In the subterranean quiet of the stadium's locker room, the air felt thick, like it was being compressed by an invisible hydraulic press. Harish sat on a dented metal bench, the smell of old gym socks and industrial floor cleaner grounding him. He wasn't meditating in the traditional sense; he was performing a mental audit. His eyes were closed, but his mind was a sprawling command center, a localized Chronos-Nexus that made the stadium's multi-billion dollar GSC servers look like abacuses.
"Great Sage," Harish whispered, the sound barely a ripple in the humid locker room.
[TING!]
The interface of the Great Sage flickered into his retinas, a cascade of emerald and gold data-streams.
Great Sage: Master. The previous 'Gold Knight' chassis was a primitive shell—a 3D-printed insult to your causality. I have finished mapping the 'Zero-Logic' Blueprint. We are no longer using the Tower's junkyard scrap. We are using the fundamental threads of the Sovereign's origin.
"Begin the manifestation," Harish commanded. "And strip the weight. If I feel even a milligram of unnecessary drag, I'll consider it a failure. I want this armor to be less like a suit and more like an executive decision made manifest."
The Chronos-Nexus Watch on his wrist didn't just glow; it seemed to consume the light around it. Raw logic strands—glimmering, translucent fibers that looked like frozen lightning—spilled from the device. They didn't wrap around his skin; they sank into it. The armor was weaving itself into his nervous system, creating a secondary layer of reality that Harish wore like a second thought.
The result was a matte-black and dull-gold lattice, so thin it was invisible to the naked eye until the moment of impact. It felt like nothing, yet it felt like being the center of the universe.
Up in the VIP balcony, the atmosphere was a different kind of heavy. Vikas Agnihotri was leaning over the mahogany railing, his knuckles white. Beside him, Kaelen stood as still as a marble statue, her eyes fixed on the sixty-four split-screens displaying the simultaneous "Filtering" matches.
"Look at them," Vikas sneered, gesturing toward Pit 4. "Our 'Otherworld' contractors are clearing the floor. Sir Alaric alone cost us a small fortune in mana-crystals. He's a Paladin of the 7th Sphere. His mace doesn't just crush bone; it deletes the concept of 'defense' from the target's mind."
Kaelen didn't respond. Her gaze was fixed on the screen for Pit 4. She saw Takeo—the stuttering, ramen-obsessed assistant from Harish's shop—standing in the center of the arena. He looked pathetic. He was wearing a baggy, grey hoodie that looked like it had been through a lawnmower, and he was clutching a Bokken—a katana-shaped wooden stick—as if it were a lifebuoy in a hurricane.
"Why is he there?" Kaelen whispered to herself, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs. "Takeo doesn't even know how to hold a cup of tea without spilling it. If he dies, Harish will... Harish will never forgive himself."
"He's a sacrifice," Vikas chuckled, oblivious to Kaelen's internal storm. "The GSC needed fodder to fill the brackets. He's a nobody. Watch as Alaric turns him into a fine red mist."
Down in the stands, the "commoner" section was a cacophony of bets and baseless rumors. Silas, the veteran with the brass prosthetic, was shouting over the roar of the crowd to Jaxon, the data broker.
"Ten gold on the Paladin!" Silas roared, his mechanical arm hissing as it vented steam. "I've seen those True-Silver knights before. They don't fight; they execute. That kid with the wooden stick? He's a dead man walking. The impact of that mace is going to crack the stadium floor all the way to the parking lot!"
"I don't know, Silas!" Jaxon yelled back, his eyes glued to his tablet. "The betting odds for the 'Samurai' just fluctuated. Someone just dropped a massive 'Sovereign-level' bet on him from an anonymous account. And did you see his eyes? He looks like he's having a seizure, but his feet... his feet haven't moved a millimeter since the buzzer sounded. It's like he's bolted to the planet's core."
"It's probably just rigor mortis setting in early," Silas scoffed. "Hey, look! Alaric is moving! Here comes the 'Judgment' strike! Close your eyes, Jaxon, this is going to be messy!"
Inside Pit 4, Takeo felt like his brain was being scrubbed with steel wool.
"Master? Master, your voice is very loud in my skull," Takeo whimpered, his vision blurring.
"Shut up and hold the sword, Takeo," Harish's voice echoed in his mind, cold and absolute. "I have mapped your nervous system to the stadium's tectonic plates. You are no longer Takeo. You are a localized manifestation of my boredom. When I move my finger in the locker room, your arm will follow. Don't fight the 'Sovereign Sync.' If you resist, you'll probably explode."
"Understood... Master," Takeo squeaked, his posture suddenly snapping into a terrifying, rigid perfection.
Sir Alaric stepped forward. Every step he took left a glowing, holy footprint in the sand. His True-Silver armor hummed with a celestial frequency that made the audience's teeth ache. He raised his mace, a massive hunk of star-forged metal that began to glow with a blinding, white-hot intensity.
"Where is the 'Master' of this world?" Alaric demanded, his voice a thunderclap. "Why do they send a trembling servant to face a Paladin of the 7th Sphere? I feel no mana in you, boy. No spirit. No glory. You are a void."
"The strike is heavy," Takeo's mouth moved, but the voice that came out was a deep, modulated baritone that resonated with the frequency of a mountain. "But your ego makes the swing slow. Inefficient. You are spending 40% of your energy just making your armor glow. You are a lighthouse trying to be a weapon."
Alaric's face twisted in holy rage. "BLASPHEMY! DIE UNDER THE WEIGHT OF JUDGMENT!"
The Paladin lunged. The mace came down like a falling moon.
[WHHH-RUUUUM!]
The sheer air pressure from the swing created a localized hurricane, blowing the sand out of the pit and forcing the spectators in the front rows to shield their eyes. It was a strike that should have turned Takeo into a microscopic smear on the concrete.
But Harish, sitting in the dark locker room, flicked his index finger.
✨ Radiant Movement: Lightstep Drift!
Takeo didn't dodge. He "glitched." To the audience, it looked like a frame-skip in reality. Takeo was standing in the path of the mace, and then, without a single blur of movement, he was three inches to the left. The mace passed through the space where his chest had been, the sonic boom of its passage ruffling his hoodie.
"What?!" Alaric roared, the momentum of his missed strike dragging him forward. "A mirage?!"
"No," Takeo (Harish) whispered, his voice cold as deep-space. "Just an audit of your trajectory."
Harish, in the locker room, closed his eyes and visualized the Atomic Slash. He didn't just want to hit Alaric; he wanted to dismantle the logic of the Paladin's existence. He sent the command through the Nexus threads, pouring 10,000 years of conceptual swordsmanship into Takeo's trembling arm.
Takeo's wooden katana-stick began to vibrate. Not with mana, but with Molecular Hardening. Harish was locking the carbon structures of the wood into a diamond-lattice harder than any metal in the multiverse.
"Atomic Slash: Sequence 01," Harish muttered.
Takeo's arm blurred. It wasn't a swing. It was a spatial erasure.
[SHRRRR-IP!]
The wooden sword didn't "hit" the True-Silver armor. It passed through it like a hot knife through butter, not by cutting it, but by commanding the atoms of the armor to "forget" how to be solid.
The stadium fell into a deathly silence. Alaric stood frozen. For a second, nothing happened. Then, with a sound like a thousand glass chimes breaking at once, the Paladin's True-Silver armor fell apart. It didn't break into shards; it fell in thousands of perfect, one-centimeter cubes that clattered onto the sand like rain.
The star-forged mace simply dissolved into fine grey dust, blowing away in the wind. Alaric was left standing in his simple linen tunic, his divine connection severed, his eyes wide with a terror that surpassed physical pain. He looked down at his bare chest, then at the "clerk" with the piece of wood.
"My... my soul-bond..." Alaric stammered, his voice breaking. "It's gone. How?"
"You were over-budget on divinity," Takeo (Harish) said, the puppet strings finally slackening as Harish retracted his mind. "I just balanced your books."
Takeo's eyes rolled back in his head, and he promptly fainted, falling face-first into the pile of silver cubes.
The stadium erupted. It wasn't a cheer; it was a riot of confusion and fear.
"DID YOU SEE THAT?!" Jaxon screamed, his tablet falling from his hands and shattering. "He didn't just beat him! He disassembled him! That wasn't a martial art! That was... that was an administrative override!"
"The armor!" Silas yelled, his brass arm sparking as he pointed. "That was True-Silver! It's supposed to be indestructible! How does a wooden stick turn it into building blocks? Rumors were right—the Gold Knight's people aren't players. They're the ones who built the game, and they're here to delete us!"
In the VIP box, Kaelen was no longer standing. She was leaning against the wall, her face as white as her mask. She had seen that strike before. She had heard the theory of the "Atomic Slash" in the bedtime stories Harish used to tell her when they were kids—stories about a legendary warrior who didn't fight people, but fought the "math" of the world.
'Harish...' she thought, her breath coming in shallow gasps. 'You told me those were just stories. You told me you were just a shopkeeper. If that was you... if you're controlling Takeo... then who is the Gold Knight?'
She turned and bolted for the exit, ignoring Vikas's confused shouts. She had to find her brother. She had to know.
Back in the locker room, Harish stood up. He felt the mental strain of the Puppetry, a dull ache behind his eyes, but he pushed it down. He checked the status of the "Samosa-Eating Ghost" in the stands—the entity was currently providing a perfect alibi, appearing as a blurred figure that looked enough like Harish to fool any casual surveillance.
"Takeo is safe. The Agnihotri's champion is a pile of scrap metal," Harish muttered. "Now, for the main event."
He tapped the Chronos-Nexus Watch twice. The matte-black fluid surged out, coating his frame in the Sovereign Armor. The dull gold highlights glowed with a predatory light.
"Great Sage... actually, forget it," Harish corrected himself, a small, genuine smirk playing on his lips. "I don't need a Sage. I am the Sovereign. I've spent my life fixing broken fans and leaky roofs. It's time to fix a broken world."
He stepped out of the locker room and into the tunnel of Pit 1. The light at the end of the tunnel was blinding, and the roar of the crowd was a physical wall of sound. His opponent was already waiting—a Shadow Assassin from the unorthodox sects, a man who lived in the spaces between heartbeats.
"I hear you like to audit people, Gold Knight," the Assassin whispered from the darkness of the arena's edge. "Let's see how you audit a ghost."
Harish didn't draw a weapon. He didn't even drop into a stance. He just stood there, his matte-black armor absorbing the stadium lights.
"A ghost?" Harish's voice boomed, the Sovereign Sync amplifying his tone until it felt like the voice of the stadium itself. "You're not a ghost. You're just a collection of poorly optimized carbon molecules. I have exactly four minutes to finish this before the second delivery of the day arrives—my father's new soldering iron. Let's see if your 'shadows' can handle a direct light."