’t know why,” Kei Y muttered as he watched, “but that feels like cheating.”

It was the Chinese participant.

He had increased his weight drastically, using some form of technique to accelerate his descent. Attacks from others bounced off his body as if their Force couldn’t penetrate or affect his skin in the slightest.

And despite the sheer speed of his fall, the participant attacked with flawless martial arts—so clean and precise that those he targeted didn’t even have a chance to defend themselves. Their movements were disarmed before they could do anything.

Kei Y witnessed it all, then looked up behind him.

Silvie had seen it too.

They didn’t speak, but they both knew.

“He’s as impressive as they made him out to be,” Silvie thought to herself. “And this isn’t even his full strength. This is more like a simple stretch.”

Kei Y observed her quietly. Even through the mask, he could read the emotions in her body language—admiration, a flicker of doubt… and mostly, eagerness. She wanted to test herself against someone like that.

And for once—so did he.

[Eliminated]

The system chimed.

Kei Y looked down and saw the notification pop up next to his name.

“Oh, good. Olly, your first point,” he said, patting the cub’s head.

Olly nuzzled him back proudly, clearly delighted with himself.