Rieren needed a little time to find the Arraihos camp. She had only seen it through Batcat’s memories so the exact location and even the appearance were vague in her head. Thankfully, her little Spirit Beast took the lead when she started to lose the way. Such an invaluable kitten Batcat was.

It was a good thing Rieren had assumed Silomene’s form too. She was a known quantity, so the Arraihos guards didn’t stop her.

“Can you please take me to Amalyse?” Rieren asked the nearest guardsman.

He offered her a short bow, then sent off one of the nearby attendants to find Lady Arraihos. Apparently, Silomene was considered an important enough guest to have Amalyse’s mother and the Clanmistress of the Arraihos clan meet her. Which was fair. Silomene was the second scion of the Tarciel clan, after all. After Oromin, that was.

“Lady Tarciel!” Lady Arraihos said. She had mustered a smile, though the edge of sadness was still visible at the corners of her eyes and mouth. “How kind of you to visit again. Are you doing well?”

Rieren offered a short curtsy. “Greetings, Lady Arraihos.” Despite knowing Silomene quite well by now, it felt odd trying to pretend to be her. Rieren didn’t put too much heart into the deception. “I am as well as I can be. I simply wished to see Amalyse again.”

“Of course. She is lucky to have such a devoted friend. Something that you might be able to remind her of, if you would be so kind. Come, I will take you to her.” She signalled another attendant with a flick of her hand. “Vela, tell Amalyse to get ready. She has a visitor. And then bring some refreshments. The golden peaches should do.”

Rieren felt that her old form would have shaken her head at that. Golden peaches? Rich people and their ostentatiousness. They never failed to take her by surprise every now and then.

Amalyse was staying in her own tent. That didn’t bode well. The fact she wanted to be alone suggested she didn’t want to be seen by anyone, so Rieren’s surprise visit might end up at a spot of awkwardness if Amalyse refused to see her at all.

Thankfully, that didn’t turn out to be the case.

“Are you dressed, dear?” Lady Arraihos asked with surprising tenderness, like she was dealing with a fawn that might skip away in fear if she spoke even a little harshly.

Amalyse’s answer was a grunt. “Ready enough. Come on in.”

Her mother offered Rieren a smile that was a good deal apologetic before leading the way inside. Amalyse, it turned out, wasn’t that ready. She was still in her bed, still wearing only her light shift, with her hair all mussed up and her face looking like she had been grinding it on a whetstone.

“Amalyse!” Lady Arraihos grasped. “Didn’t I send Vela to tell you to get dressed? Look at the state you’re in.”

“Please Lady Arraihos, it is no great matter,” Rieren said.

She ignored her. With no small amount of fuss, Lady Arraihos bent to fixing up both Amalyse’s immediate vicinity and Amalyse herself. For her part, Amalyse had never been one to put a great deal of stock in presentation, though her current state was quite the low even for her.

“There,” Lady Arraihos said, stepping back from her daughter. She couldn’t very well make Amalyse get dressed in front of Rieren, but she had tucked Amalyse into the blanket and made her hair look a little less messy than before. “Much better. I will see where Vela is with those peaches. Lady Tarciel, please make yourself comfortable.”

Like a miniature hurricane, Lady Arraihos left the tent.

As soon as her mother was gone, Amalyse perked up a little. “Boorish woman.” She shook her head so that her hair fell more naturally around her, though it turned somewhat messy again. Rieren received a slight smile from her friend. “What brings you here at this time of day, Silomene?” Then she spotted Batcat. “Is that…?”

Rieren found a stool to sit on and plopped herself down. “It is me, Amalyse.”

She had let her voice return to its regular register. Amalyse’s eyes widened. She stared at Rieren like she had never seen her before.

“I remember hearing how you have the ability to take other people’s forms.” She shook her head. “That’s so wild. You realize how much you can abuse it?”

Rieren laughed softly. “There are, unfortunately, very strong limits to it. But tell me, Amalyse. How long are you going to stay cooped up in here?”

Amalyse crossed her arms defensively. “You know, I really want to be mad at you, but you’re making it very hard.”

“Maybe I should strive to make you angrier so you are forced to leave your little bed and punch me in the face.”

Amalyse sighed in exasperation. “That is not what I mean in the slightest. You trained that monster to fight against me, didn’t you?”

Ah. So that was it.

“I sparred with it,” Rieren said. “We trained together, for various reasons. As for information, I told it nothing more than what it itself had observed in the arena.”

Amalyse didn’t look convinced, but she didn’t question anything either. She only looked away. Her face had fallen, like she had been trying to hold onto a lifeline to stay afloat but it had just sunk to the depths too.

“Your defeat is not a mark against you, Amalyse,” Rieren said.

Amalye’s reply was terse. “I am aware.”

“And yet you seem to be burdened under the impression that you have suffered a great, traumatic loss.”

“If you want to insult me to get out of my bed, it’s working a little.”

“I am telling you the truth. And I am doing it because I want my friend back.”

“Like you wanted me back when you were busy preparing for your fights with your monstrous new friends?” She scowled. “Too busy to try to meet me then?”

Rieren didn’t reply. She simply steepled her fingers before her and stared at Amalyse. Eventually, her friend heaved out a big sigh, a small flush creeping up on her face.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Apology accepted.”

“I’m just…” Amalyse threw away her blanket and dropped her feet to the ground, pacing back and forth despite the cramped quarters of her tent. “Now that I’ve been knocked out of the tournament, I don’t know how I’m supposed to contribute to anything.”

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“You didn’t think you would be knocked out eventually?”

“Maybe.” They had to be realistic about things like this. Amalyse might have improved, might have grown stronger, but she wouldn’t stand a chance against the favourites in the tournament. “But I didn’t expect to go out against a monster. It feels… humiliating.”

Well, that was something Rieren couldn’t assist with. That was Amalyse’s own battle. “I believe you won’t need long to find ways to contribute, Amalyse. Your spot in the tournament might have ended, but your journey goes beyond it.”

“Thank you for the sage wisdom, Rieren Vallorne.”

“You are most welcome.”

“I just—” Amalyse stopped and stared suspiciously at the tent opening. She looked all around. Only once she was certain no one—especially her mother—wasn’t around to eavesdrop, she went on, though at a reduced volume. “I was just hoping I would have been able to make a better name for myself through the Trials of Ascendance. For my clan, for my mother. It’s…”

“Your duty?” Rieren offered.

Amalyse inhaled a deep breath, like she couldn’t believe what she was saying. “Yes.”

“Well, I think you have already secured a future for your clan.” Rieren reminded her of Kalvia, of the oath she had sworn and was doing her best to stick by. Minus the meetings with Rieren, of course. “Despite the treatment I suffered, I doubt Kalvia would fail to raise you even higher once she is Empress.”

Amalyse wasn’t convinced. “That’s another thing too. We haven’t been speaking recently. I haven’t even seen her since before her match. I have no idea what’s happening with her.”

“Hmm. I suppose she might be in some sort of mental turmoil.”

Amalyse shot Rieren a look. “What?”

Rieren explained about her meeting with Starloper, about the things she had learned and confirmed when she had spoken with her old friend. She made sure to emphasize that the Emperor’s seat had indeed changed recently, and that there was likely a rift between the imperial court and the new ruler of the Elderlands. A deeper rift than there had been between the last Emperor.

Amalyse slowly shook her head. “That’s… a lot.”

Rieren nodded in agreement. “It is.”

“We need to talk with her.”

“We do.” She smiled. “You see where you can contribute now?”

For a second, Amalyse looked a little confused. Then she smiled too. “I suppose I do.”

***

Over the next few days, Rieren assisted the monsters with their preparations against their foes. Not that it helped a great deal. Someone like Rykion was beyond any of the monsters, no matter how much they prepared.

After speaking with Amalyse and extracting a promise that her friend would come meet Rieren personally the day after, she had headed out to the arena. She had thought that she would be able to catch enough of the match between Rykion and one of the qualified monsters—a B-Grade Higher Aetherian.

All she caught was the tail end of the battle.

The blistering light emanating from the arena had made Rieren hurry. She had circuited around to approach from the direction a monster would come in. That allowed her to drop Silomene’s appearance and reassume her own.

“No chance,” the Stifling Nebula said when Rieren joined it at the railing of the stands. The monster’s voice was filled in equal measures with both awe and fear. “The Aetherian stood no chance.”

Rieren could certainly see the evidence of that.

Rykion had used some technique or skill that she hadn’t seen before. Over two-thirds of the battlefield was filled with spears of light sticking out everywhere thanks to the Karlosyne scion’s Domain. But they weren’t just glimmering shafts embedded into the dirt. Columns of light tapered off them to rise to the sky, thin pillars that stretched on endlessly into the heavens.

The Aetherian was stuck. It was trying to move between the light pillars but kept getting caught. Wherever it touched, the light burned away bits and pieces of its body.

The worst part was that Rykion wasn’t even on the ground. Like the time he had tried to annihilate Rieren from a distance, he was standing on a floating spear high in the air. Apparently, Rykion had decided the match had gone on long enough. He snapped his fingers.

Then the light pillars all started growing wider. It took less than a breath for them to all coalesce together to form one enormous column of eye-searing light that shot into the sky.

Ah, so that was what Rieren had witnessed before. The little display that had urged her to hurry onwards even faster.

The Aetherian’s scream didn’t last for even a second. It died as soon as it started. For a second, Rieren wondered if that technique had killed the monster entirely. But the light faded in time, revealing the Aetherian’s smoking body in a little pit on the battlefield.

Moments later, the match official—who wasn’t Starloper—declared the bout over.

The crowd broke into overwhelming applause as their favoured champion zipped around on his spear of light. What a show-off.

“As I said.” Rieren glanced at the Stifling Nebula. “Defeating Rykion Karlosyne is beyond most, including myself.”

None of the monsters looked happy, of course. But they weren’t protesting the same way they had done against Essalina’s one-sided victory. Maybe they were finally learning that there was a major difference in their power and those favoured to win the Trials of Ascendance.

Or maybe they were hoping that, no matter how many of them fell, Rieren would go on to win. For them.

The next bout went better. The day after the battle against Rykion, another monster was to fight Cerill. Rieren did her best to help the monster train, to make it remember the details it had observed about Cerill over the course of the tournament. Those would be what helped the Arisen win.

But it turned out Cerill was even stronger than any of them had supposed. Like Amalyse, he had grown rapidly in prowess, rising through the ranks of cultivation at a brisk pace. Rieren was starting to think it was their relative success in the tournament that pushed their renown envelopes, thus allowing them to rise to another stage in the Exalted realm.

During the battle, the Arisen attempted to use a variety of powers. This Arisen was a strange construction. It looked like the monster from the Abyss, the Blisterskull, had been conjoined with the whatever the ashen Aetherian that Demargo had become. The combination resulted in a creature that looked horrific. Like a living tree with its top cut off and body constantly disintegrating.

Its fighting style was strange too. Too many limbs slammed into Cerill. Dark blood sprayed in his direction, sizzling the ground as though it was acid. Golden light shot at him in a storm of threads.

Surprisingly, Cerill survived them all. That huge shield of his came in handy. Cerill was able to push back all of the monster’s attacks without great difficulty.

When Cerill counterattacked, the monster didn’t dodge for some reason. Maybe it thought Cerill was too weak. Maybe it believed it could weather its opponent’s attack and come out fine enough to continue attacking ceaselessly.

Whatever the case, it was proven wrong.

Cerill’s spear with the crown of curving fangs at the tip began glowing. Rieren had seen that skill before. Had almost been hit by it back at Lionshard Sect when they had been fought against each other. It came as no surprise when the glowing spear tips started spiralling around the shaft until a tornado of golden light ringed Cerill’s weapon.

The sunshine-yellow light blasted at the monster in a stream that scorched the very field. At least the monster attempted to defend itself. Blood burst out of its open neck to form a spherical liquid black shield around it. Unfortunately, the beam shattered through its ashen limbs and the shield of blood before colliding with the Arisen’s body, sending it flying back with a shriek.

When the monster struck the ground, it didn’t rise again.

“Victory!” the commentator yelled as the crowd roared in approval. The match official had confirmed that Arisen wasn’t going to rise to fight again. “Our winner is Cerill Astor!”

“Why did it not evade?” the Stifling Nebula asked. “That complete idiot.”

Rieren grimaced. “As you can see, underestimating your opponent can be dangerous.”

“I am well aware.”

She supposed she understood why the Arisen had chosen to tank through Cerill’s blow. He hadn’t been proactive in the battle. Always defending, prioritizing his own protection over getting an attack out. Credit to Cerill, he had purposefully lulled the Arisen into thinking that his attacks couldn’t be that strong. Still. The monster should have evaded.

At least the manner of the latest monster’s loss hadn’t upset the rest of them. Not against Cerill or the humans, however angry they might have been at the Arisen’s stupidity.

Still. There was one more fight left where a monster was participating. The Stifling Nebula still had to battle against Ceraline. Of course, Rieren made sure the monster knew well ahead of time that its battle was going to be just as difficult as the one against Rykion had been. It might very well lose.

But that didn’t mean they couldn’t prepare like their life depended on it. There was always a chance, however minuscule, that it might pull off an upset.

After a sparring session on the same day of Cerill’s victory—and the monsters’ latest loss—Rieren returned to her glen to find a messenger Spirit Beast awaiting her with a letter. She thought that it was from Mercion or Silomene, or maybe even Amalyse, but the letter was different from the ones they normally sent. More… luxurious. Expensive.

She blinked once she read through it. It was an invite from another Archnoble Clanmaster.

A summons to talk about their future, and the impending end of Rieren’s participation in the tournament.