Chapter 87: The Verdant Crown
"Last spar before we head back," Aidan called from his boulder, legs crossed, thoroughly comfortable. "Make it a good one."
Beatrix and Solenne faced each other across the valley floor, thirty meters of scorched grass between them, and this time neither of them looked like the loser of five straight rounds and the woman who’d beaten her.
Solenne moved first, the way she always did.
Hollow Step folded her sideways out of the world, and she came back out of Beatrix’s own shadow with a lance of starfire already formed and screaming, the exact opening that had ended their first spar in seconds.
It didn’t end this one.
Beatrix didn’t dodge, because Beatrix never dodged. Her SS-rank talent answered instead, Maelstrom Anchor flaring to life as her boots fused to the ground like they’d been poured there, and the starfire lance crashed into a spiraling shell of water that hadn’t existed half a breath earlier.
The shell didn’t block the lance. It caught it, dragging the fire into a slow, churning orbit around her body, starfire swirling trapped inside living water like a firefly in a bottle, steam hissing off the surface in long white ribbons.
"New trick," Solenne noted, already circling.
"New everything." Beatrix grinned, snapped her wrist, and threw the captured lance back.
Solenne folded away from her own returned attack, and the ground where she’d stood erupted into a geyser of steam and shattered stone. She came back out of the fold at a dead sprint, low and fast, shadow threads peeling off her shoulders in all directions, and the valley’s dim light bent as six separate angles of attack bloomed at once.
Two came high, phantom claws of hardened shadow. Two swept low at Beatrix’s anchored legs. The last two were starfire, detonating early to blind, and behind all six, Solenne herself vanished into another fold.
It was the overwhelming pattern that nobody at equal stats should have been able to answer.
Beatrix answered it by not moving at all.
The high claws broke across her raised forearms, and blue light flared at the impact, one stack of Cerulean War Requiem winding tight around her wrists. The low sweeps hit the anchor’s stored weight and simply stopped, momentum swallowed whole. The starfire blasts washed over her guard, and two more stacks lit up her arms like rings on a tally.
And when Solenne materialized behind her with a seventh strike, the real one, Beatrix’s elbow was already waiting for the space her ribs would occupy.
Solenne folded out a half-breath before it connected, reappearing ten meters back with her eyes narrowed.
"You read the fold."
"I read you." Beatrix rolled her neck, five stacks burning steady on her arms. "You always save the real hit for after the fireworks."
They collided again in the center, and this time neither held a pattern for longer than two exchanges.
Solenne learned fast. She stopped feeding the anchor direct force, switching to feints and range, starfire shaped into drifting mines that detonated at Beatrix’s blind angles, shadow stretched thin across the ground to grab at her anchored stance from below. Beatrix adapted right back, tearing her anchor loose and re-planting it in bursts, each re-anchor releasing a stored pulse of force that shattered the mines before they ripened.
Then Beatrix went on the offense for the first time, and the valley learned what fifteen minutes of stacking meant.
She hurled the anchor’s stored weight forward as a whirlpool the size of a house, and it did not fly straight. It curved, hunting, dragging loose stones and torn grass into its spin, and Solenne’s fold-steps, the untouchable rhythm her whole style was built on, suddenly had to come faster, land shorter, and cost double just to stay ahead of a tide that turned when she turned.
"Now you’re the one being fed," Aidan observed from his boulder.
"I NOTICED," Solenne snapped, folding through the whirlpool’s edge with her hair plastered flat.
She broke the chase the only way left to her, by spending everything at once. Steller Heart Blaze roared to its full corona, fire and shadow braiding into a single drilling spear, and she threw it and herself behind it in one committed line, no feint, no fold, everything on one strike.
Beatrix met it with everything of her own, twelve stacks and a fully wound anchor released in the same heartbeat, a rotating wall of water taller than the trees crashing forward into the drill.
The two techniques met in the middle of the valley and canceled each other so violently that the shockwave flattened the grass in a full circle and blew Aidan’s hair straight back off his face.
When the steam cleared, both women were on one knee in the mud, soaked and scorched and gasping, ten meters apart, and grinning at each other like idiots.
"Draw," Aidan declared, hopping off the boulder. "Beautiful. Terrifying. Deeply expensive for the valley." He surveyed the steaming, flooded wreckage of the landscape. "Nobody tell the planet."
...
The spacecraft that carried them out of the Kaelveth system was a long, silver arrow with the tournament’s crest burning on its hull, and the trip swallowed 18.3 light years like a held breath.
When the viewports cleared, two suns hung in the sky, one gold and one pale blue, their doubled light layering every shadow twice, and beneath them rose the venue.
It was a tree.
Not shaped like a tree. A tree, or something that had decided to become one at planetary scale, a single tower of living silver-brown wood rising up through the cloud layer and beyond it, its trunk wide enough to hold cities, bark ridges deep enough to have their own weather. And from that trunk spread branches, each one flattened along its top into a plaza tens of kilometers across, ringed with arenas and halls and rivers of floating light.
"The Verdant Crown," Ordun said, joining them at the viewport. "Grown, not built, before the Alliance was the Alliance. Every Origin Tomb final in this region has been held on its branches for nine hundred years."
Five thousand Epic-rank Hunters streamed onto one great branch. Three thousand Legendary-rank onto another. And for the next twelve hours, the announcement rang across every plaza, all of them were free to roam, train, spectate, and show off however they pleased.
"Twelve hours." Aidan cracked his knuckles, surveying the sprawling branch-city below as the ship descended. "I know exactly how we’re spending the first two."
...
The pub sat on the Legendary branch’s entertainment ring, and Ordun’s crew had already colonized its best corner table by the time Aidan, Beatrix, and Solenne walked in.
"Garen!" Sella waved them over, boots on the table as usual. "Rank thirty-four! We watched the whole thing from the observation ring. Very dramatic detour you took."
"Worth it." Aidan dropped into a seat, and food started arriving before he’d finished sitting. "How’s liaison work treating you?"
"Boring," Kyrsa said. "Right up until your registration file made three Organizers very curious about your mysterious master." She sipped her drink, watching him over the rim. "You’re becoming a topic, Garen."
"I’m delightful. Of course I’m a topic."
They ate and drank through an easy hour, Veshan arm-wrestling Beatrix twice and losing the second one to a suspiciously well-timed Maelstrom Anchor that he demanded be reviewed by a neutral judge, and by the time the plates were cleared, Aidan was pleasantly full and thoroughly restless.
"Right." He stood, stretching. "I saw a sign on the way in. We’re going to the games plaza."
...
The games plaza occupied a whole side-branch, a sprawling carnival of challenge facilities where Hunters burned off pre-tournament nerves by showing off. Strength towers rang like bells under Legendary-rank punches. A speed gauntlet spat out a humiliated challenger every thirty seconds. Dueling rings with floating prize boards ran nonstop under the twin suns.
And at the plaza’s center, drawing the biggest crowd by an embarrassing margin, floated a sphere of suspended water two hundred meters across, lit from within, shimmering like a captive ocean.
[UNDERWATER FOOTBALL. Techniques permitted. Teams of seven. Two goal rings. First to fifteen, or highest score at the horn. Next match forming.]
Aidan stopped walking mid-stride.
Inside the sphere, two teams tore through the water at combat speed, a glowing ball streaking between them, players riding jets of self-made current and blasting shots that rippled shockwaves across the sphere’s outer skin. A goal went in as he watched, and the crowd’s roar hit like a physical wave.
"Oh," Aidan said, with the reverence of a man discovering a new religion. "Oh, we’re doing this."
[FINN. THE WATER SPORT. Aidan, the WATER SPORT.]
"I know, buddy."
[Deploy me. I was BORN for this. It is a sport played inside my natural habitat. This is discrimination against fish waiting to happen.]
"Participants only, no summons." Aidan scanned the rules board, then winced at the wave of betrayal radiating from his summoning space. "I’ll score one for you."
[TEN. Score TEN for me.]