Paragon of Skills

Chapter 250

A spectre appears at midday when the students are awaiting for all the first-year students to come back.

It materializes above the center of the arena. It's a translucent shape, vaguely humanoid, wreathed in black smoke.

Slowly, people start noticing it and pointing at it.

"What's that?"

"No idea, is that part of the tournament?"

"It looks... kinda ominous, though."

There's a few, however, who suddenly make the right connection.

"That's from the Dark Champions."

In a matter of minutes, fifty thousand students stare upward.

And then, as if it was waiting for their attention, the spectre releases a burst of corrupted aura.

In the lower stands, a young woman grabs the arm of the man next to her. He does not shake her off.

In the middle rows, students who were eating drop their food without noticing.

The spectre speaks with a voice coming from the wreaths of smoke.

"Tomorrow," it says. "The Dark Champions of Asmodeus arrive at Ytrial Academy."

The smoke pulses.

"We will show you what real Champions are made of."

The spectre suddenly dissolves. The black smoke thins, drifts, and is gone.

In the VIP box, all heads turn toward the Headmaster.

"Why didn't you do anything?" Queen Matriarch Maelthra asks the Headmaster.

"Let them come," the Headmaster adjusts his golden spectacles. "My students are ready."

***

The students from the second trial begin appearing in the arena minutes later.

They materialize in bursts of light, dumped unceremoniously onto the stone floor, most of them landing hard. Some on their backs. Some on each other. A young man materializes six feet above the ground and hits the stone with a yelp. A girl appears face-first in someone's lap and immediately starts swinging.

The arena watches on but the mood is all sorts of wrong.

These should be triumphant returns. These are the survivors of the trial, the strongest of the year. But the spectre's words are still sitting in the air like the smell of the smoke, and the students who land on the stone don't look like good contenders to fight the hordes of the God of Monsters.

Then a main gate opens.

Jacob Cloud walks through first with his now signature Skill still on, bare from the waist up, skull tattoos covering every inch of visible skin, the single white wing shifting behind his left shoulder.

King Vyrrak Skarathys is beside him, his Platinum armor dented and dark with dried blood that is not his own.

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Behind them both, at the edge, the Sacrifice walks lightly through the gate.

His azure robes are immaculate. His golden eyes are calm. His aura is sealed so tight that anyone below Diamond would not feel it at all. He is beautiful and still and the students nearest to him pull away without knowing why.

The three of them cross the arena floor together. The crowd, which has been buzzing with dread since the spectre, goes quiet in a different way.

"JACOB!"

It starts with one voice. Then ten. Then a hundred. The chant erupts — louder than before, sharper, with an edge that was not there when they chanted barely an hour ago. It is the chanting of people who just learned the Dark Champions are coming tomorrow and need, desperately, to believe that someone can stop them.

"JACOB! JACOB! JACOB!"

Vyrrak does not acknowledge the crowd. He walks with the steady, massive dignity.

The Sacrifice does not acknowledge the crowd either.

But not for the same reason.

Where is she.

His eyes are already moving toward the the lower levels. The places where you'd expect to find a crippled tavern maid.

She is always where she should not be.

She's not in the front rows. She's not by the—

"BAAL!"

The voice cuts through the chanting.

The Sacrifice's head turns.

Cecilia is pushing through the crowd at a speed that should not be possible for a girl with a wooden leg. She is shoving past students with her one arm, her eyepatch crooked, her hair a disaster, her face red and blotchy in a way that means she has been crying recently.

Students move out of her way because of the person she is running toward.

The Sacrifice stops walking.

He should not stop.

He has been trained. He should maintain the mask, keep his pace, greet her with the pleasant, calibrated warmth he wears for—

Cecilia hits him.

One arm around his waist. Her face pressed into his chest. The wooden leg skids slightly on the stone and she compensates without thinking.

She has been compensating for that leg her entire life.

The impact is harder than it should be. She is small but she was moving fast and she did not slow down.

His body registers the collision and does what it has been trained to do: his weight shifts, his balance corrects, his hands come up to—

To what.

His hands hover in the air behind her back. They do not know where to go. No one trained him for this.

"You're alive," Cecilia says into his chest. Her voice is muffled by the fabric of his robes. "I watched the whole thing on the mirror. You went into the forest with the Dragonkin and I couldn't see you after that and then there were monsters everywhere and then Jacob almost DIED and—"

"Cecilia."

"—and that boy saved him and then the fire and the ASH and I couldn't find you on the mirror ANYWHERE—"

"Cecilia."

She pulls back enough to look up at him. Her one eye is red-rimmed and wet. She has been crying. She is also glaring at him as if the crying is his fault, which, in her accounting, it probably is.

"I'm fine," the Sacrifice says. The mask is up. The voice is warm, pleasant, perfectly controlled. "You shouldn't have worried."

"You went into a forest full of MONSTERS."

"I go into places full of monsters quite regularly."

"That's not COMFORTING, Baal."

Baal.

Her arm tightens around his waist.

The Sacrifice stands very still. He is aware of the crowd — fifty thousand students, some of whom are now watching the terrifying Blood of the Devils being clutched by a one-armed, one-legged tavern maid who barely reaches his chest. He is aware of Maelthra's presence somewhere above, in the VIP box.

He is aware of all of this.

His left hand comes down. Slowly. It settles on the back of her head. One touch. Light. Barely there.

"You're getting my robes wet," he says.

"Good," Cecilia says. She does not pull away. "They need it. You always look too clean. It's suspicious."

She does not let go.

The Sacrifice does not make her.

Behind them, the crowd is still chanting Jacob's name. Garros is somewhere in the noise, shouting louder than anyone. Vyrrak has already crossed the arena floor and disappeared through the far gate without looking back.

None of it reaches him.

His left side is very warm.

And wet.