The darkness exploded forward, and Zion's smile vanished. His hand tightened around his weapon as shapes began emerging from the black. One. Two. Three. More followed, until the void seemed filled with countless creatures. But before any of them could reach him, everything stopped. The crimson eyes vanished. The darkness shattered, as if it had never been there at all — as if it had only ever been his imagination.
Zion blinked, and the world returned.
He stood in the center of a vast battlefield: a ruined city, broken towers leaning against one another with their upper floors lost in a blood-red sky. Rubble buried the streets. Flames burned somewhere in the distance.
Zion looked around, and something in his expression shifted.
"This is more like it."
Outside the formation, the hall erupted into whispers.
"What—"
"Where did that come from?"
"That's not the usual battlefield."
Kellan leaned forward so fast his chair scraped the floor. "That's his?"
Mira's eyes stayed fixed on the formation. "Yes."
"But why is it different?"
She didn't answer. Her attention had moved to the two figures standing at opposite ends of the ruined street. Darius had risen slightly from his seat, eyes narrowed — not at the creatures themselves, but at the feeling coming off them. The pressure. The weight of their presence.
One was enormous — nearly three meters of dark armor that seemed to drink the light around it, a blade-axe hybrid resting across its shoulder. The other stood several meters off: smaller, human-shaped, almost elegant, its body sheathed in pale scales, a curved blade in each hand.
Neither moved. Neither attacked. They simply watched Zion.
Kellan swallowed. "Those two..."
"They're strong," Mira said.
"How strong?"
She glanced at Darius. He was the one who answered. "Comparable to the one I fought."
Kellan's mouth fell open. "Both of them?"
"Both."
The hall went quiet.
At the edge of the grounds, the elderly examiner finally spoke, eyes still on Zion. "The candidate is a Dual Awakened."
The silver-robed official turned to him. "Should we adjust the difficulty?"
"No." A pause. "Increase it. Two opponents. Both at the same level."
Several nearby examiners turned. One lowered his voice. "Is that necessary?"
The old man finally looked away from the formation. "For an ordinary awakened, surviving one opponent at that level is enough." His eyes returned to Zion. "But someone who has awakened twice cannot be measured by the same standard. If his potential is greater, then the pressure must be greater as well." His gaze sharpened. "Do not mistake a second awakening for a simple increase in strength. More power creates more possibilities, but it also creates more ways to fail."
The official nodded. "Begin."
Inside the formation, the giant moved first.
Its foot came down and the street cracked under it — boom — and then it was closing the distance far faster than something that size had any right to. The weapon came down in a full overhead swing. Zion threw himself backward and felt the wind of it pass a hand's width from his chest before the street where he'd been standing simply ceased to exist, stone shrapnel scything past his ear.
He hit the side of a broken building at a bad angle, rolled his shoulder into the impact to kill the momentum, and was still finding his footing when he felt it — that prickle at the base of his skull that meant something was already committed to hitting him. He ducked on instinct before his eyes had even confirmed the threat. Two curved blades passed through the space his head had occupied a half-second earlier.
He kicked off the wall rather than run from it — running invited a chase he couldn't win — and the scaled creature twisted mid-air to follow him anyway. Their blades met. Clang. The impact traveled through his wrist and into his shoulder, a dull ringing pain that told him he'd blocked with poor structure.
The force threw him onto the roof of a ruined building. The scaled creature landed opposite him, unhurried. Below, the giant was already moving.
Zion's eyes flicked between them. One overwhelming. One precise. Neither giving him room to breathe, let alone think.
"That's annoying," he muttered, and then the giant jumped.
He moved without deciding to. The roof gave way beneath him a half-second later, the massive weapon tearing through where he'd been standing, and he fell through two floors of collapsing stone and timber, twisting his body to keep his head protected, taking the debris on his forearms instead. He hit the ground hard enough to lose his breath for a moment — and the scaled creature was already there, blade coming for his throat.
He got his own weapon up in time. Barely. The second blade came from the other side and he ducked under it, felt the giant's follow-up tear through the wall an inch above his head, and rolled clear through the dust and rubble on the ground.
Three attacks. Three angles. No pause between them, no gap to exploit.
He understood then. "They're coordinating."
"Did you see that?" Kellan said.
Mira nodded slowly. "They aren't fighting independently."
"They're covering each other's weaknesses," Darius said, arms folded. "The large one controls space. The smaller one controls openings."
Below, it played out exactly that way. The giant swung, forcing Zion out of range — and the instant he stepped clear, the scaled creature was already there to meet him. He blocked one blade. The second opened a line across his ribs, shallow but immediate, and blood soaked into his shirt before he even registered the pain.
"He got hit," Kellan said, his voice tight.
"He's being forced into predictable movement," Mira murmured.
Darius nodded once. "Exactly."
The pattern repeated — retreat, cut off, retreat, cut off — the giant's weapon always arriving a half-beat after the scaled blades had already narrowed his options. Zion's breathing had started to come harder. Not from exhaustion yet. From the constant recalibration, the mental cost of solving a moving equation with no time to think.
They weren't just strong. Their fighting styles naturally complemented each other, turning every opening into another trap. A single opponent could be studied. Two created uncertainty. And uncertainty bred mistakes.
The giant charged again. This time Zion didn't retreat — he stepped into it, ducking under the swing close enough to feel the heat of displaced air on his scalp. The scaled creature came from the side and its blade caught his shoulder, a shallow tear that would sting for days if he had days left to feel it. He ignored it and kept moving. One step. Two. Three. Threading the gap between them before either could reset.
For the first time, the two creatures were separated. Zion turned, breathing hard, and allowed himself something close to a smile.
"I see."
They attacked again, and this time he didn't try to dodge both. He picked one.
The giant raised its weapon and Zion went low, slipping inside its reach where the reach itself became a liability — a blade that long needed distance to be dangerous, and up close it was just weight. He drove three quick strikes into the joint of its armor. The plating cracked. The creature roared, and in that half-second of noise Zion felt the air change behind him and spun on reflex.
Their blades met again, the impact numbing his fingers, but he'd bought himself something more valuable than a hit — information. He'd found the seam. Finding it wasn't the same as exploiting it, though, not against something that could still put him through a wall.
He forced himself to breathe, to let his surroundings blur into background noise — the fire, the groaning stone, the footsteps — until only the two bodies in front of him remained sharp. The set of the giant's shoulders before it committed to a swing. The angle of the scaled creature's hips before it pivoted. Their footwork. Their breathing.
Then he saw it.
"They're not perfectly synchronized."
Mira caught the words. "What?"
Kellan leaned forward. "What did he say?"
The giant swung. Zion waited — later than instinct wanted him to, late enough that his stomach dropped — then sidestepped at the last possible moment and grabbed the creature's armored forearm instead of retreating from it. He pulled, using its own momentum against the drag of his weight, and the giant's swing carried it stumbling straight into its partner.
The scaled creature tried to jump clear. It wasn't fast enough. The giant's shoulder caught it mid-leap and both of them staggered, off-balance for the first time in the fight — and Zion was already moving, blade opening a deep line across the smaller creature's chest before it could recover its footing.
It reeled back. The giant swung blind, still recovering its own balance, and Zion ducked behind it so the blow caught its partner instead, staggering the scaled creature a second time.
"That's the weakness," Zion said, breathing hard now, blood running freely down his side.
"They need each other," Mira said, eyes bright.
"Strongest when they fight together," Darius agreed. "Which means—"
"If Zion can make them interfere with each other," Mira finished, "their strength becomes the opening."
It held up under pressure. The giant and the scaled creature charged together again, and this time Zion stepped between them on purpose, timing it so the giant's downswing forced the scaled creature to check its own attack rather than risk hitting its partner. The two strikes collided instead of landing on him, the shockwave of it rattling loose stone from the nearest wall.
He used the half-second that bought him. His blade found the giant's knee — it dropped, armor grinding — and he spun through the opening to catch the scaled creature's wrist. One curved blade spun away into the rubble.
The creature backed off, favoring the hand. Zion didn't let it reset. He closed the distance and it met him with its remaining blade — he blocked, but the kick that followed caught him square in the chest and threw him ten feet backward into the ruined street. He landed hard enough to black out for a heartbeat, tasted blood, spat it out.
Both creatures were recovering. Both still standing. Zion pushed himself up on a hand that wouldn't stop shaking and laughed — short, disbelieving, more relief than humor.
"Why is he laughing?" Kellan asked.
Mira smiled despite herself. "Because he figured it out."
He lowered his weapon and let them come to him this time, meeting the charge rather than waiting for it. The giant swung; he stepped inside the arc. The scaled creature struck; he tilted just enough to let the blade pass a finger's width from his ribs. He drove his shoulder into the giant's chest — more instinct than plan, more desperation than technique — and felt it stagger under the impact hard enough to buckle one knee.
The scaled creature closed in to punish the opening. Zion grabbed the giant's weapon instead of retreating, pulled against its grip, then let go at the last instant. The unresisted momentum carried the blade forward and the scaled creature barely twisted clear of its own ally's weapon.
That was the gap. Zion was already behind it, blade at its throat, arm shaking with the effort of holding the position steady.
For half a second, nothing moved.
Then the creature's body dissolved.
The hall erupted. Kellan shot to his feet. "One down!"
Mira didn't celebrate. Her eyes stayed on the formation. "Not yet."
The armored giant was still standing — and changing. Cracks spread through the damaged plating; the pieces fell away to reveal something underneath that glowed faintly through the dust. Its muscles swelled. The weapon in its hand lengthened, the blade thickening into something heavier, uglier.
Zion's smile disappeared.
The silver-robed official turned to the examiner. "Was that part of the design?"
"Yes."
"Then the second opponent was only part of the pressure?"
"Exactly. Now we see whether he can survive without the advantage of numbers."
The giant vanished. Zion turned — nothing to his left, nothing to his right — and then the ground beneath him detonated outward as the creature erupted from below. He got his weapon up on instinct rather than judgment and the impact still launched him bodily through the air, through the side of a building, the entire structure coming down around him in a roar of collapsing stone.
For several seconds, nothing moved in the dust.
Kellan went pale. "Zion?"
Mira stood without meaning to. The dust kept falling. Nothing answered it.
The giant advanced, one heavy step at a time, weapon rising for the finish—
A hand broke through the rubble.
Zion pulled himself out, one arm slow to respond, his balance uncertain beneath him. But he was upright. That was the only thing that mattered right now.
Kellan exhaled. "He's alive."
"Of course he is," Mira said, though her voice wasn't quite steady.
Zion faced the creature and felt, for the first time, the true cost of the fight catch up to him all at once — his lungs burning, his arm refusing to fully close around his weapon, his legs unsteady beneath him. He couldn't outmuscle this thing. He couldn't outrun it. And the trick that had worked on two opponents meant nothing against one.
He needed something else, and he needed it before his body ran out of road.
The giant attacked. He blocked, and the impact drove him back a full step, boots skidding across broken stone. It attacked again. He blocked again, arms screaming now, each impact costing him more than the last. Around the formation, even the whispering candidates had gone silent.
"He's being overwhelmed," Darius said quietly.
"Can he win?" Kellan asked.
Mira answered instead. "Yes."
"How do you know?"
"Because he's still thinking."
She was right. Inside the formation, Zion had stopped watching the weapon and stopped watching the creature. He was watching the city — the leaning towers, the narrow streets, the collapsed stone, the fire eating through what remained of a rooftop nearby. Someone had built this battlefield. That meant it could be turned against them.
The giant swung. Zion retreated toward a half-collapsed tower, let it follow, then threw himself sideways at the last moment. The weapon tore through the tower's remaining support instead of through him, and the whole structure groaned and began to fall.
Zion didn't wait to see it land. He ran — not away, but along the street's dead end, until stone walls closed in on three sides and there was nowhere left to go.
The giant raised its weapon. "Got you," it seemed to say, in the language of raised steel.
Zion didn't retreat. He went forward — up onto the creature's own extended arm as it swung, running the length of it before the surprise even registered, and drove his blade down into its shoulder from above. The armor cracked under the strike. The creature roared and clawed for him; he was already gone, dropping clear as the collapsing tower finally came down and buried it under tons of stone.
Silence.
Then the rubble shifted, and the giant stood again, its armor fractured, each movement slower than before.
It charged one final time. Zion didn't run from it. He waited, let the weapon commit fully, and stepped inside at the very last instant, driving his blade into the cracked plating. Once. The armor gave further. Twice. It buckled. A third strike punched clean through, and light spread across the creature's body in a single fracturing line before it shattered into nothing.
The illusion ended. The ruined city dissolved, the blood-red sky fading with it until only the familiar walls of the examination hall remained — and Zion stood in the formation exactly as he had entered it. No tears in his sleeves. No blood on his skin. The battlefield had never been real, and neither had anything that had happened to him inside it.
Only the ache remained. His shoulder still throbbed with a pain that had no wound to explain it. His lungs still pulled shallow, like his body hadn't quite caught up to the fact that none of it had happened. He flexed his hand and felt the ghost of the numbness from a hundred blocked strikes, real enough to make him check his own knuckles just to be sure.
Nothing there. Just the memory of it, stubborn and vivid.
"Huh," he said. "So it doesn't actually let anything touch you."
Outside the formation, Kellan let out the breath he'd been holding. "You should've seen your own face in there. I thought you'd lost an arm."
"The formation only projects what's happening," Mira said. "It never lets it happen to you. Only the feeling stays behind."
"Convenient," Zion said, "and deeply unsettling."
Zion stepped off the platform, and the moment his foot touched solid ground, hundreds of eyes turned his way — some impressed, some wary. He ignored all of it and went straight for Kellan and Mira.
Kellan was already grinning. "You looked terrible in there."
"I won."
"You still looked terrible."
Mira shook her head, fighting a smile of her own. "Ignore him."
"I was planning to," Zion said.
"Hey!"
Before Kellan could get further into it, the silver-robed official's voice cut across the hall: "Candidate One Hundred and Fifty-Eight has completed the first stage."
That was it. No mention of the Dual Awakening. No questions, no explanation.
Zion glanced toward the elderly examiner. Their eyes met for a moment — nothing in the old man's expression gave anything away, no warmth, no warning — and then he simply looked away and made a small note on the scroll in his hands.
"Candidate One Hundred and Fifty-Nine," the official called, and the hall's attention shifted at once. Zion returned to his seat.
Kellan leaned in. "So?"
"So what?"
"The fight. What did you think?"
Zion considered it for a moment, entirely straight-faced. "They were strong."
"That's all?"
"That's all." He paused, patting down his stomach like he was checking for damage that wasn't there. "Also I think I burned through a week's worth of meals in ten minutes. I might actually die of starvation before the second stage."
Kellan stared at him. "You almost got cut in half by a war axe and *that's* your takeaway?"
"Priorities."
Mira put a hand over her mouth, laughing despite herself. "You're impossible."
Zion leaned back and watched the next candidate step into the formation, but his mind stayed on the battle — not the pain, not the opponents, not even the win. Something underneath all of it.
The Academy had thrown two opponents at him because it expected more from a Dual Awakened. That much was obvious. But the fight had taught him something the examiner probably already knew: two awakened paths didn't just mean more power. It meant more choices, more room to adapt — and more room to get it wrong if he let the two sides of himself work against each other instead of together.
And he'd won all of it without touching either path directly. He still knew almost nothing about his bloodline ability — hadn't so much as tried to call on it — and the only awakening he'd actually used, the only thing that had let him read the giant's shoulders and the scaled creature's hips before either one moved, had been his eyes.
He looked down at his hands, turning the thought over. If this was what one half of him could do untested, how far could he push both — before they started tripping over each other?
The idea settled into him slowly, and despite everything, he found himself smiling.
Another formation lit up. Another candidate stepped forward. And somewhere beneath the noise of the hall, Zion's understanding of his own strength had quietly, permanently shifted.
Here's a short one in the standard webnovel style — casual, a bit of behind-the-scenes color, and a soft call-to-action:
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Author's Note:
That fight took longer to get right than I expected — I wanted the two-against-one dynamic to actually matter tactically, not just look cool on paper. Let me know what you thought of the "healing formation" reveal at the end; it's going to matter more than it seems later on.
Also, yes, Zion really did just fight for his life and immediately start thinking about food. He's going to be like this the whole series, I'm sorry.
Thanks for reading — if you're enjoying the story, a rating/review or a few power stones genuinely helps it reach more people. See you in the next chapter for Stage Two. 👀