Kruger's scream was still inside the walls when everyone hit the arena floor.The flash of light deposited them all at once, the full team materializing from the stands to the stone in a disorganized spread, and Silas reached Kruger before the others had fully found their footing. Both hands went into the wounds immediately, green healing light wrapping the damage in thin pulsing lines, and she worked with the focus of someone who has learned to ignore everything happening around the thing that needs her hands."Hold on." She said it through her teeth, the words pushed out between the concentration. "Hold on, I have you, just don't move."Linor and two others hit the Sword of Law from three angles simultaneously.Spells opened across the arena floor, clashing metal filling the air, mana discharge throwing light across the stone in colors that meant different things coming from different hands. It was coordinated and it was everything they had and the golden knight didn't move back a s

Caldrias didn't wait.Silver Mirage activated the moment his foot touched the arena floor, his body splitting into copies that spread outward in a fan pattern, each one semi-transparent and moving with the specific weight of something real, converging from five different angles simultaneously.Dante watched them come.Not the copies. The ground under them. The copies moved where Caldrias moved, and Caldrias moved from a single point that the illusions couldn't fully disguise because the stone remembered weight and the weight had only one source. He read the pressure in the floor, the fractional delay between the real step and the copy's echo, and swung once, a single diagonal slash from left shoulder to right hip.Every copy dissolved.Caldrias was already answering. Silver Fang, the skill coming off his blade in a horizontal wave, tiny compressed blades riding the front of it aimed at Dante's center. Dante stepped back exactly as far as he needed to and not one centimeter further, fe

The Knight King looked down at Dante the way a mountain looks at weather."Before this crown," he said, "I was a knight. Nothing more. They called me the Immortal Knight, and the law of my people is simple. Any challenger who defeats the reigning king takes the throne." He tilted his head, just slightly. "So. Do you have the courage to try, little human? Or was the mouth the only weapon you brought today?"Dante looked up at two point eight meters of armored giant."Might as well give it a shot."The first exchange shook the ground.The King's sword came down and the shockwave alone, before the blade even landed, pushed Dante back several steps. His boots carved lines in the stone. He sent the Fallens to the edge of the arena with one look and tightened his grip on the sword.One basic strike. No skill, no intent behind it except casual force. Just a man testing a door to see if it opens.Dante did not want to think about what a skill would feel like.He found out soon enough.He swun

Augusto walked beside Dante without speaking, which suited Dante fine.The medical wing sat at the far end of the Knight compound, past two checkpoints and a corridor that smelled like stone and old oil. Augusto stopped at the door, crossed his arms, and stayed there. No explanation. No instruction. Just waiting outside the way a man waits when he has been told to.Dante knocked twice and stepped in.The room smelled of antiseptic and dried herbs. Clean, small, functional. The kind of room that wasn't designed for comfort, just recovery.Linor was in the bed. Not badly hurt, just held there by protocol, the way institutions like this always kept people a day longer than necessary to prove they had rules. He looked up when Dante walked in, and something moved through his face, surprise first, then something harder to name."I didn't think you'd actually come," Linor said.Dante pulled the chair close to the bed and sat down."We were friends once," he said. "That was real, even if it w

The argument ended the way arguments with Gianna always ended.Tears. Deployed with surgical precision, at exactly the moment his position was strongest, which meant they landed hardest. Dante had held his ground. Technically, he had won. The facts were on his side, the logic was clean, and none of it mattered even slightly.No lunch. No dinner. Sleep outside.He sat on the rooftop with his back against the low ledge and his holographic screen open in front of him, the city spread out below still carrying the noise of early evening, and his mother's voice still sitting somewhere at the back of his skull like a splinter he couldn't reach.He let it sit there and opened the first article.Watching Kruger and Mauro fight in that Colosseum had left something unresolved in him. Not about power. Power he understood, more or less. It was something underneath the power. Something structural, like the difference between two buildings where one had a foundation and one was just very heavy. He h