Katan's voice reverberated not just through the hall, but inside my very marrow, cold and abyssal.
"This place is not for just anyone, Silver."
The pressure crushed my ribcage. Every breath felt like sucking in molten lead, but I gritted my teeth and forced my legs to take short, heavy steps until I reached Silver's side.
I knelt before Her Majesty.
The Queen observed me.
There was no warmth, admiration, or gentleness in those divine eyes. She looked at me with the calculating coldness of someone evaluating an insect that, by some grotesque miracle, had survived a storm.
"I see you returned alive," her voice sounded flawless, loaded with an arrogance that repelled the air around her.
"Yes, Your Majesty!" I answered, struggling to keep my voice steady under Katan's crushing gravity.
The corner of her lips rose in a sharp, humorless smile.
"Do not confuse surviving a spectacle of mud and blood with true usefulness to my kingdom. You won the arena, yes. But I do not trust what you are. And I, personally, do not understand why Silver insists on wasting time with you."
The silence in the throne room was lethal.
Silver just kept his hands in his pockets, listening.
"Therefore, I will test you," she continued, her tone dropping to an icy blade.
"Classified information must be delivered to a specific location. Our world is not made only of gods; Lavinsk is merely our peak, the main city. Far to the south, in distant lands, there is an allied elven kingdom. Any minor deity in this castle could complete this journey without breaking a sweat."
She leaned her face forward.
"But I want to see if you can cross the lands beyond our walls. Silver, obviously, will not lift a finger to help you. It is your chance to prove you are not a mistake. If you fail, do not bother coming back."
My aura vibrated reactively to that veiled humiliation.
I raised my chin, holding her gaze for as long as Katan's pressure allowed.
"Understood. I will prove my worth."
The Queen did not respond to my audacity.
She merely raised her pale hand slowly.
*"Watashi no kotoba kara detekita."*
The air trembled instantly.
Glowing, golden letters emerged from nothing above her head, flowing and intertwining in the air like threads of light, until they wove a sheet that expanded into a scroll.
When she closed her hand, the document rolled itself up, cut through the air, and landed perfectly in my hands.
It wasn't ordinary paper.
The texture was almost metallic, cold, and strangely flexible.
"I will give my life for this mission," I declared, putting the scroll away.
I stood up slowly, without turning my back to the throne, and walked backward until I reached the immense doors of the hall.
My knees still trembled slightly under Katan's silent gravity.
As soon as I crossed the gates to the outside of the castle, the cold wind cut across my face, and the sunlight blinded me for an instant, bringing oxygen back to my lungs.
Silver was already outside.
Sitting on the first step of the colossal staircase, his silver hair dancing in the wind, watching the immensity of the city below.
I sat beside him, taking a deep breath.
"I'm going to do this. I have to succeed," I said, my voice firm, clenching my fists.
"You're not going alone, kid," Silver replied, without taking his eyes off the horizon.
"The other two are going with you. The mission is yours, but the squad is mine. You still don't know how to work together. It will be a great experience, for everyone."
He touched my shoulder.
And in the blink of an eye, the castle vanished.
We were already back in the backyard of the master's house.
By now, my stomach didn't even churn with these spatial jumps anymore.
Silver walked straight to the kitchen to speak with Kânia, who was preparing something with an incredible aroma that flooded the house.
Before I could relax my shoulders, Laura appeared in the hallway.
"Were you hiding behind the door?" I asked, letting out a nasal laugh.
"Not exactly, I felt the fluidity of the master's aura arriving," she replied, a bit awkwardly but visibly excited.
"I wanted to congratulate you again on the victory! Damn, you were insane out there! You killed without hesitation... I didn't imagine you had all that cold blood."
I frowned slightly.
"Cold blood?..."
My sentence died in my throat.
"Don't confuse instinctive bloodlust with true assassin technique."
Arthur's deep, dry voice cut through the room.
He stepped out of the shadows of the hallway, walking with slow, measured steps, shirtless, with combat wraps already coiled around his forearms and fists.
His gaze was locked onto me.
"That's what I felt watching you in the arena. Unleashed fury. Animalistic survival." He stopped a few meters away.
"You won because your enemies were arrogant idiots who lost their heads."
"Arthur, what are you doing?" Laura took a step forward, the smile dying on her face.
But it was Silver who answered, appearing in the kitchen doorway with an apple in his hand.
"He is doing what he asked me to do since you woke up from your coma, kid," Silver calmly bit into the apple.
"The Queen gave you a test out there. But your test in here, before you leave on a mission with my team, is to understand exactly the size of the abyss between you and a pureblood god in the same age group."
Silver pointed to the large dirt and stone courtyard at the back of the house.
"Training courtyard. Now."
A heavy silence fell over the hallway. I understood immediately.
It wasn't a random attack; it was a sanctioned duel. A hierarchy being established.
We walked in silence to the training area. The sun was beginning to set, painting the divine sky in shades of orange and red.
Arthur stopped in the center of the courtyard, his bare feet sinking slightly into the dust.
The orange light of the setting sun hit him, highlighting the absurd texture of his gray skin. It wasn't an opaque shade of sickness or dead ashes; it looked like polished granite.
Shirtless, his musculature was a work sculpted for absolute combat, hypertrophied to the exact measure to blend explosive speed and crushing brute force.
Small pale scars crossed his broad shoulders and chest, the irrefutable proof of someone who survived Silver's infernal training every day.
No weapons.
Only the worn white wraps methodically coiled around his hands and forearms, their loose ends swaying gently in the warm breeze.
"I hope that victory hasn't made you arrogant," he said, adopting a solid, perfect combat stance, leaving no openings.
I took a deep breath.
*Great,* I thought bitterly.
*Another round against death.*
But the difference in level here was glaring.
He wasn't a spoiled brat like Kaichin, nor an irrational brute force like Kimiko.
Arthur was a god forged by Silver's hands; despite being close in age, he was a pureblood.
I adopted my stance, without a sword.
Without my heavy sword in my hands, raw close-quarters combat was the only option.
I slightly bent my knees, sinking the soles of my feet into the dust to lower and anchor my center of gravity.
I clenched my fists tightly at chin level, feeling my skin stretch beneath the bandages still stained with dried blood.
I glued my elbows to my bruised ribs to protect them from impact and shrugged my shoulders, creating a natural shield around my neck.
It wasn't an elegant, clean, or divine martial art.
It was the violent stance of a survivor.
My body weight fully transferred to the balls of my feet, my calf muscles tensioned like springs, ready to explode in any direction the exact millisecond he breathed harder.
The dirt floor simply erupted beneath Arthur's feet.
He didn't just advance; he erased the ten-meter distance between us in a single, silent leap, gliding close to the ground like a gray shadow.
When I blinked, his broad shoulder was already rotated; his cocked fist tore through the wind toward my chest with the weight and speed of a battering ram.
I dug the sole of my foot into the dirt, tearing the ground to anchor my weight, and threw my body to meet his.
I twisted my hips, teeth gritted, channeling absolutely all the strength of my legs and back straight into my right fist.
Our knuckles clashed in the exact center of the courtyard.
There was no sound of flesh hitting flesh.
The impact sounded like two massive boulders colliding at two hundred kilometers per hour.
An invisible, brutal shockwave whipped the air at the point of contact, sweeping the dust from the ground into a perfect ring of wind around our boots and making the windows of Silver's house rattle violently in their frames.
A searing pain exploded through the bones of my right hand, shooting up to my shoulder.
I held the block for the maximum number of milliseconds my human anatomy could endure, until my defense simply crumbled under the absurd weight of his divine strength.
Arthur's punch tore through my guard as if it were made of paper.
His fist sank into the center of my chest.
The hollow sound of impact echoed through the courtyard.
I was swept off the ground, hurled backward violently. I tore up the dirt of the training courtyard with my back for dozens of meters, kicking up a thick cloud of dust.
I coughed, feeling a metallic taste invade my mouth, and dug my feet and hands into the ground to brake the inertia.
I didn't wait for him to come to me.
I used the friction of the ground, turning the impact into propulsion. I shot back, shattering the stone beneath my feet.
*Now,* I thought.
I took advantage of the fraction of a second he lowered his punching arm and jumped with everything I had, twisting my body in the air to deliver a descending kick straight to his face.
But Arthur's eyes were unreadable.
He didn't even blink.
The exact moment my heel was about to hit him, Arthur raised his forearm at a perfect angle.
The impact made the ground crack beneath his feet, but the gray god didn't move a centimeter back.
Like hitting a mountain of solid iron.
"Slow," he whispered.
With his free hand, he grabbed my leg while I was still in the air, twisted his torso, and hurled me back against the rocky floor of the courtyard with monstrous brutality.
My back slammed into the stone so hard the air abandoned my lungs.
The world spun.
But the fight had no pauses. I rose from the earth, kicking up dust, and threw a heavy hook, putting all my hip weight into the strike.
He merely tilted his neck a single centimeter to the left.
My fist only tore the wind.
Before I could retract my outstretched arm, he used my own loss of balance against me and invaded my guard like a ghost.
His gray fist sank into my side with a short, perfectly calculated hook.
The hollow impact cracked against my bones. My ribs, which had barely healed from Kimiko's blade, screamed in agony, feeling like burning embers.
The air vanished from my lungs, forcing me to double over instinctively.
The exact moment I lowered my head, blinded by pain, Arthur twisted his hips and delivered a lethal upward elbow strike.
I tried to raise my injured arm to defend, but I was too slow.
The bone of his elbow, hard as granite, violently scraped the bone of my face. The blow snapped my head back with a crack.
A deep cut opened my eyebrow instantly.
Hot blood gushed immediately, running down my face and partially blinding my left eye.
He was infinitely more technical. Faster. More experienced. He wasn't just fighting; he was dissecting me in the courtyard.
Reading my movements before my muscles even contracted.
But I refused to just take a beating.
I staggered back, spitting out a puddle of blood.
When Arthur advanced with a high side kick aiming at my temple, I made a suicidal decision: I didn't retreat.
I dove straight into the path of his attack.
The gray heel scraped past my shoulder, tearing the flesh, but the movement put me inside his absolute range.
I threw all my hatred and despair into a single right cross.
Arthur tried to twist his neck, but the proximity was too short even for his speed.
My fist grazed his perfect guard and cracked against his granite face.
It wasn't a solid hit. But the raw friction of the bandage flayed his skin.
Arthur stepped back half a pace, stopping his sequence.
He raised his hand slowly and ran his thumb over the cut.
He looked at his own dark red blood staining his fingertips, as if faced with an unforgivable offense.
The god's gaze darkened.
"A human managed to make me bleed..." he murmured.
His voice carried no pain, but a heavy, ancient, almost rocky timbre.
He lowered his hand, his dark eyes locked on me.
"Do you think my skin is gray due to a mere genetic whim, boy?" he asked, taking a slow step toward me.
"I am a Morokian. We are not born in soft wombs like humans. We were forged from the cores of dead planets, molded in the pressure of the vacuum to be the indestructible vanguard of this universe."
As he spoke, my eyes widened.
The blood on Arthur's face began to dry instantly and turn to dust.
The edges of the cut on his lower lip began to move. The gray flesh did not scar like common biological tissue; it flowed and merged again, like liquid granite cooling and solidifying in real-time.
Within three seconds, his skin was perfectly smooth again. No cuts. No scratches. Without leaving even a microscopic scar.
"We are not just hard to kill," Arthur continued, his voice resonating through the courtyard. "We are the very definition of immortality. Which means the pathetic wounds you think you opened on me never existed."
I staggered backward, panting.
Despair began knocking on the door of my mind. How could I defeat something that simply erased its own damage?
His tone was full of bitter pride.
Arthur's aura began to weigh down, cracking the dust beneath his feet.
"I am one of the last living Morokians. I carry the weight and honor of an extinct lineage," he growled, his face just a few meters from mine. "And I refuse to see that man waste his teachings on a fragile, ephemeral worm like you."
The next second, he vanished from my sight.
Arthur spun on his axis at monstrous speed and swept my legs with a brutal trip.
Before my back even hit the earth, a merciless front kick to the middle of my stomach sent me flying across the yard.
I rolled through the dust, shattering stones and opening small craters in the dirt with the weight of my own body.
Arthur slowly cracked his knuckles, his breathing only slightly accelerated, watching me try to plant my knees on the ground to get up for the fifth time.
The shout he let out before kicking me had come out broken at the end, consumed by an unstable rage I didn't understand.
*If he could knock me out with the first strike... why didn't he? Why beat me to the absolute limit? He wanted me to give up. He wanted me to crawl.*
I spat a clot of hot blood onto the shattered earth.
My legs trembled from pure muscular exhaustion.
My flesh was at its limit.
I closed my eyes for a brief moment and drew in a breath.
And then, amidst that hallucinatory pain, I remembered my mother's face.
Her gentle touch on my face when I got hurt in the village.
My father's protective eyes.
And suddenly... the storm in my mind quieted; thinking of my family was what kept my sanity intact.
Silver's words during the nights of torture on the dark planet echoed crystal clear inside my head, as if he were whispering in my ear:
*"Calm the soul. Let the body feel the power. Expand your potential."*
I exhaled slowly.
The world around me seemed to decelerate drastically. The sound of the wind beating against the leaves of the courtyard tree became muffled.
I raised my guard once again, hands firm, my stance untouchable.
There was no reaction of pain.
No attempt at intimidation.
No verbal provocation.
Arthur growled, his pride wounded seeing that I hadn't broken, and lunged like a gray lightning bolt to finish the job.
My right foot rotated in the dirt exactly half a degree.
My left shoulder relaxed, releasing all the unnecessary tension from the torn muscle.
My gaze locked coldly and emotionlessly right into the exact center of his chest.
And the entire training courtyard held its breath.