Chương 265: chapter 260

Cecilia steps off the stone bench and onto the trap line. The afflictions hit her immediately. A wave of sickly green light crawls up her wooden leg, finds the seam where prosthetic meets flesh, and burrows in. Her body locks in place and she wobbles, almost falling. For one second, she stands completely still on the edge of the trap zone, swaying. Then she takes another step. The second affliction layer activates. Her skin goes pale.

Sweat beads along her hairline and runs down the side of her face, catching in the hollow of her missing eye. Her only hand clenches at her side. The wooden leg scrapes against the stone as she drags it forward. Asterion is the first to react. He steps toward her, fast, his body already between her and the deeper rings of the trap zone. His hand catches her shoulder.

"What are you doing?" His voice is low. Confused the way someone gets confused when they see a civilian walk onto a battlefield. Cecilia looks up at him. She is a head shorter than the Highblood and she is shaking and there is a green tint to her skin that was not there a moment ago.

"Jacob gets stronger from this, right?" she says.

"He does, but..." Asterion's hand does not leave her shoulder. He stares at her. His mouth opens and then closes. He looks at the arena floor where Jacob is fighting. Then he looks back at the one-eyed girl standing in the trap zone with a wooden leg and one arm. He lets go. The crowd sees it. The students in the western stands, the ones closest to the trap line, see a girl with no arm and no eye and a wooden leg step into the affliction zone and refuse to leave. They see a Champion step aside for her.

The murmur starts small. A few voices in the second row.

"Who is that?"

"Is she insane?"

"She's not even ranked. She's going to die."

"She's... she's trying to help Jacob Cloud." That last voice is louder than the rest. A boy, third-year, standing on his seat. He is watching the arena floor where Jacob's Devil's Engine is already humming with the power drawn from Lancelot and Garros and the other Champions hidden underground. But the Engine's rhythm changes when Cecilia steps in. It picks up just a fraction. The thing is, Cecilia is the weakest person in the arena by orders of magnitude. Her contribution doesn't amount to much.

A first-year student who lost at the elimination duels and watched Jacob and Garros fight monsterified students suddenly gets up and runs up to Cecilia, standing beside her, Afflictions suddenly riddling his body. Another, a girl, runs up close by, but to Sabrina Margrave's mandala, leaving the haughty girl speechless. Then one more. Then a small group. Suddenly, all the first-year students pour onto the trap line. Some of them buckle.

A girl in the second row drops to one knee, but another girl catches her and helps her get up. A boy with burn scars across his neck walks in calmly and folds his arms as the green light coils around him. The Devil's Engine responds in the arena. Jacob's aura, already at Intermediate True Diamond, begins to climb. The light blue Mana circles across his body emit harder jets of vapor. The hum becomes a sound that the lower stands can feel in their teeth. In the arena, Nimirea falters for one step.

Iskara does not falter. She has no mind left to register what is happening outside the fight. But her body absorbs the force of Jacob's next strike differently. She slides back two meters on the stone, claws carving grooves. More students step in.

"WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY DOING?"

"They're feeding the Engine! The afflictions, they're converting, look at the Mana output!"

"That girl with the wooden leg started it. The crippled one." The crowd is splitting. Half the stands are watching the fight. The other half are watching the trap line, where forty, fifty, now sixty students stand in a zone designed to cripple them with Afflictions that come from one of the strongest, if not the strongest Champion they have, feeding their suffering into a mechanism that turns it into Jacob's power. The Engine thrums so hard the arena floor vibrates.

Marcel Valemont watches from the upper stands. His father is beside him. Duke Dorian's hand is on his arm, the grip tight, possessive, the way it always is when things go wrong. Marcel is not looking at his father. He is looking at the arena floor where Jacob Cloud is fighting two opponents at once, burning through power that should not be possible for a first-year, wielding a silver sword that belonged to a dead king. Cassian should be down there. The thought strikes him like lightning.

Cassian should be fighting beside Jacob, not against him. Cassian should be alive. Cassian, who was his twin, who shared his face, who monsterified on a live broadcast because their father pushed and pushed and pushed until there was nothing left of the boy and only the monster remained. Marcel's hands are shaking. Duke Dorian says something. Marcel does not hear it. He is watching the students on the trap line, the first-years, the ones who walk into the affliction zone because a crippled girl does it first.

He is watching them suffer for Jacob and he is thinking about Cassian. His father's hand tightens on his arm.

"Marcel. What are you doing?" The word arrives the same way it always arrives. Reprimanding. A leash. The same voice that sent Cassian to the tournament. Marcel stands up.

"Marcel." He pulls his arm free." MARCEL." He does not hear the third time his father says his name because he is already moving down the stands, jumping rows, shoving past students who scatter when they see the look on his face. He hits the trap line at a dead sprint and the afflictions slam into him like a wall. He lands on the stone with both knees. Pain arcs up his spine. He gasps. He does not get up. He stays on his knees on the trap line and he looks at the arena floor and he screams.

"JACOB!" Jacob does not look. He is mid-swing, Baalrek's silver sword carving a line of white across the space between him and Nimirea.

"AVENGE HIM!" Marcel screams. His voice breaks.

"AVENGE MY BROTHER!" The crowd hears it. For one breath, the arena goes quiet. Not silent. The fight continues, metal on metal, the shriek of Iskara's void-fire against Jacob's Domain. But the voices in the stands drop away. Fifty thousand people hear Marcel Valemont, son of the Duke who tried to destroy Jacob Cloud, kneeling in the trap zone, screaming at Jacob to avenge the twin he lost. The Engine surges. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

In the arena, Nimirea and Iskara both stop. It is involuntary. The wave of power that rolls off Jacob's body is a physical thing, a pressure front that pushes outward from his core. The Mana circles on his skin brighten until they are almost white. The Devil's Engine keeps creating a bass vibration that makes the obsidian pillars of his Domain crack and the bleached ribcages shudder. Jacob feels it. He feels all of them.

Every curse, every debuff, every sickening wave of curses that those students are absorbing on the trap line reaches him as raw force, but underneath the force there is something else. Weight. Not magical weight. The weight of people who chose to stand there. He turns his head. He looks past Nimirea and Iskara, past the edge of the arena, past the broken stone and the crumbled obsidian pillars, and he sees them. The trap line is full. A hundred students, maybe more.

First-years and contenders from the trials, standing in rows, some on their knees, some barely upright, all of them burning with the Afflictions that are eating them alive. Cecilia is in the front. One arm. One eye. Wooden leg braced against the stone. Shaking so hard he can see it from the arena floor. Marcel Valemont is on his knees. His friends, the Champions, Sabrina, Kai, Kaelrik. And people whom he only saw in the dorms or around the Academy. Some of them he's never seen before. But they are all there.

He blinks once. His eyes are wet. He does not let the tears fall. He looks at Nimirea, then at Iskara.

"I'm sorry," he says. His voice carries across the arena without amplification. The Engine's resonance wraps around it and throws it to the back rows.

"But there's no way I can let myself lose now." Jacob lifts Baalrek's sword. The silver light blooms.

The fight turns in the blink of an eye as soon as Jacob moves. His Domain ripples outward. The bleached ribcages that jut from the arena floor reshape themselves, extending, fusing, creating a maze of bone-white pillars that block Iskara's line of attack and funnel Nimirea into a corridor. Nimirea reads it. She always reads it. Her Eye of the Prophet flickers, and she cuts left before the corridor closes. A wall of black alchemical flame erupts from her palm and melts through the nearest bone pillar.

Jacob is already there. The silver sword comes in low, angled under her guard, and the edge catches the gap between the faltering water and her arm. Nimirea twists. The blade scores a line across her bicep instead of severing the muscle. Blood. Not much. But blood.

"You are really something," Nimirea says. Her voice is steady. She fires two concussive blasts from her off-hand, staggered, the second arriving a half-beat after the first to catch the dodge. Jacob does not dodge. The blasts hit his chest and the Mana disperses across his skin and do nothing to him, dispersed by the sheer power summoned by the Afflictions. Jacob cuts thrice at Nimirea. Each one aimed at a major Mana channel.

Nimirea blocks the first with a forearm barrier, deflects the second with a burst of alchemical mist, and takes the third across the outer thigh. Her leg buckles. She catches herself. Behind Jacob, Iskara is tearing through the bone corridor. She bursts from the wreckage in a spray of bone fragments and lunges. Jacob pivots. He catches Iskara's claw strike on the flat of the sword and redirects it. Her own force drives her off-balance. She staggers.

Jacob steps into the opening and hammers a knee strike into her abdomen, reinforced with Mana, and the impact launches her backward fifteen yards. She hits the arena wall. Stone cracks. She drops to all fours and scrabbles upright, already moving, already lunging again, because there is no thought behind the movement. Jacob turns back to Nimirea.

"Your arm," he says. Nimirea looks down. Her left arm is different. The skin has gone dark, scaled, the fingers elongated into something between a claw and a hand. Monsterification, creeping inward from the shoulder where the Dark Seed's corruption lives. She flexes it.

"I know what winning costs," she says. She transforms the other arm too. Both arms are monstrous now. Black-scaled, clawed, the muscle beneath the scales bunching with power that does not belong in a human frame. Her eyes are hard and her jaw is set and she looks like someone who has made a decision she cannot take back. She charges. The speed is different. The arms are faster than she is without them, stronger, and when the first claw meets Jacob's sword the impact rings across the arena like a bell.

Jacob's feet leave the ground. He flies back, catches himself mid-air with his one wing, and lands. Nimirea does not stop. She is on him in two steps, both clawed hands raking, and the speed is such that Jacob has to push himself to the very limit to dodge. Necrotic damage eats at his body. Black veins crawl up his neck. His own technique is killing him while he fights. But the Engine feeds on the power. Every affliction the students absorb on the trap line converts into force.

Every curse, every debuff, every inch of suffering becomes Jacob's fuel. He takes Nimirea's next strike on the sword, deflects it into the ground, and, with his free hand, lands a devastating punch on her sternum, making her vomit blood. Nimirea stumbles back. From the side, Iskara comes again. Faster this time. Less coordinated. Her movements are losing their form, becoming animal, becoming wrong. The bone crown on her head has grown new protrusions, jagged spurs of white that jut at random angles.

The sealed line where her mouth was is splitting. A thin fissure of dark runs across the lower half of her face, widening, and from inside it comes a sound. A raw, tearing noise from deep inside her body that carries no meaning and no humanity. Jacob catches her mid-lunge. Both hands on the sword. The impact drives him back ten steps, boots carving furrows in the arena stone, but he holds.

He redirects her momentum to the right and she crashes through a ribcage pillar and keeps going, carving a trench through the Domain's terrain. He is winning. He is winning and he knows it and Nimirea knows it and the crowd knows it and the students on the trap line know it because they can feel the Engine's rhythm changing, deepening, becoming something that shakes the stands. Jacob presses forward.

The Sacrifice watches from the edge of the arena. The seal in his blood has three hours and eleven minutes remaining. He watches Jacob force Nimirea back with a combination that starts low and finishes high, silver sword cutting a figure-eight pattern that leaves two shallow wounds across her torso. Nimirea's clawed arms catch the follow-up, but she gives ground. He's going to win. The calculation is simple. Jacob's power is still climbing. The Devil's Engine is still feeding.

Every minute that passes, a few more students find the courage to step onto the trap line and the differential widens. Nimirea is strong. Nimirea with monsterified arms is stronger. But unless she renounces all her consciousness she has no chance. That is a lot of people. He watches Iskara lunge and miss. Her body is faster but her aim is worse. The degradation is accelerating. Five minutes ago, she was tracking targets. Now she is swinging at movement. The bone crown has grown again.

The fissure across her face is wider. He can see something inside it, dark and wet and wrong. She's going feral. He shifts his focus from the arena to the students standing in the affliction zone. His eyes move across them one at a tim. The Champions are fine. They are suffering but their bodies can metabolize the afflictions. They will last. The first-years are not fine. He can see it in the way they stand.

The ones who arrived in the last five minutes are already worse off than the Champions who have been here for the entire battle. Their bodies are not built for this. The afflictions are designed for Diamond-rank combatants and these are children, most of them Gold, some not even that, and the power is eating through them faster than their Mana can repair the damage. A girl in the third row from the front is swaying. Her eyes are unfocused.

The Sacrifice tracks her breathing: shallow, irregular, the diaphragm not fully engaging. She has three minutes before she collapses. Maybe less. In five, she will die. A boy beside her is worse. His skin has gone gray. The affliction has moved past his Mana reserves and is feeding on his vitality directly. He does not know it. He thinks he is being brave. He is dying. Seven critical. Fourteen more in the next ten minutes. Jacob will win the fight, but a lot of these students will die before anyone notices.

He notes them without emotion. This is not his problem. These are not his people. He is here to kill Jacob Cloud now that he's winning again and then retrieve Iskara and then die. His eyes keep moving. They find Cecilia, who is to his left. She is in the front row of the trap line, exactly where she steps in. She has not moved. The Sacrifice watches her. She's worse than the others. She is a civilian, a crippled girl with one arm and one eye and a wooden leg. She will die soon. Of course she will.

She is a broken thing. A body already missing pieces, already compensating, already running on less than a whole person's worth of constitution. Where the first-years have Mana reserves to burn through first, Cecilia has nothing. The afflictions go directly to the foundation. She should have thought of that before stepping in. His eyes do not leave her. She is falling. It is slow. Not a collapse. A settling.

Her wooden leg bends, the joint that connects it to her thigh flexing at an angle it was not designed for, and her body tilts forward. Her hand unclenches. Her fingers splay open. Her knees begin to fold. She is going down before anyone else. She's dying. But it's not my problem. He looks at the arena floor, where Jacob is fighting, the Engine roaring.

Nimirea's clawed arms are fast and getting faster and Jacob meets each strike with the silver sword and turns it aside and the crowd is screaming and the Domain is cracking and none of it matters. Not my problem. He looks back at Cecilia. Her knee touches the stone. The wooden leg skids out to the side. Her body lists. Her hand reaches for something to hold and there is nothing there. Not. My. Problem. He looks at Iskara. She is fully feral now.

The fissure has split her face from jaw to cheekbone and inside it there are too many teeth and not enough structure to hold them. She lunges at Jacob with both claws extended, misses by a meter, crashes through a pillar, spins, lunges again. No skill in the movement. No technique. Just the body running on whatever the Dark Seed left behind. No recall order. The Sacrifice checks the oath-channel Maelthra used to communicate with him. The oath-channel is the thread of compulsion that connects him to Maelthra.

It runs through his blood alongside the oaths, a line of fire that carries her voice, her commands, her will. He checks it for Iskara. Not for himself. He has been given his orders. Kill Jacob Cloud. Retrieve Iskara. But Iskara is monsterifying past the point of retrieval and Maelthra can see this. The oath-channel is silent. He checks again. Nothing. I can't act without an order. Maelthra is watching her daughter lose her mind in front of fifty thousand people and the line is silent. The line is still silent.

Maelthra has written her off. Her own daughter. He looks at Iskara but immediately after he looks at Cecilia, on one knee, skin the color of stone. His left hand finds his side. Cecilia's other knee touches the stone. The Sacrifice stands very still at the edge of the arena.