Chapter 136: The Absurd
I am not an impartial narrator. I am not the sort of chronicler who steps politely out of the way to allow history to unfurl itself in all its majesty.
No, I am petty, biased, and entirely preoccupied with the preservation of my own skin. If my recounting veers toward sarcasm in moments where more noble souls might lean toward solemnity, then I can only ask that you forgive me.
After all, when one has been repeatedly flattened, stabbed, humiliated, and threatened with celestial debris, the sense of reverence tends to wear thin.
That said, even I fell quiet in that moment.
The plaza, ruined and ragged as it was, still held the echo of ceremony. The air was thick with dust and expectation, so heavy that each breath seemed to scrape the throat. The nobles in their half-collapsed balloons leaned forward as if a theater curtain had drawn back on the climax.
The coin rose, turned, gleamed and spun—an absurd little sliver of gold dancing with more poise than the rest of us could ever muster.
For all the mountains that had fallen, for all the magic that had shattered the streets, for all the blood dripping from our mouths, the world itself seemed to pause in deference to that glimmering scrap of metal.
And then, with the soft inevitability of gravity, it returned. The Man in White’s pale hand extended, his fingers curled, and with a faint clink it landed in his palm. He quickly curled his hand into a fist.
We waited.
Oh saints, how we waited.
I expected thunder. I expected light. I expected at the very least a modest earthquake or perhaps a choir of celestial voices proclaiming the new state of existence.
But nothing happened. No flash. No surge of divine power. No revelation. Nothing. The world simply continued, as if this were a common parlor trick and we were all idiots for expecting more.
A silence stretched, painful and brittle. My lungs felt too tight. My hands ached around the pen. And then, of course, Arculaus broke it.
It began with a snicker. Just the smallest twitch of sound, the sort of noise a child makes when told to sit quietly at a funeral and has just remembered a joke about goats. His shoulders trembled. His lips quivered. And then, like a dam giving way, it burst forth in full.
Laughter.
Hideous, obscene laughter. Not the noble chuckle of an amused lord nor the sinister cackle of a villain in a storybook, but a raw, howling bark that cracked and sputtered through the air.
He clutched his stomach, gasping between bursts, tears streaking the dirt on his face as if joy itself had overwhelmed him. He doubled over, half-wheezing, half-choking, until I thought he might collapse again just from the effort of his own amusement.
"Oh! Oh, saints!" he croaked between gasps. "This... this is your mighty judgment? This is your grand sermon, your proof of fate itself? A coin flip and a bit of theater?" He pounded his palm against the cobblestones, wheezing. "You pompous fraud! Equality, humility, fate—bah! All just words to make peasants clap for you! And they call me arrogant!"
I blinked. I truly didn’t know whether to be offended at the slander or jealous that he could still muster the energy to ridicule our immaculate tormentor while I could barely remain upright.
The Man in White said nothing. He simply waited, the faintest ghost of a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. His fingers opened then. The coin gleamed against his open palm.
Heads.
He looked down at it, then up at Arculaus, and said with the casual ease of a man announcing tea was ready, "Ah. Looks like I’ve won."
That was it. That was the entire proclamation. No fire, no divine choir, just those words and a shrug of inevitability.
I nearly fainted. Arculaus twitched, his body shuddering once, but then his grin returned sharper than ever.
"You call that a victory?" he spat, his laughter returning in jagged bursts. "You’re nothing but a charlatan in clean boots! A fraud with a coin! You hide behind riddles and pompous speeches because you’ve no power worth fearing. At least I—" he clutched his chest, wheezing, but his eyes gleamed with renewed arrogance "—at least I have dominion. At least I have power enough to make the world tremble!"
I might have rolled my eyes if my sockets hadn’t been too dry. But before I could deliver the witty quip forming in my lungs, I noticed it.
Movement.
Not from Arculaus, not from the Man in White, but from the opposite side of the plaza. A shadow among shadows. A hulking frame shuddering as it stepped from the wreckage.
It was him.
The stitched man.
My heart lurched violently, hammering against my ribs so hard I thought it might tear loose and flee without me.
He stood at the plaza’s edge, looming and silent, each breath escaping his mangled body in ragged bursts of fog. His gaze locked on mine across the ruin, and I felt my blood turn to ice.
There was no mistaking it: this was not merely anger. It was something deeper, older, a fury that had marinated long enough to sour into hatred.
I wanted to scream, but my throat refused. I couldn’t bare to look away.
Directly between us stood the two of them—the Man in White serene, Arculaus manic. Neither noticed the stitched man, too consumed in their performance. But I saw him move, saw his hand stretch toward the shattered wall.
Toward, oh gods, my spear.
Yes, my spear. The one I had hurled in desperation at the priest during our earlier fiasco, the one that had lodged itself stubbornly in the stone. I had nearly forgotten it, abandoned it like all the other regrets littering my past. But he remembered. Oh saints, he remembered.
His massive hand curled around the shaft, muscles straining, veins bulging as he wrenched it free. Stone cracked and crumbled as the weapon came loose with a shriek of protest. The spear gleamed, faintly bloodied, kissed by the light of fire and ruin.
And then, in one fluid motion, he hurled it.
In that same instant, Arculaus surged up from his knees, whipping out a hidden wand from beneath his cloak. His chest expanded, his voice found that dreadful pomp again, and he threw back his head to boast.
"I—" he choked, wiping his mouth with the back of his trembling hand. "I am Arculaus of House Veyra! One of the seven pillars of Soloris! Bearer of the Veyran line, master of the gravitational arts, heir to a thousand years of supremacy! You think me undone by tricks of chance, by a coin, by—"
He never finished the sentence.
The world bent sideways in a single, obscene instant.
The spear tore through the air with a shriek, a silver streak cutting across the plaza faster than breath. One heartbeat Arculaus was boasting, his mouth twisted in derision, his arms spread like some vainglorious preacher. The next—
WUMP!
The spearhead smashed through the side of his neck with a noise I would never unhear. Not a clean slice, not the poetic whisper of a blade through silk, but a crunch, a wet, tearing sound like meat and stone being split together.
His body jerked violently, his proud posture folding inward as though a string had been yanked taut inside him. Blood erupted in a red viscous arc, spraying his embroidered robes, splattering the cobblestones, dotting the air itself with flecks of scarlet.
A bubbling gargle burst from his throat, half scream, half choke, as though the arrogance itself had been torn out mid-syllable.
I couldn’t breathe. My pen shook in my hand. My mouth hung open in disbelief. The plaza seemed to tilt around me, the weight of impossibility pressing against my skull.
My mind gibbered at the sight, screaming that this was not how the script was supposed to go, that fate itself had been ambushed and butchered right in front of us.
And then—silence.
Arculaus froze mid-gasp, his body jerking once, twice, before stilling. His hands fell limp at his sides, streaked with his own blood. His eyes bulged wide, glassy, and horrified. He swayed there a moment, a grotesque effigy, before finally sagging to his knees and crashing face first into the stones.
No more laughter. No more boasting. No more words at all.
Just that silence, thick and choking, ringing louder than any one of his pompous declarations ever had.
The only sound that carried itself through the plaza then was Salem’s wheezing cough as he crouched on his knees not far away, the layered spells crushing him finally dissipating into nothing, leaving him bent forward and sucking air like a fish tossed unceremoniously onto land.
It was ludicrous. Utterly ludicrous.
The King-Class mage, the stitched puppetmaster of our terror, the scion of a great House, dead. Not slain by Salem’s impossible technique, not felled by my pen or my stopwatch.
No, his death had arrived on the tip of my own misplaced spear, hurled across the plaza by a stitched meat-monstrosity who hadn’t even meant to hit him.
Saints above, was that how it worked? Was nobility really so fragile that centuries of bloodline arrogance could be undone by one good throw from the city’s ugliest brute?
I laughed.
I couldn’t help it—I burst into laughter so raw and manic that my ribs screamed with pain. Because it couldn’t be real, could it? It couldn’t be this absurd, this anticlimactic, this farcical.
And yet there was the body, still impaled, still silent, still bleeding onto the cobblestones like the punchline to the world’s longest and cruelest joke.
The nobles laughed with me. Above us, those powdered parasites clung together, mascara streaking, their jeweled fingers digging into one another’s sleeves, the grotesque joy of it all spreading like wildfire.
Meanwhile, the Man in White strolled forward as if none of this mattered at all. He crouched by the corpse with all the casualness of a man checking his shoelaces and rifled delicately through Arculaus’s bloodied robes.
No ceremony. No hesitation. Just a quick rummage until his gloved fingers plucked free a small silver medallion.
My breath caught at the sight of it—something about its design, its faint crest, sparked a half-formed recognition in me. But the memory was elusive, slipping from my mind like water through fingers, leaving me gnawing on the edge of familiarity without catching it.
The Man in White didn’t give me time to ponder. He simply slid the medallion into his pocket as if it were nothing but spare change and rose smoothly to his feet.
Then he turned and walked back toward the others at the far end of the plaza who I had just begun to noticed.
Rodrick was upright now, barely, leaning heavily on Nara’s shoulder, his swollen face a mask of stubborn defiance that made my chest ache with irritation and relief in equal measure.
Dunny was still half-supporting the Naked Knight, whose delighted poise refused to dimmed in the slightest despite his obvious internal bleeding.
It was Dunny, voice trembling but clear, who broke the spell, asking the question all of us had been wondering for the past few days.
"J-Just who the hell are you?"
The words rang out in the plaza, sharp, raw, the kind of question that tears itself from the throat when everything else has collapsed.
We all turned, waiting, watching. The Man in White paused mid-step, and for the briefest instant I thought—finally—he might answer.
But before he could, the sky began to fall.
Not with fire this time. Not with stone. Not with some celestial tantrum of gods and gravity. No...with paper. An envelope. Then another. And another. Hundreds of them fluttering down from the heavens like a parody of snow, tumbling through the air from the gondolas of the nobles’ balloons above.
The first few landed softly on the cobblestones, pale against the blood. Then more, a rain of white paper filling the area until the survivors were brushing them from their hair and shoulders in confusion.
I plucked one out of the air on instinct, my hand trembling.
The Man in White caught one as well. He didn’t hesitate. He broke the seal and unfolded it in one smooth motion, reading without a flicker of expression. But I saw it. I swear I saw it—the tiniest twitch of his fingers as he scanned the page. Subtle as a sigh, but there nonetheless. Something had pierced his immaculate calm.
I tore mine open with far less elegance, the paper crinkling under my frantic fingers. And then I saw it. The words. The decree written in the stiff, ceremonial hand of power.
A bounty is has been placed. Reward: Ten million crowns. Target: the figure in white.
The blood drained from my face so fast I thought I’d faint right there in the rubble. Ten million. Not a fortune, not a reward—an empire’s ransom, enough money to buy loyalty, betrayal, armies, a kingdom.
A price worth ten times the prize of this entire tournament.
My lungs locked. My hands shook. And then, against my better judgment, against every ounce of survival that screamed not to, I looked up.
And there he was.
High above, perched in one of the air balloons, his black feathered cloak draped like a banner of shadow, his golden ponytail catching the firelight below like silk spun from madness. My sponsor. My benefactor. My curse and my salvation.
He was smiling down upon us as if we were nothing more than game pieces on a board he had already decided how to overturn.