Chapter 68: Elyen’s Gift

Mio

Her body moved against the pile of green meat.

The Dance decided the timing. Forty years of muscle memory threaded through her nervous system and pulled, and Mio went with it because the alternative was dying under a pile of orcs at ninety-one hit points.

The white pearl gauntlet on her left forearm hit first.

She felt the impact before she registered the motion. An orc’s chest caved under her palm, ribs folding inward, and her body was already rotating into the second strike before the first one landed.

The obsidian arm followed and punched clean through the one behind it. Bone fragments sprayed against the orcs on either side.

The third and fourth landed flat-palmed and drove through whatever they touched. The pile that had pinned her scattered outward, bodies launched off her in every direction, and by strike eight she was on her feet with nothing holding her down.

The rest of the Dance happened standing.

Strikes nine through sixteen carved through the orcs that had been pressing in behind the pile. Elyen’s forty years of river-stone precision filtered through a teenage girl running on adrenaline and two arms the elf never had.

The Dance was designed to flow. Mio bludgeoned. It was supposed to transition between targets with economy. She just hit the next thing in reach and let the obsidian arm sort out the difference.

Sixteen strikes in only four seconds. That’s all it took.

The gauntlet’s warmth faded. Her arms dropped to her sides, the Dance releasing her body back to her, and the sudden absence of purpose almost buckled her knees. She caught herself on the obsidian arm.

Her muscles ached in places she didn’t know she had muscles—deep in the hip flexors, through the connective tissue between her shoulder blades. Elyen’s body had trained for decades to handle this. Mio’s had not.

She stood in a ring of broken bodies. Life Blooms rising off them in clusters, green-white light lifting from the corpses. Her lungs burned and her hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

[HP: 91/3,066]

Still ninety-one. Four seconds of that and not a single hit had landed.

She cast Vitalize before her next breath.

[Vitalize]

[+438 HP]

[Vitalize]

[+438 HP]

The Blooms drifted toward her as she healed, Reservoir drinking them in. Numbers she didn’t bother reading. The pile had generated dozens, and the Dance had scattered dozens more across the arena floor behind her.

The drums had stopped.

The arena had gone quiet for the first time since she walked in. Half the horde still standing. The eagle’s nest king was on his feet. He barked something guttural down at his army below. The translation didn’t come. Didn’t need to.

The formations reformed. Shields up. Mages to the back tiers. The frontline locked shoulder to shoulder and the shamans started chanting again. They’d pinned her once. They could do it again.

The spells hit her chest and slid off.

She looked down at where they’d landed. Back up at the shamans.

They chanted louder. The second volley hit. She felt it arrive and leave. Nothing between. No immobilization. No voice-bind. The gauntlet on her left forearm pulsed once, warm, and the magic died on contact.

[Active Form: Gauntlet]

[Trait: Lotus Heritage — Zero Hesitation]

The Life Blooms from the Dance and the pile and everything before it still littered the arena floor. Forty, fifty, more than she’d ever had in one place—every last one sitting within chain distance of the next.

“Pon.”

The nearest Bloom detonated. The chain ripped through the frontline, each detonation triggering the one beside it. Blooms she’d laid down before the hammer hit. From the pile. From the Dance. All of them linked, and the Rupture tore through every one.

The concussion wave flattened everything standing within thirty meters. Shields bent in half. Orcs who’d locked formation were thrown backward into the stone tiers, their bodies cracking against the seats.

The sound was a single rolling thunder that echoed off the arena walls and came back louder.

[+4,200 Bloom]

[+6,100 Bloom]

[+3,800 Bloom]

The numbers came too fast to read. She stopped trying. The Reservoir counter climbed, bloated with the frontline’s worth of absorbed life.

[Engine: Objective — Complete]

Reward: 10,000 XP

Huh, that was easy.

The Reservoir kept filling. The Blooms kept coming. Everything the chain had killed was feeding her now, and there was a lot of dead.

[Level Up: 30]

[Level Up: 31]

[Level Up: 32]

[Level Up: 33]

[Level Up: 34]

[+25 Unallocated Points]

[Reservoir: 208,641/425,000]

The surviving orcs broke.

It started at the edges. The ones furthest from the chain who’d seen it roll toward them and stop just short. They turned first, and the ones behind them followed, and then the whole line collapsed inward. Shields dropped. Weapons abandoned.

They scrambled over each other to reach the exits, clawing at the stone tiers, shoving their own kind out of the way. Mages fled first. Shamans second. The frontliners who still had legs ran after them.

Where, they didn’t know. Anywhere from her.

She stood in the middle of the arena with Blooms still dissolving into her from every direction. Two arms at her sides. One black. One white.

“Mio!” Kaito’s voice from the upper concourse, carrying over the silence. “The core is the orc king!”

She looked up.

The eagle’s nest sat at the highest point of the arena, carved into the stone above the top tier. The orc king was standing at the edge of his platform, both fists at his sides, watching her through the haze of dissolving Blooms.

He hadn’t run.

Mori sneezed behind Kaito. Then again into her mask.

“Well done, little deer.” She sniffed, wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “That was actually impressive.”

She definitely didn’t see that praise coming.

Not from Mori.

“Time to wrap this up.”

Mori launched off the concourse on a column of thermal energy, rising in a clean arc over the arena and into the eagle’s nest. She landed back in the dirt three seconds later. One hand holding a small figure by the collar.

A boy.

Green-skinned, wide-eyed, tusks barely grown in. Couldn’t have been older than twelve.

He dangled from Mori’s grip with his feet kicking at nothing, both hands wrapped around her wrist trying to pry himself free, and the incursion shuddered around them.

“Here it is. The core.” Mori held it at arm’s length. “Kill it.”

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