The trial opened three days later, and the whole kingdom stood ready at its threshold.
The entry point was a shimmering gate in the sky above the pocket realm, a tear of pale light that pulsed once every ten days and stayed open only long enough to swallow those who had e to enter. It hung there over the assembled host like a held breath, and the light spilling out of it fell across a hundred thousand upturned faces. Ananta Regalon had e to enter in force, and the sight of them gathered in one place, for the first time in a long time, was a thing to behold.
The ten strongest were chosen the way everyone had known they would be, and there was no argument about it. Almond, Lily, Rudra, and Ainen stood at the head of the Generals, the four who had killed a Doom Monarch and taken ten worlds between them. The other six spots went to Kexell, Marcus, Silvester, Hiroshi, Maya, and Jian, each of them proven across a whole campaign, each of them a name the sector had learned to respect.
But the ten did not stand apart from the rest, and that was the thing that mattered. Every other Regalon had e too, packed into the ranks with the army, because this was the family’s climb and the family did not sit it out. Julian and Bianca. Viktor and Liang. Roken with his great hammer, Tejas beside his grandfather, Valentina at Bianca’s shoulder, all of them, the whole scattered clan pulled back together for a single purpose. Even Dagon and Sabrina had e, standing near their daughter, and Aria was there too, quiet at the edge, watching her disciple lead an army under a strange sky.
The remaining spots in the hundred thousand were filled the way the kingdom filled everything now, with the exotic army their decks had built. The factory had run without stopping for days, and out of it had poured the bined creations of four kinds of power, ranked and ready and waiting for the light to take them.
Dread-Reavers stood beside Ember-born, black and burning shoulder to shoulder. Oblivion spirit-constructs held their lines next to Decree-Sentinels of grey adamant. It was an army that no other kingdom in the trial could match, not in what it was made of and not in the hands that had made it, and the family looked at it with the quiet pride of people who had built the thing themselves.
The Asura Executives stayed behind, and though they would have followed the family into anything, they did not plain about being left to hold the sector.
They understood what it meant. They had e up from the bottom plane as slaves, the lowest of the low, people who had lost everything and everyone before the kingdom reached down and gave them a ladder. And now they were trusted, wholly and without hesitation, to run ten top-tier worlds while the family climbed toward the upper layer. There was no higher honor the kingdom could have given them, and every one of them felt the weight of it.
Almond found the senior Executive before he left, the woman who ran the whole network of towns in the family’s absence. She had once been property with no name of her own, and now she stood before her King as the steward of a sector.
"Hold it all together," Almond told her, and there was real trust in it, not just mand. "Keep the towns running, the Coins flowing, the worlds safe. We will be back with an upper layer under our feet, and when we build our first city up there, you are going to run it."
The woman bowed low, and when she straightened her eyes were bright, though she did not let her voice waver. "The sector will be exactly as you left it, my King. Down to the last stone." A small, fierce smile touched her mouth. "Go take your peak. We will keep the lights on until you get back."
Then the family stepped up to the gate, a hundred thousand strong beneath a held breath of light, and the pale radiance reached down and took them.
The dimension on the other side was unlike anything they had expected, and every one of them, hardened as they were, stopped for a moment simply to look at it.
It was a world turned inside out. The sky was a deep churning violet, restless and alive, shot through with slow lightning that made no sound. Across it drifted islands of floating stone, whole landmasses hanging in the empty air with rivers pouring off their edges and falling into nothing, the water breaking into mist long before it found a bottom that was not there.
The ground beneath their feet was black glass veined with threads of soft light, cool and smooth and faintly warm all at once. And strangest of all, the horizon did not fall away as a horizon should. It rose. The whole dimension curved upward in every direction, so that they stood at the bottom of an enormous bowl and could see the distant land climbing away from them on all sides, until it vanished into the violet haze overhead.
And at the center of that impossible bowl, unthinkably far away, stood the peak.
It was gigantic beyond any word for it, a single mountain that climbed past the floating islands, past the churning clouds, past the reach of sight itself, its summit lost somewhere in the storm of the sky. It was the destination, the only thing in this whole strange world that mattered, and standing at the foot of everything and looking up at it, not one of them could honestly say it looked reachable.
Marcus was the first to break the silence, tipping his head back to stare up at it. "Ten days to cross that," he said. "On foot. I have seen some things climb since we got here, but that is asking a lot."
"On foot, through whatever lives between here and there," Aryan said. He had e as part of the hundred thousand, running the tactical picture the way he always did, already reading the strange land for threats. "And we are not the only ones aimed at it. Every kingdom that wants the upper layer is somewhere in this bowl right now, all of them racing the same mountain. Some of them are going to decide the fastest path runs straight through us."
Almond looked at the impossible peak for a long moment, and the familiar focus settled over him, quiet and certain, the look his family had learned to trust across three layers of climbing.
"Then we do not waste a single one of the ten days," he said. "We move as one. We move fast. We do not stop for anything we can go around, and we do not slow down for anything we can leave behind." He turned to face them, the whole gathered host, Generals and family and army under a violet sky. "Everything that gets in our way, we handle, and then we keep walking. The peak is the only prize in this world. We do not lose sight of it, not for an hour."
The kingdom had barely begun to move when the dimension showed them its first test.
The black glass ahead of them cracked with a sound like ice breaking on a lake, and things began to climb out of the breaks. They were made of the same glass as the ground, jagged and faceted and razor-edged, rising up in a glittering horde that caught the violet light and threw it back in a thousand cutting colors. When they turned toward the intruders, they made a sound like a great hall full of mirrors all shattering at once.
"Trial monsters," Lily said, unbothered, already reading the shape of them the way she read everything. "The dimension defends itself against anyone crossing it. I would be more worried if it did not."
"Then we teach it that we are not worth the trouble," Rudra said, and stepped to the front, cracking his knuckles with the calm of a man who had never once been afraid of a fight.
The family flowed into formation around him without needing to be told, years of fighting together making it as natural as breathing. The exotic army spread out behind them, a hundred thousand strong, Dread-Reavers and Ember-born and spirit-constructs and Sentinels forming ranks beneath that restless sky.
Somewhere across the impossible curved horizon, dozens of other kingdoms were meeting tests of their own, all of them fighting toward the same distant summit. But here, on this stretch of black glass, it was Ananta Regalon that the dimension had chosen to test first.
"Ananta Regalon," Almond called, and his voice carried over the whole host, steady and clear. "We cross this world. We take that peak. And we earn our way up, the way we have earned everything else, together." He drew his first card, and behind him the sky filled with steel. "Ten days. Move."
The kingdom surged forward across the black glass, into the glittering horde, under a churning violet sky, and the race for the upper layer began in earnest.
Reviews
All reviews (0)