I swear to you, the entity that threw me into this world whoever or whatever they are — has a terrible sense of humor. I thought out loud, curled up in that cubicle barely big enough to hold my shadow.
The cave, which until yesterday had been my sanctuary of silence and traps, now looked like an improvised first aid ward.
Norwenna lay unconscious in one corner, breathing slowly stable, but limp like a ragdoll — while her brother, his body marked all over with lacerations, was having my ointment applied by Leon, who went about it like he was playing a childhood game.
Leon laughed at every little gesture, proud as if he had just discovered a hidden talent for field nursing. I, caught in the middle of it all, had to hold back my urge to curse and fry everyone into ash, while wondering what kind of madness fate still had in store for me.
I looked around: the altar with its copper tray bubbling with light, the prism of the egg vibrating as though awakening, glowing in the vivid atmosphere of my beast egg on the brink of saturating and, by my reckoning, hatching.
I tried to focus on priorities: a safe incubator, the egg growing, traps active. But there was another, less noble priority: my ointment stock. Someone should have explained to the world that there are limits to decency, and one of those limits is not wasting my personal medicine in an important tournament where I'll be betting my life.
"Shit, my cave turned into a damn infirmary now," I muttered, unable to hold back a tired smile.
Leon shot me a triumphant look, as if he too was amused by the final outcome of the twins' battle.
Nathanael, his breath ragged, mumbled something I couldn't make out — maybe a request, maybe a threat before closing his eyes again, leaving the ointment to do its ugly work.
I closed my fist around the black ring, feeling the faint buzz that always came when I let my mind wander too far. Shaking my head, I swept the room with a practical eye and began reorganizing the space: pushed a slab of stone to serve as an improvised cot and cleared a path toward the fissure I used as a quick escape route.
Well… all of this happened after the twins' final clash.
The forest — if you could still call it a forest — was nothing but ash and craters. The impact of their forces had swept everything away, as though a god had wiped that piece of the map clean with one hand.
As soon as the dust curtain fell, Leon and I rushed into the heart of the destruction, looking for a victor. But the scene was nothing as simple or conclusive as I expected.
Norwenna… gone.
Nothing, not a trace.
My first assessment was that she had been eliminated from the tournament and sent back outside the pocket world. Leon, though, almost had a breakdown when he found only Nathanael's head lying sideways among the rubble, motionless.
The idiot went running in panic, screaming like a child, certain the artifact hadn't activated in time and that his master was truly dead. The truth, of course, was even more absurd: Nathanael was just buried up to his neck.
The rest of his body trapped beneath tons of debris.
I, on the other hand, froze at the sight.
The destruction they had caused was on a scale I had only seen before during the Behemoth incident and the meteor.
It made me swallow hard: there really were competitors capable of defeating me.
Fighting Nathanael, even a scratch could mean losing a limb to that strange poison. And Norwenna had only lasted as long as she did because her affinity with nature let her sustain that strange, powerful crystal golem.
The doubt ate at me: should I take advantage of the situation as it was now and eliminate the two of them, Leon and Nathanael?
I could claim it was revenge for their partnership with Norwenna.
It was while wrestling with this dilemma that I heard muffled, almost illusory a faint groan from beneath my feet.
For a moment I thought I was hallucinating. But no. The sound came again, and after shifting aside some blocks of rock and scorched roots, I found… Norwenna.
Completely buried, her body limp, but still in the tournament. She hadn't been eliminated.
The whole thing was so absurd it felt like a badly rehearsed play. We dragged the bodies across the crater back to my cave, Leon panting and chatting nonstop as though we'd been lifelong friends.
Seriously, the guy has no social filter.
And Norwenna, when she wasn't passed out, muttered between clenched teeth that the "hideout was close by." I only realized the path we had taken when I was already opening the crack to my own cave: for reasons I didn't understand, my little cave had become their refuge.
I sat them down on cold stones and analyzed their conditions.
First I checked my tournament partner, made sure she was breathing; chest, pulse, fluctuations.
Then I cleaned away the worst grime, pulled out splinters of wood and shards of stone, wiped away the blood. After that, ointments: what little was left of them, at least, applied here and there, a bandage in this spot, a dressing in that one.
Leon, with abnormal care, treated Nathanael like he was rocking a baby; fussed over him, reapplied compresses, and made ridiculous threats.
"If you take advantage of her I'll stick my spear up your ass," as if that would solve anything.
Weighing the facts, the conclusion was undeniable and heavy: Nathanael was the last one standing.
He had survived conscious, broken, but still breathing.
That's no small detail.
If Norwenna, with an entire forest on her side and that bizarre, powerful golem, hadn't brought him down, then the bastard was in a different league. An opponent like that isn't a threat you patch up with a friendly bandage; he's an unknown breathing right beside you.
And the question that wouldn't leave me: 'what if it were night?' The affinity I had guessed to be with his shadows bloomed in darkness. On top of that, there were the 'family arts' that corroded matter and life.
At night, in pitch black where shadows spread unchecked, he would be an unmatched predator.
The thought chilled my gut — predicting an enemy by day is one thing; imagining that same enemy magnified by the night is something else entirely.
I did the math in my head, with my usual coldness.
Immediate containment: tie up and seal Nathanael away from the incubator. A living body and poison is a bomb; a tied-up body is a problem you solve at your own pace.
I thought it, but I didn't do it.
My mind kept drifting as I adjusted bandages and pressed compresses onto Norwenna.
I felt two strange feelings coil together inside me: cold respect, because recognizing another's strength increases your own chances of survival, and a thread of tactical excitement that burned warm within me.
Fights at that level aren't just carnage; they're strategy, raw power, creativity. Things I could study, train, and eventually use to become stronger. Like it or not, I had to admit, watching that battle had flooded me with inspiration. Even in the way they moved, I'd found answers to questions I hadn't even asked yet.
I decided to wait until Norwenna woke up before deciding what to do with Nathanael.
**
Once the bandages were done, we sat there — Leon and I — on the cold cave floor, breathing slowly as though our bodies needed to resynchronize their own heartbeat after all that chaos. It wasn't long before he started talking, unloading a heap of truths he had clearly been chewing on since the fight.
"The boss has never been pushed that far against her before," Leon said, his voice heavy with something between admiration and awe.
I raised an eyebrow. The question I didn't ask lingered in the air.
"Do they fight often?" I finally asked.
"Not that much. But the Plumbarius family has traditions… occasions when it happens, happen." Leon twisted his mouth, searching for the right words.
"There are three paths an heir can inherit. But it's not always a choice — it's selection. Whoever proves themselves worthy, inherits."
I motioned for him to go on.
Nathanael had shown something that couldn't be explained away by fists and magic; there were techniques woven into his personal power.
"And Nathanael?" I asked. "Heir to one of those paths?"
"Absolutely," Leon answered. "He's the figure most compatible with one of the family techniques born in the last five hundred years."
I arched my eyebrows with interest. Compatibility with techniques always meant being in a position of high influence, and even if he was just a competitor in the Champion Rank, I was certain that didn't stop him from wielding a fair amount of power and sway.
"Probably tied to the combination of his affinities," I said half to myself, piecing the puzzle together.
Leon shook his head, impatient with the simplification.
"It's not just affinity, man. Plumbarius techniques go beyond that."
The silence stretched. I sighed, waiting for him to continue.
"The boss is considered the best manipulator of inner energy of the generation." Leon spoke slowly, as though weighing each syllable. "No one in the new generation within the Champion Rank even comes close to his level."
He paused, and I caught the hitch in his words.
"Well… until now." Leon looked straight at me, with that dumb mix of pride and provocation. "The rumors say you can manipulate inner energy with high efficiency too."
I didn't reply.
I just studied Leon's analysis, trying to match his words with what I had seen on the battlefield.
Those charges, the bow firing arrows the size of spears, the punches that split the golem's shell — all of it lined up with something beyond simple physical training.
Inner energy manipulation.
Control that turns muscle into a weapon, breathing into fuel. It was a difference of quality more than quantity.
"Because of those talents, he inherited the techniques of the first patriarch," Leon added, with the air of someone revealing a family secret. "A rare thing. The kind of fact that turns into legend."
I gave him a look, halfway mocking. "And this is the part where I'm supposed to pull a shocked face because that's such a thunderous statement, right?"
Leon snorted, laughing.
"Yeah, it should be. You're kind of weird for not knowing the stories of the first patriarch."
A flicker of anger bubbled up inside me — more automatic than rational.
"Man, I swear hearing you call me weird makes me want to vaporize you," I said, my voice softer than the words.
Leon laughed again, foolish, and the tension that had been growing between us dissolved into loud laughter.
The laughter came easy, almost therapeutic; for a moment, we were just two competitors in a shelter, trying to erase the image of a battlefield that had been reduced to steel and dust. Forgetting that we were here to carve each other apart.
While he rambled on about traditions, compatibilities, and patriarch legends, I stored every word away like mental notes.
It changed everything, not just about Nathanael, but about what the tournament was truly exposing: the real power of the twelve families, who still guarded ancient secrets.
And my ignorance of the true potential hidden behind their heirs.
'I should have known already. Aeloria and Seraphine weren't normal either. And I never even asked Dorian if he belonged to his family's main branch or not.'
Night was falling, and the tenth and final day of the tournament was upon us.
And with it, the long-awaited result.