The mist led to a building set back from the main street of the eastern district, and by the time Aelius reached it, all seven of the other contestants had converged on the same point from different directions, which meant the clues had been consistent regardless of where anyone started. They filed through the door in a loose cluster, nobody announcing themselves, nobody making any effort to be either visible or invisible, just eight identical people walking into a building because the event had funnelled them here.
Inside, the building was one large room. No furniture except a central table, and on the table, eight sealed envelopes arranged in a circle. Above each envelope, a symbol glowed faintly in the air, a different one for each, and at the center of the table a single object sat under glass, a key on a chain, ornate and clearly significant.
Nobody touched anything immediately. Aelius looked at the symbols above the envelopes. They weren't letters or numbers, more like shorthand, abstract enough that they required interpretation rather than reading. He looked at the one glowing above the envelope nearest him and felt nothing particularly useful about it.
"One each," someone said from across the table. "The symbols must correspond to something on our objective cards."
Aelius reached into his requip space and pulled out the crushed remains of his note. He smoothed it enough to read it. At the bottom, below the text he had already read, was a small symbol he had not noticed before because he had crushed it before he finished looking. It matched the one above the nearest envelope.
He picked it up and opened it.
Inside was a single sentence. He read it, looked at the key under glass, and looked at the rest of the room.
The others were opening their envelopes too. One person made a small sound and then stopped themselves. Another looked up from their envelope and immediately looked back down. A third folded theirs very carefully and put it away, which told Aelius something about their objective even if it didn't tell him which person they were.
His own note said: The key unlocks the NPC's location. The NPC will give you more points should you manage to save it.
He looked at the key under glass again and revised his assessment of his objective. Survive until time expires had seemed straightforward when he read it. It was slightly less straightforward now that it came with the additional information that the NPC was a target and the key to finding them was sitting in a room with at least one person whose job was to use it for the opposite purpose.
Someone reached for the key. Three people immediately moved to block them, which confirmed at least three protect objectives in the room and one person impatient enough about their assassination objective to tip their hand immediately.
The person who had reached for the key stepped back. "So that's how it is," they said.
"Apparently," someone else said.
The room reconfigured itself into something more…tight. The three who had moved to block the key were protectors or were very good at pretending to be. The one who had reached for it was either the assassin or someone willing to be mistaken for one. Everyone else, including Aelius, had stayed still, which said either survival, caution, or both.
He looked at the key; it was going to become a problem regardless of what he did about it, so the question was whether it was more useful to him under the glass, in his hand, or in someone else's hand that he was watching. He looked at the three who had moved and tried to read anything useful from identical bodies moving in identical ways, and got very little from it except that one of them moved with an odd familiarity, controlled and clean, the kind trained into a person rather than grown there naturally.
He had his suspicion about which of the eight that was, but suspicions without confirmation were just stories he was telling himself, and he had learned that lesson thoroughly enough to not act on it here.
"Someone needs to pick it up," one of the blockers said. "It doesn't do anything sitting there."
"Whoever picks it up reveals that they either have a protect objective or an assassination objective," another voice said from behind Aelius. "Anyone with a survive objective has no reason to touch it."
"Which means the three of you who blocked the reach already confirmed your objectives," a different voice said. "Protect or assassinate, one of those three."
Two of the three said nothing. The third one said, "Or I moved because I wanted to see who else would move."
In the stands, section nine was watching the lacrima screens with varying degrees of composure.
Romeo had both hands on the barrier in front of him, leaning as far forward as the railing allowed. Macao was sitting very still with the program rolled tightly in both hands. Wakaba was drinking at a pace that suggested he had decided this event required fortification. Bisca had one hand over her mouth. Alzack was watching the screen with the focused expression of someone doing tactical analysis, whether they meant to or not.
On the screen, the building's interior was visible from above, the magical lacrima showing every competitor as themselves despite the illusion active on the ground. Aelius was the only one who had left the room, his real appearance visible to the audience as he moved back into the eastern district streets, and the crowd's reaction to watching him simply walk away from the key while everyone else debated it was a sustained noise that the announcer leaned into immediately.
Back in the building, the debate about the key had escalated.
The person who had reached for it first tried again, faster this time, and two of the three blockers moved to intercept, and the third blocker, the one with the assassination objective that nobody in the room knew about, moved too slowly to be believable as a protector and slightly too fast to be a bystander, and the specific quality of that movement was the first real crack in the information wall between everyone present.
Someone noticed. "You moved wrong," they said to the false blocker.
"What does that mean?" the false blocker said.
"It means you're not protecting it," the same voice said. "You moved like you were going for it, not like you were blocking someone else from going for it. The angle was wrong." There was a silence in the building that had nothing comfortable in it.
"So we have two assassination objectives in here," someone said.
"Or one very paranoid survivor," the original false blocker said.
"Or someone who just identified themselves by knowing exactly what an assassination approach looks like," a third voice said.
On the screens above the arena, the audience could see all of it clearly, the real objectives floating above each competitor's head in small glowing text that only the crowd could read, and the gap between what was visible to the audience and what was visible to the competitors had become the entire entertainment of the event. The person who had just made the accusation had a protect objective. The person they had accused had an assassination objective. Two of the three remaining silent had survival objectives. The last had a protect objective and had said nothing since entering the building, which the screens confirmed was deliberate.
"They're going to figure it out," Romeo said, from section nine.
"They might," Macao said. "Or they'll talk themselves into the wrong answer before the timer runs out."
"How much time is left?" Bisca asked.
Wakaba checked. "Forty minutes."
"Forty minutes of this," Alzack sighed, slumping in his chair.
Back in the eastern district, Aelius was moving through the streets at a pace that covered ground without appearing to cover it, the kind of movement that registered as aimless to anyone watching and wasn't. He was mapping the district. Not because he needed to; his objective didn't require the map, but because having it was better than not having it, and the habit of understanding terrain was one he had spent too long building to set aside because the immediate situation didn't demand it.
The district was smaller than it looked from the plaza. The streets looped back on themselves in patterns that seemed random and weren't; the layout was designed to funnel movement toward the center without making the funnel obvious. He had been moving away from the building for eight minutes, and he was closer to it than he had been at the four-minute mark, which confirmed the loop.
He stopped at an intersection and looked at the three streets branching from it.
Someone else was in the district. He could hear two sets of footsteps moving on parallel streets, converging on his position from different angles. Either the building had emptied faster than expected, or these were two people who had been in the streets the whole time and had simply been quiet enough that he hadn't registered them until now. He picked the left branch and kept moving.
One set of footsteps adjusted to follow.
He had a follower, which, given his objective,e was an inconvenience that had the potential to become a threat. He still didn't know whether the person behind him had a protect objective that had decided he was the NPC, an assassination objective that had decided he was the target, or a survive objective that had decided following someone who seemed to know what they were doing was a reasonable strategy.
He turned a corner and stopped, pressing himself flat against the wall beside the turn. The footsteps behind him came around the corner, and the person walked directly into the space where he had been standing a second ago and found it empty, and in the half second of adjustment he stepped out from the wall and past them and kept walking in the opposite direction down the cross street, smooth and without hurry, and by the time they turned around he was already at the next corner.
He went left. Then right. Then through a narrow gap between two buildings that was technically an alley and barely qualified, and came out on a street he hadn't been on yet, and the footsteps behind him were gone.
The first assassination happened twenty-three minutes into the game.
Aelius didn't see it, but he heard the crowd's reaction filter through the city's ambient sound, muffled but present, the specific quality of noise that came from fifty thousand people watching something happen that they had been anticipating. Somewhere in the building or the streets around it, someone had completed their objective.
The second happened six minutes later, closer this time, in the eastern district itself. He heard the sound of a brief struggle two streets over, short and decisive, and then nothing, and then the ambient sound of the city continued as though it hadn't been interrupted.
Thirty-one minutes. Thirty-four. Thirty-seven.
The city had gone quieter than it was at the start, the movement in the streets thinner, fewer sets of footsteps audible at any given moment. Either people were staying still, or the event had reduced the number of people capable of moving, and Aelius had no way to determine which from where he was without exposing his position more than he wanted to.
He had chosen a section of the district that gave him three exit routes and a clear sightline down the longest street in either direction, and he had stayed there for the last several minutes while the person following him stood at the corner and watched the cross street. The arrangement was not a partnership. It was two people with the same objective using the same space without discussing it, which was the most either of them was willing to commit to.
Thirty-eight minutes.
The ambient sound shifted. Not the crowd, something in the city itself, the quality of the constructed air changing slightly in the way it had when the mist started moving toward the east. Aelius looked at the street in front of him.
Someone was at the far end of it.
They were moving toward him without hurrying, which was more deliberate than hurrying would have been, and the way they moved through the street was the specific movement of someone who had a destination and was certain of it. Not a survivor navigating. Not a protector responding to a threat. Someone who had found what they were looking for and was walking toward it.
Thirty-nine minutes
The person at the end of the street picked up their pace slightly, which confirmed they had seen him, and the adjustment in their movement confirmed they were not approaching to talk. He looked at his options: three exits, one approaching threat, thirty-nine minutes on a clock that needed one more minute to expire.
The person came down the street and closed the last twenty feet between them at a run, and he stepped to the side of the first strike and put his arm up to deflect the second, the impact carrying enough behind it to confirm this was not a survivor or a protector mistaking him for a target; this was someone who had spent thirty-nine minutes finding him specifically, which meant their objective card had included enough information to narrow it down. He had been the target the whole time.
The third strike came in fast, and he caught the arm behind it, stopped it, and held it there, and they stood in the street with the grip between them and the clock at thirty-nine minutes and forty seconds, and the city was very quiet around them.
"You have about twenty seconds," he said. The person tried to break the grip, the knife in their hand shaking as it struggled to reach its mark, a tool Aelius didn't even see until now. "Fifteen," he said.
They tried again, harder, and he adjusted his footing and held it, and the ambient sound of the city shifted again, and the crowd noise above it rose slightly, and at some point between fifteen seconds and zero the timer expired, and the magic of the event began to dissolve.
The identical faces peeled away first. He watched the person whose arm he was holding become someone he didn't recognize, a woman from one of the guilds he had seen in the preliminary but hadn't paid significant attention to, her face carrying the frustrated composure of someone who had come very close and not made it. She looked at him, at the grip on her arm, at the street around them as the illusion city began to fade back into the arena floor.
Above them, the announcer had found his register. "AND TIME EXPIRES on the Crown of Illusions, ladies and gentlemen, with two successful assassinations, three survivors, including Fairy Tail's representative who just spent the last twenty seconds physically preventing his own assassination with eight seconds left on the clock, and I want to be absolutely clear about what we just watched because I think some of you may have blinked and missed it!"
The crowd had not been quiet for the last twenty seconds and was considerably less quiet now.
Aelius walked toward Fairy Tail's section and looked at the scoreboard updating above the arena floor. Points distributed by objective completion and survival. Two guilds with full assassination points. Three guilds with survival points, including his. Two protectors who had succeeded. One who hadn't.
Macao was already on his feet in section nine when Aelius looked up.
He looked back at the scoreboard and then at the stands and then at the arena floor returning to flat stone as the last of the city dissolved into nothing, and thought that for an event he had found boring for most of its duration, but annoyingly engaging enough he was unable to turn his thoughts to anything else to pass time.
The scoreboard settled into its final arrangement for the morning, and Aelius looked at it from Fairy Tail's section without any true feeling.
Third place overall. They had been second after yesterday, and the Crown of Illusions had dropped them one position because the event's point distribution favored completed objectives over passive survival, and two guilds had completed assassinations cleanly enough to pull ahead. Sabertooth still held first, their competitor having been one of the successful assassins. Lamia Scale sat second, their protector having kept the NPC alive through the full duration. Fairy Tail was third, two points behind Lamia Scale and four behind Sabertooth, which was the same gap as yesterday.
Macao had the numbers written on the back of the program before Aelius sat down. He held it out without saying anything, which Aelius took as a sign that Macao had decided the commentary could wait.
The break between the morning event and the afternoon battles ran shorter than yesterday, the officials moving through the setup with the efficiency of people who had done it once already and had identified where they were wasting time. By the time the stands had fully resettled from the morning's event, the announcer was already back.
"Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, and before we get into this afternoon's battles, I want to address something directly." His voice carried the particular quality of someone delivering information they had been instructed to deliver and had decided to deliver with enthusiasm anyway. "Following yesterday's third battle, the officials and the Council representatives overseeing the games have made two adjustments for the remainder of the week. First, the time limit on individual battles has been extended. There is no longer a fixed cutoff. Battles will conclude when one competitor concedes, is rendered unable to continue, or when the head judge determines the match has reached a genuine standstill." A pause. "Second, the ward reinforcements applied at the end of yesterday's third battle will now be standard for every battle going forward, not applied on request."
The crowd's response to that was loud and immediate.
"I believe," the announcer continued, and there was something in his voice that was not quite amusement and not quite dread, "that those of you who watched yesterday's third battle will understand why." He cleared his throat. "On to the draws."
Aelius looked at the lacrima screen above the arena floor as the matchup list began to populate.
First battle. Second battle. He read through them without interest until the fourth line appeared, and the guild name beside Fairy Tail resolved on the screen.
"And for our fourth battle of the afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, Fairy Tail versus Blue Pegasus"