Chapter 81: Duel With The 2nd Rank, Competition Over

They flew far before they stopped.

The Mountain was generous in its hiding places, and Lyra found them a good one: a deep cleft high on a quiet shoulder of rock, sheltered from sightlines on three sides, its mouth narrow enough to watch and wide enough to hold the grounded Dragonfly. She seeded the approaches with her eyes and her snares, and only then did the team let themselves breathe.

Their five bells floated among them, one apiece, exactly as they’d claimed them in the first hour. The thirty had carried none to take. Aelira gave each bell a glance to confirm it sat secure, untouched by any rival hand.

The hours passed quietly. They rested in shifts, ate, let the easy ache of motion drain out of them. Beyond the cleft the Mountain churned with distant violence, flares of combat blooming and fading across its immensity as the cull ground on.

Three hours into the quiet, Lyra’s ears went up.

"Incoming," she said, but her voice held more wariness than alarm this time. "Nine of them. Not sneaking. Walking right up. They know exactly where we are."

The team rose, unhurried, and went to meet them at the mouth of the cleft.

The newcomers stopped a respectful distance off, nine figures arrayed loosely across the rock. Four carried bells. Four did not. And at their head stood a young man who needed no introduction, though Lyra’s quiet readout supplied one anyway, a name and a number that made even Rivera’s brow lift.

[Cael Barkhorn. Rank: 2nd.]

Second. Out of ten thousand.

He was tall and easy in his stance, golden-eyed and sharp-featured, with the unhurried confidence of someone who had never yet met a problem he couldn’t punch through. His gaze swept the team and settled, with clear and pointed interest, on Rudrean.

A slow smirk crossed his face.

"I’ve been looking for you," Cael said.

Rudrean tilted his head. "Have you, now."

"Mm." Cael strolled a few paces closer, hands loose at his sides. "Word travels on this rock, even out here. They’re saying a no-name ranked ninety-seventh took apart Davyon Lenerith in a betting duel like the man was standing still. Rank eight." He spread his hands. "And I thought, now that is interesting. Because a man who beats rank eight without trying is not a rank ninety-seventh man. He’s something else, wearing a ninety-seventh man’s number." His golden eyes gleamed. "I came up here to find out what."

’He saw straight through you the moment he heard the story,’ Isalyn murmured. ’Sharp. And dangerous, at second on that board. Be careful how much you show him, darling.’

"So here’s my proposal," Cael went on, before Rudrean could answer. "A duel. You and me. Magic Suits on, first breach loses, the way the arena does it." He nodded back at his four bell-less companions. "If you win, we walk. You never see us again, I give you my word, and my word’s good. But if I win..." The smirk sharpened. "I take four bells off you and yours. Even trade. Four of my people get their tickets, and you’ve still got plenty time left over to take from others." He cocked his head. "Fair, for the curiosity you’ve stirred up. Don’t you think?"

The team exchanged glances.

Rudrean only studied Cael for a quiet moment, weighing the man, the offer, the eight at his back. A duel kept it clean. A duel ended it without the whole knot of them tangling, without bodies, without the kind of mess that drew eyes.

"All right," he said simply. "First breach. You lose, you leave."

Cael’s grin widened. "Now we’re talking."

...

They squared off on the open shoulder of rock, fifteen meters between them, the others drawing back to the edges to watch.

Cael opened hard and fast, no testing, no feeling-out. He came in low and rising, his fists wreathed in a dense golden force that warped the air around them, each blow carrying enough weight to crater stone. He was good. Genuinely, frighteningly good, a second-ranked talent with a martial sense honed razor-sharp, and against almost anyone else in the pool he would have ended it in three exchanges.

Rudrean was not almost anyone else.

He read the first blow before it landed and simply wasn’t where it fell. The second he turned aside with a fingertip, redirecting that crushing golden force a hair off-line so it spent itself on empty air. The third he met, palm to fist, and the shockwave blew a ring of dust off the rock in every direction, and Rudrean did not move so much as a step.

Cael’s eyes widened.

He pressed harder, faster, a blistering chain of strikes that would have overwhelmed a lesser fighter under sheer volume. Rudrean flowed through all of it. White ribbons unspooled along his arms, rings of light forming at his wrists and ankles as his Combat Art woke, and his movements smoothed into something that looked less like fighting and more like a man walking unhurried through a rainstorm without getting wet. Every blow found nothing. Every opening Cael thought he saw closed before he could take it.

Then Rudrean began to answer.

A short, fused pulse of fire and wind caught Cael’s guard and rocked him back a step. A flicker of the near-invisible Boreal Puncture, dialed down to a warning, scored a thin smoking line across the rock between Cael’s feet and made him flinch aside. Rudrean did not chase the kill. He suppressed. He crowded Cael’s rhythm, broke his footing, took away every angle the man tried to build, until the second-ranked talent on the Mountain was fighting purely to stay upright and not landing a thing.

"You’re holding back," Cael ground out, half furious, half delighted. "You’re still holding back."

"Yes," Rudrean said.

And ended it.

He slipped inside one last desperate golden haymaker, planted his palm flat against Cael’s chestplate, and released a single tight burst, a compressed knot of fire and wind detonating point-blank against the suit. The Magic Suit flared, shrieked, and breached, light cracking across its surface as its protection failed in a spray of dissipating sparks. Cael staggered back, unhurt beneath it, but his suit unmistakably, visibly broken.

Silence on the rock.

For a moment Cael just stared down at his own breached armor. Then, slowly, he began to laugh, a real laugh, rueful and bright.

"Knew it," he said, shaking his head. "Knew you were something else." He looked up at Rudrean, golden eyes alight with something between frustration and pure, hungry respect. "A man wearing a ninety-seventh number. Right."

He turned to his four bell-less companions and jerked his head back down the slope.

"We’re done here. A deal’s a deal." His gaze cut back to Rudrean one last time, and the smirk returned, edged now with a promise. "I’ll see you inside the realm, ninety-seven. Try not to keep hiding the good stuff. It’d be a waste."

And true to his word, he led his nine away, down and out of the cleft, leaving the team alone again with their bells and the long hours still ahead.

...

Time passed.

Many other tried to take the bells from them, but Rudrean and Aelira were simply too powerful, while Lyra was simply too resourceful with her items, creating troubles as well as protecting the whole team’s bells efficiently.

In the end, the 36 hours passed by, and the final 1000 participants of the Secret Realm were finalised.