Then the Primordial Court’s preparation area doors slammed open.

They stormed out.

Five of them, senior officials by their robes, moving onto the lower walkway with the kind of energy that didn’t belong to people following procedure and belonged entirely to people who were furious and had procedure available as a weapon.

The first one didn’t wait to reach the walkway railing.

“YOU KILLED HIM!”

His voice cracked through the silent arena like something breaking, pointing directly at me on the platform with his entire arm shaking from the force of the accusation.

“YOU KILLED A HIGH OFFICIAL OF THE PRIMORDIAL COURT!!!”

“IN FRONT OF EVERYONE!!!” a second one, a woman, her voice climbing, hands gripping the railing in front of her so hard the knuckles had gone pale.

“HE WAS ALIVE WHEN HE WALKED OUT THERE! HE WAS ALIVE AND YOU!!!”

She stopped and pressed both hands over her mouth, as if trying to calm herself down.

Her shoulders shook once.

“…He was my partner,” she muttered lightly, tears glistening on her eyelids.

“Twenty years. He was my partner for twenty years and you just—”

She couldn’t finish it.

A third official stepped forward, older, his composure more intact, but his eyes doing something that composure couldn’t fully cover.

“Aestrea Moon,” he said, formally, each word placed with the careful weight of someone holding something very heavy and trying not to drop it.

“By the authority of the Primordial Court, you are hereby accused of the assassination of a ranking official. You will submit to immediate detainment pending full tribunal review, or we will treat your non-compliance as confirmation of hostile intent toward the Court.”

“He was supposed to come back…”

A younger official, barely older than me by the look of him, was standing at the back of the group with his hands at his sides and his eyes fixed on the empty platform where Caelid had been.

His voice had the specific flatness of someone who had not finished processing what they were looking at.

“He was supposed to come back after this. We had… we made plans! After the competition, he was going to…” He stopped and swallowed hard.

“…H-he’s not coming back.”

Nobody responded to him.

The woman with her hands over her mouth made a sound that she immediately suppressed.

“DETAIN HIM,” the first official shouted again, back to full volume, the grief in him converting back into fury because fury was probably easier to fake.

“SOMEONE DETAIN HIM RIGHT NOW BEFORE HE KILL—”

Two restraint specialists emerged from the corridor behind them, divine-grade binding arrays already active in their hands, moving toward the platform access point.

I stood on the platform and watched all of it.

..That woman was probably his lover, but… definitely not his ex-wife, ahem…

That aside, the Court put them here on purpose.

Because a tribunal reviews evidence, but an arena full of witnesses reviews what they saw, and what they saw was a woman crying over someone I was registered to fight.’

I really don’t have an answer for this.

“That will not be necessary.”

Olivia came around the corner of the side corridor at a pace that hadn’t changed from every other time I’d seen her walk somewhere.

Her hands were clasped in front of her ceremonial robes. Her golden eyes moved across the group of Primordial Court officials with an expression that was still, technically, pleasant.

The senior official turned on her immediately.

“Overseer, this matter is entirely outside the academy—”

“It occurred on my platform… during my competition.”

“YOUR PLATFORM?” The first official, the loud one, stepped forward, his voice cracking again.

“ONE OF OUR OFFICIALS IS DEAD. CAELID IS DEAD. YOUR PLATFORM IS WHERE HE DIED, AND THE PERSON WHO KILLED HIM IS STANDING ON IT RIGHT NOW, AND YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT JURISDICTION—”

“Yes.”

Olivia indifferently replied.

The official stared deadly into her eyes, and Olivia returned his gaze with almost boredom, and then, she looked at the senior official.

“Your official entered this arena, walked onto a registered competition platform, and deployed a full domain of destruction before a single exchange occurred.” She let those words sit for exactly one second.

“In front of every person currently sitting in this arena.”

“He was defending himself from—”

“From what?” Olivia raised an eyebrow.

“From a registered opponent standing at his mark who had not yet moved?” She tilted her head slightly, almost mockingly.

“What was he defending himself from?”

Olivia smirked lightly.

“Unprovoked domain deployment against a registered opponent is an initiating aggressive act under divine law,” she continued calmly.

“Which means everything that followed falls under legitimate self-defense.” She looked at the restraint specialists.

“You can put those away.”

The specialists looked at the senior official.

The senior official looked at Olivia.

“We have witnesses! The entire arena watched—”

“—The entire arena watched your official deploy a destruction domain first,” Olivia stated.

“Yes. I’m aware. I was watching too.”

The woman with her hands over her mouth looked up.

Her eyes were red.

“He’s gone,” she said to Olivia directly.

“Whatever the law says, whatever the jurisdiction is, he’s gone, and that person on that platform is why.”

Olivia looked at her.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she spoke in a soft tone.

“That grief is real, and I won’t dismiss it.”

The woman’s chin trembled.

“But grief,” Olivia continued, gently, “is not evidence. And intent cannot be assumed from outcome alone.” She looked back at the senior official.

“If the Primordial Court wishes to file a formal review, the competition record is available through standard channels. Every second of every match was documented.”

“Including this one.”

The senior official held her gaze for a long moment.

Behind him, the younger official who had talked about plans was staring at the platform floor, not listening to any of it, somewhere else entirely.

“…This is not finished,” the senior official said finally.

“File the review. We’ll be here.”

They stood there for another moment, the group of them, grief and fury and professional calculation all sitting in the same space and none of them resolving cleanly.

Then they turned and walked back toward the corridor.

The woman went last.

She dramatically stopped at the door and looked back at the platform one more time with those red eyes, wiping them away.

Then she went through, and the door closed behind her.

Olivia turned toward the platform and directly looked at me, giving me a small wink before turning away and disappearing from my sight.

My question was…

How did she know that this was coming?

I looked at the corner she’d disappeared around for a moment longer than I needed to. Then I sheathed both swords and walked out of the arena and into the corridor beyond it without stopping.

The corridor was surprisingly empty.

But my mind was definitely not.

Outer Gods, huh…?

Beings that existed outside the established divine hierarchy entirely.

Something categorically different, entities that predated the current structure of the Divine Realm and everything beneath it, things that the oldest gods referred to as someone or something that one shouldn’t provoke.

They didn’t operate within the rules that governed divine beings… and the most ‘scary’ thing about it was that they didn’t have ‘authorities’.

They weren’t imprisoned by a single concept.

I think… they called it something like… Laws.

But other than that, this is going to be a really big problem if the Primordial Court is in contact with them.

I… can’t deal with an Outer God.

Even if I was at my strongest state…

That’s how damn scary they are.

Not to mention that Calied died trying to tell me that. Whatever they did to revive him, whatever was left of him inside that rotting body, he spent the last of it on that.

…Why, though?

I didn’t have a clean answer for that yet.

I turned a corner in the corridor and kept walking, the academy’s outer grounds visible through the high windows on my left, the afternoon light sitting across the stone in long flat bars.

The only thing I can attribute their appearance… is the breakthrough of their leader to the peak of the 9✯ True God Realm.

I stopped walking, stood in the empty corridor, and looked at the light coming through the window for a moment.

Five bases located. Intelligence compiled over months. A window created by their leader’s breakthrough attempt, where his attention would be turned inward.

Everything I’d built pointed to a specific moment.

That moment was now.

And now I knew that behind the Primordial Court was something I didn’t have complete information on.

So… I currently have two options.

Wait, and gather more information on the Outer Gods. Build a new timeline that accounts for them.

Or hit the Court now, while the window is open, before their leader completes his breakthrough and closes it.

Use what I already have, and move faster than they could ever expect, and then figure out the Outer Gods while the Court is burning.

I started walking again.

The answer wasn’t actually a choice.

Waiting meant giving them time to complete the breakthrough.

Taking the time to act meant dealing with a strong Peak 9✯ leader who had connections to Outer Gods and a well-run organization, rather than a disorganized one with five vulnerable bases and weak internal security.

Fuck…

I’ll need to ask for Olivia’s help this time.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep