Chapter 101: Conflict, Shocking Triple Selection
Aidan reached the pedestal in the vault’s dimmest corner and found the armor waiting exactly the way old, patient things wait, unbothered by how long it took.
He stretched a hand toward it.
Footsteps arrived behind him before his fingers closed the distance, a small crowd’s worth, and Aidan recognized the lead figure on sight. Violet robes. A coiled serpent crest nowhere in view this time, but the same violet all the same.
Voren Desmeral. Ruvel’s grandfather.
Two younger Desmerals flanked him, a lean young man radiating Epic-rank power with a bored, entitled slouch, and a sharp-eyed young woman carrying Legendary-rank density like she’d earned every ounce of it.
The armor’s will stirred the moment Aidan’s fingers brushed its surface, something old and interested turning its attention his way.
Voren felt it too.
His hand twitched, one finger curling in a small, precise circle, and invisible strings snapped taut around Aidan’s whole body.
He was yanked backward off his feet, floated bodily across the vault floor like a puppet on a very rude string, and deposited neatly back beside the old man before he’d even finished registering the pull.
Aidan frowned. "What are you doing?"
Voren ignored him entirely.
"Go," he told his grandchildren, not looking at Aidan at all. "See if it accepts either of you."
The young man and woman glanced at Aidan on their way past, twin looks of open ridicule, the specific disdain of people who’d never once had to wonder if a room valued them.
"Hey, old man." Aidan’s voice carried, loud and easy, cutting clean through the vault’s ambient hum. "Did your mother and father forget to teach you manners?"
Heads turned across the whole vault at once.
More arrived within seconds, drawn the way drama always drew people, robes bearing crests from half the great guilds and houses of the Alliance crowding in around the pedestal.
"Humph." Voren’s lip curled. "A brat who doesn’t know his own limits. Don’t you know to respect your elders?"
[Arthur: I want to eat this old man. He won’t be tasty, though. I’m sure of it.]
[Tom: This old fart is sourer than a lemon.]
[Finn: I don’t understand any of this, but yes! He is smelly!]
"What’s going on?" Ordun’s voice arrived from the crowd’s edge, Kyrsa and the others pushing through behind him.
"Respect?" Aidan laughed, loud enough to carry. "I was about to touch that armor. You pulled me back so your grandkids could have a shot at it instead." He tilted his head. "Why? Scared it was going to pick me?"
"Delusional." Voren turned his back on him entirely.
The Epic-rank grandson touched the armor first and got nothing, no glow, no stir, the pedestal’s surface staying exactly as dead as it had for everyone else in the vault. He stepped back, jaw tight, pretending the attempt hadn’t mattered.
Then the granddaughter reached out.
The armor answered instantly, light climbing through every etched pattern on its surface. It rose off the pedestal in a slow, graceful float, glowing brighter with every passing second.
A murmur rolled through the gathered crowd.
"I heard someone in the Desmeral family finally cultivated that Spirit Art their old patriarch pulled from an Origin Tomb," a bystander named Corin Vale said, craning to see. "That must be her."
"She ranked fourth in the crown round," another voice added, a woman named Ilsa Renn. "If she’d mastered that art fully, she’d have taken first easily."
"Less than five masterpieces left in the whole vault," someone else murmured. "It’s been ages since anyone actually got one."
Aidan laughed. "What a joke"
His laugh was loud enough to drown every other voice in the vault, and every eye in the crowd swung toward him at once.
He walked forward without hurrying, stepped past the young man still sulking off to one side, and came to a stop right beside the granddaughter.
She looked at him, eyes narrowing.
She remembered him from the crown round clearly enough, the reason she’d steered wide of his territory the entire time, never confident enough in her odds to risk the encounter since she knew she couldn’t beat Aidan just yet.
’But this armor is mine.’
"Hey." Aidan grinned at the floating, glowing shape. "You’ve got a will, right? Then you can probably make a better choice than this."
The armor turned.
It happened slowly, deliberately, the glow along its patterns sliding across its own surface like attention shifting, and for two full seconds nothing else happened at all.
Then it flared.
Light poured outward from the armor in a single, absolute wave, and the aura that came with it rolled through the vault like the weight of a throne nobody alive remembered being built.
It felt old in a way that had nothing to do with time, patient in a way that had run out of patience the moment something worth choosing finally arrived. Every Hunter in the crowd felt it settle onto their shoulders like a hand testing whether they’d bow.
The armor collapsed into a single beam of light and shot straight into Aidan’s chest.
It bound to him instantly, hungrily, like something that had been waiting far longer than five hundred years for exactly this moment and refused to wait one second more.
[Ebon Sovereign’s Mantle. Masterpiece. Divine-rank.]
The vault went dead silent.
"As expected of brother Garen." Ordun broke the silence first, laughing outright, and the crowd’s murmur rose back up around it in a wave of disbelief and delight.
Voren Desmeral’s face didn’t move at all, which was somehow worse than if it had. His jaw sat locked, violet eyes fixed on Aidan with a stillness that took real, considerable effort to maintain, and the girl beside Aidan took one look at her grandfather and quietly stepped back.
Then a second aura bloomed, entirely different from the first.
It came from three racks over, cool and precise, the feeling of space itself folding at the edges like paper creasing along an old line. Vyra Ashgrove stood with one hand resting on a set of pale, storm-grey plate, and the armor rose around her in silver light that fractured the air near it into faint, drifting shards.
[Fractured Horizon Regalia. Masterpiece. Divine-rank.]
"Two." Corin Vale’s voice cracked with disbelief. "Two masterpiecee moved in one day?"
"That’s unheard of," Ilsa Renn said, staring between the two of them. "There’s never been a vault opening with more than one claimed in a season."
"Yeah, these feisty armors are picky, but two were chosen."
"Last time one was chosen was four years ago."
Aidan caught Vyra’s eye across the vault. She inclined her head, same as always, and he grinned back.
Then a third aura flared, sharp and dark, and every conversation in the vault died all over again.
It rolled off a rack near the entrance, hungry and patient at once, crimson threading through black like a wound that refused to close.
Ouja Sinclair stood with two fingers resting against a long, dark coat of armor, and it wrapped itself around him without a single word exchanged, crimson light bleeding through every seam.
[Famished Crimson Shroud. Masterpiece. Divine-rank.]
The vault erupted into open, disbelieving noise.
"Three." Corin Vale sounded like he’d forgotten how to finish a sentence. "Three of them. In one hour."
Aidan looked across the vault at Ouja, who looked back with that same lazy, unbothered smile.
’So all three of us got it.’ Aidan blinked. ’Hearing the talks of people here, It seems there aren’t more people chosen as Transcendent players in this alliance, but there should still be more than just us three.’