The hall for Stage Three was not white, but grey durasteel, echoing with the tense silence of a coliseum before the bloodsport. Of the thousands who began, fewer than four hundred remained. They were the elite, the cunning, the lucky. Their auras, visible to Arlan's dialed-down Umbral Sight, were knots of focused power and simmering aggression. The air itself tasted of ozone and anticipation.
Overseer Kaelen's hologram appeared once more, towering and grim. "Combat Prowess. The foundation upon which all else is built. Without the strength to enforce your will, your ingenuity is theory, your resilience a temporary state. The final stage is a series of sanctioned duels. You will be matched by the system based on your performance in prior stages and your manifested affinity."
A wave of tension passed through the candidates. Duels. One-on-one. No shadows to hide in, no puzzles to solve sideways.
"The rules remain: lethal force is prohibited. All other means of victory are acceptable. Submission, incapacitation, or expulsion from the ring constitutes a loss. You fight until one of these conditions is met." The Overseer's gaze swept over them. "Your first match will be against a opponent of comparable seeding. Succeed, and you advance. Continue until you have five victories, or three losses. Your final ranking will be determined by your win-loss record and the quality of your opponents."
A massive bracket materialized in holographic light above the arena floor, names slotting into place with machined speed. Arlan found his: ARLAN THORNE vs. BRENNUS KORVAC.
He knew the name. A scion of the Korvac family, known for their earth and stone manipulation. A brute-force fighter. Seeded in the upper middle of the pack. The system, judging Arlan's "spatial affinity" as dormant and his victories as based on cunning, had likely pegged him as a fragile trickster. It was pairing him with a tank to smash the glass cannon.
A cruel, but logical, match-up.
"First round, commence!"
Arlan's designated ring was a circle thirty meters across, demarcated by a line of white light on the floor. Waiting for him was Brennus—a mountain of a teenager, already showing the thickened skin and dense musculature of his earth-affinity. He stood with arms crossed, a confident smirk on his face. His aura was a dull, sturdy brown, solid as rock—a strong 2nd Order, Rank 8.
"Thorne," Brennus grunted as Arlan stepped into the ring. "Heard about you. The legacy who can't legacy. Don't worry, I'll make it quick. Gotta save my energy for real fighters."
Arlan said nothing. He took his stance, body relaxed, mind entering a state of cold clarity. The noise of the other duels starting around them—cracks of ice, whooshes of flame, shouts of effort—faded to a distant murmur.
A proctor, standing outside the ring, raised a hand. "Begin!"
Brennus didn't charge. He stamped his foot. The durasteel floor rippled like water, a wave of kinetic force shooting toward Arlan. It was a broad, control technique, meant to knock him off balance.
Arlan didn't jump. He used Shadow-Slip, not to evade sideways, but to slide backwards along the floor, his feet barely touching as the wave passed harmlessly underneath. He was learning to use the skill not just for stealth, but for micro-movements in combat.
Brennus frowned, then clenched his fists. The floor around Arlan's feet suddenly turned to grasping, sticky mud, seeking to trap him. A basic earth-shaping trick.
Arlan reacted instantly. He formed a Dark Tendril and stabbed it into the floor next to the mud, using it as a pole to vault himself up and out of the grasping circle, landing lightly five meters away.
"Stop dancing!" Brennus roared, finally charging. His body seemed to gain mass, his skin taking on a grey, stony texture. He was a battering ram.
Arlan let him come. At the last second, he sidestepped, a blur of grey. As Brennus passed, Arlan struck, not with a fist, but with a knife-hand strike aimed at the kidney, infused with a spike of Umbral energy—the same numbing cold he'd used on the beast-kin.
Thud.
It was like hitting a cliff face. The umbral shock dissipated against Brennus's stone-hardened flesh. The bigger boy grunted, more in annoyance than pain, and backhanded Arlan across the chest.
The impact was colossal. Arlan flew backwards, skidding on the floor, his ribs screaming in protest. He tasted blood. Brennus wasn't just strong; his hardened body was a weapon.
"Physical attacks are insufficient. His affinity provides innate damage reduction. You require armor-piercing force or debilitating status," the shadow-voice analyzed coolly.
Armor-piercing. Arlan had one source of that. The one he feared.
Brennus advanced, cracking his stone-knuckled fists. "See? Tricks don't work on real power."
Arlan pushed himself up, wiping blood from his lip. The frustration, the helplessness, the memory of the pylon—it all coalesced into a single, white-hot point of need. He couldn't win with shadows alone. He needed the void.
He stopped thinking. He stopped planning. He reached inward, past the cool pool of Umbral energy, into the vast, frozen silence that was his spatial affinity. He didn't try to gently coax it. He raged at it. He funneled all his cold fury, his desperate need to hurt, to break, into that silent expanse.
WAKE UP.
Something cracked.
Not in the room. Inside him. A fissure in the glacier.
Brennus lunged for a finishing grab. Arlan didn't dodge. He thrust his open palm forward, not at Brennus, but at the space directly in front of Brennus's chest.
He didn't visualize a spell. He visualized erasure.
A soundless, black-and-silver tear in reality, the size of a coin, appeared in the air. It existed for a nanosecond, a tiny, hungry maw of non-space.
Brennus's stone-covered chest slammed into it.
There was no impact. A perfect, coin-sized disc of his stone carapace, and a tiny bit of the flesh beneath, simply vanished. No blood, no scream—just a sudden, impossibly clean hole going right through him.
Brennus stopped dead, his charge halted. He looked down, confused. He saw daylight through his own sternum. A perfect circle. Then the pain and the biological shock hit. He made a wet, gurgling sound, his stone skin reverting to flesh as his concentration shattered. He collapsed to his knees, clutching the void in his chest, his eyes wide with incomprehensible horror.
The proctor was there in an instant, hands glowing with green healing energy, sealing the wound. "Match! Victor: Arlan Thorne! Medical team!"
The white ring deactivated. Arlan stood, his hand still outstretched, trembling. He felt… drained. Hollowed out in a new way. His Universal Mana Pool, already low, was at 5/100. A vicious headache, a thousand times worse than before, split his skull. But beneath the pain, there was a terrifying, exhilarating awareness. The glacier had not just cracked; a trickle of its frozen water had been released.
He looked at his hand. The air around it still shimmered with a faint, heat-haze distortion.
Around his ring, silence had fallen. Several nearby duels had stopped, the fighters staring. He saw Lyra Solara, having effortlessly frozen her own opponent in a block of cosmic ice, watching him with intense, wary fascination. He saw proctors exchanging sharp, concerned looks. And he saw, from the observation gallery above, the void-like aura of the high-level Silent Accord operative, focused on him like a targeting laser.
He had done it. He had manifested his spatial power. Not with control, not with finesse, but with pure, destructive intent. He had created a wound in reality to win a schoolyard fight.
The cost was apparent. Brennus was being carried out on a stretcher, alive due to immediate healing, but severely injured. The hole was clean; it would heal without major organ damage. But the psychological scar… Arlan pushed the thought away. Sentiment was a luxury.
His personal system updated, its text glowing with a new, urgent intensity.
```
**Stage 3 - Match 1: Victory.**
**WARNING: Spatial Affinity forcibly destabilized. Manifestation was crude, highly dangerous, and detectable.**
**Universal System Alert: [Spatial Anomaly - Minor] logged.**
**Shadow Protocol Adjustment: Spatial Stabilization Method - Stage 1 now CRITICAL.**
**New Immediate Objective: Survive next four matches WITHOUT repeating spatial manifestation. Use controlled Umbral abilities only.**
```
Controlled. He had just torn a hole in a boy's chest. Control felt like a distant memory.
His next opponent was called. A wiry girl with a wind affinity, her eyes wide with fear after witnessing what he'd done. She was fast, but hesitant. Arlan won the match in forty seconds using Shadow-Slip to get inside her guard and a series of precise, nerve-striking blows augmented by subtle Umbral shocks to disrupt her wind channels. He didn't enjoy it. It was a chore. A necessary step.
The third match was against a fire-aspected brawler. Arlan used the environment—kicking up dust to create shadows, using Dark Tendrils to trip and entangle, staying just outside the boy's reach until he overcommitted and Arlan knocked him unconscious with a kick to the temple. It was efficient. Brutal. The crowd, what little there was paying attention to his ring now, watched in uneasy silence.
His fourth match was harder. A tactical mind, a boy with a light-manipulation affinity who created blinding flashes and hard-light constructs. He was a direct counter to Arlan's shadow-based tricks. For two minutes, Arlan was on the defensive, blinded, cut by razors of solidified light. He was losing.
The coldness in him saw the solution. The boy's constructs were pure light. They cast no shadows of their own. But Arlan's body, when hit by the light, cast a shadow behind him. A deep, sharp shadow.
As the boy formed another hard-light javelin, Arlan didn't try to dodge the throw. He turned his back to it at the last second.
The javelin of light shot toward his back… and passed through the long, dark shadow he cast on the floor. As the pure light interacted with the concentrated Umbral energy of his own enhanced shadow, it did not pierce. It diffracted. The javelin shattered into a harmless prismatic spray.
The boy stared, stunned. Arlan used his moment of confusion. A Dark Tendril wrapped around his ankle from the shadow at Arlan's feet, yanking him off balance. A follow-up strike to the solar plexus ended the match.
Four wins. One more to secure a top ranking.
He was battered, bruised, his mana reserves critically low. His head throbbed with the backlash of his spatial outburst. But he was still standing. The cold engine inside him churned on, fueled by pain and purpose.
His fifth and final opponent's name flashed on the bracket.
ARLAN THORNE vs. LYRA SOLARA.
A murmur ran through the remaining candidates. The cunning, brutal upstart versus the celestial princess. The shadow against the star.
Arlan looked across the hall. Lyra met his gaze. There was no fear in her stellar eyes. Only a cool, analytical interest, and the unwavering confidence of absolute power.
She stepped into the ring, her silvery aura blooming around her like a miniature galaxy. The very air grew colder, sharper, filled with the scent of ozone and cosmic dust.
The proctor raised his hand.
This would not be a fight won by tricks, or nerve strikes, or shadow plays. This was the crucible. To win, to truly dominate as his system demanded, he would have to unleash the thing he was trying to hide. He would have to dance on the edge of the void once more, with an audience of wolves watching.
He took his stance. The cold in his chest spread, icing over the fear, the pain, the doubt.
Let the star come. He would show her the dark between.
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