The air was different.
Vaeliyan felt it as soon as the sim shifted, the new battlefield slamming into place like a door closing on a scream. The heat of the copper sky dimd, replaced by the cold glint of steel under clouded starlight. The killing floor was gone. The waves of human soldiers vanished, swept aside as though erased.
In their place stood a single silhouette.
A ch-Knight.
It lood thirty feet tall, plated in scarred Imperial alloy, every line of it carved with the brutal elegance of a war machine ant to erase cities. Its fra was shaped like a giant suit of armor, broad-shouldered and thick through the limbs, built less for speed than unstoppable montum. The cockpit sat embedded in its chest like a heart of green glass, a spherical pod of reinforced 360° glass designed to endure artillery fire. Inside, the pilot sat cradled in a harness of skeletal support struts, visible but untouchable, watching the battlefield through panoramic screens and layered sensor overlays.
Its head was low and rounded, built into the upper torso rather than standing atop a neck. A smooth armored faceplate covered the front, featureless except for a recessed visor-slit of reinforced crystal and clusters of green targeting lenses that pulsed like buried stars. It was not a face. It was the suggestion of one, a cold mask ant to unsettle. Its shoulders carried twin missile batteries, its left arm a rotating flechette turret, its right a heavy impact fist designed to shatter fortress walls. Hydraulic pistons as wide as tree trunks lined its joints, shuddering with each motion. Every step drove cracks through the earth, scattering debris as if the ground itself wanted to recoil from it.
It did not breathe. It did not flinch. It simply was, a fortress walking on two legs, an apex weapon ant to grind wars into silence.
Pressure rolled across the battlefield like a tightening storm, and it kept walking.
Vaeliyan’s visor marked its approach, flashing warnings, heat signatures crawling across his vision like slow red cots. His field pushed against it instinctively, testing, probing for cracks, and found nothing. The pressure slid off its armored hull like water off stone. He smiled under his helt, sharp and eager. “Ah,” he murmured. “So, this is what the Princedoms have to offer.”
Then it struck.
The heavy warriors from Barcus’s side charged first, huge figures wrapped in crude plating and raw muscle, roaring like living siege rams. Their mass slamd into the ch with bone-snapping force, and broke. The ch barely shifted. A single arm swept through them like a threshing blade, cleaving bodies from the waist up in clean, casual arcs. Blood misted across the steel and stead. Limbs fell like broken tools. The shock of their impacts echoed through the ruins like drums. They were gone in seconds.
Barcus’s spinning discs screeched through the air, carving molten lines into the ch’s legs. Sparks fountained off, bright and harmless, like rain striking stone. The ch simply stepped forward, driving its armored fist down through another warrior and grinding him into the stone with the casual weight of falling architecture.
Vaeliyan moved.
Bastard and Styll flanked him, black-scaled shapes flickering through the dust, their silver eyes burning cold as they wove between the ch’s sweeping strikes. Styll darted beneath its knees, claws flashing, while Bastard leapt along its back and fired lightning point-blank into the armored plating. The crackling blast scorched black lines across the ch’s surface, and did nothing. The machine didn’t even react. It kept moving, relentless, its turret arm rattling bursts of flechettes at Bastard as he darted away in blur-streaks of static and sparks. The rounds punched stone into dust where they struck, each shot heavy enough to crater concrete.
Vaeliyan hit the field like a storm front. His pressure spiked in jagged bursts, detonating under his feet and hurling him sideways through the air. He moved in sharp, unpredictable arcs, ricocheting between shattered pillars and broken walls, changing direction midair in erratic lunges. Each burst cracked the air like thunder. The ch tracked him with perfect chanical precision, and still couldn’t keep up. Its turrets spun to follow, flechettes ripping through where he had been a heartbeat ago, always a fraction too slow. It saw him as a threat. It simply could not catch him.
Vaeliyan slamd into the leg like a thrown blade. The spike-mods punched into the plating and held, and he climbed, pressure knifing off him in pulsed shockwaves as he rose. The ch’s sensors burned green, locked on him, head twisting to follow his ascent. It lashed out, fist sweeping through the space he had been, but he had already launched himself away in another burst of concussive air, spinning above its shoulder like shrapnel given thought.
Below, Barcus slamd his hand to the cracked glass of its cockpit. Purple fog jetted from his mouth grille and poured through the fractured sphere. The pilot inside seized, convulsed, and then went still. For one second, the ch froze.
Then it shut down.
The glow in its sensors cut out. Its servos locked.
Barcus smiled faintly.
The ch detonated.
The image of the blast unfolded in front of Vaeliyan like a mory that wasn’t his. The crater tore through the stone, vaporizing the pilot, the cockpit, and half of Barcus’s converted vanguard in a single eruption of white heat. Armor shards scread outward like shrapnel, severing limbs and heads in a clean wave of ruin. Barcus was flung away injured but alive.
Vaeliyan felt nothing from it. No shockwave. No heat. It was like watching soone else’s ghost move. The sim didn’t even tremble. Only the visual, sterile and perfect, played on around him like theater.
A warning tone keened through the comms, sharp and cold.
Vaeliyan’s grin sharpened. “Ah. So, they self-destruct on breach. A living bomb. It recognized the pilot was compromised.”
He kicked free of the plating and dropped to the fractured ground, landing in a crouch as Bastard and Styll regrouped at his flanks. The ch’s head turned in perfect chanical precision, flechette turret spinning up with a rising whine.
“Alright,” Vaeliyan muttered. “So not like Barcus, then. Don’t try to take the pilot.”
His visor flared with targeting paths, painting glowing arcs through the ruined air.
“Just kill them. Good. That was my only real option anyway.”
The ch’s head jerked as Vaeliyan slamd onto its shoulder, his truncheons biting deep into the scarred plating, the spike mods screeching sparks and gouging shallow trenches as they caught. Pressure coiled around him like a living storm, condensing with every heartbeat. He didn’t hesitate. He drove one truncheon into the armored faceplate, again and again, each blow landing like a piledriver, bending the tal inward until spiderweb cracks splintered across the reinforced glass of the cockpit. The ch reeled with the impacts, a fortress flinching for the first ti.
The pilot inside whipped his head toward Vaeliyan, eyes wide behind his visor, hands flailing at the controls. The glass bowed, scread, and then ruptured. Vaeliyan let go of everything. Pressure collapsed inward from every direction, a silent implosion. The pilot’s body crushed flat in an instant, bones folding like wet paper. Blood burst from him in a red fog, misting across the shattered interior as the ch sagged beneath Vaeliyan’s boots, hydraulics hissing in death.
The body hit the ground seconds later, headless and hollow, sparks coughing from its chest. The towering fra pitched forward with a groan and slamd down, shaking the ground like a falling tower.
Vaeliyan vaulted free before it hit, already in motion, pressure spikes blasting from his feet and shoulders in staggered bursts that flung him through the drifting smoke. His vision locked on three new chs spawning ahead, massive silhouettes dragging themselves up from the fractured stone. Their missile pods rotated as their limbs unfolded like siege towers taking their first steps. Farther off, Barcus still fought, buried in the storm, his remaining vanguard collapsing around him. Flechette fire ripped through his surviving warriors while his spinning blade rings slashed shallow molten scars into armor that simply would not break. He didn’t look at Vaeliyan. Vaeliyan didn’t look at him. They were separate storms sharing the sa killing field.
Barcus was still ahead of him in kills. That wouldn’t last.
The three new chs cut across Vaeliyan’s path in perfect formation, their heavy strides pounding shockwaves into the stone. Bastard surged past his feet, silver eyes flashing. Styll darted in from the side, reckless and fast, her body coiling with wild energy, and then she was gone. A shoulder-mounted rocket struck her full in the face. There was no ti to scream. One heartbeat she was there, the next she was just drifting tal and at scattering across the stone.
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Vaeliyan barely flinched. Unfortunate, but expected. She’d always been the most reckless.
Bastard snarled wordlessly in his mind, a sharp crackle of anger, but underneath it was fear, old and sharp as glass. He wasn’t built for this. His claws scored the plating and sparked off harmlessly. His lightning skittered across armor without ever touching the pilots inside. Every second brought back the weight of that old alley he’d crawled through as a kitten, starving and broken, the whole world towering over him like it ant to crush him out of existence. The sll of oil and blood here was the sa. The ground shook the sa way when giants passed too close. He felt like that again. Small. Forgotten. Powerless. The old terror burned behind his eyes like it had never left.
Vaeliyan felt it through the bond, knew what it was, but didn’t waste ti on him, not now. Later he would comfort the bond, reassure him that this didn’t matter, that he was not that small thing anymore. But not now. Bastard could survive. He couldn’t win.
Vaeliyan blurred through the fireline, ricocheting off his own pressure bursts, dragging ch fire across each other. Turrets roared after him, then tore into their own allies when he cut away at the last possible second. Flechettes scread through the air like razors, gouging armor when they missed him and slamd into the other machines. The hits didn’t do much, these things were too heavily plated, but they staggered when struck, their turrets slowing, taking precious seconds to spin up again. He marked the delay instantly. A weakness.
“This would be easier if I were Warden,” he thought, silent and cold as he spiraled between them. “I could just step inside and end them.”
But he wasn’t. So, he would break them instead.
He slamd onto the central ch, truncheons screeching sparks across the cockpit glass. Cracks webbed across the surface as his pressure compacted around him, tighter and tighter, until the glass burst like a bubble. The pilot twitched once before the invisible weight crushed him flat, bones snapping like twigs. Vaeliyan ripped the corpse free and dropped it to the floor like trash.
Then he sat in the cockpit.
He was out again a second later, launching himself skyward as the ch’s core alarms howled. The self-destruct ard with a shriek. Vaeliyan hit full speed instantly, every ounce of stored force detonating behind him in a single jet burst. The blast flung him across the ruined courtyard as the central ch went white.
The detonation ripped it apart. The shockwave annihilated the central ch, chewing it into shrapnel that hamred the other two from both sides. Their armor cracked. Their cores ruptured. All three chs erupted in a chain of blinding white fire, torn apart in perfect symtry. The blast wave carved a crater through the courtyard, molten stone spraying outward as their wreckage burned.
Vaeliyan rolled through the blast wake, skidding to his feet. The air sizzled from the heat. The three chs were gone, nothing left but twisted, burning fragnts scattered across the fractured ground.
“That should clutch this,” he thought, teeth bared.
He looked to Barcus.
The last of his soldiers were gone. The air around him was empty, silent. And from the haze, the streaks of missile contrails were already cutting toward him.
“Are we done now?” Vaeliyan called out, his voice steady but faintly frayed at the edges, his hands still twitching from the echoes of combat. The words ca out more like an exhale than a demand, exhaustion leaking through the cracks.
“Yes,” Ruby’s voice chid back, light and cheerful. “That’s it. You’ve beaten the forr Lord Bacchus, so I suppose… all hail Lord Vaeliyan. Congratulations on the victory. I’m so very proud of you.”
Her tone was bright and musical, almost sing-song, but it barely touched him. The tension of the fight still lingered in his muscles like coiled wire, straining against themselves. He rolled his shoulders slowly, feeling the ache ripple through him as he loosened his grip on his truncheons, the tal still faintly vibrating from how tightly he had held them. The rhythm of battle was only just beginning to bleed from his bones. His pulse still ca too fast, as if part of him hadn’t realized the fighting was over. Even his thoughts were struggling to slow down, still caught in that sharp, animal focus where nothing existed but movent and survival.
There was a pause. Then Ruby added, “And just hold on for a mont. We do have one more wave, if you would like to test yourself.”
Vaeliyan tilted his head slightly, weary but curious, his expression unreadable. He didn’t lift his eyes from the middle distance. “Is there any prize for doing so?”
Silence stretched for several long seconds, thick and deliberate, as if the system was considering how to answer him. He stood motionless, the quiet pressing around him, the emptiness after violence sohow louder than the battle had been.
Finally, Ruby replied, her tone quieter now, stripped of its usual lilt. “No, not really. You’re already receiving all the accommodations we can provide for this success. It’s mostly just a test for us. Data collection. Nothing more.”
Vaeliyan gave a short laugh, tired and low, almost a sigh. It sounded like sothing breaking loose inside him. “Honestly, Ruby,” he said, “I’m tired. I’ve done so much today, and I don’t really want to be in here anymore. This was fun, but we have our first class with High Imperator Kasala tomorrow and… well, we’ve taken every seat in his class. It’s going to be fun to see his reaction when he realizes he’s getting an entirely new class he’s never t before. He’ll have to take all new apprentices because they’re the only ones left. It’s going to be good. I’m excited for this.”
Ruby humd softly, thoughtful now, like she was smiling behind her words. “Oh, that does actually sound rather exciting. We will get you out of there as soon as we can. Darling, did you want to speak to Barcus at all?”
Vaeliyan turned. Barcus stood a short distance away, whole again, perfectly still. He looked untouched, as though none of what had just happened had mattered at all. He simply existed, quiet and steady, like a statue that had chosen to breathe. They locked gazes for a long mont, two warriors with nothing left to prove to each other. There was no triumph in either of them, only recognition, the kind that needed no words.
Vaeliyan nodded once, slow and deliberate, the smallest gesture but carrying the weight of finality.
Barcus nodded back, silent and steady, the faintest flicker of respect crossing his face. It was gone as quickly as it ca.
“No,” Vaeliyan said quietly. “I don’t need to. I just want to get out of here.”
“All right,” said another voice, calm and even, cutting through the quiet. “Ending simulation.”
There was no sound as the world peeled away from him like a discarded skin. One blink and it was simply gone, and the silence swallowed even the thought of what had been here.
Vaeliyan stepped forward as the world of the sim lted away, the blank nothing peeling off his skin like water running off steel. The silence of the void cracked, and from the collapsing haze rose the sound of tal striking tal, pure, sharp, eternal. The tension in his limbs, wound taut from hours of relentless slaughter, slowly uncoiled as the weight of battle bled from him. He stood, still breathing like a war drum, watching as the world fell apart into nothing.
Steel stood before him.
Her voice rang like tempered iron drawn from the forge, rich with pride and power. “You’ve done it. Once again, I am so proud of you. Do you know what you have done?”
Vaeliyan blinked, still half-braced for war, then let his arms fall to his sides as though they were suddenly too heavy to lift. “Honestly… not really. I’ve defeated so tests.”
“Warren.” Her perfect face tilted, catching the unseen light as if her skin were polished chro, seamless and immaculate. “You just set yourself as the benchmark against the man who is currently the strongest High Imperator the Green Zone possesses. Barcus is the Cosmic Breaker of the Green Zone. And you have stepped above him. You do not understand what this ans yet, but it is an implication of what you are to beco.”
Vaeliyan’s lips twitched into sothing between a grin and a grimace. “All right. I really don’t know what that ans exactly, but I’m guessing it’s good… I’ve seen Imujin clap and the world evaporated in a sim. So if a Cosmic Breaker is above a World Breaker and a World Breaker is above the Continent Breakers, then… I’m gonna be above that. That’s exciting.” He gave a small laugh, breathless and unsteady, the sound cracking halfway through. “I’m really, really excited for that. It’s so good to see you. Is there anything I should know about the next boon? Or the next task that I should complete?”
“Warren. My child.” Her voice softened, still edged in steel, but warm in its weight. “This boon is not a boon of power. It is a boon of heart. Sothing that I know you deserve. For one day, you will exist as two. Vaeliyan will remain here in the Citadel, while Warren will be carried back to Mara. Your mind and body will be split, each moving as if whole, though they will be bound. At the end of the day, Warren will return to you, and you will be whole again.”
Vaeliyan’s breath caught, his throat tightening, and then he dropped to his knees, truncheons clattering from his hands, and for the first ti in longer than he could rember, he wept. His shoulders shook as he forced the words out. “Wait… are you telling that I can be both here… and with Wren, and our child?”
Golden tears rolled from Steel’s eyes, bright enough to leave molten trails down her perfect face. “Yes, my child. You will get to see your child for the first ti in person. As the true you. But know this: there is a cost. The Warren that walks Mara will be only a servant of your soul, a vessel to carry you there. He will not hold your full power. You will not have access to Vaeliyan's passive Skills while you are split. This is the only way this can be done.”
Her voice gentled, sorrow woven beneath the steel, the weight of sothing ancient humming behind her tone. “I hope this boon is sothing you find worthy. It took more than you would understand, but it does not grant you any actual power. It will only grant you solace. I hope it is enough… for what is to co. As for your next task, it is not ti for to grant it to you. I have other things I must attend to before I can grant you the next stage, the next boon. And this boon took more than you would expect.”
She hesitated then, the faintest flicker of grief behind her flawless mask, like a crack in tempered steel. “Warren… I can offer you sothing small, if you wish. Sothing tangible. It will not co from . I will need to ask Umdar, to provide the power to balance this.”
Vaeliyan stared up at her, eyes wet, breath ragged, the enormity of what she was offering slowly sinking in like molten tal cooling around his ribs. She was not trying to fix him. She was trying to give him sothing to carry forward with, sothing real.
He bowed his head. “Then… if you wish to give it, I will accept. I won’t ask for anything. I trust you.”
Steel tilted her head, patient, as though she could wait for centuries if she had to. “If there is sothing else, sothing not of the heart but of the hand, say it. Ask, and I will see what he will grant.”
Vaeliyan drew in a slow breath, feeling the weight of the mont settle into him like cooled iron. “Then… sothing small. Anything. Whatever you think would help. I trust you.”
Steel smiled, faintly, as if proud, her molten tears fading back into her skin until she was flawless once more. “Then I will see what can be done.”
And for just an instant, the sound of the forge returned, the echo of a hamr striking deep within her voice, like the beating heart of a star, and he felt the promise of her will wrap around him like a tempered blade.
Then the world faded.
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