Chapter 96: Blood Writ II

James’s uncle chose that moment to step into the center of the room.

He had stayed back during the confrontation, letting it run, and he came forward now with his expression arranged into something that looked like a father’s disappointment for the benefit of every important guest watching.

"This is not what tonight was meant to be," he said while his voice carried the practiced regret of a man who had decided in advance exactly how concerned he wanted to appear. He turned toward Cormac with a slow shake of his head. "You have embarrassed this family in front of our guests. This was a celebration, and you turned it into a spectacle."

The words sounded like a reprimand, but there was nothing underneath them. He did not order Cormac to withdraw. He did not apologize to James or to his mother. He performed disappointment at the volume the room needed to hear it, and the performance let Ganner Corp stand above the mess rather than inside it. To the investors and TRB officials and foreign buyers watching, the family head was a reasonable man caught managing two young men who had let emotion ruin a good evening.

Across the room, Adrian had not moved.

He stood near the same column he had stood beside all night, and he had not celebrated, had not stepped forward, had not said a single word during any of it. He watched James sign and he watched James’s face while he signed, and his expression held the same quiet attention he gave to a guest list. He was not thinking about the punch or the insult or the spectacle his brother had made.

He was thinking about what the room would look like in three months, and what it would mean for the family if James walked out of that duel alive.

Finn reached James while the official was still confirming the record.

"What the hell was that," he said, low and tight, the anger in his voice running alongside something closer to worry. "You let him bait you into a Blood Writ."

"He insulted my mother," James said. "Twice."

"I know. I heard." Finn’s jaw worked while he glanced toward Cormac and back. "That’s exactly what he wanted, James. He took a punch on purpose so he’d have the opening to call the writ. You walked straight into it."

"I know what he did."

"Then why—"

"Because the second one wasn’t about baiting me," James said quietly. "It was about her. And I’m not going to stand in a room full of people and let that sit."

Finn did not have an answer for that, because there wasn’t a clean one.

Marcus arrived a moment later, and where Finn had come as a friend, Marcus came as someone already calculating the shape of the problem. He looked at James with none of Finn’s heat.

"A Blood Writ isn’t a guild dispute," Marcus said. "It isn’t something Emerald Spire can make quiet calls about and erase. Once it’s recorded with TRB oversight, the only people who can end it are the two who signed it. Influence doesn’t touch this."

"I’m not asking Emerald Spire to touch it," James said.

"Good. Because it can’t." Marcus held his gaze for a moment longer. "You understand what you signed. Most people who sign these are angrier than they are ready."

"I understand it."

Finn looked between the two of them, caught between his father’s flat practicality and his own worry, and the gap between the two reactions left him standing there with nowhere useful to put any of it. Marcus was already treating the duel like a fixed condition to be managed. Finn was still standing in the part where his friend had just agreed to a fight to the death.

James saw it on him and spoke before Finn could. "We’ll talk later. Not here."

Finn held his eyes for a second, then nodded, because there was nothing else to do in a room full of cameras.

James walked out of the ballroom with his mother and Nyra a few minutes later.

The crowd parted to let them through, but nobody looked away. Some faces held shock, some held the bright awful interest of people who had just watched something they would be talking about for weeks, and a few already had the distant calculating look of people working out what a Ganner-versus-Necromancer death duel would mean for the market, the guilds, and the value of every name attached to it.

His mother did not say anything while they moved through the room. She held Nyra’s hand on one side and stayed close to James on the other, and she kept her face composed until they were past the doors, but the composure was the kind that cost something to hold.

Nyra looked up at her, then at James, and tugged lightly at his sleeve. "Daddy, is the bad man coming?"

"No," James said. "We’re going home."

"Are you hurt?"

"No." He kept his voice even for her. "I’m fine. We’re just leaving."

She accepted that the way she accepted most things, by holding on a little tighter and staying close, and the three of them walked out through the entrance where the press had been waiting all night.

Outside, the noise of the hall dropped away behind the closing doors, but the quiet did not make any of it less real. The writ was signed. The date was set. Three months was the whole of it, and James already knew the next three months would not look like the last one.

By the time James got his mother and Nyra home, the ball was already on every screen in the country.

The clips spread the way these things spread, fast and out of order and stripped of context. One video showed only James crossing the floor and putting Cormac down with a single punch, theCRACKof it clear over the gasps, with no audio of what had been said before it. Another caught Cormac’s insults but cut off before the punch, framing James as the one who escalated. A third showed O’Shea catching the ice fist in one open hand and held on that moment because it looked impossible. A fourth focused entirely on the writ itself, on the two names being recorded and the quiet, flat way James had saidI accept.

The public split before the night was over.

Some people watched the full sequence and said plainly that James had been provoked, that any son would have swung after hearing his mother spoken about that way. Others watched the cut that started with the punch and said the Necromancer of Team Zero had finally shown what he really was under the broadcast-friendly image. Ganner-friendly accounts moved quickly to frame Cormac as a grieving brother demanding answers about a missing sibling, a man pushed past his limit by the person he believed responsible. Challenger forums skipped the morality of it entirely and went straight to the odds, arguing about class matchups and level estimates and whether a Legendary Necromancer at Level 17 could take a Ganner heir in a straight fight to the death.

Sometime after midnight, TRB released a short official statement. It confirmed that a Challenger Blood Writ had been invoked and accepted under recognized witnesses, that the terms had been formally recorded, and that TRB oversight had been scheduled for three months from the date of the challenge. It offered no opinion and took no side, which somehow made the whole thing feel more serious rather than less.

By midnight, the duel was no longer a family matter.

It was national news.