"Calm down," Kessel said.
He looked at Mira with the flat patience of someone who had watched many talented young people make the mistake of measuring themselves against the wrong scale. "Every elite fighter in the Temple Alliance comes here for the Demon Hunt Selection. Why are you surprised to see Earth Knights? There could be one representative per rank. And it’s not only our Knight Temple that sent fifth-tier fighters — all six temples sent their own fifth-tier powerhouses. The last Selection’s top ten final round was filled with fifth-tier vocation holders."
Mira pressed her mouth shut.
"Your goal," Kessel continued, "is to finish in the qualifying top ten. That gets you to the final round. After that, you give everything you have. That’s the job. Not placing first in the preliminary. Not beating Earth Knights in round one. Top ten. Final round. Then we see."
He didn’t say it, but what he was thinking was visible in the way his eyes moved to Leo for a fraction of a second before returning to neutral.
*Leo is fourteen. He can do this twice more before he ages out. This time is for the experience. Next time, with five more years of growth, the top three won’t be a stretch.*
He would not say that to Leo. Not before the competition started.
"The preliminary round is a knockout format," Kessel said. "However, fifth-tier competitors and above receive byes through the first two rounds. The Temple arranges it that way to ensure our strongest make the final stage — better rankings for the Knight Temple overall. Which means you two will be fighting from round one, with no margin for error. One loss and you’re out."
"Understood," Leo and Mira said together.
"Rest tonight. Don’t go outside. If you can squeeze even a small increase in spiritual energy before tomorrow, your odds improve by that much." Kessel stood. "I’ll check on you after dinner."
He left.
Mira looked at the door for a moment, then looked at Leo.
Leo was already sitting cross-legged on the floor.
She watched him for a moment. Then she picked up her own training material and settled into the chair by the window.
---
An hour after Mira had gone to her own room, Kessel came back.
He sat across from Leo without preamble, in the way he sat when something needed to be said without ceremony.
"Tell me everything since the trial began."
Leo told him everything.
The Luke Clan ambush. The Dyke Clan assassin. Liora and the blade at her throat. The Lodestar Stove redirecting the attack. The Dark Green Dual-Bladed Demon and what it had taken to kill it. Evander at the auction house, the pills, the promise. Soren on the road, the five against one, the Madness technique.
When Leo mentioned the Dark Green Dual-Bladed Demon, something moved across Kessel’s face — brief, controlled, gone in a second. It might have been satisfaction. It might have been relief. It was hard to tell with Kessel.
When Leo mentioned Evander and the promise, the expression that replaced it was considerably less ambiguous.
"You let that boy manipulate you," Kessel said.
Leo opened his mouth.
"Don’t defend it. He used Identification Method to read your age and cultivation level, then made you an offer timed to when you were most likely to say yes." Kessel’s tone wasn’t angry. It was the tone of a teacher watching a student make a predictable mistake and deciding whether to be irritated or educational about it. "He’s calculating for the next Selection too. You’re fourteen. If you don’t place top three this time, you can still do it in five years. He would still be eligible. That’s his real gamble."
Leo was quiet for a moment.
"I didn’t think of that," he admitted.
"No. You thought he was honest and the pills were good and the risk seemed low." Kessel exhaled slowly. "He wasn’t wrong, exactly. But you weren’t reading the whole situation. A man who can make fourth-tier pills at eighteen, who carries a Halcyon Union VIP black card, who has an Identification Method skill that cost enough to fund a small army — that person is not making impulsive decisions." He paused. "He bet on you specifically. That tells you something about what he saw when he read you. But it also means the relationship isn’t as simple as you may have taken it to be."
"Can I undo the promise?"
"No. A real man keeps his word." Kessel’s voice shifted slightly, into something that was almost, not quite, approval. "But you can stop being surprised when he turns out to be more than he appeared. Now. The pills."
Leo produced all three vials and the energy pills from the Forget-Me-Not ring and laid them out.
Kessel examined each one. He held each vial up to the lamp light. Read the instructions. Set them down in a specific order.
"Fourth-tier grade across all three." He was quiet for a moment. "You couldn’t buy all of these for ten thousand gold. Possibly not for twenty." He pushed the energy recovery vial toward Leo. "This one, keep accessible during matches. The cultivation pills, you take one tonight and one tomorrow morning before the round begins. The combat boost—" he touched the third vial without moving it, "—hold that for a moment when you genuinely have no other choice. The twelve-hour weakness afterward in a competition setting is a serious liability."
"I understand."
"Good." Kessel looked at him steadily. "Your goal for this competition is simple. Reach the final round. Everything beyond that is a bonus."
Leo nodded.
Kessel stood to leave.
"Master," Leo said.
Kessel stopped.
"Three Earth Knights," Leo said. "In the preliminary round."
"Yes."
"Are there likely to be more by tomorrow’s registration close?"
Kessel looked at him for a moment. "Probably."
Leo held that. "Thank you."
Kessel left without another word. That was fine. Leo had everything he needed to know.
He took the cultivation pill, settled into his meditation posture, and began.
---
The day of the competition arrived without fanfare.
Early morning, Kessel escorted Leo and Mira to the Alliance Great Stadium. The structure was as overwhelming from the inside as it had looked from the plaza — six sub-stadiums arranged under the main dome, each one a self-contained competition space, the whole thing designed with the Six Temples in mind at every level.
At the registration check-in for the Knight division, they encountered Gareth.
He arrived with an older man — same jawline, same bearing, clearly his father. Jiuwen City’s Consul, presumably. He looked at Kessel the way people look at someone they’ve been planning to look at for a long time.
"Brother Kessel," he said. "We meet again."
Kessel glanced at him with the particular quality of a glance that communicates, without any room for misinterpretation, that the other person is not worth a full look. "Pray your son doesn’t draw Hao Chen’s number," he said, and walked inside.
Gareth’s father stiffened. "The one who should be praying—"
But Kessel, Leo, and Mira were already past the entrance, and whatever was said after that, none of them heard it.
---
The Knight Arena was enormous and dense with energy.
Two hundred meters in diameter. Sand-covered floor, the ground beneath it layered with restoration magic — whatever damage a fight did to the surface, it could be reset in minutes. The spectator stands curved around the full perimeter, elevated for sight lines. At the far end, the judges’ podium rose above the rest.
Above it all, the dome.
The dome was not empty. Massive magical formations covered its inner surface — visible as faintly glowing inscriptions that curved and crossed each other across the full three hundred meters of the ceiling’s span. The ambient energy in the space was tangible, the way air feels before a storm. Not aggressive, not aimed at anyone. Just present. Just waiting.
"The elements are so dense here," Mira said, looking up.
"The formations concentrate them," Kessel said. "The dome exists to ensure the competition is fair and contained. Nothing gets out. Nothing interferes from outside." He looked at the field. "Every hit lands as it was meant to. Every technique performs exactly as it was built to perform."
Leo’s competition number was 97. Mira’s was 98.
He held the plate and looked at the other competitors already filing in. Some he couldn’t read at all — their energy completely contained, experienced enough to know not to display what they had before a match. Others leaked. He could feel the fifth-tier presences like stones dropped in water — ripples that moved differently from everything else in the room.
There were more than three.
He counted without making it visible. Five. Six. Possibly seven.
A knockout tournament, with fifth-tier competitors bypassing the first two rounds.
Which meant if he made it to round three, he would almost certainly be fighting one of them.
Leo stood at his assigned position on the edge of the field, plate in hand, looking at the sand and the dome and the formations above it.
*All right,* he thought. *Let’s see what I’m made of.*