But the display of force wasn't over. A maniacal grin, stretched taut across his bloodied and swollen face, twisted Cassian's features into a mask of pure madness. He activated a remote device clutched in his trembling hand.
A deep, tectonic groan shuddered through the very foundations of the stadium. The stage, a ruin of shattered stone and twisted metal, trembled violently before a massive section of its floor retracted with a shriek of tortured steel, revealing a pit of absolute darkness.
From that abyss, it rose.
A towering automaton, standing over nine feet tall, ascended into the light. Its chrome chassis, a masterpiece of fluid, deadly engineering, gleamed with an almost liquid luminescence under the stadium's emergency lighting. Raw, untamed Water Aether, crackling like blue lightning, sparked and hissed from its articulated joints.
It radiated a suffocating wave of power, an aura so dense and oppressive it felt like being plunged into the crushing depths of the ocean. Its singular, glowing blue optic swept over the thousands of spectators, an indifferent, calculating gaze that caused a wave of instinctive, primal fear to wash over the stands.
The collective gasp of the audience was a physical thing, a sudden void of air that left a ringing silence in its wake.
"By the Founders…" a veteran C-Rank hero breathed out, his normally stoic eyes wide with disbelief. "What is this insanity? Has the Valerian Family truly been hiding a weapon of this magnitude?"
Beside him, another hero, her face grim, shook her head slowly. "This changes everything. That automaton… its Aether signature dwarfs mine completely. I can't even begin to imagine facing it. It's a walking catastrophe."
In the section where the promising new generation of heroes from Aegis Academy sat, Terris let out a long, low whistle, his bravado momentarily forgotten. "Sheesh, you weren't kidding about their tech being top-tier, Jane."
Jane, for the first time all day, had lost her sharp-tongued, analytical composure. Her mouth was slightly agape, her mind struggling to process the sheer military-grade power on display.
"Alright, I'll be honest," she finally managed, her voice a hushed whisper. "I wasn't expecting… a fortress-class Golem."
Ed simply shook his head, his gaze fixed on the unfolding disaster. "Maybe this will finally wake Ryan up and get his head out of the clouds."
A few rows away, almost invisible amongst the panicked crowd, Ryan Sterling wasn't looking at the Valerians or their terrifying war machine.
His eyes, narrowed into intense, analytical slits, were locked solely on Orion. He saw past the casual posture and the calm smile, sensing an ocean of power so deep and still it defied all logic—a terrifying, placid abyss.
At the stage entrance, Elysia and Lisanna felt their palms grow slick with cold sweat. A faint, shimmering frost began to form around Elysia's fingertips, an unconscious manifestation of her anxiety.
Even with all that they knew of the siblings, they still couldn't quell their nerves.
"Are they really going to fight that head-on?" she muttered, her voice tight with a fear she rarely showed. "That thing… its power is at the absolute zenith of the C-Rank."
Lisanna placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. A warm, golden light pulsed from her palm, steadying Elysia's nerves. Her own expression, usually bright and cheerful, was now one of rare, focused severity. "Even if they are, we won't let them do it alone. The moment it gets dangerous, we jump in."
Elysia gave a short, serious nod, her resolve hardening. The pact was sealed.
Back on the stage, surrounded by his three silent, perfect guards and his family's ultimate weapon, Cassian's confidence surged back like a tidal wave. It washed away the humiliation, replacing it with a venomous, intoxicating power. His features twisted into a disgusting, blood-flecked smile.
"Well, well!" he laughed, a nasty, grating sound that echoed across the ruined arena. "Not so confident now, are you, Sump-rats? Even a true B-Rank Hero wouldn't dare act so damn arrogant in the face of the Valerian Water Guardian!"
Collyer's expression became calmer, regaining a measure of his patrician composure as he took control of the situation. He projected his voice, laced with false magnanimity, a ruler offering a final chance for clemency.
"In life, there are times when even the most powerful must recognize a superior force and take a step back," he declared, his words a thinly veiled threat. "Perhaps a more… beneficial agreement can be formed between us."
"Hurry it up," Lyra interrupted, her voice utterly flat, dripping with a profound and insulting boredom. She lazily beckoned with her hand, a gesture one might use to summon a dog.
"Bring your strongest attack. I'll crush it. Then muster your strongest defense. This guy here," she jabbed a thumb towards Orion, who offered a serene, almost pleasant smile, "will flatten it, and you along with it."
That was the final straw. The pretense of control, of nobility, of civilized negotiation—it all shattered. The killing intent that had been simmering within Cassian and Collyer, a toxic brew of wounded pride and aristocratic rage, finally boiled over into a volcanic eruption.
"THEN DIE!" the father and son roared in perfect, hateful unison.
An unfathomable aura of Aether, a pressure wave so immense it visibly cracked the air, blasted out from the five Valerians. Their advanced suits flared to their absolute peak output, glowing with an incandescent blue light.
In a single, flawlessly coordinated motion, they slashed their Aether-infused swords forward.
The Water Guardian mirrored the movement, its own massive mechanical blade cleaving the air.
The entire stadium seemed to groan under the strain. The stage floor, already damaged, didn't just crack—it disintegrated into dust as raw, chaotic shockwaves smashed against the audience's shimmering defensive barrier.
From their combined assault, a monstrous, churning wall of pure Water Aether materialized. This was no simple attack; it was a biblical cataclysm, a literal waterfall crashing down from an unseen sky, roaring with the force to scour cities from the face of the planet.
Simultaneously, the Water Guardian's optic glowed with a blinding intensity. It unleashed a concentrated, high-pressure beam of Aether from its blade, a lance of pure kinetic fury that merged seamlessly with the waterfall.
The attack didn't just combine; it fused, amplifying the destructive power tenfold, transforming the deluge into a maelstrom of annihilating force.
The sheer power was utterly invincible. The hexagonal plates of the audience barrier began to glow cherry-red, straining and screeching under the impossible pressure.
Across the stands, nearly everyone, hero and noble alike, went pale with abject terror.
"No C-Rank could possibly survive that! It's impossible!" someone screamed, their voice breaking with hysteria.
"ORION! LYRA!" Elysia and Lisanna shouted in unison, their hearts lurching into their throats as they prepared to leap into the fray, no matter the cost.
And in that moment, as a world-ending armageddon descended upon them, Lyra merely sneered.
She moved. It wasn't a blur of motion. She was simply elsewhere. As if she had folded space and time around her, she appeared directly before the roaring tsunami of death, her expression one of utter disdain.
An unfathomable wave of Aether, a power so vast and primordial it made the Valerians' combined might seem like a child's splash in a puddle, unleashed from her petite frame.
A torrent of brilliant, sun-gold vibrational energy overturned the world. The force of its emergence alone created cyclonic whirlwinds that tore the remaining stage floor to absolute shreds and sent debris hurtling into the sky.
Across the stadium, large, terrifying cracks spiderwebbed across the audience barrier, causing thousands to cry out in horror as their only protection began to fail.
Then, Lyra punched.
The sound was not a boom. It was a thunderous silence, a void where all other sound and sensation ceased to exist. A solid stream of pure, golden, vibrating Aether—a lance of absolute deconstruction—shot from her fist. It moved at speeds that defied physics, and with a violence that defied sanity, it smashed into the heart of the massive Aether waterfall.
For one silent, terrifying instant, there was nothing.
Then, a great, world-shattering annihilation rocked everyone to their very core.
The massive, seemingly unstoppable Aether waterfall didn't explode; it was unmade. It was instantly and completely vaporized into trillions of microscopic water droplets that hung in the air like a fine, shimmering mist.
A colossal shockwave, stripped of its watery form but not its cataclysmic kinetic force, erupted outwards in every direction.
The audience barrier, already fractured and groaning, held for a fraction of a second before it completely shattered into a million shimmering shards of light.
"AHHH!" a collective cry of pure, undiluted terror rose from the stands as the wave of invisible force rushed toward them.
But before a single person could be harmed, a new barrier of crystalline, diamond-hard ice instantly materialized out of thin air, encasing the entire audience section in a flawless, protective dome.
Many stared dumbfounded as the seemingly unstoppable shockwave slammed into the ice barrier and dissipated harmlessly, not leaving so much as a single scratch on its pristine surface.
Back on what was left of the stage, Lyra's golden stream of energy, having lost none of its terrifying force, was now mere inches from the faces of Collyer and his utterly terrified cohort.
Then, with an expression of supreme boredom and a display of perfect, contemptuous control, she simply willed it to disperse into harmless motes of light.
In the absolute, ringing silence that followed, Lyra snorted. "Like I said," she sneered, her voice echoing in the devastation. "Pathetic."
No one could even begin to process what had just happened. But Orion gave them no time to think. He took a single, deliberate step forward, and a pressure of absolute, soul-crushing cold exploded from him.
A swirl of icy blue aura, so pure and conceptually dominant that it made Lyra's explosive display seem crude and brutish by comparison, surged outwards.
The temperature across the entire stadium plummeted in an instant. Frost, black as the void, began to creep across the ruined debris.
In that moment, Orion was no longer a man; he was an avatar of the absolute zero, a divine spirit of a winter that freezes stars. An elegant, terrifyingly sharp spear of black ice—ice so dense it seemed to swallow the light—condensed in his hand.
"Ready to see if your ultimate defense can fare any better?" he asked, his voice a calm, chilling whisper that carried to every ear in the silent stadium.
Collyer, Cassian, and the three stone-faced guards went utterly, bone-marrow deep pale. Their bravado, their rage, their pride—it all evaporated like mist in a hurricane, replaced by the primal, instinctual terror of prey standing before a predator that exists outside the natural order.
They could feel it in their very Aether Cores, a cold certainty that crawled up their spines: Death was inches away.
With a unified, guttural howl of pure desperation, they exploded with every last ounce of Aether in their cores and their suits. The Water Guardian, its chassis groaning and buckling under the strain, did the same.
All of their remaining power, their very life force, was poured into one final, desperate defense. A new construct formed—a colossal, ancient-looking tree made of swirling, hyper-compressed water, its branches exuding a rippling defensive force that seemed unshakable, a symbol of their family's deep-rooted power.
But it was far, far from enough.
Orion simply thrust the ice spear forward.
He didn't throw it. The movement was small, economical, almost dismissive. A sharp stream of pure Ice Aether, so cold it seemed to freeze light itself, shot from the spear's tip.
The very air in its path crystallized and shattered. The ruined stage froze solid in a heartbeat.
And with a final, thunderous shattering that echoed in the profound silence, the Great Water Tree was utterly vaporized into the tiniest, most fundamental particles of matter.
The remaining force of the ice stream, utterly undiminished, savagely smashed into Collyer's group.
"AHHHHH!"
Horrified wails of pure, unadulterated agony were cut brutally short as blood erupted from them in a crimson torrent, a stark, violent contrast to the swirling, icy mist.
Five figures were blasted out of the ensuing explosion of cold like broken dolls.
Cassian, Collyer, and the three perfect guards were slammed into the far stadium wall with enough force to shatter it completely. As tons of concrete and steel crumbled down on top of them, none of them moved a single muscle, the auras of their lives flickering like dying embers on the verge of being extinguished.
The mighty Water Guardian robot was ruthlessly smashed into a thousand pieces. Its large, ruined components rained down across the devastated area like the bones of some fallen, mechanical giant.
As the last of the icy wind died down and the shockwaves finally cleared, the sight that greeted the entire world was one of absolute, terrifying, and unquestionable dominance.
Orion stood serene amidst the wreckage, his black ice spear still held casually in his hand, not a speck of dust on his clothes.
Lyra was beside him, an expression of profound, unshakable boredom on her face as she surveyed the carnage.
And across from them, the five proud Valerians were buried and broken, and their ultimate weapon was nothing more than a pile of scrap metal.
Then, a new realization dawned on the horrified crowd, a thought so chilling it eclipsed everything that had come before. Their faces, already pale, drained of all remaining color as their eyes darted from the pristine ice dome protecting them, then back to Orion.
The power that had saved them, that had so effortlessly and elegantly contained the cataclysmic aftershock of the battle, was the very same power that had just wrought such utter, absolute destruction.
He hadn't just won; he had controlled every single aspect of the devastation, ensuring with godlike precision that not a single spectator was harmed.
"Wha-what is he…" a hushed whisper, filled with pure, trembling horror, broke the silence.
No one knew who said it first, but soon the thought echoed in a thousand minds, a frantic, terrified mantra whispered on a million trembling lips across the province.
"B-Rank… B-Rank… that power… that control… is B-Rank…"