The chamber beneath Bria’s royal palace existed for exactly one purpose, a meeting place reserved for the ten ranked fighters the kingdom had come to regard, quietly and without much argument from anyone who’d ever witnessed them fight, as something closer to living gods than ordinary warriors.
They gathered rarely, and never without reason.
**Rank One, Grandmaster Osric, Level 700, Swordsman.**
**Rank Two, Lyra Duskbane, Level 650, Assassin.**
**Rank Three, General Thaddeus Korr, Level 600, Warrior.**
**Rank Four, Battlemage Mireille Sancroix, Level 550, Elementalist.**
**Rank Five, Lord Baldrik Reinhart, Level 480, Swordsman.**
**Rank Six, Selby Thorne, Level 430, Assassin.**
**Rank Seven, Darvin Cole, Level 390, Archer.**
**Rank Eight, Yusra Bellamy, Level 350, War Cleric.**
After Rank Eight, the rest become low rankers but two stand out as their skills are almost on par with Rank Eight and seven and they are
**Rank Nine, Otto Reyes, Level 320, Berserker.**
**Rank Ten, Mika Sable, Level 300, Mage.**
Because of the force and contributions from them, they are allowed to seat in the hall of rankers.
Ten seats around a stone table older than the kingdom’s current dynasty, and tonight, every one of them was filled.
“The Adventurer’s Guild flagged something unusual three weeks back,” Reinhart said, sliding a report across the table toward the center where everyone could reach it.
“A dungeon near the western border of Briaton province.
No rank designation.
According to the entry logs, it only ever admitted a single person before sealing itself entirely.”
Thorne’s eyebrows rose from where she sat in the sixth seat.
“A one man dungeon.
That shouldn’t exist.
Every dungeon on record admits however many souls are willing to walk through, until it either clears or breaks.”
“That’s precisely why it flagged,” Reinhart said.
“The guild’s own scholars can’t explain it.
Neither can mine, and my own household has ties close enough to the region that I’ve had a man asking quiet questions since the report came in.”
“And what has your man found,” Korr asked, arms folded.
“Rumor, mostly,” Reinhart admitted.
“A boy, sixteen, awakened at level one with a cap of two, the lowest recorded in living memory anywhere on this continent.
He entered that dungeon.
A hundred days passed inside it by the village’s reckoning, though the villagers themselves swear it looked like only a matter of hours from the outside.
He walked out alive, strong enough by every witness account to end two separate duels without drawing his blade, one against a swordsman well above his own recorded level.”
The chamber went quiet for a moment, the kind of quiet that settled over rooms full of people who had each, individually, survived enough impossible things to know better than to dismiss another one outright.
“Level one cap two,” Sable said slowly, from the tenth seat, the youngest voice at the table.
“And he came out of that dungeon strong enough to matter.
That’s something else entirely.”
“It could be a fluke,” Cole offered.
“An artifact he found.
Borrowed strength, temporary.”
“Or it’s exactly what it looks like,” Osric said, speaking for the first time since the report had been laid on the table, his voice carrying the particular weight of a man everyone else in that room instinctively deferred to.
“A boy who found something no one was ever meant to find, in a place none of us have any business understanding yet.”
“The tournament opens in six weeks,” Reinhart said.
“I’d rather not pull resources from it prematurely on a rumor, however strange.
Once it concludes, I propose we send a small group of the lower rankers to investigate the village directly, track the boy’s movements, and confirm what we’re actually dealing with before it becomes something the kingdom can’t afford to have caught off guard.”
A round of quiet nods circled the table.
Reyes, the berserker in the ninth seat, grunted his agreement without bothering to add words to it, and the matter settled, tabled rather than closed, the way most things this uncertain tended to settle in that chamber.
It was Bellamy, in the eighth seat, who finally broke the following silence with the question that had clearly been sitting behind her eyes since the meeting began.
“Osric,” she said.
“You’ve been quieter than usual tonight, even by your standards.
Something’s bothering you.”
Osric was quiet for a long moment, his fingers tracing an old, faded scar along one forearm that none of them had ever asked him about directly.
“Six months ago,” he said finally, “I crossed into Abarat’s border territory.
Unofficial business, nothing the crown sanctioned, a personal matter I won’t detail here.
I encountered an archdemon there.
Salvata.”
The name landed differently on different faces around the table.
Korr’s jaw tightened visibly.
Duskbane went very still.
“Salvata,” Duskbane repeated.
“The seventh ranked archdemon in Abarat’s own hierarchy.”
“The same,” Osric confirmed.
“Tell us,” Korr said quietly.
Osric’s gaze drifted somewhere past the table, somewhere none of them could follow, and when he spoke again, his voice had dropped into something quieter, more careful, the tone of a man recounting something he still hadn’t fully finished processing himself.
“She met me on open ground, no ambush, no dishonesty in it.
A duel, by her own request, and I accepted because refusing would have cost me more standing than the fight itself risked.” He paused.
“I opened with Heaven’s Severance, my strongest technique, everything I’ve built across seven decades of training compressed into a single strike.”
He described it plainly, without embellishment.
The blade meeting resistance it had never once met in seven decades of combat.
Salvata’s counter, a single almost lazy backhand that shattered his guard and sent him skidding across broken ground hard enough to crack three ribs on impact.
His own desperate follow up, a technique he’d never shown another living soul, met by a wall of condensed demonic flame that had taken the better part of a month to fully heal from afterward.
The fight stretching on far longer than it should have, Osric giving everything he carried and watching, with a mounting, sick certainty, that none of it was enough. The source of this chapter is g.com.
“She could have ended it at any point in the first two minutes,” he said.
“I understood that clearly enough by the end.
She simply chose not to.”
The table sat in absolute silence.
“What level was she,” Sable finally asked, quiet, almost afraid of the answer.
“I don’t know precisely,” Osric admitted.
“High enough that the number itself becomes meaningless past a certain point.
What I do know is my own level, going into that fight.” He paused, and the pause stretched long enough that several people around the table leaned forward without quite meaning to.
“Two thousand.”
The silence that followed was different from the one before it, heavier, the kind that pressed against the chest rather than simply filling a room.
“Two thousand,” Reinhart repeated, his voice flat with disbelief.
“You’ve been Rank One for a decade, Osric.
The court’s own record shows you at seven hundred.”
“The court’s own record shows what I’ve allowed it to show,” Osric said, without apology.
“For reasons that have kept this kingdom’s rivals guessing for longer than any of you realize.”
No one at the table argued the point.
Several of them, Sable especially, looked visibly shaken by the implication sitting underneath it, the understanding that the numbers this entire kingdom’s hierarchy had been built around were, at best, only part of the true picture.
“You survived a fight against an archdemon at two thousand,” Bellamy said slowly, “and lost.”
“I survived,” Osric said.
“That much, I’ll allow myself to call a victory of a kind.
If every soul at this table combined our full strength into a single force and threw it at Salvata together, I do not believe we would fare any better than I did alone.
And she is only the seventh strongest of her own kind.”
The weight of that particular fact settled over the chamber slowly, each of them working through its implications in their own private silence.
If a mid ranked archdemon could bring the continent’s strongest human fighter, secretly leveled at two thousand, to the brink of death and choose mercy rather than finish the job, the six archdemons standing above Salvata in Abarat’s own hierarchy represented a scale of threat none of them had properly accounted for.
“How did you survive,” Korr finally asked.
“If she chose not to end it, why.”
Osric’s expression shifted, something complicated crossing it that none of them had ever seen on his face before, not fear exactly, but something adjacent to it, respect tangled with old, unresolved dread.
“Because someone else arrived before she could decide otherwise,” he said.
“Someone she recognized.
Someone whose name alone made her withdraw without another word exchanged between them.”
“Who,” Sable asked, barely above a whisper.
Osric was quiet for a long moment, weighing, it seemed, exactly how much of this particular truth this room was prepared to carry.
Then he said the name.
Every eye at the table went wide at once, and for a long, stretched moment, no one in that chamber said anything at all.