Book 5: Chapter 46 (329): Traces of Wood (Patreon)

Before Rieren could see if Elder Olg could assist with her corruption removal procedure, she had to attend Kalvia’s match first. Rieren didn’t want to miss it.

It was nice to see she wasn’t alone in the monstrous stands again. The Darkstalker had successfully convinced several of the Abyssals and Arisen to attend the bout, just as they had done with her battle yesterday. It was gratifying to see them there once more.

“Do you already have a victor in mind for today’s battle, Destroyer?” the Darkstalker asked.

It was also relieving to have the same old conversation with the Darkstalker. The same little guess on who was going to win.

“I do not,” Rieren said.

“Truly? That is surprising from you, Destroyer.”

“This could go either way.”

The monster looked down at her. She could almost decipher a challenging look on its half-burned-off face. “Would you care to pick a winner, then?”

Rieren considered the battlefield, where the day’s combatants were approaching the centre. “I will go with Kalvia Zhouven.”

Ceraline was emotionless as ever, her face blank and giving nothing away. But Kalvia was almost the opposite. If Rieren looked closely, it appeared Kalvia was biting her lip, her mouth twisted ever so slightly in anxiety and anticipation.

She was stressed. Not good. She needed a clear head to win.

The pre-battle proceedings went the same as usual. The commentator announced both cultivators to raucous cheers from the crowd. They all sounded extra boisterous, as though they were making up for all the noise they hadn’t been able to give vent to in the last match. Poor fools, unable to hurl insults at Rieren because their own champion had implicitly forbidden it.

She focused on the current battle. The match official was retreating, step after step, hand raised high.

“Begin!” the commentator yelled just as the man’s hand dropped.

The fight went underway with Kalvia summoning her Domain immediately. It was clear she had a battle plan. All that stress and anxiety was just about the bout’s outcome, not how she was going to handle the fight itself.

In response to roots and shoots bursting from the ground, Ceraline sent forth a wave of paper. They attached to Kalvia’s plants, glowing script popping up on the pages as they started to reduce everything the heir to the throne had summoned into Essence. But it was going slow. Exactly what Kalvia was going to rely on.

Ceraline’s absorption powers worked in such a way that the less solid the Essence’s form was, the easier it was for her pages to pull in the Essence. Pure flames could be absorbed in less than a heartbeat. Water would take a little longer. Solid rock even longer than that.

Thus it was that Kalvia was attempting to push out so much of her Domain all at once that Ceraline was overwhelmed.

It almost worked. The barrage of roots that she had pulled up all fell upon Ceraline in a massive tidal wave, seeking to slam and swallow her whole. Ceraline was fast, however. She dodged away to one side, then countered with her own techniques stored within her pages. The fluttering papers shot out glowing bolts of blue fire that eradicated the plants with ease.

It was clear that Ceraline was going to have to rely on offence a lot more than her regular defence. The realization almost brought a quirk to her lips, something even Rieren caught from her position. Or maybe she was looking too intently.

The combatants continued exchanging pure firepower for a while. Kalvia kept summoning more and more of her plants. Her Domain Summons tree rose high into the air, her tangle of roots trying to choke the entire battlefield.

All the while, Ceraline continued bombing everything with her blue flames. Once she had cleared enough of a pathway, she tried attacking Kalvia directly. One of her pages had summoned a long sabre made of pure blue fire. Her burning slashes tore through Kalvia’s defences, leaving not even ash in her trial.

The difference in their direct powers was making itself felt. Kalvia might have powerful techniques to rely on, and a Domain that was strong, but Ceraline’s strength as a cultivator trumped her own. That was why all that plant matter was being scoured out so easily. Why Ceraline was quickly able to get in positions from where she could attack Kalvia directly.

Thankfully, the would-be Empress avoided Ceraline’s direct attacks. Rieren frowned. Thankfully? Did she want Kalvia to win this fight?

It took a moment to consider and come to the answer. Yes. Rieren did want her friend to win. Things might have turned sour between them, but a part of her wanted to face Kalvia directly in her next match. What better way to settle their differences than upon the field of battle?

The audience was obviously happy too. They cheered whenever either combatant made a move, applauded every time someone used a skill or technique like they were terrific accomplishments in and of themselves.

With a mixture of hopping across branches, using her Domain Summons, and even the deflecting skill on her strange knife, Kalvia managed to avoid any terrible injuries. She was still in the fight, a hair away from getting overwhelmed by her stronger opponent.

She was even displaying a few skills Rieren hadn’t seen before. One was a sort of evasive manoeuvre skill that reminded Rieren of Fray Passage. Kalvia swerved back in a blurring motion, knife poised in her hand, then shot away in a different direction like she had launched herself from a bow.

The other was a strange posture she adopted that apparently blocked just about anything that could hit her. She held her knife before her with the blade pointing up, her free palm pressed behind the blade like she was helping it push back against any attack landing upon her.

It reminded Rieren of that other skill she had possessed before Earthfall Blade. Ground Truth. The one that could withstand powerful attacks.

Was Kalvia actually using a similar skillset that Rieren herself employed? At this point, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see Kalvia pop out something like Gale Blade with just that knife.

But that didn’t explain what her goal might have been. Defending and evading were fine and well, but she would need to find a way to win. Maybe her goal was to tire out Ceraline. Maybe once the other woman’s Essence was exhausted, Kalvia would swoop in for a killing blow with her knife.

But Ceraline was on to her. The intensity of the blue-flame techniques increased by a dozen-fold. Columns of fire towered down from the sky, streaking meteors of it shot through the entire arena, and all the while, Ceraline moulded it into various killing shapes like spears, axes, and maces.

Somehow, Kalvia managed to block or evade them all. She was caught once or twice but managed to survive the worst of the damage by a hairsbreadth.

Ceraline’s frustration was almost visible. Her face gave nothing away still, but Rieren noted it in the woman’s more frantic movements, in the lack of any discernible pattern to her ongoing attacks. She was throwing everything pell-mell at Kalvia in hopes of subduing her.

In the end, Ceraline’s Domain manifested in its full strength too. Normally, her Domain was a more muted thing. She kept it localized to just her body, for its main purpose was to grant Ceraline an endless stream of pages from which she could call forth all sorts of powers.

But now, it was spreading out. Pages upon pages covered the ground, blanketed the air, turned the entire area dark as it shaded the battlefield from the sun. Soon enough, Kalvia was surrounded by hundreds of pages with nowhere to go. The papers were glowing too. Techniques would spit from them in moments.

Could she block everything Ceraline was about to throw at her that instant? Rieren realized she was almost anxious to find out.

Kalvia had already responded. She had rushed forward, heading straight to Ceraline’s exact location. Maybe she was hoping that if she was close enough to her opponent, the techniques she was about to face would be reduced in intensity, so as not to harm their wielder as well. But she was forgetting about the papers. They would protect Ceraline from anything.

Which was probably why Ceraline made no move to adjust anything at all. Everything in her Domain was glowing steadily. All her techniques were about to unfurl all at once.

Around them all, the crowd grew hushed, expecting to see a final clash that would decide the fate of the two combatants. Rieren couldn’t help but be drawn to the same conclusion, the same expectation. This was it.

But the Domain broke.

All the glows disappeared at once. In their place, hundreds of miniscule splinters took to the air within the Domain. And Kalvia was still charging, of course. Right into her opponent.

The surprise had prevented Ceraline from protecting herself as well as she could have. She moved too late. Kalvia’s curved knife stabbed in, digging through Ceraline’s robes, through the layer of pages underneath, and into her to draw blood an instant later.

Blue flames sprouted at the same instant. They tried to take over Kalvia, rush up the arm she was attacking Ceraline with and immolate her.

But Kalvia’s surprises weren’t done. As Ceraline responded to her stab with the spurting azure fire that was now burning everywhere around them, Kalvia brought forth her own Domain Summons in answer.

Except they came from straight within her.

Kalvia’s skin split at various places. Her arms, her face and forehead, even from beneath her robes. At every spot, blood spurted out before a thin vine shot out of her body, covered in gore but unimpeded from stabbing right into Ceraline. Another little surprise she had no response to.

With everything elsewhere burning away, a regular Domain Summons would have been impossible. That was why she had summoned them straight from within herself. The one place Ceraline’s flames hadn’t reached just yet.

The majority of the vines burned away too. But not all. The bloodied tendrils were small enough to find the dangerous gaps they needed.

Gaps that led straight to Ceraline’s eyes, to her nostrils, ears.

That was when the flames died. The competitors stood perfectly still in that moment, frozen in time with silence reigning around them. Everyone in the arena simply stared.

It took a few more heartbeats before the match official decided to hurry over to see what was going on. A few more moments to confirm what was going before he signalled above him.

“Folks, the match has ended,” the commentator said. His exuberance was dampened by his shock. “The winner of our second semi-final bout is Kalvia Zhouven, the heir to the imperial throne!”

It took a second for the audience to react to that news. The commentator filled that pause with the explanation of what had just happened, just to make sure those who hadn’t understood the outcome already could learn why exactly Kalvia was the winner.

Ceraline had no wish to suffer the same fate that Ledorne had. She was smart enough to realize when she had been beaten, that further fighting would just leave her with potentially irreparable damage. No point in staving off defeat when it had been assured so heavily.

“That was…” The Darkstalker shook his head. “I feel that is insane even for human standards. Do you agree with the commentator’s explanation, Destroyer?”

Rieren was tempted to laugh. Kalvia had pulled off so many things at just the right time. It was incredible. “I do. A brilliant manoeuvre. To use the residual spiritual connection between paper and her chosen Aspect of wood…” Rieren could only shake her head in appreciation. “And then to pull that sacrificial surprise at the end. The entire match was planned.”

It stretched her disbelief that Kalvia had actually been able to assert control over Ceraline’s Domain. The Elderlands had renovated the production of paper a few decades ago to use bark from trees in place of the old method of using grass and linen. This made paper much more easily available for use for all sorts of purposes.

Including the use of scripted techniques like the ones Ceraline used to such great effect. That her paper was produced in the same way was hard to believe, but maybe it was the fact that the old manner of production still used grass, something Kalvia could have established a spiritual connection with through her Domain’s Aspect.

That she had done so in the middle of a battle was staggering. Though, Rieren was tempted to believe she had tested this beforehand as part of her practice for the fight.

Rieren turned her attention back to the field of battle. Kalvia and Ceraline had separated, with healers rushing over to tend to both women. When the Empress-to-be offered a hand to Ceraline, it almost appeared as though the other woman would ignore it and move on. Ceraline had never been one to care for social niceties, nor the impact they could bear.

But she eventually accepted Kalvia’s proffered hand. They shook. The sight made the crowd go wild, just like it had done when Rykion and Oromin had trudged off arm in arm.

“Are you satisfied with that victor, Destroyer?” the Darkstalker asked.

Rieren watched Kalvia walk out of the arena, the healers trailing in her wake. “I am looking forward to the final, yes.”