Lirael, matriarch of the frost wraiths and now unofficially styled the Winter Singer, stood atop a low grassy ridge, her form half-woven from glimmering hoarfrost. Three weeks of crash tutoring from the original six clans had remade her. She was no chieftain of a dying realm anymore. A flick of her wrist could summon frost enough to bury a village. Her voice could turn rain to sleet mid-fall.
"Borgul," she said, her tone sharp and steady as packed ice. "Take your drake riders and run the full perimeter. Mark every water source, every stone outcrop, every stretch of deep loam. Korg, you lead the heavy crews on site prep. We are not here to chase glory. We are here to last three years. We stockpile first. We fortify. We let the others bleed each other thin. Then we show them what 'common grade' can really do."
A rough, roaring cheer went up from the ranks. Three thousand voices, loud and earnest and absolutely convinced. They had not come to win a tournament. They had come to bring home groceries.
Up in the observation spire, Headmaster Corvin steepled his fingers and stared at feed number seventy-three, his expression unreadable.
The tournament's opening phase was designed as a test of faith as much as tactics. The moment subjects crossed into the arena realm, their link to their god thinned. The stronger the bond, the calmer they stood. Panic was normal. Chaos was expected. Most young deities' armies spent the first hour huddled together, waiting for orders that never came fast enough.
Of the two hundred contestants, roughly eighty had frozen solid at drop-off—noble scions with force-fed ranks and purchased subjects who had never known a day without direct divine guidance. Another fifty had recovered quickly and set about scouting and hunting, exactly as the academy curriculum taught. A dozen elite contenders had moved like well-oiled machines: securing high ground, posting sentries, laying out battle formations. Those were the ones to watch.
Soren Shaw's ocean-aligned host had landed on an island shore and already begun harvesting shellfish while reinforcing the tidal cliffs. Liora Voss's forest elves had stumbled into a herd of wild stags, put them down without a single casualty, and set about drying the meat for future trade—classic Voss pragmatism. Murong Xue's Fourth Rank holy legion had simply carved a swath through the nearest woodland and raised a glowing white fortress in under an hour, pristine and imperious. Exactly what you expected from imperial blood.
And then there was contestant seventy-three. Laia.
Corvin leaned forward slightly.
Her army looked like a refugee caravan. Tattered leather armor. Rough-hewn wooden carts. Sacks and barrels bulging from every surface. Slimes bouncing gently in the back of every wagon. The whole lot of them looked like they had wandered in off the edge of the world, not marched into a national tournament.
He had been about to write her off as another overambitious low-ranker when the two stonehide drakes at the front knelt, bit down into the dirt, and started chewing.
Corvin blinked.
He rewound the feed. He played it again.
They were tasting the soil.
One lifted its head, jaws caked in rich dark loam, and rumbled something to its commander. Good earth, it said. Deep. No toxins. Crops will grow well here.
Lirael knelt, ran her pale fingers through the dirt, and sighed like she had just found a vault of star-forged ore. If only our home had soil this good, she said. No one would go hungry.
Corvin stared.
Who tests farmland first thing in a war game?
Normal contestants hunted. Normal contestants scouted for enemy positions. Normal contestants did not drop into a combat arena and immediately start evaluating crop yields.
He watched, fascinated, as the column moved to a sheer cliff face at the valley's edge. He assumed they would use earth magic to carve it out. Shaping stone was first-year basics. Every acolyte learned it.
Instead, one silverback ape hefted a bulging water slime like a living battering ram. He slammed it hard against the rock. A spiderweb of cracks spread across the stone. Then he jammed the slime against the fissure, and water poured forth, seeping deep into every split.
Lirael stepped forward. One finger touched the pooled water.
It froze solid in an instant.
The cliff face shattered. Great slabs of rock split away from the wall, clean and even, as if carved by a master mason.
Corvin's teacup slipped in his hand.
Physics.
They were using physics.
Freeze water in the cracks. Let expansion break the stone. No grand earth-shaping spells. No blasts of divine power. Just ice, water, and a slime.
He had been a God King for three hundred years. He had seen every trick, every spell, every style of warfare. Never in his life had he seen a host of magic-wielding subjects use basic material science to mine stone.
What in the name of the Supreme Gods does this god teach her people? he thought, bewildered.
Word spread fast through the examiner's hall.
A crowd began to gather around feed seventy-three. Kaelen Shaw shouldered his way to the front, popcorn in hand, and whooped when he saw the shattered cliff face.
"Brilliant!" he cackled. "Absolutely brilliant. I've never seen anything like it. Is she training them to be farmers or soldiers?"
No one had an answer. The public commentary booths were already going wild. Spectators who had tuned in for angel legions and leviathan battles were now glued to a bunch of ragged-looking refugees digging cellars and diverting a stream with mud and stone.
Most thought it was a joke. A gimmick. A desperate nobody trying to stand out. They would get wiped out the second a real army found them.
A few, the older ones, the ones who had survived sieges and border wars, watched in silence. They knew something the crowd did not.
Armies that could feed themselves, that could fortify fast, that could turn bare rock into shelter in an afternoon? They did not die easy. They outlasted you. They wore you down. And when you were weak and hungry from fighting everyone else? They came for you.
Down in her private booth, Laia sneezed.
She rubbed her nose, glanced around suspiciously, then grabbed another honey cake off the snack platter and took a huge bite.
Mmf. So good.
She had not tasted anything this sweet in almost twenty years of internal kingdom time. Back home, sugar was a luxury you traded dwarven iron for. Here? Unlimited. Free. Part of the complimentary contestant package.
She was going to eat her weight in pastries before the first day was over. She was going to get her money's worth and then some.
She glanced idly at the projection screen on the wall. Her people were digging holes in the side of a hill. Looked like they were building cisterns. Good. Smart. Water was important.
She took another bite of cake and leaned back.
Someone's probably talking about me, she thought vaguely. Eh. Whatever.
She had more important things to worry about. Like whether the next tray would have those little glazed fruit tarts she'd spotted on the way in.
Outside her booth, the tournament hummed with chaos and drama. Alliances were already being brokered. Scouting parties were clashing in the woods. The first supply drop was scheduled to fall at sundown, and every major contender was already maneuvering for position.
Inside booth seventy-three, it was quiet. Peaceful.
Laia reached for another pastry, and smiled.
Three years of internal time. Three years of free snacks.
This was already the best competition she had ever entered.