Free Web NovelChapter 69: I’ll Push Through! Culmination Arc [30]
The platform was caving in.
Not dramatically. Just gradually, the stone sinking under the pressure of Auros’s field like something being compressed from above. Every step Auros took the field expanded further and Vexis felt the gravity shift, the air becoming thick and heavy and wrong, the weight of his own body multiplying until each step cost twice what it should and his calves burned from the sustained effort of staying upright.
Five times. Maybe more.
He grinned anyway.
Vexis scattered his aetheric blood further, flooding it down from his core through his thighs, his calves, all the way to his feet, letting the perfusion take everything. He could feel his muscle fibers tearing. Not dramatically, not all at once. Just one by one, the way a rope frays before it snaps. He hadn’t pushed the Stima this far in a sustained exchange before. He knew what it cost and he was paying it deliberately.
He’d think about the bill later.
"ILL PUSH THROUGH!"
Auros swung his leg in a wide arc, aiming for the shoulder.
It connected.
It felt like being hit by a wall that had been moving at speed. The field had compressed itself entirely into that kick and Vexis felt it all the way through the shoulder into his spine and the platform that had been sinking swapped for the air as he flew clear across the stone and hit the invisible barrier at the edge with enough force to make his vision strobe white.
"AUROS BELKAN WITH A DEVASTATING KICK! VEXIS LESTILAUT IS DOWN AGAIN THIS IS THE BEST FIGHT YET!"
The tremors started. Not in the platform. In Vexis’s body. A deep vibration running through his legs, his chest, his forearms. His veins felt like they were running fire instead of blood. His heart was working at something that wasn’t a sustainable rate. Sweat poured out of him all at once, his hair lifting with the heat coming off his skin, his saliva running faster than he could swallow it.
He got up.
Immediately. Not slowly, not carefully. Just up.
"IS HE HUMAN?" someone in the crowd screamed. "BUT USING A SWORDBEARER TECHNIQUE IS NOT ALLOWED RIGHT?"
The question spread.
Not because anyone expected an answer.
Because nobody had one.
"How many times has he been launched already?"
"I counted four."
"It was six."
"No, it wasn’t."
A fourth student leaned forward over the railing. "Does it matter? He’s still standing."
The crowd noise had changed. Earlier there had been cheering. Excitement. The usual appetite for spectacle that came with a culmination.
That was gone now.
People were watching differently.
On the far end of the student seats. A messy brownhaired young man sat with his uniform. His fist closed. Looking at the fight like it’s something he was not familiar of. Havier is looking specifically at Vexis. At his grin, despite the blood.
The students in the lower rows had stopped talking entirely. Some of them had unconsciously risen from their seats. Others were gripping the railings hard enough for their knuckles to whiten.
The announcer looked between both fighters.
"I have officially lost track of how either of these competitors are still conscious."
A burst of laughter rolled through the coliseum.
Nervous laughter.
The kind people used when they weren’t entirely sure they should be watching what they were watching.
"AUROS BELKAN REFUSES TO STAY DOWN!"
The crowd answered with a roar.
"VEXIS LESTILAUT REFUSES TO STAY DOWN!"
The roar came back louder.
The stone platform groaned beneath them. ƒree𝑤ebnσvel.com
Dust drifted through the sunlight.
Neither fighter seemed interested in stopping.
And for the first time since the culmination began, a few spectators were no longer wondering who would win.
They were wondering who would survive.
Vexis wiped his mouth on his sleeve and rolled his shoulder. It screamed back at him.
"Nice," he said, already running.
In the sponsor section, Mareth had both hands over his mouth. He looked at Velion and Velion looked back at him and for once in this culmination neither of them had anything to say. Further along the row a woman with silver hair and a green-and-gold coat had her notebook open and was writing without looking down at the page.
"Who is his family again?" the man beside her said.
"Idiot! It’s Lestilaut," she said. "Second son. Of the Archmagus."
He wrote that down.
On the bench, Roz felt the bond change temperature.
Not metaphorically. The signal coming through the connection had gone physically hot, faster and more chaotic than anything Vexis had produced in the first round of the fight. His ears flattened.
"He’s entered overclock," Roz said, quietly, to nobody in particular. "The perfusion is feeding on the body’s own resources now. Cell metabolism accelerating. At this rate his own tissue becomes the fuel." He watched the platform. "He needs to end this."
Auros came in with both fists raised.
Vexis ducked under the first, took the second on his forearm, felt bones creak, and headbutted Auros directly in the nose for the third time this fight. Blood streaked both their faces. Auros staggered one step. Vexis grabbed his collar, dropped his weight, and threw him sideways across the cracked stone.
Auros rolled and landed in a crouch. His breathing had changed.
Good, Vexis thought. That was the right kind of change.
"You’re still grinning," Auros said. Rough. Disbelieving.
"It’s a good fight." Vexis wiped blood off his jaw. His hand left a smear. "First one I’ve had in years."
Auros came to his feet and expanded the field to its full output, the stone around him fracturing under the weight of it, the gravity spiking so hard two students in the front row gripped their seats. He pulled both arms back.
Everything in him. One shot.
Vexis pulled his whole arm back too.
Everything in him.
"FOLKS I DON’T KNOW WHAT WE’RE ABOUT TO WITNESS BUT I NEED EVERYONE TO BRACE—"
Both of them launched forward at the same time.
Both fists met in the center of the platform.
The shockwave hit the coliseum like something had detonated. Rubble scattered outward in every direction, the platform stones splitting from the epicenter, the invisible barrier around the arena rippling visibly under the impact. The sponsor clouds swayed. Three rows of spectators threw their arms up simultaneously.
Auros’s arms collapsed.
Not broken cleanly. The field had taken the impact and redirected it inward and his forearms and wrists absorbed what physics had to offer, twisted wrong at the elbow, hanging at angles they didn’t belong at.
Vexis’s hands had gone blue.
Both of them. Pale blue at the knuckles spreading up through the fingers, the blood pooling where the perfusion had burned through its own channels.
They flew in opposite directions. Stone met both of them.
Silence for two full seconds.
Auros’s voice came out thin. "I...forfeit."
The announcer opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
He didn’t say anything.
The healers were already moving.
The faculty were already moving faster.
Arya reached the platform first, followed by two other professors Vexis didn’t recognize and then Vivienne, who walked at the same pace she always walked regardless of the situation. A cluster of senior faculty had gathered at the barrier’s edge and the one with the highest collar started talking the moment the barrier dropped.
"Noctevar." His voice was tight. "Your representative. A Stima practitioner. In a mage culmination. Do you have any idea of the liability this creates? Unregulated aetheric perfusion at that output, in a live competitive format, against another student—"
"I wasn’t aware he was a Stima practitioner," Vivienne said.
"You weren’t—" The man stopped. "You weren’t aware."
"No."
"He’s in your class. You are his professor. You have been his professor for the entire academic—"
"I said I wasn’t aware." Her voice hadn’t changed temperature at all. "I’m aware now."
The man stared at her.
He didn’t push further.
She walked past him toward Vexis.
At the Misfits bench, the other faculty were already announcing it, the words carrying across the coliseum in clipped official tones.
"Vexis Lestilaut of Class F is disqualified from the third format. Grounds: unregulated use of aetheric blood. Use of Stima technique in a regulated mage competition."
Vexis was on his knees on the cracked stone.
He let the Stima go.
The aetheric blood settled, coming off the boil, the perfusion pulling back from his muscles and his veins and every place he’d pushed it. It felt like cold water filling a container that had been on fire. His whole body registered what the last several minutes had actually cost it all at once.
He coughed blood onto the stone.
His nose opened a second later.
Footsteps, fast.
He looked up. Theodore. White hair, freckles, his good shoulder tight with the sprint, bellus at his collar watching Vexis with both ears flat.
Theodore stopped in front of him.
He didn’t ask what happened or how bad it was or anything procedural. He just looked at Vexis directly and said, "Are you okay, Vex?"
Vexis blinked.
He wasn’t used to the way this person talked to him. That was Arthur’s thing, Arthur’s person, Arthur’s dynamic. He’d watched it happen from the other side for weeks.
He nodded.
A voice came from slightly above him. Rough. Familiar and not.
He looked up.
A pale, thin young man floated at about eye level, black hair, black eyes, an exhausted expression, wearing clothes Vexis had never seen before. Small frame. The kind of person nobody looked at twice walking down a street.
Vexis stared at him.
Then he smiled.
"Welcome back, Arthur.
