The heavy gates of Pit 1 didn't just open; they groaned, a tectonic protest of ancient iron sliding against salt-crusted stone. Harish, encased in the Astra-Sovereign Mark II, stepped onto the blood-stained sand. This wasn't the clunky, jury-rigged suit from the previous rounds. The matte-gold and dull-black lattice of his armor didn't reflect the stadium lights; it seemed to eat them, absorbing the very concept of "inefficiency" from the environment.
Across the arena, The Eclipse—a legendary Murim Assassin whose name was whispered in the dark corners of the Underworld—was already a ghost. He had vanished using the Shadow Movement Technique, his presence detectable only as a slight, nauseating ripple in the darkness near the stadium walls.
Harish didn't scan the room. He didn't drop into a defensive crouch. He raised his left wrist, and the Chronos-Nexus Watch projected a holographic countdown into the dusty air: 04:00.
"The delivery arrives in four minutes," dollar's modulated voice vibrated through the stadium, sounding like a mountain range grinding together. "Let us begin the Audit."
The Eclipse struck with the predatory instinct of a deep-sea hunter. From the pitch-black shadow cast by Harish's own body, three blades emerged like jagged teeth. This was the Shadowless Blade Technique—strikes that possessed no mass, no reflection, and no sound until the millisecond they tasted skin.
Harish didn't even turn his head. He utilized ✨ Radiant Movement: Lightstep Drift.
To the fifty thousand people in the stands, it looked like a frame-skip in a high-definition broadcast. Harish's body blurred into a golden smear, a streak of light that moved faster than the human eye could process. The three shadow-blades passed through his afterimage, striking nothing but the ionized air. Harish reappeared three meters away, his feet sliding into a perfect Kokutsu-dachi (Back Stance), his center of gravity so low and stable it looked like he was part of the planet's crust.
The Assassin didn't miss a beat. He surged from the ground like liquid ink, his twin daggers weaving a web of black death around Harish's throat. Harish met the flurry with pure, unadulterated martial arts—the kind you learn from decades of repelling pests from a shop door. Using Wing Chun trapping logic, Harish's hands became a rhythmic blur of parries.
[POP-POP-CLANG!]
Every time the invisible blades neared his vitals, Harish deflected them with the "Edge" of his forearm armor, redirecting the lethal kinetic energy directly into the stone floor. The ground beneath Harish's feet began to spider-web and crack, the shockwaves of the redirected strikes turning the sand into a fine, white powder.
In the mid-tier stands, the air was a thick, humid soup of terror and disbelief. Jaxon, the data broker, was hyperventilating, his fingers trembling so hard he couldn't even reload his betting app. Beside him, Silas, the veteran with the brass prosthetic, was leaning so far over the railing that his mechanical arm was hissing with over-exertion.
"Do you see his hands, Jaxon?" Silas whispered, his voice cracking with a raw, primal fear. "He's not using mana to block. He's using Geometry. He's catching those daggers on the exact tangent where the force is zero. That's not a knight. That's a god-damned mathematician with a grudge."
"I just lost two million shares of Agnihotri Tech!" Jaxon screamed, his face a mask of pale sweat, his hoodie clinging to his trembling shoulders like a wet shroud. "The Eclipse hasn't been touched in twelve years! He's a Shadow-Rank Grandmaster! And dollar is treating him like a noisy fly! Look at the stadium walls—they're cracking just from the air pressure of dollar's parries!"
Frustrated by the lack of blood, The Eclipse pushed his Shadow Movement to the absolute limit. He bit his lip, the copper taste of his own blood igniting his life-essence. Suddenly, eight "Shadow Clones" materialized, circling Harish in a perfect, lethal octagon. Each clone unleashed a Shadowless Torrent, a coordinated strike designed to shred a target from every conceivable angle at once.
"Too much noise," dollar rumbled.
Harish extended his right hand, palm upward. He didn't use the Chronos-Nexus to fabricate a weapon. He did something that made every Grandmaster in the VIP booths stand up in unison, their tea forgotten, their hearts stopping. He pulled from his own Internal Energy.
[HUMMM-SHIIING!]
From his palm, a three-foot Aura Blade (Chi Sword) ignited. It wasn't a hologram. It was pure, compressed internal energy—so dense it glowed with a blinding white-gold light that turned the arena into a second sun. The air around the blade ionized instantly, crackling with the sheer weight of Harish's soul.
Harish executed the ✨ Radiant Sword Technique: Solar Flare Arc.
He spun in a slow, deliberate 360-degree circle. The Aura Blade didn't just cut through the air; it audited it. As the golden arc passed through the eight Shadow Clones, the pure Chi vaporized the dark mana holding them together. The clones didn't die; they simply evaporated into harmless mist. The "Shadowless" blades of the original Eclipse were shattered by the "Absolute" presence of Harish's internal energy, the metal shards embedding themselves in the far walls of the pit like shrapnel.
The Eclipse, now visible and bleeding from the ears from the sonic resonance of the Aura Blade, let out a primal scream. He ignited his final life-reserve, merging his twin daggers into a single, jagged shard of Shadowless Void. This was a suicide move—a strike that traded the user's future for a single moment of absolute destruction.
The two warriors collided in the center of the pit.
[CLANG-SHHH-BOOM!]
It was a masterpiece of high-speed combat that the human brain wasn't wired to understand. The Assassin moved with jagged, flickering darkness, appearing and disappearing like a glitching video file. Harish moved with the fluid, lethal grace of a Sovereign.
Harish used the Sovereign's Pivot, rotating his hips by a fraction of a degree—not even an inch—to let the void-dagger graze his chest-plate. The friction of the near-miss created a shower of sparks that illuminated the Assassin's panicked face. In that same heartbeat, Harish delivered a One-Inch Punch to the assassin's elbow.
[CRACK!]
The sound of the bone snapping echoed through the silent stadium like a gunshot. The Assassin's arm went limp, the void-dagger flickering out of existence. But the Murim master was stubborn; he countered with a desperate, spinning kick aimed at Harish's temple. Harish didn't flinch. He caught the foot mid-air with a grip that could crush granite, transitioned into a Seoi Nage (Shoulder Throw), and slammed The Eclipse into the stone floor with the force of a falling star.
The crater created by the impact was three meters deep. The dust rose in a mushroom cloud, choking the front-row spectators.
"Thirty seconds," dollar announced, his voice cool and utterly bored.
The Assassin tried to use a desperate "Shadow-Leap" to retreat into the darkness of the crater, but Harish reached out. He didn't even lunge; he just grabbed the man's physical form with a Tiger Claw grip. Using the Chronos-Nexus Watch, he performed a Spatial Hardening on the Assassin's coordinates.
The man was frozen—not by ice, but by the very space-time around him turning solid. He was a statue of flesh and bone, trapped in a moment of failure.
Harish stood over him and raised his Aura Blade one last time. He didn't strike to kill. He simply tapped the flat of the Chi-sword against the Assassin's forehead.
[CHIME!]
A pulse of Zero-Logic energy flooded the Assassin's nervous system. It was a digital "Ban." In that second, the man's Murim cultivation, his shadow-arts, and his very connection to mana were temporarily locked by the Sovereign's authority. The Eclipse slumped, his eyes rolling back, unconscious before his head even hit the sand.
00:01... 00:00.
The buzzer sounded. The digital holographic clock turned red and dissolved into the air. Harish didn't look at the unconscious legend at his feet. He didn't look at the cheering, terrified crowd. He looked directly at the VIP section where Kaelen was standing, her face pale, her hands gripping the railing so hard they were bleeding.
"Efficiency achieved," dollar said.
With a final ✨ Radiant Movement: Photon Glide, Harish vanished.
A second later, Harish was in the dark, damp maintenance hallway behind Pit 1. He was breathing hard, his lungs burning from the ozone. The Sovereign armor retracted into his watch with a soft hiss, leaving him in his wrinkled "intern" jumpsuit. He was frantically wiping gold-dust and carbon soot off his neck with a greasy rag when his phone buzzed.
Delivery Notification: Your package (Soldering Iron - 60W) has been delivered to your porch in xxxxxxxxxxx.
"Thank God," Harish muttered, leaning against the cold brick wall. "If Dad had to wait another hour for that, he'd have—"
The heavy steel door at the end of the hallway burst open. Kaelen stood there, her hair disheveled, her violet eyes burning with a mixture of terror and a heartbreak so sharp it felt like a blade in the room.
"Harish," she whispered, her voice trembling so hard it barely carried over the hum of the stadium generators. "That 'Gold Knight'... out there. He used the Sovereign's Pivot. That tiny shift in the hip to redirect weight. I've watched you do that a thousand times at the shop when you're mopping the floor to avoid slipping on the spilled tea. I've watched you do it when you're reaching for a high shelf without a ladder."
Harish froze. He gripped his mop handle—the one he'd grabbed from the supply closet to look busy—his knuckles turning white. He didn't look at her. He couldn't.
"Kaelen, you're seeing things," Harish said, his voice trying to find that casual, lazy tone, but failing miserably. "The stress of the tournament is getting to you. I'm an intern. I don't have a sword of Chi or a suit of gold. I have a bucket of soapy water and a sister who needs to go home and lie down."
Kaelen stepped closer, her footsteps echoing in the narrow hall. "Don't lie to me! I saw the Atomic Slash in Pit 4. I saw the Aura Blade. Those are the bedtime stories you told me! You said they were myths! You said the 'Universal Auditor' was just a character you made up so I wouldn't be scared of the dark! But I saw it, Harish! I saw my brother out there playing god with the universe!"
The silence that followed was heavy, pregnant with a decade of secrets. Harish finally turned his head, his eyes meeting hers. For a split second, the lazy shopkeeper was gone, replaced by the Sovereign—the man who had just dismantled a legend in four minutes.
"Kaelen," Harish said, his voice soft, raw, and weary. "The world is a very broken machine. Sometimes, you need someone who knows how to fix the wiring without making a scene. But right now? Right now, that soldering iron for Dad is sitting on the porch in xxxxxxxxxxx. If someone steals it because we're standing here arguing about 'martial logic,' we're both dead. Dad doesn't care about the Gold Knight. He cares about his shop."
Kaelen stared at him, tears finally spilling over. She didn't know whether to hug him or hit him. The brother she thought she knew was a lie, but the man standing in front of her—sweaty, tired, and worried about a 200-rupee soldering iron—was still undeniably her Harish.
"You're a monster," she whispered, though there was no hate in it.
"I'm an auditor," Harish corrected, a small, tired smile playing on his lips as he started walking toward the exit. "And we're running out of daylight. Let's go home, Kaelen. I think there's some leftover cake in the fridge."