Paragon of Skills

Chapter 247

Jacob's knees buckle.

The left leg gives first, then the right follows a half-second later. He hits the ground on both knees.

Cassian pulls his hand free from Jacob's chest with a wet, sucking sound.

Blood follows in a thick rush. It pours down Jacob's front, soaking through the torn armor on his body. He pitches forward onto his hands. His arms tremble. The fingers splay wide against the dirt, white-knuckled, trying to hold his weight.

Then they give out too, and he collapses face-first into the moss.

He is trying to breathe.

Garros can hear it—a horrible, gurgling, drowning sound. Jacob's mouth is open against the dirt. His back rises and falls in shallow, hitching spasms that look more like convulsions than breathing. One hand twitches toward where his sword fell. The fingers stretch, claw at the moss, and don't reach it.

Blood is spreading under him in a widening dark circle that the moss drinks greedily.

Cassian pulls his sludge-blade arm back and flexes it. The obsidian coating ripples, reconfiguring. He looks down at Jacob the way one looks at a pest.

He wipes the blood off on his thigh. Casual. Unhurried.

He is in no rush. The Fake Champion is drowning in his own blood. It's over.

Garros hasn't moved.

His legs are locked. His sword hangs limp at his side, the tip dragging in the dirt. His mouth is open but nothing comes out—not a scream, not a word, not even the air he forgot to exhale. He can hear the wet, rattling sound Jacob is making and it fills his skull until there is room for nothing else.

Get up, he thinks. The thought is aimed at Jacob. Or at himself. He doesn't know.

Get up. Get up. Get up.

Jacob does not get up.

Cassian turns to Garros.

His voice shifts—still distorted by the dark sludge crawling through his vocal cords, but almost conversational now. Friendly, even. The monstrous undertone hums beneath the words like a second voice harmonizing with the first.

“I watched the whole thing, Garros.”

Garros flinches at the sound of his own name.

“It was very impressive.“ Cassian tilts his head. ”I mean that sincerely.”

Cassian takes a step toward him.

Garros's hand tightens on his sword. The grip is instinctive, mindless—his body doing the only thing it remembers how to do. But his arm won't raise. The blade stays where it is, its tip scoring a shallow line in the dirt as his hand shakes.

“The Dark Champions have been watching you,” Cassian says with the voice of someone delivering good news. “Now that your curse is gone—“ He gestures loosely at Garros's body. ”You're more valuable than ever.”

Behind Cassian, Jacob twitches.

A spasm runs through his back. His hand moves again—a tiny, desperate crawl toward the sword that is still inches too far away. The gurgling sound changes pitch. It gets worse.

Garros's eyes snap to Jacob and then back to Cassian.

“You have a choice,” Cassian says.

He takes another step. He is close enough now that Garros can smell the dark sludge—a sweet, rotting stink, like overripe fruit left in a furnace. The sensory pits on what used to be Cassian's face flare open and vibrate faintly, reading Garros's heartbeat, his breathing, the fear chemicals soaking his blood.

“Join the Dark Champions as a Dark Champions yourself.” Cassian lets the words sit. ”You will get real power. Protection for your family. Everything the Academy could never give you.”

Garros's throat moves. He tries to swallow and can't.

“There is one condition.”

Cassian gestures down at Jacob.

Jacob, who is still twitching in the dirt. Still making that awful, drowning sound.

The pool of blood under him has reached Garros's boots.

“Give the final blow,” Cassian says. “Proof of loyalty. Proof that you have the heart to cut ties with the losing side.”

Cassian extends his hand toward Garros.

In his palm sits a Dark Seed.

Small. Dense. It pulses with a slow, rhythmic heartbeat of its own, like a living thing. The surface is slick and dark, and the light that touches it doesn't come back. It sits in Cassian's clawed palm and it breathes.

“Take it,” Cassian says. “Kill the Fake Champion. Become what you could never become at the Academy.”

Garros stares at the Dark Seed in Cassian's palm.

He stares at Jacob on the ground.

The gurgling has gone quiet. Jacob's back still rises and falls, but the intervals are getting longer. The blood has stopped spreading. Either the wound is clotting or there isn't much left to pour.

Garros's hand is still shaking.

His sword is still in it.

***

In the arena, the hope is dead.

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A moment ago, students were standing on their seats, chanting. Now, they’re… done.

Done is the right word.

There’s nothing, not a murmur.

It’s as if the tournament ended already—but three days prior.

A girl in the front rows puts both hands over her mouth. Her fingers press so hard against her lips that the knuckles go white. Students who were standing slowly sink back into their seats, one by one.

Nobody speaks. Nobody knows what to say.

Some in the crowd recognize him. He is a Duke's son. He is Marcel Valemont's twin—the young man who lost to Jacob Cloud in the first trial.

“A Duke's son.”

“He joined them.”

“Is Jacob dead?”

“He's not moving.”

“He's not moving—”

Somewhere in the stands, Marcel Valemont is watching.

He is not celebrating his twin's victory over the boy who shaved his head. He is sitting perfectly still with his spine rigid against the stone bench, staring at the mirror with eyes so wide that the white shows all the way around. His face is white like bleached paper.

The thing on the mirror wearing his brother's face is not the twin Marcel grew up with.

That is something else.

Marcel looks terrified.

The students around him have pulled away.

The gap happens in increments—a shifted knee, a body angled away, an elbow drawn in. Nobody makes a conscious decision to move. They've connected the face on the mirror to the face sitting among them. Marcel's twin. Marcel's blood. The empty space around him grows wider with every passing second, as if the dark sludge on the mirror might somehow be contagious.

The whispers sharpen.

“That's his brother.”

“Did he know?”

“Of course. He must have known. They're twins.”

Marcel doesn't move.

He stares at the mirror and his lips are slightly parted and his hands are flat on his thighs and he had absolutely no idea.

Higher up in the stands, Duke Dorian Valemont is gripping the armrest of his seat.

The wood groans under his fingers. His knuckles are bone-white. Bastian sits beside him, his eldest and heir.

The Duke's composure—the smooth, practiced control of a man who has spent decades navigating the razor-thin margins of court politics—is cracking in real time. His jaw is clenched so hard the muscle jumps visibly beneath the skin. A vein has risen on his temple. His eyes haven't blinked in too long.

“He's lost his mind,” Duke Dorian mutters to Bastian. “This was never the plan.”

“Father…”

“Dark Seeds. Murder on a live broadcast. In front of the entire Academy. In front of every noble family that matters.”

Duke Dorian's grip tightens. A piece of the wooden armrest splinters off and falls silently to the floor.

“My son just set fire to everything I've built.”

Bastian says nothing.

There is nothing to say.

The silence between father and eldest son stretches. On the mirror below them, fifty thousand students watch Cassian hold out a Dark Seed to the trembling boy while Jacob Cloud bleeds into the moss.

Bastian speaks after a long pause.

“He didn't need this,” Bastian says. Quietly. Almost to himself. “The training, the resources, the bloodline—Father, you gave them every advantage—more than I had. Why did he do this…”

Bastian's voice drops.

“I don't understand why he would throw all of that away for…”

Becoming a monster, is what Cassian thinks.

Duke Dorian doesn't answer.

His eyes are on the mirror. But they are not on Cassian anymore. They are on the other boy—the one kneeling in the dirt next to Jacob's body. The Blackmere runt.

The youngest son of a family that discarded him.

A boy who spent his life with nothing. Who trained in empty courtyards until his hands bled. Who just fought with a sloppy, imperfect, desperate technique—and won.

I wish he was my son.

That’s Duke Dorian’s fleeting thought.

***

Garros looks at the Dark Seed in Cassian's hand. He looks at the monsterified students ringing the clearing — fully feral, jaws hanging open, saliva and blood dripping from crystallized teeth. He looks at Jacob on the ground, facedown, the drowning sound barely audible now.

He slowly nods.

“Sure,” Garros mutters, walking toward Jacob.

Cassian grins. The satisfaction on his half-human face is total.

He holds out the Dark Seed.

Garros does not take it. He raises his sword with both hands instead. He turns toward Jacob's body.

Cassian lets the hand drop—this is even better. The boy wants to do it raw, before the power. Before the gift of a Dark God.

“Go ahead,” Cassian says softly. “You have a bright future in front of you.”

He walks to Jacob and kicks him onto his back so the Leader of Champions can see the face of the man about to kill him.

Garros stands over Jacob. The sword trembles in his grip.

He looks down at the young man who gave him everything.

Jacob, barely conscious, smiles at him with bloodied teeth.

Garros doesn’t close his eyes while looking at the dying Leader of Champions.

Then he drives the blade down.

The sword pierces Jacob's body.

Cassian exhales. A long, satisfied breath.

The fully monsterified students screech in response, a chorus of animal triumph.

A beat passes, with every monster present eager to hear Jacob stop breathing as Garros’s sword pierces his heart.

Then, however, the blade lights up.

White light erupts from the point of contact. And it’s not the same clumsy light that Garros’s sword emitted during the Dawn Thrust.

This is blinding.

Absolute.

It pours out of the sword and into Jacob's body and then outward in every direction like a detonation.

The light hits the monsterified students and they shriek, recoiling, clawing at their own faces. Cassian staggers backward, throwing an arm over his eyes. The feral students nearest to the blast collapse, the dark sludge on their bodies cracking and flaking off in sheets.

The light holds for several seconds.

The clearing is pure white.

Nothing is visible.

Then it fades.

There is a patting sound. Soft. Familiar. Firm, awkward, slightly too hard.

When Cassian looks again, Jacob is standing. His hand is on Garros's shoulder. The wounds disappeared. He is breathing. His eyes are open and clear.

“Your Rainbow Skill is something else,” Jacob says, calm.

He looks at the sword still stuck in his chest and then up at Garros. “Nice trick.”

Garros's hands are still locked on the hilt. He is shaking so hard his teeth are clicking together as he removes it leaving no wound behind.

He had no idea if that was going to work.

Cassian's laughter has stopped.

He is staring at Jacob with a expression of total incomprehension. Then the incomprehension curdles into rage.

“YOU’RE BOTH DEAD!”

He roars. The dark sludge on his body surges. It swallows his face entirely. His frame swells, limbs thickening, joints cracking and reforming, his silhouette losing the last traces of anything human. He becomes a hulking, monstrous shape twice his original size. His aura detonates upward —, past the threshold, into full True Diamond Rank.

Jacob watches the transformation with the expression of a calm man.

He turns to Garros while the hulking monster is about to lunge behind him, with all the rest of the monsters jumping in the air toward them.

“Thank you for saving my life. Now, though, you might want to take a few steps back. This is going to make a mess.”

He raises one hand and places it over his own face, fingers spread wide, like a mask.

“Reverse Domain,” Jacob says.