It was hard to accept, but he could tell it was the truth.
Mutant level was meant to be capped at level 5 but somehow he had gone even beyond that.... He could no longer feel the monarch within him, but he could tell why.
He was the monarch.
The tournament. The divine gifts. The carefully calibrated matches that pushed them to their limits and rewarded growth. None of it was for entertainment. None of it was random selection or arbitrary cruelty.
It was preparation.
They'd been training. All of them. Every fighter in this arena, every player in the settlement, everyone who'd been grinding levels and gaining abilities and growing stronger—they'd been preparing for this moment.
For him.
The tournament wasn't meant to entertain the gods. It was meant to create warriors strong enough to kill what the gods themselves couldn't kill. To forge weapons capable of destroying the Monarch before he fully awakened.
And Akhil was the Monarch's vessel.
