The Grand Tournament erupted under a sky bruised purple with storm clouds, the imperial arena no longer sands but a ''living battlefield''—rolling hills, jagged ravines, mist-choked forests stocked with beasts bred for slaughter. This was ''The Crimson Hunt'', where fifty champions competed in simultaneous pursuit: direbears with iron claws, venomous wyrmserpents coiling through caves, thunderhoof stallions that could trample steel plate. Bows sang, blades flashed, beasts roared. Blood misted the air.
Heena reigned from the imperial stormspire—a towering obsidian platform ringed by lightning rods, crimson banners whipping in wind. Her body was a furnace of pain—lungs wet with blood, bones grinding, cosmic rejection accelerating without System 427—but her face was carved granite, ruby tiara defying the gale.
