On the plain, tension condensed like a storm about to break. Nathanael removed his robe with a slow, almost theatrical motion, revealing a lean body clad in black armor beneath. But it wasn't just armor.
It looked more like a walking arsenal: knives strapped to his shoulders, daggers at his waist, short swords crossed on his back, small throwing blades aligned along his legs, and even some weapons I couldn't identify — serrated, curved, grotesque, designed to kill in ways I preferred not to imagine.
"What the hell is this," I muttered, my mouth half open.
On the other side, Norwenna wasn't outdone.
The vegetation around her responded to her call as if it were an extension of her will. Branches and roots entwined, forming a dense carapace that closed over her body. In moments, she was encased in a natural colossus, a living Golem so intricate it looked like a masterpiece sculpted by the forest itself. The material wasn't just wood or ordinary stone — there was something dark, pulsing, resilient, and at the center of its chest a diamond-shaped marble stone glowed, radiating power like a mineral heart.
Then everything happened at once, as if the tension between them had finally snapped.
Nathanael flickered. His prana wasn't like most; it didn't shine, roar, or crackle in the air. It was translucent, almost nonexistent, and all the more dangerous because of it. His figure vanished before my eyes, dissolving into the shadows of the forest as if the environment itself had swallowed him whole.
At the same time, the ground around Norwenna erupted. Thick vines and twisted roots burst from the earth like living spears, piercing everything in a radius of a hundred meters. The impact sent torrents of dust into the air, chunks of soil flying like stone shrapnel.
But none of it touched Nathanael. He moved with feline fluidity, dodging by fractions of a second. His body flickered, blurred from shadow to shadow, faster and harder to track each time. He looked less like a warrior and more like a phantom hunting its prey.
Norwenna didn't retreat. The surrounding trees began to groan, whole branches creaking until they snapped, only to then whip and hammer down like weapons. The forest itself bowed to her will, raining blows on the ground, trying to crush the figure darting like an ant among giants.
From my position, I barely blinked, eyes wide, trying to keep up.
A kunai flew from some hidden point in the shadows. The projectile gleamed for an instant and struck one of the roots acting as spears in front of the golem. The impact was brutal; it didn't feel like a blade, it felt like a cannonball. The root disintegrated into dust before it even hit the ground. The kunai continued on, embedding itself into the trunk of a nearby tree, which immediately began to wither and rot at an absurd speed, as if centuries of decay had been compressed into seconds.
"Poison?" I muttered in disbelief.
"Yeah…" Leon replied, eyes never leaving the battlefield. "The boss is the heir to the family's arts."
Norwenna's golem finally reached Nathanael.
Its fist slammed into the ground with violence, missing him by inches, but the shockwave tore across the field like an earthquake, flinging Nathanael dozens of meters back.
Only he didn't fall. In midair, he landed lightly on a branch, as if his body had no weight. In an instant, his silhouette turned completely black, his shadow gaining substance. Then, impossibly, he propelled himself forward, ignoring the force that had sent him flying.
Black knuckle-dusters materialized in his hands, absorbing the light around them. His body spun, executing a perfect somersault in the air.
By centimeters, he dodged the golem's colossal fist, and in the same spin landed a precise punch to the creature's elbow joint.
"BOOOOOOOOOOM!"
The impact thundered.
A shockwave exploded, sparking energy and snapping half the golem's arm, which bent grotesquely.
But Norwenna didn't back down.
Before the arm detached completely, the golem's other hand seized the broken piece like an improvised club. With a single brutal swing, she whipped it and struck Nathanael still suspended in midair.
The blow landed like a stone catapult.
His body was hurled through the forest, slicing through trees like a missile. Shards of trunks exploded in every direction until darkness swallowed him.
"Damn…" were the only words I managed. For the first time since entering this hell of a tournament, I realized I had never been in a position like this: just watching, from the front row, a real fight unfold before me.
The improvised club, the golem's old arm — didn't last long. The wood darkened to a grotesque purple, venom spreading like a plague until the limb rotted completely and crumbled into dust in the creature's colossal hands.
Norwenna didn't even flinch.
The ground beneath her convulsed violently, as if the earth itself were being drained, hollowed to the bone. Rocks, roots, mud, and vegetation rose in waves, fusing into the golem's body.
Its structure rebuilt before my eyes: the lost arm was reforged, more robust, more solid, as if the forest had agreed to pay any price to keep its champion standing.
"It's time we fight for real, little brother," Norwenna's voice echoed from within the living wall.
And that wasn't all.
The golem's torso expanded, roaring as if it had lungs of its own, and two more arms sprouted just below the main shoulders. But these were different: they ended in massive pincers, like the claws of a monstrous crab, able to crush boulders as if they were hollow shells.
The forest trembled in response.
Suddenly, a bluish mist burst across the battlefield. It was as if thousands of flowers were vomiting their own pollen, so dense and abundant it covered the entire clearing and stretched as far as the eye could see. It shimmered faintly in the light filtering through the canopy, creating a scene both beautiful and terrifying.
"Found you…" Norwenna said with a crooked smile, her voice resonating deep from within the golem.
And in that instant, I realized: there was nowhere left for Nathanael to run. The forest was no longer his hiding place.
Now, it was his cell.
The golem advanced with pinpoint precision, each step calculated as if it could sense exactly where its prey would be. From one of its arms, a colossal war hammer began to form, the two upper arms raising the stone weapon more than five meters long.
An aura of red prana spread through the creature's body, and in a movement that defied all logic, the hammer swept the space before it, striking points where, apparently, nothing existed.
"BOOOOOOOOOOM!"
The shockwave flung Nathanael, who had been hidden somewhere, backward, but he remained unscathed, gliding through the air as roots tried to bind him to the ground.
With two sharp knives, he cut through each one with frightening ease and agile movements. The touch of the blades made the wood and roots rot instantly, as if the very life of the soil surrendered to his presence.
The golem didn't hesitate. It charged with impossible speed for its size, tearing apart the forest terrain with every stride. Trees were ripped out, rocks crushed, and the bluish pollen thickened in the air, turning everything misty, almost ethereal.
Nathanael, meanwhile, was becoming a specter.
He moved from shadow to shadow, invisible, ghostlike. But the fury of the golem came at a price. Wounds began to appear on his face, deep cuts from shattered terrain and the impact of broken branches, and one in particular revealed that something had struck his ribs at some point.
I remained two kilometers away, breathing slowly, trying to absorb every detail. Every movement, every strike of the golem, every dodge from Nathanael was a spectacle of strength and strategy, things you didn't see every day.
The golem's unstoppable assault continued, until something very strange happened.
A blow from the golem that seemed impossible to avoid.
The hammer came down with devastating force, and for a moment, Nathanael became nothing more than a speck beneath the golem's weight.
But then, from the shadows, a large black arrow emerged, cutting through the air with surgical precision. It struck both of the golem's arm joints at once, causing its hands to falter and the weapon to fall slack, missing its target by mere millimeters.
The arms began to rot away, stained with a grotesque, shadowy purple, crumbling rapidly.
Wasting no time, Nathanael swapped his daggers for a massive bow, nearly his own size, and an arrow that looked more like a spear appeared on the string.
"ZING!"
The shot tore through the golem's head with brutal force, scattering stone debris in all directions. Corruption began to spread from the elbows down the arms and from the neck into the shoulders.
The monster seemed to fall apart even as it tried to continue its assault.
Norwenna, calculating quickly, didn't hesitate.
Realizing the hammer had failed, she simply grabbed the heavy golem's remaining body and hurled it in a free fall toward Nathanael.
Her brother had no time to react.
"Shit…" he muttered, his eyes widening as the colossal body of the golem plummeted just inches above his head, smashing into the ground around him with a deafening crash.