"Man, that door is bullshit," a voice grumbled from in front of the crowd of cadets who were circling the entrance of the Sovereign Blades' trial door. Cutting his way through the crowd, Deacon caught sight of the owner of the voice and raised his brows in response. What type of drugs did you knock up?
The cadet he was looking at was someone who looked like he was carved out of a boulder and into something that supposed to look like a human, but was somehow already had a beard that reached to his abdomen, a face that was more similar to a grater than a normal human head, and massive shoulders, veins thick as rope, arms wider than most people's torsos.
Who the hell is he? Deacon asked himself as he quickly ran through his memory to try and figure out who this person was, and could not recall ever attending any of his classes with this person in the academy.
"Fuck the Sovereigns," the cadet grumbled, sweating through his gambeson as he stalked away from the ornate stone double doors along with his Party, each of them wearing the deflated expressions of people who had just been laughed at. "This is some bullshit – door can't even open wider than a crack, even having equipped every Strength booster under the sun."
"Oh look, another one," someone murmured nearby as Deacon fully cut through the crowd and was walking to the doors, just loud enough to be heard but quiet enough to pretend innocence — followed by a low, rolling ripple of laughter from a cluster of cadets lounging against the wall, clearly here just to spectate the failures while waiting for their turn to attempt the trials in other Knight Orders. "Give us a good show!"
Deacon tuned out the voices and jeers sent his way with a middle finger being raised over his shoulder.
Reaching up in front of the closed double doors, Deacon took a moment to admire the very door he'd seen plastered on his very own dorm room ceiling wall before resting both hands flat upon the cold stone. They were carved with the same seven weapons in their crest — sword, spear, wand, axe, dagger, bow, bo staff — each etched with painstaking precision, shadowed so vividly that it looked as if he reached for them, he could pull them free.
The moment his palms lay flat and briefly pushed against it, he was immediately met with resistance, not unlike the doors of the Inner Sanctum. However, unlike the Inner Sanctum, even with his newfound strength, he would need to utilize all of it to push open the doors.
"Of course," Deacon muttered under his breath before flexing his jaw – unnoticing of the small needles that pricked through his gloves and into his palms. The Sovereign Blades only want the best of the best in their ranks. It would've been weird if it opened like a normal door.
He drew in a slow breath through his nose, ground the hips, anchor the stance, align the spine, he thought just as his lungs were filled with air, he pushed.
Still, even as he pushed, the doors refused to budge open.
He leaned in harder, muscles coiling beneath his armor as his boots scraped for purchase against the polished marble. His shoulders rolled forward, spine locking, every fiber of strength he possessed surging through his arms.
"Come on," Deacon grumbled as his arms strained against the doors.
For a moment, the doors resisted like the stubborn weight of a mountain, completely unwilling to acknowledge him – until the stone beneath his palms trembled and began to push inwards, just enough for a thin band of warm orange lamplight to spill through the crack and brush across his chest.
A murmur rippled behind him, but Deacon didn't spare a single glance. He simply pressed on, pushing with growing, focused force as the stone groaned in protest.
Inch by inch, the doors yielded, and while his arms trembled once under the weight, he didn't falter. He continued forward with the unbothered steadiness of someone who had already decided that failure was not a possibility worth entertaining.
He'd been training all his life with weapons, striving to be the best of the best, and despite his failure in the tournament in the academy, this was his chance to prove to himself that he was just that.
The final separation of the doors resonated through the hall with a deep, echoing groan, the sound more like something vast and ancient waking than mere stone shifting. Deacon stepped across the threshold without hesitation.
The room inside was devoid of ornamentation, but not in the careless way of an unfinished chamber. Plain stone walls formed a perfect rectangle, and rows of oil lamps flickered along the edges, their flames swaying in the faint draft and casting layered shadows that danced across the floor. No banners of glory, no murals of previous members or scenes, just a wide, open, unassuming space that looked like an indoor training ground, which somehow held far more weight than any grand hall could.
As soon as both of his boots settled on the stone floor, the doors behind him shut on their own, closing with a slow, dense thud that sank into the chamber and made the faint flames of the oil lamps flicker for a moment.
Deacon didn't bother looking back, because the thundering sound of the door closing told him what he needed to know — there was no leaving the moment he stepped inside, and that was expected anyway.
The room itself was larger than what he initially perceived when peering from the doorway; simple stone walls formed clean lines all the way across the rectangular chamber. The lamps along the perimeter gave off only enough light to make everything visible without actually revealing everything clearly, causing long, layered shadows that stretched across the floor and pressed up the opposite wall, creating the distinct feeling that you were being watched.
He took his time looking over the weapon racks lining every wall of the trial room. Another aspect he noticed was that the weapons hung within the weapon racks were far more than just the seven weapons that made up the crest of the Sovereign Blades. He could see tens of swords, ranging from estocs to talwars to zweihanders, daggers ranging from katars to baselards to kris, and the very same was to be said for the many other types of weapons that lined the walls and weapon racks of the trial room.
Am I in heaven? Deacon muttered to himself as he took in the sight of the many weapons that, even from a glance, he could tell were made by smiths with nigh incredible skill.
Forcing himself to pull his eyes away from the weapons, Deacon found that he was alone in the trial room.
Taking two steps further inward, Deacon stopped himself just before taking another step as his newly gained bracelet, the Talisman of the Inner Mind, which was around his right wrist, began to vibrate and pull his attention towards a certain direction.
His head turned slightly, following the faint pulse in his heightened senses, and that was when he noticed it — a section of the left wall where the stone shimmered faintly with a blue undertone that hadn't been there before. It wasn't glowing outright… it was just catching the light incorrectly, like something partially concealed behind a thin veil.
A hidden wall? Deacon mused to himself before he began to walk towards the wall, and as he neared the wall, he began to feel an extremely faint echo of mana. Was this the next door I need to open? That the weapons around were to hide the true purpose of this room?
I guess that would make sense considering that Sovereign Blades are to be skilled in both martial and magic fields, he reasoned to himself as he now stood in front of the glowing wall.
Lightly raising his right hand, Deacon tentatively reached for the glowing wall, just to see if the wall was indeed solid or if it was just a hologram.
And that was when something entered his field of vision from the edges of his right eye's peripheral vision – a porcelain-white mask.
The word, Identify, barely formed in his mind before the System understood his intent and produced the output of his skill:
[?]
Deacon reacted by instinct alone; his hand closed into a fist as his torso turned, his entire body moving to deliver a clean, short-range strike driven from the hip and anchored through his heel, the kind of strike that didn't need distance to generate power and would have collapsed the jaw of the person who snuck up on him and set up for him his other fist to follow up.
Except his fist didn't meet anything except a hand that had intercepted just before it would connect with the porcelain mask.
Deacon's gaze drew back, tracing the arm to the wearer of the mask — a tall man, taller than him by two and a half feet, wearing simple burnt red training clothes that clung to a frame built from nothing but hardened muscle, the kind of musculature that came from continuous combat, not vanity lifting or drug injecting like the cadet outside.
Even with the brief glance Deacon had of the man, and even with the lack of Identify, he knew that this man was dangerous – far more dangerous than anything he'd ever faced before.
Deacon pushed off the ground with a backward step to create space, but the moment his boots left the floor, the man was already gone — not vanished, but moved, fast enough that there was no transition to track visually.
One moment, Deacon was two meters away from him, the next the masked man was back within Deacon's guard, his arm already drawn back in a short, compact strike that didn't even allow room for a counter.
The strike hit dead-center in Deacon's gut, the blow digging deep and ripping the air out of his lungs in a single, brutal exhale. Spittle flew from his mouth as his body snapped backward, launched as if he'd been hit by a train.
He hit the wall hard enough to split the mortar and send dust cascading down the cracks that formed around his form. The sound reverberated cleanly — a deep, resonant thud that was loud enough that the training hall outside the sealed doors went abruptly silent.
Deacon's lungs contracted once in a sharp, involuntary spasm before he forced air back in and exhaled it slowly, stabilizing his breathing while one hand pressed briefly against the imprint forming beneath his ribs. His abdomen throbbed, but his stance stayed solid as he pushed off the cracked stone and stepped forward again. Heavy exhales left him, boots sliding over loose dust, but his body moved on its own — keeping his upper body low and balanced, ready to shift in any direction.
Something that was proven to be invaluable as he barely had time to fall out of the crater he'd made before another strike slammed into the wall where he had just been standing. The blow shook the stone brick from its foundation, cracks spiderwebbing outwards in violent arcs that stretched across nearly the entire wall and ran through the floor.
If that hit landed squarely on him, Deacon doubted it'd simply knock the wind out of him again; it would have torn through his torso.
He hit the ground in a crouch, hands splayed just long enough to stabilize, before springing forward with a sharp push that sent him straight into the masked man's space. His right fist twisted into a corkscrew, his hips snapping in line behind the punch as it dug hard into the man's side, the angle chosen deliberately to target the liver — a strike that should've disrupted the masked man's focus, and rhythm all at once.
The masked man didn't even flinch, not even reacting in the slightest to the full force of Deacon's supposedly debilitating punch. He simply absorbed the blow like it was a breeze brushing against him.
His right arm shot forward, fist already chambered and arcing toward Deacon's head. Deacon's left palm blurred up to meet it, catching the strike on the heel of his hand. Even so, the force behind the blow blasted him backward, his boots leaving the ground for half a heartbeat as he let the momentum carry him to reduce the impact.
But before he could be thrown more than five meters, his body snapped to a halt mid-air. Thin, line-like shimmers, glinting from the warm orange glow of the oil lamps hung and the trial walls, stretched between his curled form and the masked man's outstretched fist.
Feeling the tension reach its maximum around his fingers, a mana platform flickered beneath Deacon's feet for the smallest sliver of a second. It was barely a foothold, the magical equivalent of a ladder rung, but it held him just long enough to push off of, launching himself forward as his opposite hand was pulled back.
He closed the distance in an instant, his fist aimed straight at the mask, uncaring that if his punch connected, it would have broken his knuckles, because momentum and impact mattered more than self-preservation – he could just drink a potion afterwards. Because holding back against someone who clearly outscaled you in every way was the epitome of stupidity.
A second before Deacon's fist would collide with the porcelain mask, the masked man's head turned slightly, unperceivable to Deacon, and caught notice of the objects connecting his fist to Deacon's pulled back one.
Thin steel wires, wrapped tight around the man's dominant wrist, anchored back to Deacon's ring and middle fingers on his left hand. They weren't normal steel either — they were flexible woven-thread steel, the kind for restraining monsters that outweighed armored wagons, along with being used for trap setting.
Visible to his own eyes behind the mask, he could see the tension of the wires harshly biting down on Deacon's gloved fingers to the point that he could see his fingers were already turning purple at the joints.
Turning his gaze back to Deacon's face, the masked man's left hand came up and sliced through the steel threads with the same ease someone would use to swipe cream off a cake, before he shifted his body just enough that the incoming punch could be caught between his palm and forearm.
The recoil from the interception pushed the masked man backwards, but he landed in a low, stable crouch, sliding a few inches across the polished stone floor.
A faint smirk grew on Deacon's face as he saw the man get pushed backwards from his punch while the severed wire loosened from his fingers and fell slack, slipping from his gloves and pooling at his feet.
Reaching for the first pouch on his left leg, Deacon found it gone. A quick glance toward the crater he'd slammed into showed it lying at the base, torn open, its contents scattered in a metallic spill.
Glancing back at the masked man who was now standing fully upright, he saw that the masked man was watching him in return, body relaxed in a way that ticked Deacon off as he'd tanked through his punch without looking at all affected by it.
Noticing Deacon's gaze return to him, the masked man raised his left hand, palm up, fingers curling in a clear bring it gesture while his right hand now held a longsword, its point leveled at Deacon.