The glacial battlefield was a shattered chaos.
Team 006 regrouped with alarming coordination: Violet sprinted ahead, poised and predatory, while Cragtooth thundered from the left, his rhinoceros-sized bulk cracking ice sheets beneath his feet. Mistbreaker advanced on the right, shields shimring like halos of ice-glazed moonlight.
Eathan stumbled, breathing raggedly, realizing with mounting horror that his escape routes had just narrowed drastically.
Then—
A shadow flashed from a high mirrored ledge. Esther plunged through the air like a silent missile, landing in a perfect crouch directly between Eathan and his pursuers. Before Cragtooth even registered her presence, she rose, brushing stray snowflakes off her sleeve with nonchalance.
"Where do you think you're going?"
Cragtooth paused mid-charge, looking baffled by this tiny roadblock.
"You dare—?"
"I dare," Esther confird. Without waiting for the opponent to react, she ghosted forth, hooking one foot behind Mistbreaker's ankle. Leveraging his own montum, she flipped him straight into an open crevice. Mistbreaker flailed, shields sparking as he disappeared with a muffled yelp.
She turned to face Cragtooth, eyebrows lifted slightly. "Next?"
The hulking brute growled, lunging forward again—but Esther was already blurring away, leading him into a wild-goose chase through the maze of mirrored cliffs. She tossed a brief glance back, eyes locking onto Eathan's.
He swallowed. ssage received: Run, idiot.
Eathan bolted, clutching the egg like it was Taeril White's morning coffee. His relief lasted all of ten seconds before Violet appeared again, lting out from a frost-coated reflection with infuriating elegance.
"Why is it always you?" he groaned, voice climbing an octave.
She offered him the briefest flash of a smile—polite, deadly, custor-service unfriendly—and lunged. Eathan ducked under her swipe, desperately scanning for backup. Willow was sowhere across the field, still locked in titanic combat with terrain fragnts, and Esther was halfway across the arena, distracting the frost-monsters.
He was completely alone.
Violet lunged again, blade inches from his throat. Panic surged, blurring rational thought. Eathan did the only sensible thing he could: he flung the Divine Egg directly at the closest teammate with a shriek of desperation.
"Esther—take it!"
Ti slowed to a crawl. The egg twirled through midair, glinting beneath spectral spotlights. The entire spectator section leaned forward in perfect unison. Even the comntary team stopped breathing, fully invested in this single, eggy trajectory.
Esther, mid-stride, twisted on the step and extended her arm. Her fingers brushed the smooth shell—only to stop abruptly, as if halted by invisible strings.
Gasps echoed through the stands. RealmNet emojis froze mid-spam.
Then, swift and fluid, Violet snatched the egg from its arc, pivoting on her heel without hesitation. With renewed purpose, she bolted straight toward Team 001's spawning platform, eyes alight with imminent victory.
Yverie nearly exploded in her seat. "She's going for the final goal! Team 006 might take this match!"
RealmNet chat went supernova, unleashing a tsunami of "GGs" and dragon emojis. One fan theorized Esther's betrayal. Several thousand responses debated Esther's exact bribery fee.
Up on the commander's platform, Ao Bing folded his arms, a complacent smile spreading across his cold, aristocratic face. Taeril, lounging nearby, didn't even spare a glance downward, apparently engrossed in counting invisible dust motes floating past his sleeve.
It didn't take long for Violet to reach the node-core, a sleek crystalline pedestal humming in its protective do of runes. She lunged forward and, without hesitation, slamd the egg down onto the glittering core.
[TI REMAINING]:
03:12
A flash erupted, golden rings igniting skyward. The countdown display flickered to a stop in the sky, indicating that a score had been taken in.
Team 006's spectators roared like a victory symphony.
"Here we have it! A winner—hold on."
Yverie's voice snapped out like a whip, sharp enough to stun the celebrating crowd into abrupt silence. Her starlit eyes went wide as she squinted down at her console. Next to her, Brother Woo leaned over, brow also furrowing.
The next second, his calm deanour fractured slightly.
"The system just pinged..." Yverie's voice carried throughout the arena with disbelief. "Team 001... wins?"
Complete silence fell over the stands, broken only by Cragtooth's distant, confused grunt. Ao Bing's carefully curated triumph collapsed, his arms unfolding slowly. He shot a sharp look toward the judges' box, clearly certain so cosmic prank had occurred. Beside him, Taeril White had shifted in his seat, a barely perceptible lift of his head.
"Did the Ledger glitch?" Brother Woo's voice was skeptical, contemplative.
"No, no, no—" Yverie stamred, rapidly flipping through screen after screen, each bursting open with blazing text in divine script. "The Ledger never makes mistakes. Surely, this has never happened in the entirety of Realm-Barrier Gas' history."
Comntators scrambled, requesting an imdiate Ledger replay from the Jade Deity.
Another hush fell over the stands, only broken by Team 006's Cragtooth, now standing on a jagged chunk of ice and loudly demanding justice for "the egg scam." Mistbreaker, freshly respawned, simply stared into space, dripping frost-water and existential dread.
Above, the massive broadcast screen flickered. A gong resonated through the stadium—once, twice, three tis. A line of text erged, glittering in jade letters:
[CLOUD-JADE LEDGER]:
Replay Authorized
Instantly, reality rolled backward, reconstructing itself with dizzying clarity. The screen zood in, cutting precisely to a frozen mont earlier in the match—Esther's outstretched hand suspended inches from catching the egg.
"Freeze fra!" Yverie announced, leaning forward in suspense. "Let's follow Team 001's Esther carefully this ti."
The entire audience leaned forward again, holding a collective breath.
The scene inched forward fra-by-fra, revealing that Esther's hand hadn't faltered by accident—no hesitation, no betrayal. Instead, her fingers curled slightly, deliberately pulling away at the last fraction of a second.
It was a conscious attempt to overco muscle mory.
Then, Violet appeared like a blur, successfully intercepting the egg and darting toward the glowing node core.
"Track Esther's trajectory after disengagent," Brother Woo demanded.
The cara shifted in response, retracing Esther's ghost-like retreat. The rewind squeaked, stopping finally at the 10-minute mark—the occurrence of the first chaotic terrain shift. Under countless pairs of eyes, Esther slipped unnoticed beneath a mirrored ice crevice the mont she had been pulled underwater by Mistbreaker. The shimring surfaces had swallowed her image whole, cloaking her movents completely.
The replay then entered Esther's hidden path, a series of mirrored tunnels woven beneath the surface—an assassin's shadow untouched by caras or eyes. Esther weaved through them, each step a tinted whisper, each breath calculated and silent.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
RealmNet continued to hold its breath, chat eerily quiet.
Finally, Esther erged at Team 006's node core, the crystal pedestal flanked by spirit seals, humming in its isolated beauty. Without hesitation, she reached inside her sleeve, pulling out—
"Is that…" Yverie's voice lowered with her squinted eyes. "A barcode scanner?"
[@WTFanclubOfficial]: ?
[@PineappleBandit]: ??
[@taphysicalFraud]: ??????
"She… she's scanning Team 006's node-core?" The starry-eyed strear choked out, half-horror, half-impressed. "Brother Woo, what in all the heavens?"
Onscreen, the assassin calmly swiped the scanner over the node core's base. With a crisp, faintly ridiculous chirp, the small device imdiately spat out a glowing slip—an anchor-seal tag, precisely tistamped and verified.
"Pause!" Brother Woo raised one steady hand. The replay halted, hovering perfectly over Esther's action.
Yverie leaned so far forward that she nearly toppled over. "Can we zoom? Zoom!"
The screen expanded, zeroing in on Esther's calm, steady fingers as she took a second, identical seal slip from her pocket—a seal printed earlier by none other than Eathan's [Receipt Printer]. With a single fluid motion, Esther swapped the slips, thodically overlaying Team 001's anchor seal onto Team 006's core.
The crowd, watching the woman's slowed actions, fell silent. The actions looked like mundane inventory managent, except it had single-handedly flipped the entire match. A realisation—terribly ingenious—began to dawn on them simultaneously.
Then, Violet appeared onscreen, unaware and racing toward that sa core. Confidence radiated from her; victory was inevitable. The audience watched as she slamd the Divine Egg down, igniting the core in brilliant golden glory.
Except, now everyone saw clearly, painfully so, that the glittering core was no longer Team 001's. Violet hadn't scored a victory—she'd simply slamd the Divine Egg into the node core now assigned to Team 006.
It was an act of pure sabotage.
Violet's confident smirk transford, fra by fra, into stunned horror as the replay paused once more, capturing the exact instant the triumph died in her eyes. The stadium exploded in return. RealmNet's silence fractured into frenzied screams and keystrokes:
[@QiEchoLord]: Esther weaponized custor service protocol?!
[@taphysicalThief13]: I've seen war cris less audacious than this.
[@TaxAuditGod]: this villain behaviour… i think i need a mont
Brother Woo's usually unflappable deanour cracked as he stared, expression matching the woman on the screen. "Ingenious. Esther replaced the tadata of Team 006's node-core, effectively turning it into their own. Ingenious… Ingenious."
Yverie leaned back, wiping sweat off her forehead. "Team 001… They had turned Cloud-Jade's own system back onto itself."
Her voice rose as the audience roared in an echo.
"A bureaucratic assassination!" she cried, hands flying into the air. "We've witnessed literal, paperwork-fuelled sabotage live, people! The legendary Reverse-Anchor strat has just debuted in the Realm-Barrier Gas!"
Onscreen, Ao Bing had gone utterly still. He exchanged a single, icy glare with the white-haired man beside him, whose impassive expression had broken into the faintest curve of a smile.
The giant screens flashed once more, displaying final ga statistics alongside a dazzling leaderboard update. Around them, snow flurried, as if the entire arena itself were letting out a relieved breath. Even the infrastructure seed vaguely impressed by the match outco.
Brother Woo's calm voice rolled over the loudspeakers, now back to his usual serene delivery. "With that, Team 001 secures victory for Ga One. Strategically precise, calmly executed, and—"
Yverie, voice nearly trembling with excitent, cut in: "ABSOLUTELY INSANE!"
The crowd burst into a wild cheer again, chants of "Esther!", "Willow!", and "barcode scanner!" ringing through the stands.
Having now returned to the original arena, Team 001 stood in stillness, watching as the ssage and live replay hovered above them. The cara zood onto each of the team mbers' bemused faces, Eathan looking especially disoriented beneath the giant holographic banner that now proudly declared:
[WINNER: TEAM 001]
Then, he received a faint pulse from the [SYSTEM]:
You have completed [Main Quest]:
Survive Ga One of the Realm-Barrier Gas!
You have been rewarded: 200 Karma, 700 Qi Tokens, 1% Integrity
[Integrity] has increased by 1%! (58% → 59%)
Host [Level]: Lv. 38 → Lv. 39
Eathan stared numbly at the numbers, feeling sowhat insulted by how excited the [SYSTEM] always sounded despite his difficulties. But his indignation evaporated at once when he caught sight of the Qi Token count.
Seven hundred?
He blinked, then rubbed his eyes. Nope. Still seven hundred. His Qi Token reservoir had shot up from a agre 99 to passing the unprecedented 799.
Honestly, given the level of psychological trauma he'd sustained so far, it felt disturbingly reasonable. He should have known that divine egg-keeping paid far better than saving the world from equilibrium failure. Eathan retracted his gaze, a slightly manic gleam already forming in his eyes as he ntally calculated how to spend his newfound wealth.
"In any case…" he mumbled, voice muffled by his scarf as he shifted his attention back to the now-frozen big screen. "I can't believe the plan worked."
Onscreen, Esther stood impeccably still, looking like soone who'd just committed grand larceny at a tea ceremony—and perhaps enjoyed it far more than her bored face suggested. Offscreen, the real one turned to Eathan, and sothing sleek flew toward him—the barcode scanner he lent out, tossed casually back into his chest.
Eathan turned the scanner over in his hands, fingers tapping. Beside him, Willow grunted as she crossed her arms. "I could say the sa. How'd you think of sothing like this would work?"
"I didn't. Not at first." Eathan exhaled, eyes tracing the glowing glyphs that still faintly humd on the scanner's display. "But rember how I asked Yverie to clarify the rules during the opening ceremony?"
Esther's eyebrows lifted subtly, urging him on.
"I realized we weren't explicitly forbidden from altering node-core tadata," he explained. "So I tried it at the start of the ga, and succeeded. That's when I thought: if I could use the printer to replicate our own node anchor seal, why couldn't I replicate Team 006's as well?"
Before, he was the only one who could activate the [Receipt Printer] skill on the scanner. However, the skill had recently advanced to Level 3 after the fight against the Taowu, which unlocked a "borrow mode" that enabled others to use it as well, albeit at a much higher Qi Token cost.
Willow snorted, massaging her armoured shoulders. "So your grand strategy was a gamble on a technical loophole?"
"Pretty much," Eathan admitted with a sheepish grin. "Though I was honestly terrified when Esther still didn't co back halfway through the countdown. Felt like I was betting everything on an untested exploit."
"You banked on chaos, knowing the faster and fiercer things beco, the more everyone's focused on the egg and not the core," Esther said, nodding once. "Satisfactory strategy."
"Well, it worked. A little too well. We were the bait." Willow paused, eyes narrowing as if she'd just pieced together a very unpleasant truth. "Correction. He made sure I was the bait."
Eathan blinked. "You an—?"
"The White Tiger. He knew," Esther slid in. "He knew that I could anchor-swap nodes faster than they could react." Her gaze lingered on the big screen, tinged with subtle contemplation. "Finn and Chewie would've drawn too much attention—both of them practically scream 'look at ' in different flavours of chaos. And then there was Willow, who has the subtlety of a freight train. And Eathan is just…"
She glanced at him with mild pity.
"Well. Eathan."
"Hey."
"Which made you perfect," Esther said, patting his arm like consoling a small pet. "Your most morable trait is probably existential panic. Nobody suspects the panicking intern."
From sowhere in the team stands ca a muffled yelp. Finn leaned dangerously over the railing, waving a qi-glazed drumstick for emphasis. As he waited for the rest of Team 001 to reconvene back at the team booth, he struck a finger towards the big screen, then down at Eathan, Willow, and Esther in the arena.
"So..." he murmured, incredulous. "Did Commander White seriously build the entire strategy into the team selection?"
Chewie answered beside him with a simple nod, stabbing into a drumstick of her own with fingers as chopsticks. "It only works with these exact three roles. Willow tanks. Eathan prints. Esther seals."
They stared at each other, a slow, unsettling understanding blossoming in the silence.
Back at the arena grounds, Eathan, who'd been grappling with the question of why him ever since the start of the match—felt his heart squeeze uncomfortably. The suspicion had been gnawing at him from the beginning, but now, seeing the quiet certainty in his teammates' eyes, it had crystallized into certainty.
"This wasn't at random, was it?"
Esther's gaze softened slightly, her face shifting just enough to hint at sympathy. "Not at all. It was deliberately precise."
Willow's armour creaked as she crossed her arms.
"Each role is irreplaceable." She tilted her head at Eathan, as if finally seeing him clearly. "Your little embedded cheat code gave us the anchor tags—the printer, the barcode scans. We couldn't have swapped the cores without it."
Eathan swallowed hard. "But my stealth stats are about as subtle as Chewie's table manners. If it had been doing the scanning, they would've spotted the mont I tried to disappear."
From the team booth above them, Chewie froze mid-bite, drumstick dangling from her mouth.
"Precisely," Esther said. "Speed and stealth are my forte, but without your special scanner, there'd be nothing to stealthily acquire in the first place."
Willow chuckled dryly. "And without making all that fuss, Violet's crew would've sniffed you out sooner. I'm basically a walking neon wall distraction." She looked mildly offended, then shrugged. "Eh, soone's gotta be."
The trio fell silent again, the truth settling around them was heavy but undeniable.
Esther exhaled a thin wisp of steam. Her gaze travelled upward toward the command deck above, where a man stood watching with the distant amusent of a puppeteer whose marionettes had perford precisely as intended.
"There's a reason why the commander chooses his players," she muttered quietly. "He always sees sothing the players don't."
Eathan followed her gaze, breath catching. At that very mont, far above in the stands, Taeril turned, eting his eyes from across the fading glaciers. The white-haired man's expression barely shifted, his lips curving upward just by a fraction—a faint, barely-there smirk of triumph.
A silent, understated touché.
Then he turned away with lazy grace, already reaching for a third cup of coffee in the hour.
And that, Eathan realized, was the most unsettling part.
He turned back to the group, heart still drumming out its frantic rhythm against his ribs. "He didn't send us in just to survive."
Willow arched an eyebrow at him. "Only took you—what, an entire ga to realize that?"
Esther's lips twitched in subtle amusent.
Eathan ignored their jabs, still staring numbly upward at Taeril's retreating back. "He sent us here to win. He planned it, from the mont he picked our nas."
A slow, collective sigh settled among them. They all looked upward again, seeing their commander's distant silhouette now frad perfectly against the icy sky—still sipping coffee, still nonchalant.
Not to survive, but to win.
That's what it ant to be on the White Tiger's team.
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