The final drew every noble house in the capital to the edges of their seats, Carlson against the tournament’s other standout, a young mage from the eastern provinces whose elemental range had carried her through five straight matches without a single serious wound.
Sister Odile laid her hand against each of them one final time before the match began, Extra Life settling over both competitors in its familiar golden pulse, and the arena fell into an expectant hush as the referee raised a hand and let it fall.
The fight ran long, properly long, the kind the crowd would still be discussing weeks after the tournament closed.
She kept him at range for the opening minutes, chains of layered fire and wind forcing him into constant, careful movement, Phantom Step the only thing keeping him ahead of an assault built specifically to punish anyone who closed distance carelessly.
He broke through eventually, catching a narrow gap between two spell chains and closing it with everything Phantom Step could offer, and the mage, desperate, unleashed a technique she’d clearly been saving, a wide, sweeping firestorm meant to catch him regardless of his approach angle.
Carlson met it with Disappear.
The firestorm itself vanished mid cast, wrenched away and relocated the instant it fully formed, leaving the mage standing exposed and momentarily stunned by the sudden absence of her own spell.
Carlson closed the last of the distance and ended the match with Heaven’s Edge, the thrust stopping a careful inch short of her throat rather than through it, burning through the last of her Extra Life with the same measured restraint he’d shown through every match before it.
The crowd erupted the moment the judges called the match in his favor.
**Heaven’s Edge used in live combat.
Proficiency 5 → 6.**
**Disappear used in live combat.
Proficiency 3 → 4.**
Lord Baldrik Reinhart descended from the noble box to stand beside his son as the crowd’s cheering rolled on, pride and something more complicated tangled together on his face, the particular weight of a father watching his sixteen year old son become, in the span of a single tournament, the kingdom’s most talked about name outside its own sealed circle of ten. Follow the newest chapters on NovelPing.
Prime Minister Jarad summoned Carlson to the administrative tower the following morning, before the tournament’s closing festivities had even fully wound down, Councilor Vessa seated beside him with the same thick stack of reports she seemed permanently attached to.
“You fought well,” Jarad said, without much preamble.
“Better than well.
The court hasn’t stopped talking about that final since it ended.”
“Thank you,” Carlson said, careful, uncertain why a prime minister’s private summons would follow a tournament victory rather than simply a formal ceremony like every year before it.
“We have a problem,” Jarad said, sliding a familiar, worn report across the desk toward him.
“Three Behemoths, level one hundred each, converging on a village near the western border.
Every ranker capable of properly handling that kind of threat remains occupied holding the eastern front of this civil war together, and the barrier protecting that village won’t hold indefinitely against three named monsters working in concert.”
Carlson scanned the report, understanding settling over him slowly.
“You want me to go,” he said.
“I want you to use exactly what you demonstrated in that arena,” Jarad said.
“Identify the strongest active threat in the region beyond that village’s borders, and use Disappear to send the weakest of the three Behemoths directly to it.
Let the other two think twice about whatever coordination they’ve worked out between them.
It buys the crown time until Reinhart or Korr can finally be spared from the front.”
“Cannot be spared either,” Jarad said, not unkindly.
“You proved yesterday that you don’t need him standing beside you to handle serious danger.
I wouldn’t ask this of you otherwise.”
Carlson was quiet for a moment, the weight of the request settling somewhere between pride and genuine fear, sixteen years old and being handed a task that would, a year ago, have belonged entirely to someone four times his level.
“When do I leave,” he asked.
“Tomorrow,” Vessa said.
“We’ll have an escort ready, and a full briefing on the region before you go.
This isn’t a suicide mission, Carlson.
It’s a delay tactic, buying the crown time it desperately needs.
Do exactly what your skill was built to do, and you’ll be home again within the week.”
Carlson nodded, steadier than he felt, and left the tower already turning the shape of the coming fight over in his mind, three Behemoths and a barrier he’d never personally tested and a village he’d never heard the name of until an hour ago.
He had no way of knowing, walking back toward his father’s estate to break the news, that the village in question sat close enough to a mountain once haunted by an Ashfang that a boy named Hoju had grown up beneath, or that the strange, unofficial rumors Roy kept quietly circulating through the garrison about a level two anomaly traced back to that exact same stretch of border he was about to be sent toward.
Some threads on this continent, however far apart they seemed to start, had a way of eventually finding each other regardless of how carefully anyone tried to keep them separate.