Chapter 89- Cult’s Movement
The crowd roared as Leo and Thane stepped into the arena.
Most of the bets had already gone to Thane.
Leo looked around. Stone platforms and tiered seats climbed the walls of the arena, packed with thousands of spectators whose voices blurred into a single restless roar.
The arena was covered in sand.
Thane stood opposite him, calm, clearly no stranger to this place.
Leo was level 21. Thane was level 41 ....a legendary-class duelist from the Ascendant Holdings.
But inside the arena, none of that was supposed to matter.
[Ding~]
[Equal Grounds activated.]
[Combatants normalized to Level 1 with identical baseline statistics.]
[Standard arena equipment issued.]
A weapon rack rose from the ground between them, stocked with nothing but common gear.
Leo picked a plain sword. The grip settled into his hand like it had always belonged there .... good balance, good weight.
Thane had already chosen the same and was running through a few practice slashes, loose and unhurried.
"Just so we’re clear," Thane said, "you won’t get to blame my class or my stats later."
Leo raised his sword. "Wouldn’t dream of it."
"Then give me something to work with. I’d hate to feel like I wasted my afternoon," Thane said.
A vein throbbed at Leo’s temple. He bit back the urge to say something he’d regret.
The bell rang.....
Thane moved first ..... one step, nothing more.
No burst of skill, no sudden acceleration.
Just a single step, and somehow his sword tip was already hovering an inch from the center of Leo’s forehead.
Leo jerked back and caught the thrust with his blade.
Sparks scattered.
Both their wrists trembled from the force of that first exchange.
Leo reset his stance.
Rook’s voice surfaced in his memory, gravel-rough as always: Damn brat, why are you staring at the sword? Watch the wielder, not the blade. Weeks of brutal training clawed their way back to the surface.
Leo dragged his eyes off the sword and onto the man holding it.
And slowly, he started to see it — the small shifts. Shoulders. Hips. The subtle pressure change in Thane’s front foot before it moved.
Thane came again, angling for Leo’s ribs. Leo saw it and parried, and this time, instead of retreating, he stepped in. The force of the parry drove Thane’s weight forward, and for one fraction of a second his side was open.
Leo took it.
His blade slid past Thane’s sword, aimed true, and scratched the leather at the ribs... a clean touch, no real damage, but a touch all the same. Thane twisted away just barely in time.
He reset his stance. "Good," he said as a wild smile had appeared on his face.
Something shifted in his posture..... barely visible, almost nothing.
But Leo felt it change.
He advanced carefully, closing the distance while he searched for the next opening, cataloguing Thane’s reach, his angles, the rhythm of his speed.
Thane struck while Leo was still calculating.
The thrust came straight down the middle. Leo tried to intercept it, but Thane’s blade slipped past his guard and found his chest. Enough to count.
[Hit registered: Thane.]
The message lit up the sky above the arena. The crowd erupted — cheers for Thane, jeers for Leo, all tangled together.
Leo stepped back, gripping his sword tighter. It wasn’t that he’d been slow. It was that Thane’s blade had arrived before Leo’s body had even finished asking his mind for permission to move.
"Your eyes can keep up," Thane said, almost gentle about it. "Your body can’t. It still checks in with your head first. That costs you the seconds that matter."
Leo had nothing to say to that.
The second exchange began. Thane circled right; Leo followed, step for step. The sand under Thane’s feet barely stirred — no wasted motion anywhere in him.
Leo saw the attack building and braced for it, timing his parry to perfection, ready to deflect the strike and counter cleanly.
But Thane’s sword rotated mid-motion, slipping past Leo’s blade entirely and tapping his wrist instead.
Tap.
[Hit registered: Thane.]
"That’s two," Thane said, and something like amusement colored his voice.
Leo let out a slow breath.
It was worse than he’d thought. Thane’s ability to redirect an attack at the last possible instant was absurd — a level of control Leo simply didn’t have yet. His read had been correct. Thane was just that good.
Leo attacked first this time, aiming for the waist, folding a feint into the strike — a slash bending mid-swing into a thrust. It was a trick that had worked on monsters and bounty targets more times than he could count, so he went in with something close to confidence.
But, It still meant nothing. Thane stepped back once, and the thrust died in the air between them. He simply moved aside and tapped Leo’s throat before Leo could recover his guard.
[Hit registered: Thane.]
Three.
The crowd roared louder.
The duel dragged on, and Leo still hadn’t landed a real blow.
Then Thane’s blade caught his wrist at just the right angle and the sword flew from his hand. The stone seats seemed to shake under the noise of the crowd. Thane’s sword tip came to rest against Leo’s chest.
Leo stared down at his weapon lying in the sand.
"Pick it up," Thane said.
Leo looked at him. "The match is still going?"
"You asked for a duel."
There was no mockery in it. No gloating at all.
Leo picked the sword back up and kept fighting.
He never managed to land another hit.
He got tapped again and again, and every time, he shouted "Again" and threw himself back in.
Finally Thane’s blade crossed his, pressed it aside, and stopped just beside his temple.
[Ding~]
[Match concluded.]
[Winner: Thane.]
The arena went silent for a beat. Then the cheers came back twice as loud.
Leo lowered his sword.
Thane pulled off his helmet. "You almost landed one, near the start."
Leo laughed, helpless. "I couldn’t even touch you."
Thane studied him for a moment. "Equipment can buy you an opportunity. Stats can give you the body to use it. Calculation can show you your choices." His eyes were steady, unreadable. "But none of it can stand in for you."
The arena dissolved around them.
Leo found himself back in the forest where he’d been hunting, his belongings still with him. He exhaled and teleported back to the forge dimension.
He didn’t like what he was feeling right now. Not one bit.
A message from Rook was already waiting — the old man was just outside the dimension barrier, in the ruins. Not long after, the two of them sat across from each other inside the eternal forge.
"So," Rook said. "How does it feel, getting trashed like that? Couldn’t even touch him. Got some perspective on your own skill now?"
Leo gave him a wry smile. "You saw?"
"Kid, everyone saw. It was broadcast to half the continent. You’re famous now — a legend of memes, if nothing else."
Leo let out another long sigh, staring at his own hands. "I thought equal stats would make it fair. I thought if I just found one good opening, I could do something."
Rook let him talk.
"You’ve got potential, kid. I can feel it. It’s just still asleep. Only thing left to do is train until it wakes up."
"I can forge better weapons," Leo said. "Build stronger gear. But I can’t just magic up experience in a fight."
The old man’s face softened, and he nodded slowly.
"Alright. Listen up." He cleared his throat. "There’s something I never really wanted to tell you — bit of an old wound. But..."
He went quiet for a while, like he was arguing with himself over whether to say it. Then he seemed to settle it.
"When I was young, I had a rival. Didn’t matter what I did — I could never catch upto him. Every duel ended the same way, my loss. I nearly gave up the sword entirely. But I didn’t. I trained like a madman instead, and eventually I broke through — not only in strength, but in spirit."
He paused.
"After that, I beat him. Just like that. And since then I’ve beaten men far stronger than he ever was."
Then, almost as an afterthought: "Oh — I’ll be heading to Space Z soon. Tell Elona dear to let me through."
He turned to leave, then stopped and looked back.
"Loss isn’t the end, boy. It’s a lesson with a blade at your throat. You can ignore it. You can whine about it. Or you can learn from it."
Leo saw him out of the smithy. The old man was level 9 now, closing in on 10.
The forums were already on fire.
The forger got folded, lmao.
Thane’s on another level.
Feel bad for the blacksmith honestly.
Leo didn’t bother reading the rest.
....
Far beyond Iron Haven, in a hollow cave beneath a stand of black pines, a girl knelt before a cracked stone altar, its surface worn by more time than it had any right to show. Ten candles burned in a ring around it, and a barrier of crimson energy pulsed faintly across its face like something breathing.
A head began to take shape within it — one horn, half a jaw, features still forming.
The devil fragment’s mouth opened, half-formed and wrong.
"Ten remains."
....