Nine months of internal time came and went, and the Green Accord shattered like glass dropped from a spire.
Liora Voss, her alliance frayed beyond repair by months of missing supplies and mutual suspicion, folded her remaining forces into Murong Xue's Radiant Covenant. The other two lesser lords of the old pact took their armies and sailed for the coast, swearing fealty to Soren Shaw's Tide Pact. What had been a three-way balance of power collapsed overnight into a dead heat between land and sea. The whole arena held its breath, waiting for the final war to begin.
Then the truth came out.
A Tide Pact scout, digging a forward outpost near the western marshes, struck empty space three feet down. He fell through into a smooth, arched tunnel lined with packed earth and glowing moss. By the time he scrambled back to the surface screaming, word was already spreading.
They were not alone. Something had been living under their feet this whole time. Something that had been stealing every third supply crate, stripping every orchard, hollowing out half the countryside without anyone noticing.
The two great alliances poured manpower into excavation efforts. They found miles of tunnels. They found storehouses stacked high with unopened crates. They found underground farms lit by glowing slimes. They found nothing living. The moment they broke into one tunnel, the inhabitants sealed it off and vanished into the dark.
The three former Accord lords stared at the tunnel mouths and felt sick. If they had known this was out there, they never would have turned on each other. But it was too late now. Only fifty contestants remained. To back out now, to break rank and chase the tunnel rats, would leave them exposed to their bigger rivals.
Up in the observation hall, the mood was electric.
Corvin drifted from booth to booth, watching the contestants react, and had to suppress a dry smile.
Nearly every god in the room was glued to their projection screens. They had been for hours. Balled-up orders scribbled on parchment littered every desk. Plates of food, delivered at the start of the day, sat untouched on every side table, the divine essence already seeped out, the pastries stale and the juice flat. Every time one of their subjects fell, their faces would twist like they had been stabbed.
And then there was booth seventy-three.
Laia had her feet propped on the console, a half-finished textbook open on her lap, and was working her way through what had to be her fifth snack tray of the day. She glanced up at the screen maybe once every twenty minutes, squinted, nodded to herself like yep, still alive down there, and went back to reading and eating.
No commands. No panic. No reaction at all to the news that her tunnels had been discovered.
Corvin leaned against the doorframe of her booth and stared.
He had met prodigies. He had met lazy nobles. He had met cold, calculating strategists who never broke a sweat.
He had never met anyone who treated a national tournament like a quiet study hall with free catering.
What kind of upbringing produces a child like this? he wondered. What kind of god doesn't even bother to check on her army for nine months straight, and still has them running the most elaborate supply heist in tournament history?
He shook his head and drifted back to the central scoreboard.
The rankings had been updated that morning. Murong Xue sat first, as expected. Soren Shaw was second.
Third was Laia.
No alliance. No allies. Three thousand ragtag subjects. And third place, by a mile. All from scavenged supplies, stripped farmland, and point beans collected off the ground like fallen acorns.
Corvin sighed. The tournament had been designed to teach cooperation. To show young deities that no one wins alone. That alliances and trade and shared strength were the path to victory.
Well. Mostly. There was always an exception.
What really stunned him, though, was the slimes.
Everyone knew elemental slimes were a status symbol. Proof your divine alignment was strong enough to spawn pure elementals. Pretty. Useless in a fight. A rich god's decoration.
No one had ever used them like this.
Light slimes growing crops underground. Water slimes irrigating and putting out fires. Thunder slimes relaying signals across miles of tunnel like living telegraph wires. Earth slimes patching walls and sealing cave-ins. They were the backbone of the entire burrow. Without them, none of it would have worked.
Corvin could already hear the audience screaming. He was right.
Outside the academy, the tournament broadcast had exploded.
What had started as a niche academic event, watched mostly by noble families and military recruiters, had become a cultural phenomenon. Viewership had tripled in the past month. Advertising slots were selling for ten times their original price. Merchants were already hawking "Burrow Rat" plushies and replica storage sacks.
The audience had a name for them now: the Tunnel Rats.
Cunning as foxes. Greedy as bears. Digging like moles. Slippery as eels.
Every time they stripped another supply crate right out from under the alliances' noses, the viewing galleries roared. Every time they sealed a tunnel and vanished without a trace, social boards lit up for hours. No one had ever seen anything like it.
Everyone wanted to know who was behind it. What house. What bloodline. No one had a clue.
Down in her command pavilion at the heart of the Radiant Covenant's territory, Murong Xue stood rigid, her hands clenched at her sides, and stared at a cross-section map of the western tunnels.
She was Fourth Rank. A mid-tier goddess. She commanded angels and radiant knights and healing priests that could raise the dead. On an open battlefield, she could have swept every other contestant aside before lunch.
And here she was, losing a supply war to a bunch of diggers.
They had tried everything. Smoke poured down the holes—only to hit U-shaped bends in the tunnels that trapped the fumes and vented them harmlessly away, like some kind of perverse stone plumbing. They had flooded the tunnels—the water had vanished into side passages and drained away into the bedrock. They had bombarded suspected sections with arcane barrages—most of the tunnels were empty by the time the spells hit, and the rest were so deep the blasts barely shook the walls.
They never fought. They never stood their ground. They never even showed their faces. They just stole. They stripped every field bare. They dug up every fruit tree. They grabbed every crate before it had even finished falling.
Murong Xue had thought they were scavengers. Annoying pests. Nothing more.
Then a cold thought had settled over her that morning.
What if the supplies stop coming?
The tournament had run a full year already. Two more to go. What if, in the final stretch, the food ran out? What if only the ones who had hoarded would survive?
"Double the foraging parties," she said, her voice cold. "Seize every farm. Stockpile every grain sack. We start rationing at once. And keep digging. I want those burrows found and sealed before winter."
Her captains bowed and hurried out.
Murong Xue stared at the map, her jaw tight.
It was already too late, and she knew it.
High in the observation spire, Headmaster Corvin looked out over the arena realm spread below him, and smiled.
One year down. Two to go.
Time to turn up the heat.
He gave a single, quiet gesture.
Across the map, supply drop frequencies halved.
And from the northern wastelands, the first great void beast tide began to move south.
No more easy scavenging. No more quiet hoarding.
The easy part was over.
Now they would see who was really built to last.
Deep underground, Lirael looked up from her map, her head tilted. Somewhere far above, the air had shifted.
Borgul paused mid-bite of dried meat and sniffed the air.
Korg stood up from his stone bench and cracked his knuckles.
Somewhere distant, the ground rumbled.
The three leaders exchanged a look.
Well, they thought in unison.
That's new.