If Rieren had been alarmed by that little trick Kalvia had pulled earlier in their battle, now she was positively agitated. That technique. She had seen the old Forborne Emperor use it. It was the same ability he had unleashed when he realized Vanharron had fallen. When he understood that nothing more of his city could be saved.

So he had sought to destroy everything—and everyone­­—within the seat of his power with a final, monumental summoning of his power. A power that ate his very being to fuel itself.

“Kalvia!” Rieren shouted. “Stop!”

The thread of sunlit energy pouring down from the heavens started widening, growing into a column. Its radius burgeoned outwards with every heartbeat. When it touched the ground, the earth simply melted until it began to dig deep underground. The air in front of the column was twisting so ferociously that it had turned into a miraging mirror.

Rieren twisted her head around. While most of the crowd stood dazzled by the display of might from their chosen champion, those at the dignitaries’ stands knew what was truly happening.

Several of them had stood up. Some had summoned protective barricades of various colours and energies. Three Masked Avatars had come to the front of the stands, summoning up a barricade of wood covered with golden leaves. Beyond them all, even the current Emperor had risen to his feet, the sight of which had consternated many of the others around him.

Rieren turned back to her actual battle. She had learned enough. They weren’t going to stop this, not for Rieren. No, they cared enough to protect themselves, and that was it. Even Starloper wasn’t rushing to stop this or intercept. Why would he? He wanted them to use as much Essence as possible, and the amount Kalvia was unleashing was unimaginable.

So much for making sure the competitors didn’t end up killing each other.

Rieren faced the growing column that was fast approaching her location. “Kalvia! How much of yourself are you destroying to perform this?”

If the heir to the Elderlands’ throne could hear Rieren, she gave no indication. All she wanted to do was win. No matter what.

There was no other option. Rieren would need to head in.

She summoned her Domain first. The water didn’t last long. That overheated column of blazing sunlight was too close, quickly turning all of Rieren’s summoned water to steam. The cloak of water and vapour she wrapped herself with would have to do.

Rieren charged in, using a burst of water to fuel her momentum.

Contact with the column was just as bad as she had feared it would be. As soon as she touched it, the burning began. Rieren had made sure to thicken her concentrated Essence armour as much as possible. It would provide some much-needed cover.

But it wasn’t enough to stave off the sheer power behind the technique. Rieren could feel her skin burning already, could feel her flesh crisping underneath. The heat was scorching her very bones. That she could even see inside the burning column was no small a blessing. Condensing Essence into one’s eyes was invaluable.

Still, her time within the column of pure sunlight was extremely limited. Thankfully, it wasn’t too wide. Kalvia and her cocoon were positioned in the centre of the technique’s area of effect.

One step inside, then Rieren used Fray Passage to take herself to the cocoon.

Next, she began hammering away at the hard wood. The heat was warping her Receptor Sword. One good smack with it left a fissure on the cocoon’s wooden exterior, but also broke her sword at the same time. Not good. Rieren continued hammering away with the jagged end of her blade.

But then her Essence armour cracked. Over her back, across her shoulders, on her face and limbs. All over her body, the pressure of Kalvia’s technique was shattering the concentrated Essence armour.

Fray Passage had given her a bit of reprieve. After all, while using the skill, Rieren was essentially invulnerable from any and all damage. But now that she was still, there was nothing stopping the pouring sunlight from melting her entire body.

Immediately, Rieren’s skin started simply sloughing off. Her flesh ruptured and burst. Then her skeleton was hit. The power of Kalvia’s technique was singeing her very bones. Rieren’s mouth opened involuntarily to scream, but no words came out. Instead, pure heat and light shoved in, liquifying her from within.

Even in that blazing agony, even in that moment where nothing in the world existed save the fact that Rieren was being vaporized alive, she had enough mental acumen to activate Reaver Stance.

The boost to her strength, to her resistances, to the acuity of her mind, were all Rieren might have died without. For, in the next instant, she pulled her arm back, before stabbing into the cocoon with all the might she could summon. Her blow landed right atop that fissure from earlier. A crack that widened into a proper hole that she could shove her hand through.

A gap in Kalvia’s defence that allowed Rieren to reach in and slap the other woman hard.

The technique disappeared. All the light burning the world, all the incandescent white and gold, vanished as though they had never been.

Rieren gasped. This time, she did find a breath to scream out at the top of her lungs. Her eyes were bloodshot and blurry, darkness bordering the edges of her vision. When was the last time she had gone through pain of this calibre?

Not now. Thoughts could come later. First, Rieren had to act.

A thread of gold shot out from the cocoon again. Even her blurry sight picked it up. Rieren was having none of it. With Reaver Stance enhancing her strength to titanic proportions, she grabbed the edges of the hole in the cocoon, then pulled. It tore apart, fell off, revealing the culprit underneath.

Kalvia was standing with her head angled so that her mouth was pointing straight at the sky. At the sun. Her wide, gaping mouth from which emanated that thread of pure gold, linking the depths of her soul—her elixir field—to the strongest Aspect that fed into her wood Aspect.

Sun Aspect.

“Enough,” Rieren said.

She barely recognized her own voice. No doubt, her larynx had been deformed thanks to the damage she had taken. That she could even talk was a great accomplishment in its own right.

Rieren shoved her hand through the wider gap in the cocoon and clamped her palm over Kalvia’s mouth. Balanced on the edge of the cocoon, with her other hand raising the half-molten slag of her broken sword over Kalvia’s face, Rieren leaned down so she didn’t have to talk any louder than necessary.

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“Give up,” she growled. “Or I will make you give up.”

A drop of molten metal dripped off her sword and splashed on Kalvia’s cheek. Her scream was muffled behind Rieren’s palm as the molten droplet started eating through her Essence armour. It was probably already burning her skin and the flesh around her mouth.

She didn’t surrender, however. There was fear, panic, and desperation in her eyes, but no sign of defeat. Defiant till the very end.

So be it.

Rieren raised the half-molten sword high. The cocoon shook, a multitude of wooden tendrils spiking out to stab Rieren all over. She could almost have laughed them off. After that horrific ordeal from Kalvia’s prior technique, with the pain still possessing her very soul, all that pesky plant matter was next to nothing.

She stabbed the broken sword down. Kalvia screamed again. Rieren’s attack broke the Essence armour around her temple and the sword blow left a vicious wound to her head. She fell, her cocoon of wood and vines crumbling to nothing.

Rieren stood over her fallen adversary. Kalvia was senseless but breathing. Still alive.

It was only then Rieren felt herself drawing in the biggest breath she’d ever consciously done so. Her heart continued to pound in her ribcage. Loud. So loud. There was nothing but silence around her.

Rieren looked up. Then blinked. The stands were fine. Despite how long Rieren felt she had taken to stop Kalvia and her technique, despite the speed with which that column had been expanding, it appeared that it hadn’t reached the arena wall. Hadn’t even gotten close. She almost laughed. All that consternation by the dignitaries’ stand, and for what?

Kalvia had retained just enough control over her technique, even when it seemed she had thrown away all abandon to take out Rieren.

Still. That technique had been devastating. For at least sixty, perhaps seventy paces around the spot where Rieren was standing, there was absolutely nothing. No sign of the ground anywhere. When she looked down at the depthless gorge around her, all she found was darkness. She stood on a lone spire jutting out from nothing.

Insane. That technique’s power was unimaginable.

Rieren pulled her focus back onto the match. Her eyes trailed over the area until she found Starloper—disguised as Skarlen Folster of course—making his way over to her. A buttress of earth was expanding out before him to connect to their lone spire.

He knelt next to Kalvia when he arrived, sparing Rieren no attention at all. Then he raised a hand to signal the commentator above him.

More silence. Rieren almost started to feel as though they weren’t going to call the match just because she had won. She wasn’t supposed to. A monster, even if a former one, turning out to be the champion of the vaunted Trials of Ascendance? Impossible. Inconceivable.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the commentator began all of a sudden. Haltingly. Wondrously. Like he couldn’t believe his own words. “The Trials of Ascendance have come to an end. A glorious, brilliant end. We have a victor. A champion. Please raise your hands, please applaud, please sing the name of the winner of the Trials—Rieren Vallorne.”

For all that the commentator had tried to sound ostentatious, he had been unable to rouse the crowd enough. They were silent at first. But slowly, they started to clap. One after another, they brought their hands together, a chorus of applause taking root in the entire audience. Even in the dignitaries’ stand. People were clapping her. They were respecting her victory.

Rieren breathed in sharply. The pain was still ricocheting through her body. She wondered what they saw. What kind of battered, broken, barely alive champion did they have?

New Achievement!

You have won a major tournament! Your strength is now vaunted for leagues and leagues, your name stitched in the annals of history. And yet, you are still not done.

Rewards

* 1 Level

* 1 Technique Scroll: Heaven’s Arc

* 10 Credits

* 1 Profession Point

Ah, so there was the achievement. Rieren had been wondering why she hadn’t received one for progressing deeper into the tournament. The system likely didn’t grant anyone any achievements until they had reached their end at the Trials.

The scroll materialized before her. Rieren caught it with a smile. Heaven’s Arc. Finally. Now this was a technique she would be carrying all the way to the end of her life.

A light cough distracted her from the rest of what she had earned. She looked down to see that Kalvia was regaining her consciousness.

“Oh, wow,” she said. Her voice was thick. With emotion or pain, it was hard to tell. “I ended up losing, didn’t I?” Rieren was about to tell her that yes, she had, but then Kalvia laughed. “Should have known even I couldn’t stop the great Rieren Vallorne.”

Rieren considered for a second, then reached a hand into the broken cocoon. Divine Rejuvenation was already fixing up her injuries, though it was taking a while. “For all that you seemed to give in to that final technique, you still maintained control.”

It wasn’t a question. Rieren had seen proof of Kalvia’s tight leash. It had been dangerous, a highly reckless move that could have had devastating effects—and still would have on Kalvia herself, if not on everyone else in the arena. But she hadn’t thrown away everything in hopes for victory. Not everything beyond her.

Kalvia slowly nodded. “I would never have actually killed you.”

“Just made me suffer a few centuries’ worth of agony in a few seconds so that I was forced to surrender?”

That wasn’t a question, either. Just a rhetorical supposition, accompanied by a raised eyebrow.

Kalvia laughed a little again. “Such is the way of cultivators like us, isn’t it?”

Rieren shook her head, but she didn’t retract her hand. Eventually, Kalvia grasped it and began pulling herself upright. Her grip was weak. That technique had stolen a great deal of her strength.

When she was back on her feet, standing next to Rieren, she swayed on her feet for a second. Her eyes were closed, screwed up in concentration. Rieren supported her. Moments later, her eyes opened. Her expression had cleared. All that tension in the battle, all the desperation, panic, fear, and whatever else had melted away.

Leaving her with that slightly playful, slightly haughty, and effortlessly beautiful look on her face.

“Please give it up for our finalists,” the commentator said with great gusto. “The two contenders who reached the pinnacle of this tournament for the ages and gave us such an excellent display of the strength of our coming generation of cultivators. Applaud the future!”

This time, the crowd’s roars and cheers were deafening. Rieren snorted. Of course, now that Kalvia was back on her feet, they finally had an excuse to give in to their wild, celebratory selves.

“They’re not just cheering for me, you know,” Kalvia said. She had a knowing look on her face. “They’re applauding this.”

It was Rieren’s turn to laugh. Perhaps she had become too biased in her reckoning of the crowd. They had clapped for her before, hadn’t they?

They stood together in the centre of the destroyed, soaking in the pleasure of the audience. The feeling of triumph, for Rieren, at least. Starloper had left the spire to stand at the edge of the arena. The healers were waiting with him.

“I… apologize,” Kalvia said. “I’ve been… far too focused on myself and finding what I wanted, figuring out what I could do, and didn’t take into account just how much my… you…” She sighed. “How much I needed all those who needed me. Who needed me for me, not as just an Empress who could do whatever they wanted to.”

Rieren frowned at her. “Is that what has been bothering you? You truly felt that the friends you made only saw you as the heir?”

Kalvia looked away for a moment. “Can you blame me?”

Rieren supposed… she couldn’t. Not really. When they thought of Kalvia, they were as likely to think of her as the Empress as just Kalvia. It was something her mind had reverted to on its own, something that felt natural to think of. Imperial heir. Empress-to-be. That was just how they had normally come to think of her.

And it seemed Kalvia had learned that was how they thought of her too. Rieren could see how it had come to irk her, how she felt reduced to her role in their story.

“Then I should apologize as well,” Rieren said. “I never meant to denigrate you in such a manner.”

Kalvia took a deep breath. “It’s not your fault. Well, it sort of is. But I could have had a more open conversation about it instead of shutting myself away. For that, I apologize too.”

Rieren shook her head. “I will forgive you if you forgive me. Deal?”

“Deal.”

They looked at each other, then laughed again. Rieren looked back up to the cheering crowds. She had done it. She had gone on to win the Trials of Ascendance. She had secured herself a vaunted seat at the imperial court.

Rieren could now change things from within, a straight path that led to Vanharron, the seat of everything wrong with the Elderlands.

But now she had to prepare for the real fight here.