Rongradin removed his cerulean robe in a single clean motion and set it aside, leaving his upper body bare. Sweat glistened across ash white skin, and beneath it, muscle moved with the particular, visible quality, swelling and releasing with each breath in the rhythmic, unconscious way.

Steam rose from his skin as he stood, burning away the grime of practice in thin, drifting wisps, the heat of exertion finding its own way out.

He was left in cerulean pants marked with a silver pattern along the seams, the design suggesting flames caught mid-movement, frozen in the fabric.

From his space ring, he withdrew two gauntlets.

Iron black, their surface fitted with pointed riveted knuckles that caught the chamber’s light in small, sharp glints, the metal groaning faintly as Rongradin flexed his fingers within them.

Rongradin loosened his shoulders. Stretched his arms back until the joints registered the extension. Turned his neck side to side with the slow, aActions done out of muscle memory rather than necessity, the body following a ritual the mind had stopped supervising years ago.

Then he closed his eyes and stayed there.

The aura that rose around him was a grayish black, visible in the way that concentrated, yet it did not disturb the space, a simple step but requiring extraordinary mental control.

Alex watched from the corner and found himself acknowledging, with the impartiality of someone making an honest assessment, that the prince had developed a better character than the version of him that existed in the Ancestral Realm.

Rongradin was a decently famous name among the countless immortal adventurers who had passed through the realm’s vast and untamed reaches, a reputation built through the realm war that had engulfed its furthest territories in vile, uncontrolled flames. That version had been notable. This one was something more.

Nearly ten minutes passed.

The great chamber drowned in silence; not even the sound of breathing disturbed it, but eventually the gold-haired woman, the spear-wielder, was the one to break it.

She did so by dropping her spear.

The weapon fell and stopped a single inch above the crystal black floor, hanging there in the last fraction before contact, and the meaning of the gesture required no translation.

Rongradin opened his eyes at the sound of it. It was time for the ceremony of first blood.

The name was metaphorical, which was perhaps the most elegant thing about the tradition—losing carried its own specific costs for each side.

For the groom, a loss meant pride and the material weight, and for the bride, a win was not truly a win in the way outsiders imagined it; it was simply the right to start the relationship on a high note and prove her love to her partner by never exercising that right.

There was a kind of honesty to the custom that Alex, observing it from the corner, found he did not quarrel with.

A cold white light began to fill the chamber, spreading outward from the floor in thin, precise lines as a magic circle traced itself into existence at the heart of the space.

The time allocated for preparation had ended. The nobles significant enough to have been granted seats to view the ceremony had been settled in their places for some time already.

The excitement for the event was high, since the ceremony carried enough weight in its own right to draw their full attention, but those among them with a genuine understanding of the occasion knew something additional was at stake.

The prince had returned from the Ancestral Realm, and this was his first public display of what that time had produced in him.

The ceremony would serve as more than a wedding tradition. It would serve as information, delivered to every noble clan present with a seat to watch from, about whether the prince was worth investing in for the eventual succession to the demon throne, or whether he was someone to be set aside as a foundation for building something else entirely.

Though the ceremony would have to wait, since Alex had other plans.

Alex watched the teleportation circle complete itself from his position in the corner, the space around it turning hazy with the gathering energy, its inner workings clear to him because of his eyes of the Ancient.

The circle’s construction lay out before him with the clarity of an open book, and when the moment was right, he planted two Errors into its fabric.

The first ensured that the spell could not be interrupted or stopped once it had begun its final sequence. The second Error was simpler in its design and more specific in its purpose. It allowed Alex to be carried by the circle alongside its intended passenger, right before the vast audience and, more importantly, before the demon king.

Alex didn’t plan to make such a show of things, but if he could do it and give some humiliation back to the demons for all the suffering they were causing, he wouldn’t shy away.

The final second stretched.

Alex stepped through the hazy space above the circle, moving into its field with the unhurried ease of someone stepping through a door they had opened themselves, and not a single person present in the chamber was any the wiser.

A full second later, the chamber was gone, and what replaced it was noise.

The roar of an audience, vast and immediate, hit the air from every direction at once as the transport completed itself and delivered its passengers to the ceremony floor.

Alex opened his eyes to the roar of thousands.

The arena was vast and circular and bare, the smell of fresh blood and old death had soaked into the ground deep enough that no amount of maintenance would pull it out entirely, the arena wearing its history in the only way that arenas of this kind ever did, openly and without apology.

Around the floor, ascending rows of seating climbed in tiered steps to the heights of the structure, filled with the gathered weight of an audience, filled with the elites and powerful of the demon continent.

The crowd noticed Alex’s presence with the speed of thousands of eyes all pointed in the same direction, and finding something that did not belong to the picture they had been given.

The generals and the vastly powerful demons scattered through the seats and stationed at the arena’s perimeter caught it in the fraction of a second before the teleportation had even fully completed, their senses concluding before their minds had finished forming the question.

It did not matter. It was already too late.

Alex stepped out from behind Rongradin with the unhurried ease of someone who had calculated the timing precisely and had no reason to rush any part of what came next.

The prince was perceptive enough to register the shift in the crowd’s attention, the subtle redirection of thousands of gazes from him to the space directly behind him, and was a breath away from sensing the presence himself.

He began to turn, but it was already over.

Alex’s arm moved, a sleek black blade having arrived in his hand at some point between the teleportation completing and this moment, like it was always there and was simply waiting for the right second to make itself known.

The pridful blade had a presence that dominated the very reality around it. The moment it fell, it froze the very time. Its impossible edge came down in a single clean arc, not caring for the countless hundreds that many onlookers wished to slow it down.

Rongradin’s face held confusion for exactly one second.

Then it twisted into agony as his left hand reached instinctively for his right, or for the place where his right had been, finding instead a blood-slicked stump, the hand severed cleanly at the wrist.

The hand itself was now held in Alex’s grip, taken from the air before it could fall.

The crowd went silent, not the graduated quiet of an audience processing something unexpected. The immediate, total silence of thousands of people whose next breath had simply stopped, suspended between what they had just witnessed and the understanding of what it meant.

In that silence, the sound of Rongradin sliding one foot back across the arena floor to catch himself was audible to every row, and the collective gasp that followed it moved through the space like a single exhalation from a single enormous throat.

Alex turned.

He was smiling, the expression wide and deliberate, carrying none of the performance of someone who had done something reckless and was hoping for the best. It carried the quality of someone who had done exactly what they intended and was prepared for everything that came next.

He raised the severed hand.

He raised it toward the seat of honor at the colosseum’s center, a chamber carved directly into the black stone of the structure, its interior hung with crimson fabric, the kind of space that communicated the rank of its occupant before the occupant had done anything at all.

On the throne within it, a throne of abyssal black that seemed to absorb the available light the way the palace’s obsidian walls absorbed it, sat a man.

A king.

His features were striking, by nature or by something beyond nature, into precisely the right configuration. Handsome was an insufficient word for what his face was. His bearing was careless in the way that absolute confidence produced carelessness, the ease of someone who had not needed to concern themselves with what others might do in a very long time.

His crown was not metal or stone but a mantle of shifting darkness itself, gathered and shaped above his head with the permanence of something that had been there long enough to stop being remarkable.

His cold black eyes, however, barely concealed what moved in them.

Surprise. Genuine, unguarded, and therefore more significant than anything else visible in the entire arena.

The gasps that had moved through the crowd shifted now, taking on new textures as the initial shock found its companions. Terror arrived in some sections of the seating. Rage in others.

The particular quality of an audience that had just witnessed a profound transgression and was waiting to understand what the appropriate response was, because no one knew what would come next, and everyone was looking to someone else to provide it.

Who was this unknown figure? What gave him the right to enter their ceremonial ground uninvited, to injure their prince in the moment of his wedding ceremony, to raise that injury like a greeting aimed at their king with the particular, breathtaking audacity of someone who had calculated the response and found it acceptable?

The sacrilege of it.