Chapter 90: Crowns
The Legendary branch’s arena stretched wider than most cities, a vast plain of raised terraces and deliberately jagged pillars, and three thousand Hunters filled it edge to edge the moment Vann Corel gave the signal.
"AND WE ARE LIVE," Vann bellowed, and the arena erupted like someone had kicked over an anthill the size of a continent.
Aidan didn’t move for the first several seconds. He stood still amid the chaos with his eyes closed, letting something quiet unfold outward from the small warm presence living near the center of his life nexus.
It wasn’t a technique so much as a hum, the particular resonance of an ascended Soul Spirit reaching across the arena the way a struck bell fills a room. It searched for anything built the way he was built.
Most of the three thousand answered as nothing but ordinary Legendary-rank power, bright and strong and thoroughly mortal. Then the hum caught on something that wasn’t.
He found the Earth signatures first, thirteen of them, warm and familiar as Isolde and Lysandra carved their own paths through the opening minutes.
He found the fourteenth a moment later, and his eyes opened slowly.
’Well. Of course you’re here.’
Ouja Sinclair stood on a shattered pillar a kilometer away, lean and unhurried in a dark coat, brownish hair stirring in the wind off the arena floor. He was already looking straight at Aidan, because of course he was, and he lifted two fingers in a lazy greeting.
The Devil Prince. Guild leader of Nightspire. The man who had sent two families to die at Aidan’s front door, then shaken his hand on a ship and called him by his real name just to watch his face do something interesting.
’You’ve been hunting me since Earth,’ Aidan thought, and his smile sharpened into something that had teeth in it. ’And now we’re both standing in a place where killing people is the entire point of the afternoon.’
He crossed the distance in three strides of wind.
Ouja didn’t run, which Aidan genuinely appreciated, and he didn’t posture either. He simply watched Aidan arrive with the patient amusement of a man watching a familiar play reach a scene he’d already read.
"Mister Garen," Ouja said, putting a small and deliberate weight on the name. "Or should I use the other one? I forget which face you’re wearing this week."
"Try either." Aidan’s lightning was already crawling up both forearms. "Neither of them likes you much."
He struck without another word.
The blow was fast enough that half the field wouldn’t have seen it land, a compressed fist of metal and charge aimed squarely at the man’s chest, because a fellow Transcendent Player standing this close was far too rare an opportunity to waste on conversation.
His fist passed through black smoke instead of a chest.
Ouja came apart at the point of impact, unraveling into a coil of dark mist that poured sideways through the air and reassembled ten meters back with his coat settling neatly around him.
"Straight to violence." He sounded almost fond. "You really haven’t changed since the mansion."
Aidan came again, faster this time, wind carrying him low as the scythe swept a wide arc meant to catch a man mid-reassembly. The blade found nothing but dark mist that poured out from under its edge, and Ouja drifted back another dozen meters without ever appearing to hurry.
’He isn’t attacking. Not once.’ Aidan’s jaw tightened as something old and competitive lit up beneath his ribs. ’He’s letting me swing so he can measure how I do it.’
He pressed anyway. He chained strikes together faster than most Hunters in the arena could have tracked, layering aspect over aspect until the air around them screamed.
Every attempt landed in smoke that scattered and reformed a breath later, and every time Ouja slipped further out of reach without so much as raising his voice.
Then he simply stopped being anywhere Aidan’s senses could follow.
The whisper arrived a moment later, laid softly into Aidan’s ear through Magic Whisper, close and unbothered and faintly entertained.
[Ouja: Relax, boy. It’s not like I am trying to eliminate you. Though of course, I do have a way to trouble you. All I need to do is to tell Desmeral family your other name.]
Aidan chuckled, clearly not giving a two hoot about that.
’Doesn’t matter, nor do i care about that punny threat,’ he whispered back. ’Whenever I get the opportunity, I’ll attempt to eliminate you. It’s as simple as that.’
The silence that followed carried the distinct shape of a laugh, and then even that was gone.
’Fine.’ Aidan rolled his shoulders and turned back toward the arena at large. ’Run for now. I’ve got a round to win.’
...
He went back to work, and in a Legendary-rank battle royale worth a library full of forbidden knowledge, work meant something enthusiastic.
Three coordinated spear-users tried to box him against a fallen pillar, so Aidan let Halcyon Iridescent Verdict answer for the first time in a real fight. He drew on old, remembered joy, on festivals and full bellies and afternoons that had never needed to end.
Fiery Spark laced both fists with flame and swelled his raw power well past what his stats accounted for. The box shattered before it finished closing, and three spears met one punch each and none of them survived the exchange.
"And GAREN is doing something with FIRE now," Vann’s voice crackled through the broadcast pillars. "Doing it bare-fisted too, folks, with a perfectly good scythe strapped to his back that he apparently keeps forgetting he owns."
He hadn’t forgotten. He just liked his fists.
A woman with a paralysis-venom talent got close enough to land a graze, and Fear answered that one. It sharpened his senses to a razor’s edge half a second before the venom could take hold.
He slipped the follow-up by a margin thin enough that the broadcast slowed the replay to catch it, then folded her Spirit Armor flat with a single palm strike.
[Crown earned. Total: 14.]
Two brothers running a gravity-anchor combination tried to pin him against the arena floor. Aidan let Sadness weigh into his next strike instead, and the root dragged so heavy and inexorable through his fist that speed stopped mattering at all. Both anchors shattered under a blow that simply refused to be stopped.
A drilled pack of nine attempted a full encirclement, which was the sort of disciplined tactic that should have worried anybody sane. Aidan clapped his hands together once and let Silence swallow every shouted signal between them.
Nine coordinated soldiers became nine confused individuals staring at each other, and he strolled through the gap their confusion opened.
"That was NINE at once," Vann sputtered. "He WALKED through them, folks. Somebody check whether this man’s Spirit Armor even has a bottom, because I have genuinely stopped seeing it move."
A feisty duo tried bombarding him from the array’s ten-meter ceiling with compressed spheres of force. Aidan caught all four mid-flight with Electromagnetism, held them in a lazy orbit around his own head for a moment purely to make a point, and sent them back with considerably more enthusiasm than they’d arrived with.
By the time the field dropped past two thousand, the broadcast pillars had started looping his fights between other matchups, and Vann had stopped pretending to cover anyone else during those windows.