Early the next day, more officials arrived to take each of the teams to their designated starting locations. Avathene and the other judges from the eastern contingent had already been moved to the judging panels. They were all given the confirmation that the distance to the designated locations would be the same for everyone.

It made sense there were multiple. After all, the runic formation would need to be completed around the perimeter of the entire tournament grounds.

“When the signal goes up,” the woman who had led them here said. Like the official yesterday, she was dressed in simple but garish robes of yellow and burgundy. “You are to begin, competitors. May fortune favour your steps.”

“You forgot to mention what the signal is,” Kalvia said.

“Ah, yes. When the first orb reaches us, you will be free to begin.”

“Orb?”

“You will see. Soon.”

“What will this orb be doing exactly?”

“’Tis the method through which the judges can perceive you and your actions.”

“What even is there to judge when all we must do is submit our tokens by any means necessary?”

The woman had no answer to that, just a smile in response.

“How do we know the exact location we’re supposed to go?” Amalyse asked. “The longer this goes on, the more I realize the official yesterday was a little sparse on the details.”

“Follow the trail in the sky.”

“Trail in the sky?”

The woman smiled at them. Thankfully, it wasn’t as oily as the tall, lanky official’s had been. “You will understand when you see it.”

Kalvia pursed her lips, clearly disliking the apparent mysticism. “One more thing.”

“Yes?”

“That combination of colours is tremendously unflattering. I am sure you would be able to find something that suits you better.”

That made the woman blink and stare. Rieren almost laughed. Good on their Empress for turning the tables about who held true power here.

“You two ready?” Kalvia said into the silence, eyeing Rieren. Gone was her playful flirting. She was deadly serious now.

Rieren recalled well her preparations from last night. Her new enchantment was prepared, ready to make use of the Mirrorblade, and she had purchased some items she might need later. “I am fully prepared.”

Amalyse assented as well. She tried to look neutral, but Rieren didn’t miss the little signs of tension at the corners of her eyes and upon her shoulders.

“You remember the plan?” Kalvia asked.

Rieren nodded. “I recall the plan well.”

“Amalyse?”

“I can recite it out word for word, if you’d like, Your Majesty,” Amalyse said.

“That’s fine.” Kalvia glanced sidelong at the woman official who had brought them to their starting location. “We’re the only ones who need to know.”

“Oh please,” the woman said pleasantly. “I am a mere official.”

They didn’t get to argue what exactly she might be. A pop echoed over the forest. Instantly, all three of them were alert. That sound… Rieren looked up. Nothing in the sky just yet, though the yawning forest before them was blocking much of their field of view.

“That signals the beginning,” the woman said. Even as she spoke, a glimmering orb floated into their midst. Rieren’s heart skipped a beat as it reminded her all too much about the orbs populating the Abyss, but this was different. Smaller, brighter, with no sensation that it held a whole world within. “May fortune—”

“Let’s go!” Kalvia shouted.

Leaving the poor woman to finish her well-wishes by herself, Rieren and her teammates headed into the forest. The Trials of Ascendance had begun.

Their plan was simple. For the first step, they were going to use Rieren’s Dawn Cloud to traverse the ground as quickly as possible while evading any potential traps. The officials couldn’t be fully trusted. She wasted no time calling up her Domain Summons and jumping aboard, setting it to travel at high speed as soon as her companions had gotten on as well.

The thickness of the trees made aerial traversal a little difficult. Too high and the branches would catch them, preventing the Dawn Cloud from passing through easily. Too low, and they might as well walk as they were liable to get caught in any potential traps.

But it couldn’t be helped. Even if the Dawn Cloud couldn’t move as fast and as freely as would have been ideal, they were still conserving energy they might need later.

“Everyone has the communicators?” Kalvia asked.

Rieren and Amalyse both confirmed vocally. They had purchased some from the System Shop that morning. Simple, cheap Comm Shells that allowed wielders to speak with each other so long as they were within three leagues of each other.

“Any sign of anyone else yet?” Kalvia asked.

Rieren shook her head. She was in charge of surveying what lay ahead of them. Neither her electroreception nor her Essence-infused senses could pick out any Essence activity nearby. “Nothing farther ahead yet.”

“Amalyse?”

Amalyse gave the same answer. “No one on our tail.”

“Nothing from the side either,” Kalvia said. “I suppose it is a little early. We only just started.”

“There, I see the first boundary.” Rieren pointed ahead of them. She didn’t lose sight of the rest of the surroundings, of course, keeping her senses on high-alert. It might be a trap. “Nothing there yet…”

“This orb is going to keep following us, isn’t it?” Amalyse said.

Neither Kalvia nor Rieren looked away from their ongoing lines of sight. Even a single moment’s distraction could be fatal.

“Focus, Amalyse,” Kalvia said. “We need to stick to the plan.”

“Got it.”

They passed out through the line of trees. Rieren tensed, ready for any surprises that might fly their way. Nothing occurred. No traps awaited them, no cultivators shot their myriad powers in their direction. They were well and truly alone.

For now.

“Still no one,” Kalvia muttered.

Rieren surveyed the entire area properly. They had come out into a large, long clearing in the middle of the forest. It stretched out in either direction for indeterminable length. The forest restarted not far away, however.

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“Look up,” Amalyse said.

Rieren did so, spotting the “trails in the sky” as the woman had said. Smoke signals. Different coloured smoke signals were emanating from specific locations all over the forest, some far, some nearer.

“We need to head towards the closest one,” Amalyse said.

“If they are not traps, that is.” Rieren immediately cursed herself. That was her paranoia talking once again.

“They aren’t traps,” Kalvia said. “Trails in the sky, remember? Though, I do agree that it’s best to be wary. But let’s focus on what’s ahead of us and simply make sure we’re travelling in the right direction.”

As soon as they crossed the threshold into the shadows under the canopy, Rieren sensed it.

While her other senses still failed to catch anything, her electroreception fired off. There was a significant disturbance of charge coming from farther ahead.

“Our first encounter approaches,” Rieren said. She brought the Dawn Cloud to a halt. “Stick to the plan?”

“Of course,” Kalvia said.

They jumped off and let the Domain Summons hover in place as they walked forward. The protocol for any encounters was the same—a probe to determine the strength of their opponents, and if they turned out to be hostile, then either fighting or running. It was the mixed manner of fighting and running that would trip up the other participants.

Their objective wasn’t to defeat everyone they encountered. No. What they had to keep in mind was their real goal.

Reaching the smoke signals.

They approached their target stealthily, minimizing as much noise as possible and channelling no Essence. This was made easy thanks to their target screaming, grunting, and making other Abyss-cursed noises that should have alerted half the forest by now.

“If only we could have gone around the idiot,” Amalyse hissed under her breath.

Rieren shook her head with similar dissatisfaction. It would have been more convenient if they could have avoided an unnecessary encounter, but their path wasn’t so easy. The forest was almost seemingly artificially constructed to ensure anyone entering its wooded bounds would need to follow certain, specific routes, which could only be entered at certain locations.

Everywhere else, the trees grew so close together, even in the middle of the day, they were utterly dark. Rows upon rows of thick, heavy trunks strung along like impassable fortress walls.

They all halted when the scene before them became visible enough to make out what was going on.

Kalvia was the first to vocalize her shock. “What in the Abyss?”

A tall young man wearing tight, fur-lined clothes was stabbing another man repeatedly. The one on the ground had to be dead by now. Rieren could barely make out the man beneath all the blood and the gory wounds. Something was quite clear, though. The warrior with the knife had spared his target’s face. A face that was distantly familiar. Then it hit her.

The dead man was from one of the Shatterlands teams. An Ordorian representative.

The knife-wilder halted all of a sudden. His head turned to face Rieren’s team like a wheel rotating on an axle.

“Oh!” The grin on his face was feral. “New victims! How kind of you to come right at me instead of making me run around to get to you.”

“That man.” Kalvia pointed to the grinning murderer’s victim. “What did you do his companions? Leave them dead or dying somewhere else?”

The warrior rose to his fee with his bloody knife, head held at an angle as though Kalvia’s question puzzle him. “I let them go.” He fished out a runic piece from within his tight tunic. Rieren blinked. No. Two runic pieces. “They weren’t the first group I let go, so long as they surrendered their tokens.”

Not good. A group that could make other groups surrender their very participation in the tournament had to be extremely powerful. It might appear as though an individual had caused this, but since the Trials of Ascendance required three-member teams, the warrior’s allies had to be somewhere close by. Waiting to unleash the trap they had set.

“Will you let us go if we surrender our tokens?” Kalvia asked.

At that, Amalyse’s hand involuntarily went to a spot on her waist. The warrior followed the motion with a lascivious glint in his eyes.

“I will,” he said. “I promise.”

Amalyse tutted. “Too bad we won’t be letting anyone get a hand on it.”

“Ah, so you want to suffer the same fate as well?” He licked the blood off the edge of his knife. “So be it, then.”

The motion that burst into being around them wasn’t surprising in the least. Rieren and the rest of her team had walked in knowing there would be a trap.

But that didn’t mean they would be trapped.

A cage materialized around them. Glowing red strings, like bright iron wires the colour of blood, appeared as though they had always been there. Rieren and the others had only failed to see them. Which was close enough to the truth, in Rieren’s estimation. They must have used some sort of Enchantment to keep the Domain hidden. It had come up too fast for anything else.

Amalyse was already acting, of course. She crushed a red crystal in her hand, which immediately turned into a giant greatsword. Red-white fire burned along its length as her favoured Aspect came into play.

It didn’t work. Fast and strong though her swing was, her sword failed to cut through the strange red wires.

As soon as Amalyse’s flaming red greatsword struck the nearest section of wires, they bent under the applied force. But it wasn’t just that section. The entire cage itself bent and twisted outwards, as though Amalyse had hit every single wire in that had materialized in the dozen paces around them, instead of just a small bunch close to her.

The knife-wilder laughed. “Escaping won’t be so easy. How do you think we trapped those other fools? Now, prepare yourselves!”

“Actually, I think we’re going to take our leave,” Kalvia said.

“Like I said, you can’t—”

Kalvia proved that she could. Her Domain had materialized too, sending up an enormous tree growing out of the ground. The roots broke out and shattered the ground, causing the trees around them to begin to fall and crash. Meanwhile, the trunk wrapped around them, forming a thick wooden shield against their enemies, while the branches poked out like unassailable spears.

Rieren herself was a little taken aback at the sheer strength of the summoned Domain. Not by the Domain itself, of course. She had seen trees like this and other versions of it come out with incredible strength and power. The Emperor’s Domain made this look like a mere sapling in comparison. Abyss, she had seen several Avatars summon similar ones in this timeline.

Still. What she hadn’t realized was just how powerful Kalvia had made her Domain. She had stated she was still in the Peak-Enlightened realm. That her Domain was this strong despite being an entire realm weaker than Rieren spoke volumes of her Domain’s true potential.

“You think an Abyss-cursed tree is going to save you?” the knife-wielder yelled at them. His voice was fading as he was left on the ground, Rieren and her two team members rising higher with Kalvia’s summoned tree. “You won’t break free from our Bloodborne Cage.”

Rieren shook her head, unbothered. The use of our had confirmed there were more of them. But the important thing was that this cage of theirs wouldn’t stand up against them for long.

Kalvia was smart. From the moment Amalyse had struck the wires, she had learned just how they functioned, as had Rieren. The bending of all the lines when even one was struck meant that they held their prey within by transmitting any aggressive forces throughout the entire cage. That meant even extraordinary applications of power would be reduced to mere tugs and pokes. Ingenious, in a way.

But the Empress-to-be had a solution to that. With her tree spiralling outwards in growth, its branches were pushing on all the wires at every moment of time. The cage could no longer dissipate the force acting against it throughout its structure.

Not when the entirety of it was currently under siege.

“Brilliant,” Amalyse said. “This is going to stop them from using the interior too.”

She was right. If the warrior and his allies had meant to trap Rieren’s team within their Domain, it had surely been foiled now. The gigantic tree had taken up the entire space between the blood-red wires pushing out hard at every point.

Rieren didn’t pay it much attention. She was certain Kalvia’s continuously expanding Domain would burst free soon enough.

The more important part was that the enormous tree’s interior was twisting and changing as well. Just as Kalvia had said when they had been planning and deciding how best to use their various abilities in conjunction with each other’s, the tree was forming hollow tunnels within its trunks.

An escape route for Rieren to follow out of this trap.

She wasted not a second to rush through the wooden tunnel. It was dark, but her Essence-enhanced eyes saw the trail of wood-Aspected Essence lining the path she was to follow. Rieren hurried forward.

It wasn’t long before she met her companions. They had followed their own tunnels.

“There are more of them,” Amalyse said.

“Probably not far.” Kalvia went silent for a second as her tree’s creaking growth sharpened for a second before powerful snaps reverberated in every direction. They had finally broken through their enemy’s Domain. “But we can hopefully use of one of the branches to come out far enough away.”

“And if we don’t?”

Rieren gripped her sword. “Then we switch to the secondary plan.”

“Let’s go,” Kalvia said, leading the way through the next tunnel.

They moved fast. This tunnel was significantly longer than the one Rieren had taken before. Kalvia was intent on creating an exit as far from the trap’s location as possible.

“Almost there,” Kalvia said. “Get ready.”

There was no literal light at the end of the tunnel. Not when the forest was so dark. But Rieren could feel a draft and what looked like a lighter smudge of colour through her normal eyes about twenty paces away. Their exit really was at hand.

Just before they burst out, however, she halted her companions for a moment. She could sense Essence outside.

Amalyse didn’t look pleased. “Second plan?”

Rieren nodded. “Second plan. Ready yourselves.”

The other two waited while she prepared herself. Pulling on the power of the former self Rieren had consumed, she pulled on as much Essence as she could, enough to make it begin to concentrate on her like a second skin. It was a good thing Kalvia’s tree prevented anyone outside from sensing Essence within it.

Now that she was ready, Rieren took the plunge and jumped free from the tree’s confines. As soon as she was outside, dozens upon dozens of crows burst from the surrounding forest. They cawed and rushed at her, uncountable black darts zipping straight for her.

Rieren gripped her sword tighter. But just as she began pulling it out, the blade a mere handsbreadth away from her waist, all the crows detonated in a fiery explosion at once.