Paragon of Skills

Chapter 246

On the magnified mirror, the arena watches Garros standing in the ruined clearing, breathing hard, staring at his hands.

The crowd is still roaring.

“GARROS! GARROS! GARROS!”

The chant has not died.

It has only grown louder, fed by its own momentum, each repetition of the boy's name louder than the last.

Then Garros does something no one expects.

He drops to his knees in front of Jacob Cloud.

Both knees hit the dirt and he bends forward until his forehead presses into the mossy ground.

The arena goes silent.

The chant suddenly disappears. Fifty thousand people just watched this boy do the impossible and defeat an Early Diamond Rank enemy. And now he is on his knees with his face in the mud.

“What is he doing?”

“Did he collapse? Is he hurt?”

“No—look at his arms. He's bowing.”

Skaernex's eyes narrow. He watches the mirror, trying to read the situation. The boy is not injured. His body language is not that of a man who has been pushed past his limits. It’s just gratitude so enormous it has nowhere to go but down.

For a moment, even Skaernex doesn't understand what's happening.

***

In the forest, Jacob stares down at Garros.

He’s frowning. His mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.

“Garros,” Jacob coughs. “Get up.”

His voice is uncomfortable.

He did not expect this. He does not want it. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, which is the closest Jacob Cloud has come to looking awkward in the entire time Garros has known him.

“You don't understand,” Garros says. His shoulders are shaking. “This isn't about the fight.”

Jacob's mouth tightens. He reaches down toward Garros's shoulder but stops short of pulling him up.

“Jacob, you just gave my family the answer to a thousand years of failure.” The words come out in pieces.

“Every Blackmere who was told they weren't good enough. Every father who crushed his son for not measuring up. Every brother who looked at me like I was—”

His voice breaks entirely. He swallows. Forces it back together.

“It was sabotage,” Garros whispers into the dirt. “It was never real. None of it was real. And you just—you just gave us our future back.”

Jacob stands there, looking down at the back of the boy's head, and for a rare moment in his life, he has absolutely no idea what to say.

“I'll teach you the spell,” Jacob says. His voice is quiet. “I promise. But please—please—get up.”

Garros does not relent.

Jacob exhales through his nose. He looks at the sky. He looks at the trees. He looks at anything that is not a crying teenager prostrating himself in the dirt.

Then he reaches down, grabs Garros by both shoulders, and physically hauls him to his feet.

Garros comes up. His body is limp, unresisting, like lifting a sack of wet grain. Jacob steadies him and steps back, expecting to see the face of the young warrior who just burned through darkness with white light. Something resolute. Something heroic. The jaw set, the eyes hard, the look of a man who has just found his purpose.

Instead, Garros's face is a complete mess.

Snot running freely from both nostrils. Dirt smeared across both cheeks and ground into his forehead from pressing it against the moss. His eyes are red and puffy, swollen nearly shut. His lower lip is still trembling.

It is the least heroic face Jacob has ever seen.

Jacob pauses.

He stares at Garros for a long moment.

Then, wordlessly, he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a folded cloth tissue. He holds it out.

Garros takes it. He blows his nose loudly. The sound echoes through the quiet clearing like a small, wet trumpet.

Jacob pats him on the shoulder. Twice. Firm, awkward, slightly too hard.

It is the gesture of a man who is not naturally good at comforting people but is trying his best.

***

Back in the arena, the silence breaks after witnessing such a scene.

A ripple of laughter moves through the stands.

It is not mocking laughter. It is warm and disbelieving. A few students are laughing and crying at the same time, wiping their faces with their sleeves, not entirely sure which emotion they are feeling or whether there is even a difference at this point.

But the laughter fades quickly into something harder.

Students begin talking. Not about Garros anymore. About what comes next.

“If the Fake Champion can rip a divine curse out of a bloodline—”

“The weakest student in the year just completely leveled up on his first try!”

“Jacob Cloud barely broke a sweat doing it, did you see him? Did you see him just leaning against a tree!? He’s so arrogant!”

“Yeah, but it was so cool.”

“So what happens when the Dark Champions actually face him?”

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The Dark Champions handed out Dark Seeds. They turned students into monsters. They built an army of borrowed power and used it to terrify the Academy into submission. And Jacob Cloud just dismantled one of those monsters with his partner. Not even by fighting it himself—by fixing the boy standing next to him and letting him do it.

The monsterified student hit Early Diamond Rank.

And he lost to a boy who learned to fight that same day.

“If that's what happens to one of them—”

“Imagine what happens when Cloud fights them directly!”

“The Dark Seeds are nothing. They're cheap. They're borrowed garbage!”

“He's going to destroy them.”

Skaernex watches the shift happen in real time.

The fear in the stands—the dread of the Dark Champions that has been hanging over the Academy like fog for weeks—is thinning. It is not gone. The students are not foolish enough to think the danger has passed. But for the first time, they are not looking at the mirrors with dread.

Skaernex exhales through his nose. A puff of smoke escapes despite the disguise spell. He does not bother to suppress it.

He looks toward the VIP box, where his father sits behind those golden spectacles, undoubtedly cataloging every shift in the crowd's energy with the precision of a man who has been engineering human emotions for longer than most civilizations have existed.

You devious, devious old man.

***

“Jacob, I'm ready,” Garros says. His voice is still thick from crying, still raw in the back of his throat, but something has changed underneath it. There is conviction there. Real conviction, for the first time. “I believe we can actually win this. I know we can. If you teach me the spell for the curse, I can bring it back to my family, and now that I can fight—”

Jacob isn't looking at him.

Garros stops talking.

Jacob's eyes have shifted to the treeline at the edge of the clearing. His body hasn't moved. His posture hasn't changed. But his gaze has locked onto something in the brush with the fixed, unblinking focus of a predator that has just scented something wrong.

Garros follows his gaze.

The brush is moving.

Not one point. Multiple points. All around the perimeter of the clearing, at roughly equal intervals, the undergrowth is rustling with a slow, deliberate coordination that has nothing to do with wind.

Students emerge from the forest.

Their bodies are completely encased in dark sludge. Their original forms are barely recognizable underneath—the uniforms have been consumed, the skin swallowed, the faces smoothed over into featureless masks of wet, glistening black. Their eyes are void-dark. Some of them have lost human proportions entirely. Limbs elongated past what bone structure should allow. Joints bent at angles that make Garros's stomach lurch. Mouths stretched too wide, hanging open, the teeth inside replaced by rows of dark, crystallized sludge.

“Surely, Nimirea, you could have sold these powers better,” Jacob mutters, much to Garros’s confusion.

The students slowly create half an encirclement.

“Behind me,” Jacob says.

Their auras are filthy, Jacob thinks, his eyes moving from figure to figure around the perimeter. Every single one of them is at Peak Diamond Rank.

“Wait, they’re strong,” Garros realizes the same.

The student he just fought was Early Diamond Rank. Early Diamond Rank with regeneration, with sludge-blades, with a body swollen past its natural limits by borrowed dark magic. And even after the curse was removed, even with the Dawn Thrust working for the first time in his life, Garros had barely won.

These are all at Peak Diamond Rank.

“They're going to die soon,” Jacob mutters. “The Dark Seeds have burned through their bodies completely. There's nothing left to save. But until they collapse, their auras have reached full peak.”

“What?” Garros asks, confused. “They’re dead?”

“Walking corpses,” Jacob nods.

The monsterified students attack.

They come from all sides at once. A coordinated rush of sludge-blades and distorted, inhuman screams that erupt from every point of the perimeter simultaneously.

Jacob steps forward, ready to cut through them.

Then he feels it.

One aura among the pack that is different.

Not just Peak Diamond. It has a foot in True Diamond Rank. It is buried in the middle of the formation, masked by the bloated, filthy auras of the fodder students surrounding it. Their corrupted signatures are so swollen and chaotic that they blur together into a single wall of dark noise—and behind that wall, moving faster than any of the others, something is accelerating.

A screen, Jacob realizes. The thought arrives with the clarity and the cold of ice water. They weren't an attack. They were a screen. The fodder students were meant to mask the True Diamond signature.

Until it was already past him.

And aimed at Garros.

Jacob's head snaps around.

He realizes in the same instant that none of the attacks are directed at him. The sludge-blades swinging from the perimeter, the elongated limbs reaching through the air, the bodies hurtling forward in their mindless, coordinated charge—every single one of them is converging on the boy standing behind him.

They want to kill him, Jacob thinks. He just became a symbol of hope…

Jacob doesn't have time to do much. He’s been caught completely off guard by this development. If they had attacked him, Skills or not, he would have killed them all. But Garros…

He makes a split-second decision.

He throws himself between Garros and the incoming wave.

His arm catches Garros across the chest. The force of it lifts the boy off his feet and sends him tumbling backward out of the kill zone. Garros hits the dirt hard. He rolls. The breath is knocked out of him and the world spins.

Jacob is not clear.

He parries the first jagged blade. He kills second attacker with a single horizontal cut that separates the monsterified student at the waist. The third he takes through the shoulder—a sludge-blade punching through the muscle and out the back. He kills the fourth anyway, driving his sword through its chest one-handed while the fifth buries a crystallized limb in his side.

He kills six of them. Seven. Eight.

It is not enough.

Multiple sludge-blades pierce his body simultaneously. One through the shoulder that is already bleeding. One through the thigh that drops his weight onto his back foot. One through the side that scrapes along his ribs and comes out dark and wet.

But the worst one—the fastest one, the True Diamond one—punches clean through his lung from behind.

The blade enters between Jacob's shoulder blades and exits through his chest.

Garros looks up from the ground.

He sees Jacob standing in the center of the clearing with dark blades buried in his body. Blood is pouring from multiple wounds—his shoulder, his side, his thigh—soaking into the moss and pooling around his boots. The blade through his lung has exited through his chest in a wet, dark point. Jacob is still on his feet. His hand is still gripping his sword.

But his breathing is a wet, rattling sound that Garros has never heard a living person make.

The True Diamond attacker steps forward out of the press of bodies.

Unlike the others, he is not fully monsterified. The dark sludge covers his arms and torso, crawling up his neck in thick veins, but his face is still visible underneath.

“Cassian,” Jacob rasps slowly.

His hand is the one buried in Jacob's lung.

“There you are,” Cassian says.

His voice is distorted by the sludge—deeper, resonant, with a wet undertone that vibrates in the bones. But it is coherent. And it is dripping with satisfaction.

“The Fake Champion.” Cassian tilts his head, looking at the back of Jacob's skull with something between amusement and contempt. “Finally exposed. Finally dying.”

He twists the blade in Jacob's chest.

The sound it makes is something Garros will hear in his nightmares for the rest of his life. A grinding, sucking, wet rotation of crystallized sludge inside living tissue. Jacob's body jerks. A thin line of blood spills from the corner of his mouth.

“Your mother would be proud,” Cassian says. He leans closer, his lips near Jacob's ear. “Oh wait—she's about to be fucking dead too, isn't she?”

Jacob looks down at the hand protruding from his chest.

He studies it for a moment.

Garros is on the ground. His hands are flat against the dirt. His fingers are digging into the moss and he cannot make them push him up. He cannot make his legs move. He cannot make any part of his body do anything at all.

Jacob's sword slips from his fingers.

It hits the moss without a sound.