I stepped forward.

What I landed on was air.

Aether Step.

A skill used mostly by knights when facing opponents who could fly high difficulty, high mana cost, requiring years of cultivation to pull off cleanly.

The gasps came all at once. The chatter cut off mid-sentence. Even the soldiers who had been whispering about the trash of House Ardyn went quiet.

I didn’t look at any of them.

I kept climbing.

Fifty-meters. I stopped there roughly level with where my parents sat, looking down at the arena floor the same way they were looking down at me.

From up here I could see their faces clearly for the first time.

Seraphina’s expression was unreadable, but her hands were folded too tightly in her lap.

Lucian’s face showed something between fury and something he hadn’t decided on yet. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

I turned my attention back to Aria.

"I’ll give you one chance. Surrender. If you don’t..."

"...Don’t blame your brother for being merciless."

I raised one hand, taking the stance of someone about to cast.

I expected her to step back. To reassess. To do the sensible thing.

She exhaled slowly instead.

"I can’t believe you’ve learned so many elements," she said, looking straight up at me. Her voice was steady. "Or that you’ve reached this level without anyone knowing. But don’t mistake one thing, brother. I am not weak either."

What is she fighting for? I studied her face from above. It’s not the throne. It never was. Then what.

She tightened her grip on her sword.

The air around her shifted.The flame answered her immediately.

She stepped forward. The gravitation spell pressed down on her.

It had no effect.

She stomped once and launched herself upward, sword aimed straight at me.

She burned through it entirely.

I ran the options quickly.

Normal spells wouldn’t reach her in time. She was moving too fast and her constitution was too high.

There’s one thing left.

I raised my hand.

"System. Villain Halo."

[It will cost PS host]

"Just do it."

[Aspect ’Villain Halo’ activated.]

Everything slowed.

Not stopped, slowed, pulled down to a fraction of its normal speed. Aria hung in the air mid-leap, sword extended, fire frozen mid-flicker. The soldiers below were still as paintings.

I looked around.

My body was wrapped in something unfamiliar.

A deep, quiet light that felt less like warmth and more like weight. The kind of presence that made a room rearrange itself.

And strings.

Thin colored lines connecting me to everyone in the arena. Most of them white. A few grey. Lucian’s was grey. Seraphina was white.

Aria’s was red.

Red.

I filed it away.

The light was already fading.

I looked at Aria suspended mid-air, sword inches from me, completely still.

"Hell’s Fire."

I had only tested it once. In the cave, alone, with nothing around me that mattered. It had dropped me to one knee and filled my mouth with blood. Bronze grade mana heart against high rank magic.

That was then.

Now I have a Silver grade Mana Heart. Mana veins open. Pain Resistance active. Ether Authority.

I raised my free hand and let it build slowly, controlled, nothing like that first reckless cast. The mana came from outside as much as inside, the All Elements affinity pulling from the air around me, feeding it steadily.

The flame appeared.

Blue. Not the blue of sky or water. It was Darker.

It was a colour not present in nature.

The space around it warped immediately. Heat radiating outward in slow suffocating waves, silent and total.

Time resumed.

Aria saw it.

For the first time since the duel began, she stopped moving.

She stopped on her own.

She stopped because something in her read the flame correctly before her mind caught up with what it was seeing.

Wrong, it said. That is wrong.

"What...."

"Hell’s Fire," I said quietly. "Once it touches something, it doesn’t stop. Not water. Not ice. Not barriers..."

"Not swords."

Her red flames recoiled from the blue like they were alive and afraid.

The arena had gone completely silent.

She closed her eyes.

One breath. Two.

The temperature in the arena dropped faster than it had dropped at any point in the duel — not gradually, not building, but arriving all at once like a door being opened onto winter. The frost that had retreated from the Hell’s Fire began to return from the edges of the stage. The air above the soldiers thickened with mist and drifting ice suspended in place.

Her mana output changed entirely. She stopped maintaining the gravitational resistance, stopped holding the red fire, stopped everything except one thing. Every reserve she had left was going into a single direction.

The ice in the air began to move.

Aria opened her eyes.

They were colder now.

"Realm of Endless Ice."

The Domain expanded outward from her body in every direction at once. The soldiers nearest the stage stepped back two full paces without realizing they had moved. The stone beneath her feet cracked in a ring as frost spread across the arena floor.

It was extraordinary.

I watched it expand toward me and thought genuinely, with no performance attached to it that in another year she was going to become something terrifying.

The Realm reached the Hell’s Fire.

The boundary between them was not clean. Deep red cold pressed inward while blue frost pushed outward, the collision filled the arena with cracking frost. Three seconds.

Four.

The soldiers had gone completely silent.

Then the Realm began to lose ground.

Not collapsing, retreating. The boundary moved outward from the Hell’s Fire one degree at a time, the ice closest to the blue flame disappearing piece by piece. The Realm kept losing ground.

Aria’s mana output was at its limit. I could feel it through the Ether Authority, the reservoir running shallow, The Domain unraveled piece by piece.

She held it for another two seconds anyway.

Then the Realm dissolved.

Not all at once. From the outside in, the ice in the air disappearing, the temperature rising by degrees, lingering in the stone and the breath she was taking that was slightly more deliberate than the ones before it.

She looked at the blue flame.

Then she looked at me.

"If I had more time," she said.

"You would find a way," I said. "Yes. I know."

She looked at me for one more moment.

Her sword arm came down. Slowly. Completely under her control.

She stood straight.

"This is your last chance, Aria."

She looked at the flame. Then at me.

"I yield."

Two words. Clear and even. No waver in them.

I closed my hand.

The blue flame went out.

The silence held for another full second before anyone moved.

I descended slowly and touched down at the center of the floor.

Turned toward Lucian’s seat.

"Does this mean I won?" A slight tilt of the head. "Or are you still in denial that your precious daughter just lost to your rascal son?"

Lucian’s hand closed around the armrest.

The stone cracked under his grip.

"How did you do it?" Flat. Cold. Nothing like his usual authority.

"Hmm? Losing your eyesight too, Father?"

"How did you use that many elements?" He stood. "You were not born with them."

There it is.

"I mentioned it already." I kept my voice easy. "I am above everyone here. No one comes close. And as for the elements I was always born with them. I simply never showed you."

...

"Just because you never saw it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there."

Lucian said nothing.

The crack in the armrest was still there.