Chapter 475: The Heavens Shall Fall (XVI)

Three weeks passed.

The festival ended.

The faction representatives went back to wherever faction representatives went when they weren’t being humiliating to academy students in public arenas.

The bracket boards came down.

The competition documentation got filed somewhere administrative and stopped being anyone’s immediate problem.

Life returned to its normal shape.

Or as normal as things got around here.

And right at this moment, I was sitting on the edge of the academy’s courtyard fountain with a cup of coffee.

Kael was sitting beside me, explaining something.

He had been explaining it for approximately twelve minutes, and I had understood roughly the first two of them, after which the explanation had taken a turn I couldn’t fully follow and had stopped trying to.

“—and THAT’S why the secondary ranking system for divine artifact appraisal is completely and fundamentally broken at its core,” he finished, with the energy of someone landing a point they were satisfied with.

Tyrian, standing across from us with his own cup, looked at him.

“That’s not what you said at the beginning.”

“It’s what I meant at the beginning.”

“At the beginning, you were talking about the market vendor who overcharged you for that crystalline fragment.”

“Which is a symptom of the broken system—”

“You paid three times the listed value because you didn’t check the listing.”

“Because the listing system is BROKEN—”

“The listing system is fine. You didn’t use it.”

“I shouldn’t HAVE to use it, Tyrian, if the market had any kind of basic regulatory—”

“How much did you overpay?” I asked.

Kael paused.

“…That’s not the point…”

“How much?”

“The point is the systemic—”

“Kael.”

“…Forty intermediate divine crystals,” he mumbled.

Tyrian pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Forty…?”

“It was a very nice fragment.”

“Forty intermediate divine crystals are not a systemic failure,” Tyrian stated. “It’s you not checking the price before agreeing to it.”

“I was in a hurry.”

“You were not in a hurry. I was standing next to you. You spent eleven minutes looking at it.”

“Eleven minutes of which I was being systematically misled—”

“By a vendor who named a price and waited for you to accept it.”

“WHICH IS MISLEADING BY OMISSION—”

I drank my coffee.

The courtyard filled gradually, students arriving in ones and twos from the dormitory direction.

The morning light sat across the fountain in a flat gold rectangle that moved by degrees as the sun climbed.

Normal morning.

Three weeks ago, I had been standing on a competition platform watching a man rot from the inside and receiving information about Outer Gods from his last breath.

Now I was listening to Kael explain why forty divine coins were society’s fault.

I appreciated both types of mornings for different reasons.

“Anyway,” Kael uttered, deciding the systemic critique had run its course. He stretched both arms above his head.

“What are you doing today?”

“Things.”

“Incredibly specific, thank you.”

“Training this morning. Preparation this afternoon.”

“Preparation for what?”

I drank my coffee.

“Things…” I repeated.

Kael looked at Tyrian… the two of them weirdly stared at each other.

“He’s been like this for three weeks,” Kael added, as if I wasn’t sitting between them.

“I’m aware. I’ve also been here for three weeks.”

“Something’s happening.”

“Something is always happening with him.”

“Something specific.”

“Something is always specifically happening with him.”

Kael turned back to me.

“Are you going to tell us what it is?”

“No.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Probably.”

“Are we involved?”

“No.”

“Are you SURE, because last time you said we weren’t involved, we ended up—”

“You’re not involved, Kael.”

He accepted it.

Which meant he immediately moved to the next thing.

“Okay, fine.” He turned on the fountain edge to face me.

“The festival is done. The competition is done. The ranking freeze is lifted.” He pointed at the ranking board on the far courtyard wall.

“When are you challenging Emyria and Thaliel?”

Tyrian also looked a little curious about this, but didn’t show much.

The ranking board showed the current standings in clean official script.

Thaliel, Rank one.

Emyria, Rank two.

Aestrea Moon, Rank five.

“Today.”

Kael blinked.

“…Today?”

“Today.”

“As in this today. The current day that is happening.”

“Yes.”

He stared at me before turning to Tyrian.

“He said today,” he mumbled, needing a witness.

“I heard him,” Tyrian nodded, his expression shifting into that focused measuring quality he got when something had moved from hypothetical to actual.

“Both of them?”

“Both.”

“Same day?”

“Same day.”

Kael looked at the ranking board.

“…You are challenging the lesbian couple, huh…”

“Kael.”

“I’m just contextualizing.”

“You’re going to walk up to the two women who are in love with your girlfriend,” he stated, ignoring me, “and challenge them for the top two spots. Today. While they already don’t like you.”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“They threw photographs at your face.”

“They did.”

“That’s not better.”

“It’s more accurate.”

Tyrian was looking at the ranking board with his arms crossed and his chin slightly down.

“You’re going for rank one.”

“Rank two first. Then rank one.”

He nodded slowly.

“Thaliel’s domain, it’s very complicated to deal wi—”

“I know.”

“Her full authority in a sustained—”

“I know, Tyrian.”

He looked at me for a moment, then he picked his cup back up.

“Alright…”

“ALRIGHT?! That’s your reaction?! This is rank one and two, this is THALIEL—” Kael stared at him. ”

“I’m aware of what it is.”

“Then REACT—”

“I am reacting. My reaction is alright.”

I finished my coffee, set the cup down, stood up, and stretched once.

“Training first, and challenges go in this afternoon.”

Kael looked up immediately.

“We’re coming.”

“You don’t need to—”

“We’re definitely coming.”

Tyrian didn’t mention anything, which meant he was also coming.

“Fine.”

Training ran until midday.

Two hours with Ruli and Leaf on the lower platform, another hour alone working through the sword art variants, the last thirty minutes sitting in stillness, letting my divine energy settle back into its resting distribution after the output.

By the time I walked back through the main academy building, the afternoon crowd had filled the corridors.

Kael and Tyrian were waiting at the ranking hall entrance.

Kael had somehow acquired food between this morning and now and was eating it with the energy of someone who had been waiting longer than he’d expected and had needed something to do with his hands.

“You’re late!”

“I said afternoon.”

“It’s deep afternoon.”

“It’s still afternoon.”

He looked at Tyrian.

Tyrian looked at his own watch with the expression of someone declining to get involved.

The ranking hall was a wide, high-ceilinged room that occupied the academy’s central administrative wing, its walls lined with the official challenge boards, the standing rankings displayed on a permanent divine-inscribed panel at the far end that updated in real time whenever a challenge concluded.

The room was moderately busy, with students moving between the boards, and a few officials at the central desk processing paperwork.

I walked to the challenge desk.

The official behind it, an older woman with the specific composure of someone who had been processing ranking challenges for a long time and had stopped finding any of them surprising, looked up.

“Name and challenge target,” she asked.

“Aestrea Moon. Rank five.” I looked at the board.

“Challenge against rank two. Emyria.”

The official’s pen moved.

She wrote it down, and then stamped, before pinning the notification to the outgoing board without any particular reaction.

“Challenge registered. A notification will reach the challenged party within the hour. They have forty-eight hours to accept or forfeit.”

“They’ll accept today.”

The official looked at me over the top of her glasses.

“The challenged party has forty-eight hours,” she repeated, in the tone of someone who had said this many times.

“Understood.”

I turned away from the desk.

Kael was staring at the notification she’d just pinned to the board with both hands in his pockets and his food forgotten in his other hand.

“That’s it? You just… walk up and write it down?”

“That’s how ranking challenges work,” Tyrian said.

“I know how they work, I mean, it felt very casual for something this significant.”

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know. More. Ceremony. Something.”

I started walking toward the corridor.

“Now we wait, I guess..”

“For how long?”

“Until she accepts.”

It took forty minutes.

We were sitting in the second-floor common area, Kael working through his food, Tyrian reading something, me looking at nothing specific and thinking about things that weren’t the ranking challenge, when the notification came through on the official academy channel.

[Challenge accepted. Emyria, Rank Two, accepts the challenge of Aestrea Moon, Rank Five. Match scheduled for the ranking arena, third hour of the afternoon. Today.]

Kael looked up from his food.

“Already?”

“She accepted fast,” Tyrian declared, looking at the notification.

“She’s been waiting for it,” I added, stretching my arms slighly.

This was going to be a burdensome battle, after all, Emyria is the Goddess of Creation, one of the authorities more annoying to deal with.

But well…

I definitely won’t lose.

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