"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the first day of the Grand Magic Games." The announcer's voice rolled across the arena as the crowd settled back into its seats, the break ending with the energy of fifty thousand people refocusing on something they had been anticipating for an hour. "The hour is almost up, and while our contestants are finishing any last snacks, I have been given the go-ahead to explain today's event. A special thanks to all the earth mages who helped us prepare this; it was no small undertaking." He paused, and even from section nine Aelius could see him raise one hand and sweep it dramatically toward the arena floor below, and the ground responded to it.
It started at the center of the arena, the dirt floor cracking along lines that had clearly been prepared in advance, earth pushing upward through the gaps with slow, heavy force. The cracks spread outward as the mass grew, the floor of the Domus Flau splitting and reforming around the rising shape, stone and soil and rock compressing into each other as the thing built itself upward, higher and higher, the scale of it becoming apparent only gradually as the upper sections cleared the arena walls and kept going. By the time it stopped, it filled most of the arena floor; an entire mountain had pushed itself up from the ground, its peak somewhere above the sight line of the lower seating sections. At the summit, visible even from the stands, sat a glowing throne.
The crowd had gone almost completely silent during the ascent, the collective response to something that large appearing where nothing had been thirty seconds ago. Then it came back all at once, loud enough that Aelius felt it in his chest from the stands.
"May I introduce," the announcer said, with the satisfaction of a man who had been holding that line for an hour, "the King's Mountain. Here are the rules, ladies and gentlemen, because there are not many of them, and what there are matter." He let the noise settle slightly before continuing. "Each guild sends one representative. That representative's goal is simple. Reach the summit and sit on the throne. The competitor sitting on the throne when the sixty-minute timer ends wins the event for their guild, and points are awarded by placement, meaning second through eighth place matter too, so do not give up if you lose the throne, because holding a position on the mountain still earns your guild something." Another pause. "Now. Here is where it becomes interesting."
Aelius was already looking at the mountain, reading the shape of the approaches, the angle of the rock faces, the places where the stone had compressed unevenly during the rise and would be structurally questionable under weight.
"The mountain does not stay the same." The announcer's voice carried the delight of someone delivering the part they had been most looking forward to. "Every few minutes the terrain changes. Bridges collapse. Cliff faces rotate. Magical storms roll across the upper sections. And, for our more combat-minded viewers," another pause, "monsters emerge from the rock itself. The mountain is alive, ladies and gentlemen, and it intends to make this as difficult as possible for everyone on it." He let that sit. "You do not get points for reaching the throne first. You get points for sitting on it when the clock runs out. Which means this event is not a race. It is sixty minutes of whoever wants it most, holding it against everyone else who also wants it, while the mountain itself tries to remove everyone from the equation entirely." The roar that followed was loud enough that Aelius could feel it through the seating.
He looked at the throne at the summit and thought about it plainly. There was something else to the game that wasn't immediately obvious. The Announcer said that points were awarded by placement, but then doubled back by saying points were only awarded to the winner…it was probably based on survivability; whoever had the hardest time getting to the top would do the worst, if they didn't end up on the seat last.
He stood up from his seat in section nine and started toward the stairs, then stopped, looked at the drop from the stands to the arena floor, and stepped off the edge instead.
He landed oddly elegantly, the impact absorbed by the dirt, with a small cloud of dust rising at his feet before he straightened up as the other contestants began to drop down as well. He walked past them toward the base of the mountain where the other representatives were already gathering, and the officials exchanged a look and apparently decided that pursuing the matter was not worth what it would cost them.
The other representatives had arrived from the proper entrance tunnel at the arena's eastern side, filing out in the way competing guild members filed out for events, with varying degrees of composure. He recognized Jura immediately, the man's size and the Lamia Scale colors making him straightforward to identify, standing with the relaxed steadiness of someone who had done events like this before and had a clear idea of his own capabilities relative to what was in front of him. Jura caught his eye and nodded once, which Aelius returned.
Sabertooth had sent one of the dragon slayers. The younger-looking of the two, pale-haired, the guild's insignia visible on his hand, was currently surveying the mountain with heavy focus.
Quatro Cerberus had sent a broad man with a drinking gourd at his waist, looking at the mountain with something between enthusiasm and a complete absence of strategic consideration. Blue Pegasus had Eve; Aelius recognized him from his unpleasant time during the Oracion Seis job. Mermaid Heel's representative was tall, dark-haired, a sword at her hip; Aelius assumed she was the one Macao had warned him of, Kagura, if he remembered her name right. Raven Tail's representative stood slightly apart from the others, a steel, almost bird-like mask on his tall frame, even taller than Aelius himself. And a small wooden thing on its shoulder.
And the last one. She was smaller, very noticeably so, standing among the other representatives in a way that made the size difference almost absurd. Her guild mark was somewhere beneath the long pale coat she wore, and her eyes, when they moved across the lineup of competitors and eventually reached him, were the color of deep water and carried roughly the same depth. She looked at him for a moment without any readable expression, then looked at the mountain, then looked back at him, before averting her gaze, mumbling something under her breath.
Above, the announcer's voice came down across the arena with the energy of someone who had been waiting for this moment through an entire preliminary and an hour-long break and was ready to spend every bit of the accumulated anticipation. "Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce your King's Mountain representatives! From Sabertooth, Sting Eucliffe! From Mermaid Heel, Kagura Mikazuchi! From Fairy Tail, Aelius Morvain! From Quatro Cerberus, Bacchus Groh! From Blue Pegasus, Eve Tearm! From Lamia Scale, Jura Neekis! From Raven Tail, Obra! And from Asteria, Seraphine!"
The crowd's response varied by name, loudest for Sabertooth and Lamia Scale, a different type of loud for Fairy Tail, somewhere between curious and genuinely interested, the sound of a crowd that had been thinking about the solo entry, and had put some faith into it.
"Eight competitors. One throne. Sixty minutes." The announcer said one last time, before he paused dramatically. "Begin!0"
The mountain was already changing before any of them had taken a step toward it. A section of the lower face rotated outward with a grinding sound that Aelius felt through the soles of his boots, a broad ledge that had looked like a natural first approach swinging away and depositing its potential usefulness somewhere around the mountain's northern side. Several of the representatives adjusted their routes immediately. Bacchus from Quatro Cerberus didn't adjust at all, simply hit the rock face at a run and started climbing like it was what he had been trained to do.
Sting went up fast. He was twenty feet up the lower face before most of the others had committed to an approach, moving with the aggressive confidence of someone who had been told he was the strongest person in any given room for long enough that he had started believing it without examining it too carefully.
Kagura moved differently, measured, reading the face before committing, her hand not on her sword yet but close to it in the way that meant it was an active consideration rather than a default. Jura walked toward the base with the unhurried steadiness he carried everywhere, and the earth around his feet responded to his presence.
Obra hadn't moved at all. Still standing at the base with arms crossed, watching the others begin their ascent.
Seraphine looked at the mountain, then at Aelius, then took a step forward and walked up into the air beside it. A move that made Aelius's brow rise slightly. She could walk on air as he did; it wasn't impressive, or even hard for most. One just needed the right type of caster magic, but most still couldn't do it.
Aelius looked at the mountain, then at the air beside it, and stepped up; he didn't care all that much in the end,
The announcer's reaction was immediate and loud. "Well, ladies and gentlemen, it appears we have not one but two competitors who have decided that the mountain's face is optional! Fairy Tail's representative and the young woman from Asteria are simply walking up the side of nothing, which I have to say I did not anticipate putting in my notes for today!"
Below, Sting had paused his climb and was looking up at Aelius with an expression that had shifted to annoyance, and honestly, the look of someone who just caught someone cheating. Kagura looked up once, and returned her attention to her own route without visible reaction. Jura tilted his head upward briefly and then continued walking toward the base.
Seraphine reached a point roughly level with him and matched his pace without appearing to do so deliberately, rising at the same rate, the empty air holding her the same way it held him. She looked across the gap between them. "You've done this before," she said. "It's not often someone uses air walk by themselves."
Aelius kept walking upward through the air and said nothing; he didn't come here for talk, let alone with someone he didn't know.
The summit was close now, the throne visible above them both, its glow steady and indifferent to the chaos happening on the mountain below it. He could reach it in the next thirty seconds if he wanted to. He could have reached it in the first two minutes if he had moved at anything approaching his actual pace, and he had not, because sixty minutes was a long time and the first thing he was going to reveal about himself this week was not the ceiling.
He slowed slightly and let the mountain's upper terrain shift happen in front of him, a bridge of rock that had been spanning two sections of the summit approach grinding sideways and dropping into the mountain's interior, which would have been a significant problem for anyone who had been on it. Nobody had been on it yet, which was luck rather than reading, but the effect was the same.
Seraphine watched the bridge go with the expression of someone who had expected it.
"You're not in a hurry," Aelius said. He knew her answer, but he was curious if she would attack now, or later.
She looked at him with those deep water eyes. "The throne waits for whoever sits in it last," she said. "Not whoever sits in it first."
He looked at her for a moment. Then he looked at the throne, and the other competitors working their way up through the chaos of the mountain below, before he stepped onto the summit and sat down on the throne.
The announcer made sure everyone knew. "FAIRY TAIL TAKES THE THRONE, ladies and gentlemen, first to the summit, Aelius Morvain sitting down like he's settling in for an afternoon, and the question now is whether anyone can move him!"
Originally he hadn't planned on taking the throne. The plan, loosely, had been to watch the others work their way up and get a read on each of them before committing to anything. Information was worth more than points in the first event, and he had come into this week knowing that the individual battles were where the real work would happen, not the morning events.
Then he had watched Jura struggle. Not badly, but Jura was a Wizard Saint with an obvious affinity for earth magic, and the earth magic that had built this mountain was apparently not inclined to extend professional courtesy to someone who shared its discipline. The face kept shifting under him, the handholds he created being swallowed back into the mountain before he could fully commit his weight to them; the terrain treated his attempts to work with it the same way it treated everyone else's attempts to fight it: with complete indifference.
Watching that had made standing around feel unproductive, so Aelius had walked up instead and sat down, which was all there was to it. He honestly didn't know if he would win this one. Being unkillable and being immovable were different problems entirely, and the throne was a holding contest, not a combat. If someone reached the summit with enough left in them actually to contest the seat, the question became whether he was willing to spend the energy required to stay in it for the remainder of the sixty minutes against sustained pressure, and that was a headache that changed depending on who was doing the pressing.
His best guess for the eventual winner, if he chose not to hold it himself, was Jura. The title Iron Rock was not decorative. A man who had earned that name in actual combat was probably not going to be moved from a fixed position by terrain shifts or by the other competitors, once he actually got there. The earth might be giving him trouble on the ascent, but Aelius doubted very much that it would be giving him trouble once he had both feet planted somewhere he intended to stay.
He had approximately thirty minutes before anyone else reached him, he judged. Maybe less for a few of them, more for most. The mountain was not making the upper sections easy; a storm had rolled across the eastern face in the last few minutes, depositing ice across the handholds in that approach, and something had emerged from the rock in the lower middle section that had created a brief but significant interruption for three of the climbers.
Seraphine was still hovering in the air a few feet from the summit's edge, watching the others below with the patient attention of someone who had decided that the summit would still be there when she chose to reach it. She had not looked at him since he sat down. She was simply present, quiet, her pale coat moving slightly in the wind that crossed the upper mountain with more force than anything at ground level.
The timer read fifty-one minutes.
He leaned back in the throne and looked at the sky above the Domus Flau, open and blue and completely uninvested in anything happening below it, and waited to see who was going to be first to make his morning interesting, but in the meantime, he closed his eyes and leaned on his hand, not asleep, but not fully aware.
The first to reach him was Sting. "You're in my seat," Sting said immediately as he roared, wasting no time attacking Aelius. Sting hit him with everything he had on the first exchange, which was the right call tactically if the goal was to remove someone from a position before they could settle into defending it. The dragon's roar hit the throne and the summit and Aelius in a wave that cracked the stone around the throne's base and sent a shockwave outward across the summit edge that Seraphine drifted back from without apparent urgency.
Aelius stayed in the throne. He had taken the hit rather than deflecting it, which had been a decision made in the half second between Sting committing to the attack and the attack arriving. Deflecting would have told Sting something about his reflexes. Taking it told him something different, and the something different was more useful for the week overall. Had stopped at Aelius's Aegis, meaning it had never hit him, instead only stirring up dust, something that was considerably less than Sting had been expecting, judging by the expression that followed.
Sting tried again, this time mixing the magic output with direct physical force, closing the distance and driving a fist into Aelius's chest with the weight of a dragon slayer's magic behind it. It was a solid hit. Aelius's hand came up and closed around Sting's wrist before the follow-through could complete, not squeezing, just stopping, and he looked at the young dragon slayer over the caught fist with the flat attention of someone conducting an evaluation rather than a fight. Sting pulled his wrist free, which Aelius allowed, and stepped back to reassess.
"You're strong," Sting said, with the directness of someone who gave credit when the evidence was in front of them.
"You're faster than I expected," Aelius said, which was true and which Sting received with a brief, surprised expression, apparently not having anticipated a straight answer.
The mountain intervened before Sting could respond, a section of the summit edge dropping away on the western side with a crack that sent both of them shifting their footing, and in the reorganization of the moment Sting moved to the throne's left side and planted himself there, changing from attempting to take the seat to attempting to hold position near it, which was the smarter play and suggested he was thinking beyond the immediate exchange.
Seraphine drifted back toward the summit edge and looked down. "Jura," she said, to no one in particular.
Aelius looked over the edge. Jura was twenty feet below the summit, moving with the steady, deliberate pace of a man who had stopped fighting the mountain and started working with the limited cooperation it was willing to offer.
Above, the announcer had been narrating the summit exchange with audible excitement. "Sting Eucliffe has reached the summit and our first real contest for the throne is underway, ladies and gentlemen, and from what I can see the Sabertooth dragon slayer hit that throne with everything he had and the man sitting in it has not moved in any meaningful sense, which is either a statement about Fairy Tail's representative or about the structural integrity of that throne, and I am fairly confident it's the former!"
Bacchus reached the summit four minutes after Jura disappeared over the edge, arriving with considerably more noise and considerably less technique than anyone else who had made it up, hauling himself over the final ledge with the cheerful disregard of someone who had decided that style was optional, and results were everything. He took one look at the throne, one look at Aelius in it, one look at Sting standing beside it, and sat down cross-legged on the summit stone with the air of a man settling in to watch something interesting happen.
"Not going for it?" Sting asked him.
"In a minute," Bacchus said, and produced something from his coat that may or may not have been alcohol and may or may not have been appropriate for the occasion.
Jura arrived at the summit without announcement, simply stepping over the edge and straightening up, and the weight of his presence on the summit stone was immediately different from anyone else who had been up there, the mountain seeming to settle slightly under him the way ground settled under something that belonged on it. He looked at the throne. He looked at Aelius. He looked at Sting, and at Bacchus on the ground, and at Seraphine hovering at the edge, and then back at Aelius.
"Sir Aelius," he said.
"Jura," Aelius said.
A brief silence settled between them, the comfortable kind that existed between people who had fought alongside each other and had no unresolved business.
Then Jura walked toward the throne, and the mountain walked with him, the stone beneath his feet responding in the way it had been refusing to respond on the ascent, compressing and solidifying under each step.
Aelius stood up, not because Jura had asked him to, or because the force of his approach required it, but because staying in the throne for the next forty minutes against Jura Neekis with a fully cooperative mountain under his feet was not a calculation that went in an interesting direction. He had held the throne. He had taken Sting's best hit in front of thousands of people. He had certainly earned enough to warrant attention at the very least. He stepped to the side of the throne and looked at Jura.
Jura looked back at him, understanding moving through his expression. "You're yielding it."
"I'm stepping aside," Aelius said. "There's a difference."
Jura held his gaze for a moment, then sat down on the throne.
Sting looked at Aelius with an expression that was working through several things at once. Bacchus raised whatever he was drinking in a brief salute toward no one in particular.
Seraphine drifted back to the summit edge, looked at Jura in the throne, looked at Aelius standing beside it, and said quietly, "The water that moves the stone is not always the strongest water."
Aelius looked at her. "That means something, I assume."
"Most things do," she said. A response that irked Aelius; something felt off about this woman, but he wasn't able to place it.
Above, the announcer had found his voice again after what had apparently been a brief stunned silence. "Ladies and gentlemen, Fairy Tail's representative has stepped away from the throne, and Jura Neekis of Lamia Scale has taken the seat, and I have to say, the look exchanged between those two men suggested considerably more was happening than a simple handover, but what exactly that was I will leave to our commentators to debate because I genuinely do not know where to begin!"
Thirty-eight minutes on the timer.
Aelius moved to the summit's edge, looked at the remaining competitors still working their way up through the mountain's chaos below, and settled in to watch the rest of the event from the best seat in the arena that wasn't the throne itself.