Status Window - Arlan Thorne
Cultivation:3rd Order, Captain-rank (Rank 2)
Mana:900 / 1500 (Post-Puzzle Expenditure)
Umbral Mana:350 / 500
Instability:16%
Condition: Low-Grade Spiritual Fatigue. Subject to Active Dominion Pressure.
The Team Combat stage was a brutal, straightforward elimination bracket. Four teams entered the massive central arena, a vast, flat expanse of enchanted granite under the blinding white lights of the Crucible. The first match: Celestial Ascent versus Sky-Cleave Spire.
Jaxon Grimm, the mountain. Liana Swiftstride, the wind. And three other powerful 3rd Order specialists.
Lyra laid out the plan in their final huddle, her voice cutting through Kieran's oppressive silence. "Kieran locks down Jaxon. Use his own mass against him. Dorian and Mira control the terrain, limit Liana's mobility. I will handle their long-range artillery. Thorne," she looked at him, her stellar eyes serious, "you are on anti-support. Eliminate their three specialists. Use any means necessary. Do not engage Jaxon or Liana directly."
It was a good plan. It gave him a clear, independent objective away from Kieran.
Kieran gave a curt, cold nod of agreement. His gaze promised a reckoning later.
The gong sounded.
The battle erupted with the subtlety of a volcano.
Jaxon Grimm stomped the ground. Mountain Intent flared. The arena floor rippled, not breaking, but becoming uneven, treacherous, and heavy. Gravity increased by fifty percent in a zone around him. Liana became a greenish blur, zipping along the suddenly chaotic terrain.
Kieran raised both hands. Dominion Intent met Mountain Intent. It was a clash of absolutes. Kieran didn't try to negate the gravity. He redirected it. He took the increased downward force and bent it into a sideways shear, creating howling gusts of stone-laden wind that battered Jaxon's position and forced Liana to dodge erratically.
Dorian's ironwood vines erupted, not to attack, but to create a twisting, metallic jungle that further constrained movement. Mira layered it with slick, frictionless ice.
Lyra hovered, gathering starlight, preparing to blast the enemy back-line.
Arlan moved. He triggered Shadow-Slip, becoming a grey smear against the chaotic background. The three Sky-Cleave specialists were a tight unit: a lightning caller, an earth-shaker, and a illusionist. They were setting up a combined area-denial spell.
He didn't give them the chance. His first strike wasn't with space. It was with perception.
He used a trickle of Umbral mana to deepen the natural shadows cast by Dorian's towering vines right at the specialists' feet. Then, he used a whisper of Amethyst Voidfire not on them, but on the light around those shadows, making the contrast extreme, blinding for a split second.
In that moment of visual disruption, he Folded space.
He appeared behind the lightning caller. Not with a slash. With a touch. He pressed a palm against the man's back and released a focused pulse of Voidfire.
The lightning caller screamed as his carefully built-up charge destabilized and arced wildly across his own body, shocking him into paralysis. One down.
The earth-shaker turned, enraged, slamming his fists down. Spikes of granite shot toward Arlan.
Arlan didn't dodge. He Anchored the space in front of him and Folded it directly above the earth-shaker's head. The granite spikes that should have impaled him instead shot out of a portal in the air and rained down on their creator. The earth-shaker raised a hasty wall, blocking his own attack but losing his focus.
The illusionist tried to cloud his mind with phantasms. Arlan simply closed his physical eyes and relied on Umbral Sight. Illusions were tricks of light and mana. Umbral Sight saw heat, life force, and true spatial relationships. He saw the cowering illusionist behind a fake wall of flame.
A quick, clean Dimensional Slash cut through both illusion and the specialist's personal ward. A golden flash. Two down.
The earth-shaker, now alone, roared and encased himself in a dome of rock.
Arlan didn't waste time breaking it. He planted an Anchor on the dome, and another on the arena floor ten meters away, directly under where Liana Swiftstride was dueling Mira. He Folded the space connecting them.
The entire, multi-ton rock dome vanished from in front of Arlan and reappeared ten meters in the air, dropping directly onto Liana's position.
She blurred away at the last nanosecond, but the disruption broke her assault on Mira.
In less than a minute, Arlan had neutralized the support line and disrupted one of their two powerhouses. It was a flawless execution of his role.
He felt Kieran's gaze like a physical weight. There was no approval there. Only colder, sharper assessment.
With their support gone, the battle turned. Lyra's gathered starlight fell like judgment, forcing Jaxon to devote all his Mountain Intent to defense. Kieran, seizing the opening, performed a terrifying display of control. He didn't attack Jaxon. He manipulated the kinetic energy of Lyra's stellar impact, focusing it from an area blast into a single, spear-like point of force that punched through Jaxon's earthen defense and overloaded his ward.
Golden flash. Jaxon was out.
Liana, overwhelmed, yielded moments later.
Victory. Clean, efficient, and showcasing perfect teamwork to the observers.
But in the victor's circle, Kieran's hand clamped on Arlan's shoulder. The grip was reinforced with Dominion Intent, a command to be still. "Your methods are… messier than I prefer. But effective. Remember your place."
The next match was the semi-finals: Celestial Ascent versus Oblivion's Edge's second team, led by Anya, the Silent Tide.
This was a different kind of fight. Anya didn't control the battlefield. She became it. Her Crushing Intent manifested as a zone of immense, silent pressure that slowed movements, thickened the air to syrup, and steadily squeezed the life out of opponents. Her team supported her, reinforcing the pressure and picking off those she slowed.
Kieran's plan was direct. "I will counter her pressure with my own dominion. You will all stay within my sphere of control. We will advance as a unit and crush them."
It was a battle of titans—Force versus Pressure, Dominion versus Crushing Weight.
When the match began, Anya's intent washed over them. Arlan felt it immediately. It wasn't an attack; it was a condition. The air became heavy. Lifting his arm felt like moving through setting concrete. His mana flow slowed. Even thinking felt laborious.
Kieran's aura expanded, a sphere of absolute rules pushing back against the pressure. Inside his sphere, movement was possible, but it was like wading through water. The two intents clashed in a silent, grinding war of attrition.
They advanced slowly. Spells from Anya's team were slowed and distorted by the conflicting intent-fields, making them easier to block.
Arlan fought within Kieran's rules. He used spatial folds not for movement, but to create micro-teleports for projectiles, delivering Mira's ice spears behind the enemy's shields. He used Voidfire to weaken the structural integrity of barriers.
It was grueling, plodding warfare. They were winning, but slowly.
Then, Arlan saw it. A pattern in the flow of Anya's pressure. It wasn't constant. It pulsed in rhythm with her heartbeat, a slight ebb every few seconds. A tiny flaw in her otherwise perfect control.
A flaw Kieran, locked in his head-on contest, didn't seem to notice or care about.
Break the cage.
The cage of this slow, grinding battle. The cage of Kieran's direct confrontation strategy.
During the next ebb, Arlan did something small. He used a thread of Umbral mana, not to attack, but to measure. He stretched a filament of darkness through the conflicting intent-fields, sensing the precise moment and location where Anya's pressure was weakest.
He didn't tell Kieran. He acted.
He planted a Spatial Anchor at that weak point, right at the edge of Kieran's dominion sphere. He gathered a small amount of mana—not for a slash, but for a Spatial Burst, an unstable, jagged explosion of spatial energy.
He fired it through the anchor, not at Anya, but at the ground directly beneath the feet of her key support—a mage who was amplifying her Crushing Intent.
The burst was wild, uncontrolled. It didn't do much damage. But it destabilized the local reality for a split second. The intricate, pulsing rhythm of Anya's pressure field stuttered.
For that one second, Kieran' Dominion Intent, meeting suddenly less resistance, surged forward like a released spring. The balance broke.
Anya gasped, her control shattered by the unexpected internal spike. Kieran's force, now unopposed, slammed into her team like an invisible tidal wave, sweeping them off their feet and overloading their wards in a chain reaction.
Golden flashes filled the arena. Victory, again.
But as the lights died down, Kieran turned to Arlan. There was no victory in his mercury eyes. Only a cold, pure fury.
"You," he said, his voice quiet and deadly. "You interfered with my control dynamic. You introduced an uncontrolled variable."
"I saw a weakness and exploited it. We won," Arlan stated.
"You disrupted a calibrated contest of wills with a… a spanner in the works!" Kieran took a step forward, his Dominion Intent focusing solely on Arlan, a crushing vise. "You cannot be controlled. You are chaos. And in the final, against my own academy's premier team, I cannot have chaos at my side."
Lyra stepped between them, her stellar aura flaring. "Enough, Kieran. His tactic worked. We are in the finals. Save your dominance games for the enemy."
Kieran's gaze didn't leave Arlan. "Oh, I will." He leaned closer, his voice a whisper only Arlan could hear. "The final match is a free-for-all melee after the team battle. All twenty remaining combatants in the arena at once. When that happens, patchwork, you are no longer my teammate. You are a flaw in my design. And I will correct you. Personally."
He turned and walked away, leaving Arlan standing in the center of the arena, the weight of the threat settling on him.
The finals were tomorrow. Team battle against Oblivion's Edge's A-team, followed immediately by the chaotic free-for-all.
He had made it to the biggest stage. And he had ensured his most dangerous opponent in the entire tournament was now his own teammate, who knew his fighting style and was waiting for the first chance to break him in front of the entire world.
The knife wasn't in the shadows. It was in the light, wearing the same uniform.