Rieren and the others made good time towards their destination. She attributed that to the fact that they were now a strong, numerous coalition of cultivators. If there were any others who wished to confront them for their tokens, they had to think twice considering their sheer numbers.
A good thing. Rieren was done with interruptions and simply wished to submit her token to be done with all this. Fighting over pieces of runic formations wasn’t at all her idea of the Trials of Ascendance.
She was here to conduct hopefully honourable combat against other cultivators, proving her superiority in the field of battle. A part of her actually appreciated that this wasn’t the chaos of an outright war. As much as it felt too good to be true, as much as a part of her still claimed there had to be a catch or a trap, she was looking forward to the one-one-one fights of the next round.
Whether that was likely to happen anytime soon was anyone’s guess. Rieren and her team might have almost reached their destination, but they’d still have to wait until the entire runic formation was complete.
“I can see it,” Artel said from the front where he was in the lead. “The smoke signal is close.”
Murmurs of approval passed through the entire group, relieving some of the tension that had been building for a while. They had arranged themselves so that they couldn’t take advantage of their positioning, but that didn’t mean they could relax. Betrayal wasn’t impossible.
All such troubling thoughts began to fade when they saw what Artel had seen. Rieren smiled. The smoke signal was indeed close.
They had passed into the largest clearing they had seen yet. At the end of it, where a wide path led even deeper into the forest, the smoke signal towered off into the sky. It was coming off a large brazier. The same woman who had met Rieren and her team at the beginning of the tournament was standing there with a pleasant smile, awaiting the rest of the competitors.
Rieren led the way there. She sensed no trap or any channelling of Essence nearby, save for those next to her. It would be wildly inappropriate for anyone to ambush them right in front of the tournament official, though Rieren didn’t put it past some of them, in all honesty.
“Welcome,” the official said as Rieren and the rest of them approached. “Congratulations on making it to the end of your preliminary journey. Please submit your tokens, indicate your team number and if the rest of your team’s representatives are present, and then you may proceed farther into the tournament.”
Galorian and the rest of them went first. Each of those teams had held their tokens upon themselves, unlike where Rieren herself had the tokens of those under her. One by one, they submitted their tokens, indicated their team members, and went past the woman to stand in the path ahead.
“Token please,” Olis said, holding out a hand.
Rieren placed a hand in her robe. It really was a good thing Serace and his team had only stolen the one token. She wondered if they had already progressed to the next round. Rieren pulled out one of her three tokens and handed it to Olis. “One token, as promised.”
The other woman looked at the smooth piece of ivory-white rock with a hint of skepticism, but then nodded gratefully. “Thank you.”
Rieren turned to Morel and the rest of her first recruits, giving them the other free token she possessed. “And one for you.”
“I was doubting whether you’d really keep your end of the deal,” Morel said quietly. “Guess I was wrong to doubt.”
Rieren smiled at him. “It seems there are still some lessons you need to learn.”
“There you go being patronizing again.”
“I have decided to embrace it.”
He stared at her, then broke into a laugh.
“We appreciate it,” Stade said. He grimaced down at the stump of his leg. “Despite our initial altercation and fallout.”
She frowned. A part of her did feel minorly guilty now at having been so ruthless against the three of them. Losing an entire limb was no small matter. But the past was done. No point in fretting over it.
“Despite this round’s end,” Rieren said. “We may be of use to one another still, in the next round. I hope we can work together, if the opportunity arises.”
Forys smiled. “I’m not against helping each other some more.”
Rieren nodded, then headed over to the official to hand in her token.
“Congratulations, Rieren Vallorne,” she said. “Will you be submitting your token for the rest of your absent team?”
The casual mention of her name hadn’t been quiet. As soon as the words had left the official’s mouth, several of those nearby all jerked around as though they’d been pricked with lightning.
They knew her.
That shouldn’t have been surprising. These were northerners, after all. They all knew that Essalina Arteroth had been killed in the past timeline, that her death was one of her primary motivators in this reprise of life. And the one who had delivered that death to Essalina was one Rieren Vallorne.
She gripped the token tightly, then quickly handed it to the official. “Yes. I will be submitting for the rest of my team.”
“Thank you.” The official took the token and placed it right into the brazier. There was a soft flash around them all. Another piece of the runic formation had been added, raising the barrier a little higher. “You may now proceed forward.”
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Rieren took a short but deep breath, stepping forward, trying not to look at the others all eyeing her with interest.
That was when the ground began shaking all of a sudden.
She looked around, alarmed. The others were startled as well, trying to place the source of the disturbance. This wasn’t a simple tremor from some overzealous use of power. No, this was a continuous shaking, like a ceaseless earthquake.
Like a charge by heavy, large feet coming in their direction.
“Official,” Galorian said imperiously. “What’s going on?”
The woman was trying to hold on to her pleasant smile, even though she was shaking along with the rest of them. “I am not certain. I assume something has happened in the distant borders of the tournament borders.”
She was right. That was where the shaking was emanating from. Rieren tried to look at the distant line of trees. Even those towering trunks and array of branches were shaking as well. But what in the world could be at the border of the tournament grounds that could cause this?
Her eyes widened. She’d heard the reports of the Dreadflood coming closer and closer. It couldn’t be… Why would Elder Olg try to interfere with the Trials of Ascendance?
She had assumed he would try to use the tournament as a distraction to head towards Vanharron. That had been his original direction, as far as Rieren had learned. Something had pushed him to come here instead. It would be concerning if his monstrous side was taking over the rational part of him. Rieren hoped that wasn’t the case.
The distant trees rustled harder. Thankfully, whatever Rieren might have expected, all that came from them were two more teams hurrying towards them.
“What’s going on?” Olis asked one of the new arrivals.
“Monsters!” he said. His eyes were wide and he was breathing heavily, like he had rushed over as fast as he could. “They’re everywhere. We fought some off but there’s too many of the bastards.”
Troubled murmurs and whispers filled the area, but Galorian stepped forward with a hard look on his face. “So what if there are monsters? We’ll just kill them all. There’s no need to be afraid.”
“I don’t think anyone here is afraid of the monsters,” Olis said. “Just the fact that there are monsters where there shouldn’t have been any. We were promised open, free ground where this tournament could occur without interruptions.”
Rieren agreed. There had been many assurances that the Trials of Ascendance wouldn’t suffer monstrous interruptions. That they would ensure the tournament grounds were protected against the same kind of invasions that had plagued Lionshard Sect and the Shatterlands for so long. It looked like the competition organizers had failed at that.
“What are we going to do?” Morel asked. “Just wait here and fight them off?”
“Fight?” someone retorted. “We don’t owe anyone here a single thing. Why should any of us fight? We’re supposed to be focusing on other competitors, on the tournament, not on any external matters like Abyssals.”
Rieren was tempted to agree with the second person. She was here to fight in the Trials of Ascendance, not take part in battles against monsters. But then, while she might have the option of leaving it to others now that she had progressed past the first round, the rest of her team were still stuck out there in the forest. She couldn’t just leave Amalyse and Kalvia behind.
“Please wait here,” the official said. “I am sending a message to the interior department and checking the procedure we must follow.”
“Hurry up,” Olis said.
The poor, stressed woman quickly pulled out a strange but familiar looking device. With a little jolt, Rieren realized it was a shell, much like her Comm Shell, but larger and clearly more complicated. The official called her superiors and started off a hushed conversation. But before she could finish her talk, the answer appeared in person.
Rieren sensed the approach. She turned around, as did several of those around her, as a large man in a green-and-black robes with polished ivory buttons and an ivory mask landed from nowhere in their midst.
One of the Forborne Emperor’s Masked Avatars was here.
Rieren immediately tensed up. She wasn’t alone in that either. Hmm. Maybe she wasn’t the only one who’d had unsavoury interactions with Avatars elsewhere. Thankfully, this Avatar ignored the competitors completely.
“I am glad to see that all is well here,” he said.
“We’ve been invaded by monsters,” Artel said. “I don’t think that qualifies as well.”
The Avatar ignored the hint of panic in Artel’s voice. “You are all to remain at this location. Official, please ensure that the competitors do not vacate the premises. We cannot allow them to come to harm, nor can we allow them to use the chaos to their advantage.”
“How in the world are we supposed to use any of this to our advantage?” Galorian asked.
The Avatar didn’t answer that either. “We are already preparing to deal with these incursions personally. If you wish to remain unharmed, please do not interfere in the proceedings.”
Ignoring all further questions and queries, the Avatar acted.
He jumped up again. As he took to the air, the ground shook some more, splitting apart for the Avatars’ customary large Domain tree to sprout up and tower into the sky. It rose in seconds, turning from a mere sapling into a mountainous tree with hundreds of branches in less than a breath.
It didn’t stop there. The tree’s bark darkened to pure black, like polished jet, and all its leaves turned red as wine. Several of the branches coagulated together to form three main “heads”, which then sprouted enormous, amethyst-petalled flowers, each big enough to swallow a Blightmane Lykan whole.
Then the flowers began gathering power.
“What in the Abyss is he doing?” Olis asked.
Her answer arrived a moment later. The flowers had been pulling the Essence around them, turning to glow with the brilliance of a sunny beacon, before firing out a pulsating beam of pure gold.
The illumination turned everything searingly bright. Rieren was forced to squint her eyes, though she managed to see what was going on. The beams of compressed power shot into the forest, setting off a series of enormous explosions that caused even more shaking, eradicating entire chunks of the grounds with awestriking power.
Rieren glared up. “You must stop,” she yelled, though she wasn’t certain her voice could be heard over the clamour. “There are other competitors still out in the forest. This indiscriminate destruction will put them in harm’s way.”
There was no response. Of course. She couldn’t expect a cursed Masked Avatar to listen to reason. Abyss, for all she knew, this might be the trap they were waiting for.
It would be terribly convenient for monsters to invade the tournament grounds, giving the Avatars license to conduct indiscriminate annihilation of the entire forest, regardless of who still remained within. In fact, Rieren wouldn’t be surprised if this gigantic tree was nothing more than a decoy too, that some burst of power would land in her current location to kill them all as well.
But no. Why wait this long to spring it, if it was indeed a trap? This didn’t feel like it was planned. Unless their motive was something else entirely.
Rieren wasn’t the only one yelling at the Avatar to halt. Morel, Olis, and one of Galorian’s allies were also telling the Avatar to pause, screaming at him to pause before he hit one of the competitors with his beams.
Nothing. The Avatar had locked onto his task. The rest of the world might as well not exist.
Rieren kept her growl to herself. There was no point in trying to use words. She could resort to violence—might even do so, regardless of the consequences, if he kept this up. But first, she had another thing she intended to try.
Just as she pulled out the Comm Shell from her robes, however, the competition official dragged in all their attentions.
Still with that pleasant smile etched on her face, the woman raised both her arms and plunged them into the brazier. Several of them started at her scream. Rieren stared, her heart feeling like it was frozen in her chest. The woman’s wail hadn’t taken away her irrepressible smile.
When the official pulled her arms out, aflame and half burned all the way to the bone, she was holding tokens. Rieren never got the chance to count how many there were.
The woman clutched them all to her chest and ran out into the chaos.