Chapter 89: Tournament’s Next Rounds
After the fun and rest, it was time.
The anchor’s voice rolled out across every plaza on the Verdant Crown and every screen in Cloud Whirl space at the exact same instant, warm and theatrical and entirely too pleased with himself.
"Good evening, good morning, and good whatever-time-it-is-on-your-particular-rock, to the billions of you tuning in from across the Alliance!" The voice belonged to a lean, silver-skinned man named Vann Corel, perched in a floating broadcast booth above the Epic branch, grinning at a camera construct like it owed him money. "I’m Vann Corel, and I have the extremely fun job of narrating five thousand overachievers trying to punch each other off a floating dinner plate. Let’s get into it."
[FIRST ROUND: BATTLE PLATFORM. Five thousand Epic-rank Hunters. Elimination continues until five hundred remain.]
[Flight is forbidden. The containment array will not permit any jump exceeding ten meters in height.]
[Every participant is granted a Spirit Armor of 100 points. Eliminate an opponent by forcing surrender, or by reducing their Spirit Armor to zero. Grouping is permitted.]
"Ten meters, folks, that’s the ceiling," Vann continued, as the platform below bloomed into motion, five thousand Hunters scattering across its vast stone expanse in every direction. "Try to fly higher than that and the array slaps you back down like a disappointed parent. Learned that one the hard way at last year’s qualifiers, absolute classic footage, we’ll replay it during the break."
...
Solenne and Beatrix found each other within the first minute, backs together on instinct, and the platform around them erupted into five thousand simultaneous arguments about who got to keep breathing.
"Standard pattern," Beatrix said, already scanning for the nearest cluster of solo fighters. "You open, I close."
"You say that like it isn’t just how we always fight," Solenne said, and folded away toward the nearest target before Beatrix finished nodding.
They cut through the early chaos like a matched pair of scissors. Solenne would fold in on an isolated Hunter, drop them to a sliver of armor with a lance of starfire before they registered the attack, and Beatrix would arrive a heartbeat later to finish it with a single anchored punch, absorbing whatever desperate counter came her way and adding it to her tally.
"Team formation, Marrow-Duskweave versus a lone striker," Vann narrated, delighted. "Hang on, my producer’s telling me the other one doesn’t have a registered team name yet, folks, somebody get this woman a sponsor, she’s got the aesthetic for it."
By the two-hour mark, the platform’s numbers had cratered from five thousand toward two thousand, dozens of duos and trios and one truly baffling squad of nine carving their way through the field with escalating brutality. Beatrix and Solenne’s own count climbed steadily, clean, efficient, never wasteful.
"One thousand two hundred remaining," Vann announced, voice climbing with genuine excitement now. "And folks, we are watching some absolutely filthy teamwork out there. If you’re just tuning in, go back and watch the replay of Duskweave catching an entire fireball combo in a water shell twenty minutes ago. Poetry. Actual poetry."
The number kept falling. Eight hundred. Six hundred. Five hundred and eighty.
Then it stalled at five hundred and thirty-six, and stayed there.
"Five hundred thirty-six," Vann said, and something in his voice sharpened. "Thirty-six short of our target. And it looks like the field has noticed our two rising stars, because folks, that is a very large group converging on a very small target."
Forty Hunters, banded together across the last hour into a single roving pack, had spent that hour learning exactly which two names were racking up the fastest eliminations on the board. They converged on Beatrix and Solenne from every open angle the platform allowed, a wall of talent and technique closing in with the specific hunger of predators who’d finally found something worth the risk.
"That’s not great odds," Solenne said, back to back with Beatrix, watching the noose tighten.
"Then let’s not give them odds." Beatrix planted her feet, and Maelstrom Anchor took root beneath her. "Same as we practiced. You open big. I finish bigger."
Solenne grinned, fire and shadow already gathering. "Now that’s a plan I like."
Beatrix went first this time, breaking their usual order, and threw herself directly into the center of the closing circle instead of waiting for it. Forty Hunters converged with everything they had, elemental blasts and blades and one truly enormous hammer all crashing down on a single anchored point.
Beatrix didn’t block a fraction of it.
She absorbed nearly all of it, Maelstrom Anchor drinking strike after strike, stacks of Cerulean War Requiem stacking so fast the blue light around her arms blurred into a solid, humming corona, her Spirit Armor bleeding down toward a sliver as the sheer volume overwhelmed even the anchor’s appetite.
"She’s eating THIRTY-EIGHT SIMULTANEOUS HITS," Vann shouted, half out of his chair. "That is either the bravest thing I’ve seen all tournament or the single worst decision in Origin Tomb qualifier history, and honestly? Could be both!"
At armor fifteen and climbing power that had nowhere left to go but out, Beatrix screamed the release.
The stored violence of forty attacks erupted outward as a rotating wall of water fifty meters tall, and in the same instant Solenne folded into its heart, Hollow Step carrying her through the collapsing pocket of the blast, and laced every drop of that wall with Steller Heart Blaze’s crimson fire.
Water met fire inside a technique already screaming outward, and the result wasn’t steam.
It was a detonation, a rolling, superheated shockwave that swallowed the entire attacking formation whole, thirty-four of the forty Hunters caught dead center as their Spirit Armor cratered to zero in the same instant, the platform itself groaning under the force of it.
[34 eliminations confirmed.]
"THIRTY-FOUR." Vann was fully standing now, camera construct swinging wild to follow the aftermath. "Thirty-four eliminations, ONE combined attack, folks, I am going to be replaying that for the rest of the season, somebody sponsor these two immediately, I don’t care what you’re selling!"
The platform’s total dropped past five hundred in the same breath, two separate skirmishes elsewhere finishing off their own targets in the confusion, the number overshooting its mark before anyone could stop it.
[FIRST ROUND CONCLUDED. Five hundred targeted. Four hundred ninety-eight remain.]
"Two extra," Solenne said, breathing hard, surveying the wreckage of the platform around them.
"Nothing to be done about it now," Beatrix said, and neither of them looked particularly sorry.
...
Aidan watched all of it from a private viewing terrace on the Legendary branch, sprawled across a cushioned bench with a drink in hand and Kyrsa, Ordun, Sella, and Veshan crowded around the same floating screen.
"That’s your team, isn’t it," Ordun said, watching the replay of the water-fire detonation loop for the fourth time.
"That’s my team," Aidan agreed, unable to keep the grin off his face.
"THIRTY-FOUR," Vann’s voice crowed one more time through the screen, "AT ONCE," and Kyrsa snorted into her drink.
The broadcast cut smoothly from the settling dust of the Epic branch to a wide, sweeping shot of the Legendary branch’s own vast arena, and Vann’s tone shifted, sharpening into something more ceremonial.
"And that concludes the first round on the Epic side, four hundred ninety-eight advancing! But you didn’t tune in for appetizers, did you? No. You tuned in for THIS."
[SECOND ARENA: LEGENDARY BRANCH. Three thousand Legendary-rank Hunters. Elimination continues until one hundred remain.]
[Each confirmed elimination grants the eliminator one Crown, tracked publicly for the duration of the round.]
[There is no minimum or maximum group size, and no restriction on technique, aspect, or Spirit Art usage. Standard Spirit Armor protocols apply.]
"And here’s the part that’s going to make every single one of you sit up straight," Vann said, voice dropping into something almost reverent. "The three Hunters holding the highest Crown count when this round concludes will earn a personal invitation to visit the Grand Alliance Library."
A murmur of genuine awe rippled audibly through the watching crowds on every branch.
[Reward for Top 3 Crown-holders: Personal access to the Grand Alliance Library.]
"For those of you living under a very impressive rock," Vann added, grinning wide, "the Library holds knowledge banned, lost, or simply too dangerous for open circulation anywhere else in Alliance space. People have started wars for less access than what’s on offer tonight." He spread his hands toward the assembling three thousand. "So. Who wants a crown badly enough to earn it the hard way?"
The Legendary branch’s vast arena fell into a taut, electric silence, three thousand Hunters sizing up three thousand rivals, and somewhere in the crowd, Aidan set his drink down.