Chapter 5
"I am three points behind you on the total ledger, Julian," I said, stepping directly into his path, forcing him to halt. "If I claim the Prime Keystone, my standing ties with yours. We face a blind council vote for the Champion's Mantle."
A muscle ticked in his jaw. For a fraction of a second, an expression of profound, sickening panic flickered across his eyes before he crushed it beneath a cruel smirk.
"You will never tie with me," he said softly. "Step aside, or I'll remove you myself."
"Try it."
Before the challenge had even left my lips, the obsidian floor beneath our boots shuddered violently.
A low, mechanical grinding tore through the chamber. The floating basalt platform tilted at a sickening angle as four massive pillars of black iron erupted from the abyss, encircling the terrace. From the shadows of the ceiling, a pair of ancient guardian constructs detached themselves—gargantuan beasts forged from basalt and bound together by weeping veins of liquid mercury.
Void-Golems. Level-eight trial sentinels.
"Careless," Julian muttered, drawing his rapier with his left hand in a single, fluid arc. The silver steel hummed with a cold, pale light.
"They're keyed to sound," I whispered, drawing my twin short-swords and dropping into a low combat stance. "The seismic resonance of our voices activated their dormant cores. If we target the joints—"
"Shut up and stay behind me," he barked.
He surged forward before I could object.
The lead golem brought a fist the size of an anvil crashing down toward the platform. Julian didn't dodge; he slid beneath the arc of the blow, his silver blade singing as it severed the mercury tendons behind the construct's knee. The beast roared—a sound like grinding boulders—and collapsed onto one side.
I pivoted toward the second golem. It was faster, its chest plate sliding open to reveal a core of spinning, concentrated gravity mana. A vortex of dark purple force began to swirl in the chamber, pulling the loose gravel and broken flagstones toward its center.
I felt the pull dragging at my boots. My mana flared instinctively—the warm, golden ember of the Sovereign Flare flickering in my palms. If I unleashed the radiant beam directly into its core, the construct would shatter in seconds.
"Don't do it!" Julian's shout was raw, bordering on hysterical.
I hesitated.
In that half-second of hesitation, the golem fired.
A concentrated lance of crystallized gravity shot from its chest, screaming through the air directly toward my sternum. The pressure of the attack was so intense it pinned my boots to the stone; the air evacuated from my lungs, leaving me paralyzed in its trajectory.
I braced for the impact, channeling every drop of my personal shield into a desperate front barrier.
The impact never came.
A wall of black wool and silver trim crashed into me, violently knocking me out of the line of fire. I hit the jagged basalt floor, rolling three times before digging my daggers into the rock to stop my momentum.
I looked up, horror seizing my throat.
Julian had thrown himself directly into the path of the gravity lance.
He didn't use a shield. He held up his right gauntlet—the hand already corrupted by the Stygian Hex—and took the full brunt of the projectile on the metal vambrace.
The kinetic force shattered the ancient runic steel into a spray of jagged shrapnel. The gravity lance detonated against his forearm with a muffled, sickening crunch. Julian didn't scream, but the sound that tore from his throat was a choked, mangled gasp of pure agony. His body was flung backward across the terrace, skidding ten yards before crashing against the base of an iron pillar.
"Julian!" I scrambled to my feet, sprinting toward him.
The fallen golem was already regenerating, its mercury veins reknitting the shattered rock. The second construct turned its smoking chest plate toward Julian's slumped form.
"Get up!" I screamed, closing the distance.
Julian didn't get up. He was kneeling in a pool of shattered basalt, his left hand clutched around his right arm. Blood—thick, black, and steaming with necrotic venom—poured through his torn sleeve, sizzling on the cold stone.
Yet, as the second golem took a ponderous step toward him, Julian looked up.
His face was completely devoid of color, his lips stained with crimson where he had bitten through his own flesh to keep from screaming. But his eyes... his eyes burned with a ferocity that bordered on madness.
"I said..." he wheezed, pushing himself up onto trembling knees, "...stay... behind me."
He raised his left hand. Without the use of his dominant sword-arm, he bypassed the traditional spell-casting matrix entirely, ripping raw, unrefined aether directly from his own spiritual core.
A cage of blinding, azure lightning erupted from the flagstones, engulfing both Void-Golems in an instant. The sheer magnitude of the discharge was monstrous—a high-tier Arch-Mage spell executed with single-handed precision. The constructs didn't just fall; the intense heat fused their mercury joints and melted their basalt frames into slag within four seconds.
The light died.
The chamber fell dead silent.
Julian stood amidst the smoking ruins of the sentinels, his chest heaving, his dark hair soaked with sweat. Then, his left leg buckled, and he collapsed heavily against the base of the iron pillar, sliding down into a seated position.
I rushed to his side, dropping to my knees on the gravel.
"You're out of your mind," I breathed, my hands trembling as I reached for his arm. "You're completely, utterly insane."
The right sleeve of his coat was shredded. The gauntlet had disintegrated, leaving his bare flesh exposed to the cold air of the labyrinth.
The sight made bile rise in the back of my throat.
The gravity strike had crushed the bones of his wrist, but worse than that, the impact had shattered the containment wards Marcus had placed on his arm. The Stygian Hex had surged upward like an uncoiled viper. Black, rotting veins now snaked over his bicep, branching across his collarbone and creeping up the side of his pale neck toward his jawline.
He looked like a corpse walking out of a shallow grave.
"Don't touch it," Julian rasped, his head lolling back against the cold iron of the pillar. His eyes were half-closed, glazed with fever and catastrophic pain. "The venom... is contagious to pure conduits. If it enters your meridians..."
"Shut up," I snapped, my vision blurring with a furious mixture of tears and rage. "Shut your arrogant mouth, Julian."
I gripped the lapels of his ruined coat and dragged him forward. He let out a low, pained groan, but he was too weak to fight me.
Twenty yards ahead, carved into the cliff face behind the fallen golems, was an arched doorway marked with a glowing blue triangle—the ancient symbol of a Sanctuary Chamber. A safe haven designed for wounded duelists, insulated from the labyrinth's monsters and, more importantly, shielded from the scrying mirrors of the Grand Chancellors above.
"Can you walk?" I demanded, hooking his uninjured left arm over my shoulder.
"I can... walk," he lied, his voice barely audible.
The moment I hauled him upright, his full weight slumped against me. His legs dragged uselessly against the stone, but he clamped his teeth together, refusing to let another sound of weakness escape his lips.
