Sovereign's Path

Chapter 44: Aurenfall XlV

"Draw your weapon," Cedric said.

"I won’t be needing my weapon." Leon smiled

"Your funeral," Cedric snorted.

He charged.

Lightning trailed off his blade in thin crackling arcs as he closed the distance, sword coming down in a clean diagonal strike. Leon sidestepped, barely moving, the strike passing through empty air where he’d been standing a half second earlier.

Cedric recovered fast, pivoting into a second swing.

This time Leon didn’t dodge.

Ki coated his fingers, pale and dense, and he met the blade head on with a single open palm strike. The impact rang out across the clearing, sword meeting fist, and Cedric was the one who moved, thrown back several meters by the force of it, boots dragging twin furrows through the frost coated ground before he managed to stop himself.

He stood there for a second, breathing hard, staring at his own hands.

’Huh’ ? Was this his blood ?

The drone above them had drifted closer, locking in tighter on the exchange, and somewhere in the back of Cedric’s mind he registered exactly what that meant. This wasn’t a side skirmish anymore. This was mainstream footage. This was the entire continent watching in real time.

If this went badly.

If this went the way it had just started going.

He was not just losing. He was being humiliated, live, in front of everyone who had ever called him a prodigy.

His jaw clenched.

He gripped his sword tighter and moved again, faster this time, lightning building thicker along the blade as he launched into a sequence of strikes, sweeping cuts and precise thrusts strung together in a pattern that had clearly been drilled for years. It was genuinely beautiful to watch, the kind of swordsmanship that belonged in a royal hall, fluid and exact, each motion bleeding into the next without a single wasted beat.

There was one small problem with it.

He was facing Leon.

Leon watched the sequence unfold with the same mild, slightly bored expression he’d worn since the fight started, and when the final strike came arcing toward his collarbone, he simply reached up and caught the blade between two fingers.

It stopped dead.

Cedric stared at it. At his sword, vibrating uselessly in a child’s grip, lightning fizzling weakly along the steel like it had lost the will to keep going.

Leon looked at him.

Still bored.

Then his other hand came around in a punch.

**BOOM**

It wasn’t an ordinary punch.

Cedric’s insides screamed in agony as he was thrown back, his body skidding across the clearing floor, frost tearing up beneath him before he finally rolled to a stop.

The crowds across the continent went silent.

*Eh?*

They’d been expecting a showdown. The current points leader against second place,a clash between the most talented prince and the useless E rank . Instead what they’d gotten was barely a fight at all. One sided didn’t even begin to cover it.

Cedric pushed himself up slowly, pain radiating from somewhere deep in his chest. He looked up.

Met Leon’s gaze.

Those eyes.

Calm. Unbothered. Looking at him the way someone looks at a minor inconvenience rather than an opponent.

Something in Cedric snapped.

"Don’t look down on me!!" he roared, pushing himself fully upright and charging again, sword pouring lightning now, every drop of mana he could force into the blade at once, the air around him crackling with the strain of it.

He struck.

Leon ducked.

The tree behind him took the blow instead, cleaved cleanly in two, the upper half toppling sideways with a slow groaning crash.

Cedric’s strike had failed.

He turned immediately, charging a second time, sword raised for another swing.

This time Leon didn’t dodge.

He stepped in, fist already moving, and caught Cedric square in the chest with a punch that carried considerably more behind it than the first one had.

Cedric went skidding backward across the clearing, through the first tree, which didn’t slow him at all, through the second, which barely did either, through a third, and finally came to a stop against a fourth, the trunk cracking under the impact.

When the camera caught his face again, a few teeth were missing.

Back at the royal platform, Theodric’s fist slammed down on the armrest, the bang sharp enough to cut through the surrounding murmurs.

His son.

Being humiliated.

"He dares," the king said, voice low and shaking with something that hadn’t surfaced in years. "Is he courting death?"

His voice rose with the next words, loud enough that several nearby nobles flinched.

"WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS—"

"Theodric." Iseult’s hand closed over his arm, firm. "Calm yourself. Everyone is watching."

The king’s jaw worked, breathing hard, eyes still fixed on the screen where his son lay slumped against a shattered tree trunk. He knew, technically, that whatever happened within the Aurenfall fell under the responsibility of the participants. That was the rule. That was tradition, going back generations.

But Cedric was still a prince.

And he was being taken apart by a nameless E rank in front of the entire continent.

Theodric forced himself back into his seat, hands gripping the armrests hard enough that his knuckles had gone pale.

...

A short distance from the royal platform, the church section had its own quiet crisis unfolding.

High Cleric Aldus Vane sat very still, eyes fixed on the screen, his usual serene composure cracking at the edges. Beside him, a younger bishop leaned forward, squinting at the footage as though trying to find something familiar in it and failing entirely.

"That’s not magic," the bishop murmured. "There’s no incantation. No mana circle. No catalyst."

"I know," Aldus said quietly.

"Then what is he?"

Neither of them had an answer.

The drone had drifted close enough now that its audio pickup was catching every word exchanged in the clearing, broadcasting it cleanly to every screen across the continent. Millions of people leaned in at once. ƒrēewebnoѵёl.cσm

...

Leon approached slowly, frost trailing behind each step, stopping a short distance from where Cedric was trying to push himself upright against the ruined trunk.

Cedric’s eyes locked onto him.

Something in his expression shifted, just for a second, an instinctive flicker that made his body draw back before his mind caught up to it.

"What... are you," he managed.

Leon crouched slightly, looking at him with the same unreadable calm he’d carried through the entire fight.

"Didn’t you say you’d hunt me," he said.

Cedric said nothing because at that moment, he felt something primal in Leon’s Sapphire eyes as they glowed.

"How does it feel," Leon continued. "Being on the losing end."

"What’s wrong, we’re just getting started".