Devourer Of Destiny - Chapter 144
Jenna was hoping against hope that this would be the night.
The young student had surreptitiously been checking the nightly offerings at the arena, looking forward to the return of the mysterious Jet whose technique had caught her eye. So far, she had been out of luck; the combatants weren’t held to any fixed schedules and came and went as they pleased.
Beside Jenna, Marlene was sitting with an amused expression. Since it was their weekly “night out” she couldn’t have very well ditched the girls, but since the list of places to visit in the city had been more or less exhausted anyway there weren’t any complaints about a repeat of the previous week’s activity together. Her companion, who had been the one to suggest the arena in the first place, had held a sly grin ever since the suggestion to return had been made. Apparently she had thought the enthusiasm would wane.
“Looking for someone?” Marlene asked, a trace of mockery in her tone.
Jenna sighed. “You’re not going to let it go, are you,” she replied flatly.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Marlene replied airly, twirling a strand of her blonde hair with a finger. “Our ice queen looks to be thawing, and I’m not going to miss an opportunity to have all the fun I can from it.”
Jenna could only roll her eyes; Marlene’s quest for schadenfreude was but one of many the adventurous woman was always on, and now that the delivery could be measured in spades she definitely wouldn’t let go. “I’m interested in his fighting style and technique, Marlene, that’s all.”
“Oh, of course,” Marlene replied sardonically. “Maybe if you’re lucky he’ll show you some swordsmanship in private, too.”
“He doesn’t use a sword, Marlene,” Jenna remarked almost automatically.
Marlene’s blue eyes rolled at the hyperliteral response. “Whatever.”
Jenna was about to retort when a chiming sound announced that the evening’s roster was available. Looking up at a prism-like structure floating above the battlefield, she quickly scanned the list and her lips formed a smile when she saw the one word she had been looking for: Jet.
“Oooh, looks like you got your wish,” Marlene quipped. “And it looks like you’ll only have to wait a short while for his entry, too. I sure hope he doesn’t disappoint you and ends up offed right away.”
Jenna rolled her eyes again and turned her attention to some of their other companions, who had been chattering away about other happenings at the Academy.
“–you hear about that teachers’ duel in a couple of days on the Fifth Tier? Apparently some total newbie sniped one of the Forging Institute’s golden children and they aren’t happy about it.” One of the girls was happily rattling off the latest gossip.
“Oooh, that could be fun to watch,” another girl commented. “I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of a duel on the Fifth Tier. Any idea on the format?”
“Forging duel,” yet another girl chimed in. “They’re gonna forge stuff and have it judged on the spot. I’m not holding out much hope for the challenger, I hear they’re facing old Harford. Horrible teacher, but he knows his crap when it comes to the smithy. If he could tell students more than a few grunts, he would’ve been promoted ages ago.”
Jenna tuned out the rest of the discussion; as an inhabitant of the Fourth Tier preparing the push to apply for the Third Tier, she had little care for the Fifth Tier, that bottom rung of the Academy where everybody either escaped as quickly as possible or wallowed in mediocrity.
The arena matches began with adequate fanfare. Jenna wasn’t very impressed with the brutish hammering at one another of supposed experts that could only manage weapons that might barely qualify as artifacts and techniques that were clearly flawed. Had she been on the arena floor she could have pulled off wins against these kinds of fellows, despite only being at the early Foundation Building stage.
This was the fated lot of those without backing or heritage, though. They were limited in the heights they could reach even if they were fortunate enough to enhance their cultivation to this stage. Still they came to this arena: the rogue experts, the castoffs of bloated clans, old students who had flunked out of the Fifth Tier. Jenna had seen enough to recognize the other category of participants too, though: current students who could sweep away all of the previous.
That was part of what intrigued her. Every one of those students she had seen so far was someone she could recognize by reputation if nothing else. That mysteriously concealed man, Jet, had dominated in the same way the students did, and yet she had no inkling of his identity. His elegant style, the lack of flashy spells and named techniques… she had to know how he did it.
It took almost an hour worth of matches, but finally the man in black took the stage. His opponent, the current master of the ring who had mowed down three other contenders before, was one of those large barbarians with a weapon too large to even be called a greatsword, a ridiculous slab of metal that could tear a body apart rather than cut it. As though acknowledging the uselessness of the edge, the thing was crisscrossed with straps of leather, an aesthetic that extended to the man’s strapped leather clothing that left him mostly exposed.
“Hahaha, little boy, are you lost?” the man yelled in greeting, the arena lights reflecting off his shiny bald head and tautly muscular arms. “The arena is a man’s battlefield, kid,” the man taunted, flashing a toothy grin.
Jet didn’t respond to the provocation verbally, instead just raising a hand and beckoning.
The barbarian snorted. “You brats who focus on your essence stuff are all the same, ignoring the power of body refinement. Eat this, kid!” With a shout, the man leapt in the air, rising to a height only possible for one capable of flight. Then, roaring, he hefted the slab of metal he used as a weapon over his head and plunged down, directly at the slight figure in black below.
Dust billowed from the point of impact, momentarily obscuring the exact details of the clash, although to everybody with spiritual sense the result was clear: both figures were still standing. A gust of wind blew away the obfuscating cloud and made the situation clear: Jet was gripped the slab-sword with a single hand, entirely unharmed, while the barbarian’s viciously victorious grin was crumbling as his senses caught up with reality.
Leisurely, almost casually, Jet swung both slab of metal and the man gripping it, slamming both into the arena floor a short distance away, causing another cloud of dirt to erupt. “Hmph,” came the first sound from the man in black, as he pulled his embedded feet up out of the earth, leaving two small gouges where they had stood during the first impact.
The barbarian’s groans echoed in the stunned silence as his new situation was clear: his whole body had been embedded in the dirt of the arena floor like Jet’s feet had been, and the man’s enormous weapon had fractured into pieces and lay strewn over the bloodied mess that he had become. The bloody wreck of a man made a visible effort to move, muscles twitching, but it was obvious that almost every bone in his body had been broken.
Jet sighed. “You lift a few heavy things daily and call yourself a body refinement expert. Boring.” Then he turned around and went to the wall of the arena and leaned and watched as the floor crew came out to pry the man out of his predicament and level the floor.
The audience didn’t seem to know what to think about the match. The barbarian who had smashed others to bits had been similarly ruthlessly crushed. There was a roar of chatter rather than applause as people started talking to their neighbors about the strange bout. Jenna’s own brow furrowed as she considered the possibilities.
One possible explanation that occurred to her was that Jet was himself a superior physique tempering expert. That would be an obvious answer as she couldn’t feel much in the way of an essence fluctuation when he had blocked the blow and then reciprocated.
But there was the matter of that gust of wind, the one that cleared the dust. It had been the smallest ripple, the tiniest whisper of essence manipulation, and Jenna did not imagine that the barbarian was the one who did that. Since the audience was shielded from interference, that meant that Jet had invoked that movement of the air, and with an extreme amount of control. What if that kind of mastery was also behind his counter and counterattack?
If Jenna could learn a sliver of that kind of control, how much better would she perform? But what if her eyes were just fooling her and she was just imagining what she wanted to see? She needed more information.
A cackle that brought shivers up Jenna’s spine interrupted her analysis, as a familiar figure entered the arena. Some of the girls around her gasped as they connected that laughter to the man who was making it.
The next arena contestant was a pale man in a black suit painted over with red diagrams and runes. His long blond hair flowed lankly down his back, and his lips and the corners of his pale eyes were painted with the color of blood. The man’s arms were outstretched to either side, his long fingers and his red-painted fingernails twitching as he laughed.
Dagrus. He had been a student at the Celestial Ascendance Academy, one who had even passed above the Fifth Tier and into the Fourth. He was a practitioner of devil arts, but the school did not discriminate on those grounds alone; his expulsion came when he contrived a blood ritual involving some of the other students. Had he pulled it off, his punishment might have been more severe, but since they had intercepted the attempt he had gotten away with his life and cultivation intact.
“Ah,” he announced in his reedy, high-pitched voice, “you aren’t a pretty lady, but you’re probably young enough to do, I guess.”
The audience was mostly quiet at the appearance of the new contestant. There were a few jeers from among the crowd, but little else to hear. With an obviously insane deviant on one end of the encounter and an utter enigma on the other, there wasn’t much for them to root for.
Jenna gnawed her lower lip anxiously, and even Marlene was dead quiet at the moment. She should’ve been happy, ecstatic even, that Jet was facing a capable opponent where a victory probably wouldn’t come through an application of bare force, but the chill shadow of Dagrus cast over the proceeding left her less than enthusiastic about the encounter.
“Shall we begin, little one?” the blood-painted devil asked invitingly.
The man in black shrugged. “Make your move, clown.”
“Clown!?” Dagrus’ smile transformed to a sneer. “We’ll see who is laughing at the end, then.” The devil floated up into the air, and a shield of red energy coalesced around him in a sphere. “Make me laugh, boy. Break this if you can,” he taunted as he looked down his nose at his opponent.
“Blood shield?” Jet asked, the first expression of curiosity he had made on the arena floor.
“Don’t you know it, tiny,” Dagrus replied, licking his reddened lips. “I’m the King of Blood, don’t you forget it.”
In the hushed silence of this odd prelude to a bizarre bout, Jet broke into laughter that echoed throughout the arena