“I still kinda feel bad for everyone else.” Erik sighed.
“We’ve been over this. We’re trying to prevent a war here. Playing by the rules when we don’t have to is stupid.” Caeden shrugged. It’s not like he didn’t understand Erik’s sentiment, though he was sure their opinions came from different places, even if they arrived at the same location.
Caeden felt bad about cheating because it violated his desire for fairness. Erik likely wanted to have more exciting battles so he wasn’t bored. They both didn’t like cheating but for entirely different reasons. Ultimately, it didn’t matter. His morals weren’t worth the lives of tens of millions of shrouded and hundreds of millions or even billions of unshrouded. Preventing a war was paramount.
Not to say that Caeden would do anything to stop the war. That was a slippery slope. But bending the rules of a stupid tournament that didn’t matter beyond shallow displays of power? He'd do that all day. In fact, he was doing it right now.
“Erik, don’t even try to act like you have some kind of moral objection. You just don’t want to be bored.” Lily, arms wrapped around Caeden’s, spoke up. He was gratified that she agreed with his assessment. Not that it was hard to come to that conclusion. Erik wasn’t exactly concerned with fairness. Which made sense, considering his life.
“Ugh, but it’s going to be so easy,” Erik whined, dropping any pretense. At the same moment, a lightning bolt flew out from among the crowd they were walking through. Caeden had felt it practically before it’d happened. The castoff from an argument between two shrouded that felt like they were somewhere in the upper millions of IP.
Obviously, it headed straight for Erik. Where else would it go?
Without even looking, Caeden’s roommate flicked his hand, and the bolt was wrapped in glowing purple chains. It burned and wiggled as if trying to break free. Another gesture and the bolt was snapped in half, dissipating into the surrounding Ki. No one in their group even blinked. Erik’s control over his surroundings, particularly anything that registered as a threat to him, had grown to a tyrannical level. Hitting him was damn near impossible. The only one of them that could manage it without completely drowning him in attacks was Caeden when they were in the Forge, and he literally controlled the entire environment.
“To be fair, I’m with Erik. We kinda turned this whole tournament on its head in one night. Did you see the face of the adjudicator when you and Cae had your investigative sense event? You two were competing while everyone else just watched. I don’t think even the judge could keep up.” Cat said to Lily. “We’re way too strong for our age.”
“Apparent age.” Lily corrected. “But yes. This isn’t exactly a challenge. But that was the whole point. We’re looking past this Tournament. What we do now only matters in how it affects what comes next.”
Caeden nodded grimly. It had been a full day since they’d completed their training in the Forge. Upon their return, Damon had news for them, and it wasn’t good. He’d used his ghosts to scout among the many attendees watching the Tournament, and more than a few had piqued his interest.
It was hard to track, as they had ethertech to confound even the ghosts Damon created, but he had confirmed at least a hundred revolutionaries were attending. At a minimum. Considering their normal level of stealth, it was likely there were many times that number. Enough to indicate they weren’t just here currying favor with the CA’s enemies to incite a war. Something bigger was going on.
Briefly, Caeden and Lily considered that they might be planning a similar attack to the one on the Academy. While they didn’t completely dismiss the idea, they thought it unlikely. The attacks across the CA had required a decade of setup, with revolutionaries taking over or converting key positions to get their assaults off the ground. Time they would not have at the Tournament.
Besides that, the security here was literally the best in the whole Starry Sea. So many important people with deep animosity gathered in one place and had everyone on edge from the start. Many shrouded specialized in counter-espionage were present here, the best of the best. It was a nightmare gauntlet for any saboteurs.
Lastly and most importantly, the only way a Revolution attack would get off the ground was with one of their aura suppression fields. Because none had been recovered in the attacks, little was known about them. But they did know that the size of the field was dependent on the power source it drew from. All the ether generators on Baserock built for the Tournament were centralized and guarded constantly by shrouded guards to prevent interference with the tournament events. Which unintentionally shot down any plans the Revolution might have to set up a field.
No, Caeden and Lily, alongside Damon, agreed that there was a far more likely reason for the massive presence of revolutionaries. One more in line with their known goal. They were going to try to instigate a war, likely by attacking different nations’ delegations and somehow convincing them another nation was the perpetrator. How the Revolution would do that, they weren’t exactly sure. There were too many unknowns with the Revolution’s advanced ethertech to assume anything about their methods.
None of this was something that Caeden or his team were supposed to deal with. Damon had only told them because Cat was his granddaughter, and they were the ones to bring the matter to his attention. They were just supposed to kick ass at all their events and nothing else. Not that that fact gave Caeden any comfort. He had a sneaking suspicion that whenever things went to shit, something he was now thoroughly convinced would happen, his team would end up having to solve it. Call it intuition or simply recognizing a historical precedent, but they tended to fall deep into it whenever the situation went sideways.
Despite that thought sitting in the back of his mind, the only thing Caeden was responsible for right now was winning the match they were headed to. The five-person team events had started late yesterday, around the time most of the other youth events were wrapping up. At least, the ones garnering any interest from the upper echelons. Youth events in more niche categories would continue through to the end of the Tournament of Powers. But all the main attractions ended, coinciding with the beginning of the unrestricted tournaments and the youth combat tournaments.
It made sense to Caeden. If the youth events, inherently less impressive contests where everyone involved was on the weaker side, took place at the same time as the main equivalents, no one would watch them. Meanwhile, the combat tournaments were the most popular events in both the main and youth leagues, meaning the youth combat tournaments could happen in the same time frame as the main niche contests and still get some interest.
All of this was just to feed the egos of the higher-ups from the different nations at the events. The youth league ostensibly existed to let the younger generations showcase themselves without being outright suppressed by those a hundred times their age. What that really meant was the nobles and faction leaders could show off their kids beating other children into the dirt. Everything else was a smokescreen and a desire for casual entertainment. That, and actually scouting out possible future talent from other nations. Basically, the state goal, but with a significantly more malicious intent.
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Caeden had completely given up caring about any leadership from any of the nations here. All of them were awful in their own special way. The Wild Queendom had no male suffrage, treating anyone of that gender as servants and toys. The Fire Kingdom was an absolute dictatorship where all men were forced to be soldiers, and technology was allowed only in warfare. Unshrouded weren’t allowed to use etherships for travel and had zero access to ethertech of any kind, on penalty of death.
The Dread Federation fetishized acts of extreme violence and crucified their enemies or executed them in ritualistic fashion as gruesomely as possible. Military service wasn’t mandatory there, an exception among the gathered nations, but the forces they had were almost exclusively blood-hungry psychopaths. The 10,000 Empires was a wildly nepotistic hotbed of corruption and abuse of power. The nobility was the only group that mattered; even other shrouded were second-class citizens. Unshrouded were slaves, without exception.
Then there was the Central Authority. A textbook case of lax regulation leading to dangerous and predatory businesses that dwarfed the government’s power overall. If the Families could ever stop fighting each other long enough to take a shit, they could sweep the Central Council off the Starry Sea. But they were too busy with petty rivalries to ever actually do it.
He was giving his all to stop a war, not out of any sense of national pride or the belief that the CA was better than any other nation. He was doing it simply to mitigate the potential human suffering as much as possible. Honestly, he was of half a mind to take over the whole thing a couple hundred years. With his team, he was pretty sure they could do it, especially if they leaned on the Forge again to wildly accelerate their growth.
He pushed that thought away. The more time Caeden spent in the Forge, acting as a guide for the Bladeborne, the more confident he felt in his abilities as a leader. Enough that he knew immediate takeover wasn't a thought worth having. He didn’t have enough experience or knowledge to handle the significantly more complex world of the Starry Sea. The Forge was relatively simple, as all the ‘citizens’ he watched over inherently respected and loved him as their father, and he could magically produce any resource at will. It was being a leader with the universe’s biggest crutch.
Still, he’d discussed the idea of maybe setting up something of their own with Lily. Their time in the Blade Forge had progressed their relationship, even as it moved at a pace that frustrated Erik and Cat to no end. Both Caeden and Lily were much more comfortable with direct intimacy now and had, at some point, started planning a future together almost by accident.
Looking at her and thinking back, Caeden could recognize the changes objectively. Before they’d trained in the Forge, Lily had never been comfortable with overt displays of affection in public. Now, she was practically attached to his hip. Similarly, Caeden would have felt uncomfortable and out of his depth with this much affection before. Now, it just felt natural.
“Who are we facing again?” Caeden asked, more to refocus his own attention than any actual need for the information.
Lily looked up at him, a soft smile on her face. “The Wild Queendom’s third team of five. Basically, their middling people. Obviously, they’re still among the one percent of the most powerful from the Queendom but…”
“They don’t stand a shadow of a chance.” Caeden finished her thought.
Lily nodded. “Oh yeah. From what we’ve gathered, every nation is following a similar overall strategy to the standard, without deviations. They won’t even slow us down.”
Caeden nodded thoughtfully. He had been surprised to learn how much strategy went into the Tournament. He wasn’t sure why, in retrospect. If there was anything shrouded seemed to invest all their time in, it was showboating and frivolous entertainment. And the Tournament of Powers was all about that. What else would they put more effort into? He had been subconsciously applying his own dismissal of the event to everyone else.
No, there were reams of data about the history and depth of planning that went into the Tournament. All of which had been distilled down to the most efficient strategies thousands of years ago. Despite that, the modern take was more heavily focused on entertainment than perfect, calculating execution.
That led to the power distribution every nation had followed with their teams for the combat tournaments. Basically, stack as much power into every team as possible. So, the first team would have the top five performers working together; the second team would have ranks six to ten, and so on. This made for matches that were total sweeps if a higher team faced a lower one, and matches that were completely up in the air when two equally ranked teams faced off.
Caeden thought it would be far more entertaining if all the teams were a mix of talent focused around producing interesting strategies through shroud synergy, but that was antithetical to how most shrouded thought. Raw power was a status symbol, and seeing it in action got everyone’s blood up. Even if it was objectively easy to figure out the outcome in most matches. Shrouded wanted to see the powerful clash against the powerful or flatten their lessers into the dirt. Even their wars usually consisted of a similar situation, with the strongest in the army facing off practically one-on-one while everyone else faded into the background, or a powerful warrior single-handedly defeating tens of thousands of foes.
Plus, this setup let team one shine above the rest. A team usually composed of members of important families, nobility, or whatever other organized power structure the nation had. The people who ‘actually mattered’. If the teams were more of a mixed bag of power with an emphasis on strategy, those ‘elevated beings’ might get lost in the rabble, losing if their strategy failed. And we couldn’t have that, now could we?
It was almost disappointing. Caeden, on some level, wanted to test the skills and power he’d gained through painstaking effort alongside his friends and comrades against an equally skilled team of opponents. But he was never going to get that here. The Tournament of Powers was about power. Not intelligence or strategy.
“Mmm,” Caeden hummed, shaking his head. “So, one of us will be enough?”
“One of us won’t even break a sweat.” Lily snorted, wrinkling her nose. “Literally any of us is overkill for this match.”
“So, who’s going to do it?” Caeden asked idly.
‘Oh, oh! Me! Pick me!” Erik jumped up and down, waving his hands.
He was soundly ignored.
“I could do it; let us finish quickly,” Lily suggested. “I’m the most effective at crowd control.”
“Nu-uh!” Erik jumped in, literally jumping onto Caeden’s back and hanging from his shoulders to get in on the conversation. “I’m the best at that! Pick me!”
“Yes, Erik. You are the best at crowd control.” Lily said patiently, looking him dead in the eye. “But we can’t trust you not to play with your food, now can we?”
“Uh,” He looked away.
“Don’t lie to me,” Lily warned.
“I-I could totally, maybe, probably take care of it,” Erik said, looking anywhere but at Lily.
“I didn’t think so.”
“Awww,” Erik whined, sliding off Caeden’s back. He’d had to lift his feet up in the air to keep his taller frame off the ground, so he landed on his knees. “Pleeease?” He pleaded, hands clutched together.
“Nope.” Lily soundly denied him.
“Boo! Cat’s right; you both are boring!”