The dust of the explosion did not settle; it hung in the air like a shroud, tasting of pulverized stone and scorched ozone.
Harold stood at the epicenter of the desolation, his boots clicking against the vitrified earth. Around him, the arena—once a proud testament to the kingdom's architecture—lay in splintered ruins. Cracked marble pillars leaned at impossible angles, resembling the tombstones of a giant. But it wasn't the stone that held Harold's gaze; it was the people.
He looked at the healers rushing toward the stands, their white robes quickly stained with the crimson of the fallen. He saw a father shielding a weeping child, both covered in the grey ash of the blast.
"Is this the price of 'clarity'?" Harold whispered, his voice hollow.
He looked down at his hand. It was steady, glowing with the remnants of his celestial grace, yet it felt heavy. "Noelle, you are one cruel man. You betrayed your own comrades for what exactly? I cannot tell what your motive in all of this is."
He closed his eyes, the screams of the wounded echoing louder than the cheers of his previous victories.
A few hundred yards away, beneath a collapsed section of the southern tier, a hand twitched.
Mikaela's world was a blur of muffled ringing and throbbing heat. Her eyelids felt like they were weighted with lead. When they finally flickered open, the sky was the first thing she saw—not the clear, blue sky of the afternoon, but a choked, orange haze filtered through smoke.
"Ugh..."
She tried to push herself up, but a sharp spike of pain in her ribs forced her back down. Memories flashed: the orb, the blinding light, the terrifying pressure of the Saint State. She coughed, spitting out grit, and managed to roll onto her side.
Her eyes scanned the wreckage. The power she had witnessed—the raw, unchecked divinity of the two combatants—had left her feeling smaller than she ever had in her life. She was a prodigy, a rising star, but in the face of that disaster, she was just a diamond lost in a mountain of rubble.
"Kael?" she croaked, her voice barely a rasp. She looked toward the crater where the boy had been. It was empty. "Kael!"
There was no answer, only the distant, mournful whistle of the wind through the cracked stones.
The air in the Dark Saint's lair was cold, damp, and smelled of rot.
"AGHH—GODS, TEAR THE LIGHT FROM MY VEINS!"
Noelle's scream ripped through the silence of the underground chamber. He was slumped against a jagged throne of obsidian, his chest heaving. His left hand was white-knuckled, gripping the armrest, while his right side was a nightmare of charred flesh and empty air.
The cauterization from Harold's blade had stopped the bleeding, but the holy residue of the attack continued to burn like a slow-acting poison. Every breath felt like inhaling molten glass. He stared at the stump, his red eyes wide and crazed, reflecting the flickering torches on the wall.
"He thinks he won," Noelle hissed, a manic chuckle bubbling up through his agony. "He thinks... a limb is a fair trade for what I've found."
He looked up. In the center of the room, a massive glass cylinder hummed with a sickly, violet luminescence. Inside, suspended in a thick, viscous fluid, Kael floated. The boy's eyes were closed, his hair fanning out like underwater silk.
Tubes were already being grafted into the boy's skin by the minions, pulsing with the rhythmic flow of extracted energy.
Noelle's grimace shifted, stretching into a jagged, hideous grin that ignored the pain in his body.
"A Saint State... manifesting in a mere whelp," Noelle whispered, leaning forward as his eyes drank in the sight of the boy in the test tube. "The Sixteen Kingdoms call Harold their god. Let them. By the time I am whole again, I won't just be a god."
He reached out his remaining hand, pressing his palm against the glass.
"I will be the one who harvests them."