Chapter : 867
The Jahl, its casual, pest-control attack having so spectacularly failed, paused for a moment, a flicker of what looked like genuine, intellectual surprise in the fiery vortex of its maw. This small, fleshy creature was more resilient than it had anticipated. The game had just become slightly more interesting.
It turned its full, undivided attention to Lloyd, completely dismissing the still-standing, but now passive, form of Ifrit. This was a grave, and perfectly calculated, tactical error on the Demon’s part, an error born of its own profound arrogance. It saw Ifrit as a simple, powerful, but ultimately defeated opponent. It saw Lloyd as a new, more entertaining toy. It failed to see them as what they truly were: two parts of a single, unified, and incredibly dangerous mind.
Lloyd pressed his feigned advantage. He let out another, desperate-sounding battle-cry and launched himself away from the wall, his practice sword held before him. He was not charging at the Demon. He was running, a frantic, zigzagging pattern across the open sand, a terrified rabbit trying to evade a hawk.
The Jahl was delighted. The hunt was on. It began to move, its massive, molten form gliding across the sand with a surprising, terrifying grace. It did not try to crush him. It herded him. It would send a casual swipe of its molten claws, not to hit him, but to force him to change direction. It would unleash a small, controlled pulse of fire, not to incinerate him, but to cut off his path of escape.
The arena was now the stage for a grand, terrible, and beautiful spectacle. A thirty-foot-tall god of fire was playing a deadly game of cat and mouse with a single, desperate, and miraculously agile human.
The crowd was completely, utterly mesmerized. Their fear had been replaced by a raw, primal, and deeply thrilling fascination. They were no longer just watching a fight; they were watching a story unfold, a drama of impossible survival against overwhelming odds. Every time Lloyd dodged a seemingly certain death-blow by a hair’s breadth, a collective, gasping sigh of relief and excitement would ripple through the stands.
He was a magnificent, tragic, and beautiful fool. And they loved him for it.
But the keen-eyed observers saw the truth. They saw the lie at the heart of the beautiful, desperate dance.
Princess Amina, her mind a cold, analytical engine, was no longer watching the spectacle. She was deconstructing it. She saw that Lloyd’s movements, which looked so panicked and so random, were not random at all. He was being herded, yes. But he was also subtly, almost invisibly, guiding the herd. He was allowing the Jahl to push him, but he was choosing the direction. And the direction was a slow, spiraling, and inexorable path that was leading the two of them closer and closer to the exact center of the arena.
“He is not running from it,” she whispered to her captain, her voice a low hum of dawning, incredible suspicion. “He is leading it. He is a matador, and the Demon is his bull.”
The spymaster, The Whisper, saw it too. And he saw something more. He saw that with every dodge, with every frantic-looking scramble, Lloyd was leaving a small, almost invisible mark in the sand with the heel of his boot. They were tiny, insignificant scuffs, but they were deliberate. They were markers. He was not just mapping the arena with his feet; he was drawing something, a vast, complex, and almost invisible geometric pattern on the canvas of the arena floor. A rune.
And the weary, one-eyed Royal Knight, watching from the challenger’s gate, saw the truth in the swordsmanship. He watched as Ifrit, who had been standing passively, suddenly re-engaged. The Demon had gotten too close to its master, and the spirit moved to intercept. But its attack was not a powerful, desperate blow. It was a small, precise, and almost gentle-looking thrust, aimed not at the Jahl’s core, but at the obsidian chain on its left ankle. The blow was easily parried by the Jahl, a seemingly insignificant and failed attack.
[Author Note: There is no rune, it’s spies suspicion.]
But the knight had seen it. It was not a random strike. It was a test. A probe. The challenger was not just trying to survive; he was systematically, methodically, and suicidally, testing the strength and the resonance of the Demon’s magical bindings.
The three of them, the Princess, the Spy, and the Knight, all arrived at the same, impossible, and terrifying conclusion at the exact same moment.
This was not a fight for survival. This was not a desperate, heroic, and doomed last stand.
This was an assassination.
And the target was not the Demon. It was the cage.
Chapter : 868
Lloyd, in the heart of the inferno, knew that his audience, his true audience, had finally begun to understand the script. The second act of his play was nearing its climax. The stage was set. The pattern was drawn. The enemy’s weaknesses had been probed.
It was time to bring the curtain down.
He allowed himself to make a mistake. A small, theatrical stumble. He feigned a twisted ankle, collapsing to the sand, his practice sword flying from his hand. He was now, in the eyes of the entire world, unarmed, crippled, and utterly, completely helpless.
The Jahl, seeing its final, glorious victory at hand, let out a triumphant, deafening roar. It reared up to its full, colossal height, its molten claws extended, its fiery maw open wide, preparing to deliver the final, crushing, and exquisitely satisfying death-blow.
The crowd screamed, a single, unified, and horrified cry. The hero’s dance was over. The underdog’s gambit had failed.
Lloyd looked up at the descending, fiery apocalypse, and behind the blank, white void of his mask, he allowed himself a small, private, and very, very satisfied smile.
Showtime.
The Royal Arena was a cauldron of raw, primal emotion. The roar of the seventy thousand spectators was a physical force, a tidal wave of sound that crashed against the high stone walls and washed over the blood-soaked sand. They were a single, unified beast, their individual hopes and fears and cruelties all merged into one collective, bloodthirsty consciousness. They were witnessing a magnificent, tragic, and deeply satisfying drama: the slow, heroic, and inevitable destruction of a beautiful fool.
But in the vast, teeming stands, in a section reserved for the common folk, in a place of cheap wooden benches and the overpowering smell of spilled ale and unwashed bodies, there was a pocket of absolute, profound silence. A single, motionless figure, as still and as unremarkable as a stone, sat amidst the swirling, shouting river of humanity.
Ken Park, in his tattered beggar’s disguise, was a ghost at the feast. His vacant, unfocused gaze was fixed on the arena, but he was not watching the spectacular, fiery dance of the two demons. He was observing the true battlefield: the Royal Box. His enhanced senses, honed by a lifetime of espionage and a will of iron, were focused on a single, slender, and veiled figure. The Princess Amina.
He was a living, breathing intelligence-gathering apparatus. He noted the subtle, almost imperceptible shifts in her posture, the way she leaned forward when the challenger evaded a blow, the tight clenching of her hands on the marble balustrade. He logged her every reaction, her every whispered comment to the formidable female guard at her side. She was a key, a variable in his master’s grand, complex equation, and he was meticulously, dispassionately, mapping the contours of her mind.
His focus was so absolute, so utterly and completely consumed by his mission, that he did not, for the second time in as many days, notice the small, quiet disturbance in his immediate vicinity.
A young woman, her face a mixture of profound worry and a deep, innate kindness, was making her way through the jostling, shouting crowd. It was Habiba, the baker’s daughter, the bringer of the honey-cake. She clutched a small, cloth-wrapped bundle to her chest, her expression one of a person on a mission of mercy in a world that had gone completely, violently mad.
She had seen him from across the stands. She had recognized the slumped shoulders, the tattered clothes, the vacant, haunted stare of the broken man she had met in the bazaar. And her simple, compassionate heart had ached for him. To be so lost, so alone, in a place of such terrifying, overwhelming noise and violence… she could not imagine the depths of his private hell.
She finally reached him, her progress a small, gentle eddy in the roaring current of the crowd. She stood before him for a moment, and her kind, brown eyes were filled with a look of such pure, unadulterated pity that it was almost a physical thing.
“Sir?” she said, her voice a soft, gentle murmur that was completely at odds with the baying of the crowd. “It is me. From the market.”
Ken did not react. His physical body remained in its state of perfect, vacant stillness. But inwardly, his mind, the cold, analytical engine, registered her presence with a jolt. The girl. The anomaly. The source of the strange, unsettling, and profoundly distracting new data point that he had so ruthlessly tried to suppress. Her appearance here, now, was a complication he did not need. He willed her to go away, to melt back into the crowd, to leave him to his work.