The main screen cut away from Coelion's sterile victory mid-cheer, and the grand arena inhaled as one. Nineteen smaller panes still streamed other groups—green flares in the desert, a cathedral folding in the gravity field—but the center bloom widened, captured, and held. It found a red thread of hair, the line of a spine too straight to be anything but royal, and an empty street that once belonged to a city and now to ruin.
Rose Sylvanyr walked alone.
Skyscrapers leaned like tired giants, ribs of rebar showing where glass had failed. Mana fog drifted in slow banks, ferment from broken conduits and long-dead wards. Wind ran fingers through severed powerlines and made them sing. She moved through it as if the world had arranged itself for her convenience, heels describing a clean metronome on cracked stone, eyes half-lidded, measuring.
A crack like thunderclap snapped the scene in half
Somewhere three blocks up, behind a skeleton of concrete and glass, a sniper squeezed. The round howled—a bullet of ice spun so tight the air whistled around it, trajectory warping from some minor spell feathering its path. The arena gasped.
The ice round was perfect: a slender, spiraled bullet, compressed and overcharged, traveling so fast it smeared the air into a glassy wake. It would have cored a fortress.
Rose raised one hand without looking. Fingers pinched. The bullet shivered, stopped, and spun between thumb and knuckle like a toy. She fed it—the bullet swelled to fist-size, then skull-size—then flicked.
Somewhere three blocks away, a silhouette lost its head. The body dissolved to white and vanished: ejected.
Before the gasp could finish, five more rounds screamed from five rooftops. Rose's palm turned; six planes of ice unfolded around her like petals, catching and returning each shot in a ricochet ballet. Five silhouettes burst to dust.
The crowd in the grand arena roared—and then fell silent again, because the sixth return shot missed the sixth shooter, passing cleanly through an afterimage.
Not an afterimage. A clone.
Rose's eyes narrowed, the first acknowledgment that someone here had earned a sliver of her attention.
New glints winked to life along the skyline. More "snipers"—a lattice of them, all at good angles, all with calm hands and matching breath.
She dissolved, reappearing on an invisible step of ice five stories up, then another, then another, moving like a skater through empty air. Shots crisscrossed—she brushed them off with casual tilts of the wrist; when she reached a shooter and split him through the sternum, he burst into crystals—another clone. She pivoted to the next—clone. The next—clone.
"Cute," she murmured, and dropped back to street level in a single silent fall, heels kissing concrete without a sound.
"Come out," she said, not loud. "You've earned a real glance."
He obeyed, sliding from a collapsed storefront with the loose-limbed confidence of someone who trusts his hands. Two pistols manifested in the air and clicked into his grip as if the world had always been waiting to provide them.
Creation-type. But not cheap. His lines were clean; his conjures, tight. The arena cameras tightened their focus.
He vanished. Reappeared at her blind side—not teleportation, just footwork and nerve—two muzzles already flaring. The rounds weren't ice alone; he'd threaded mana through the cores until they sang. The kind of ammo that rewrites a shoulder.
They hit her cheek and throat and eyes.
And flattened. Not even a bruise. The bullets fell to the ground with small, apologetic taps.
Rose's gaze flicked to him; the faintest amusement ghosted her mouth.
He sprang back, palms flashing up. The sky dimmed.
A meteor swelled into being directly above her—ice and compressed air braided into a thousand-ton answer to pride. The city wailed as the pressure changed. He snapped his fingers; gravity remembered its job.
Rose reached up one hand and touched it.
The meteor flash-froze from core to crust, then cracked into a hundred glittering ribs that blossomed outward like a dead star. Shards sang as they spun past her and buried themselves in towers.
When she glanced back up, fifty of him were on the rooftops, each with twin pistols raised, a chorus line of killers. A storm of bullets came down like rain.
She walked through it.
The rounds webbed the air with silver lines and left nothing on her but a faint sheen of dust where their cores crushed themselves against skin that would not admit harm. The real shooter kept aiming for the eye—smart, persistent—she let one bullet flatten against her iris and drop just to teach him the lesson faster.
He escalated.
The sky went black with knives.
Millions of blades—some long and elegant, some brutal as rebar—spooled into being and fell in a single, murderous curtain. On the way down they found other contestants, severed limbs, exploded health-bars, turned streets into mangled galleries. The city bellowed with the sound of metal meeting stone and stone losing.
Rose stood exactly where she had been standing and didn't bother to raise a hand. Her body shifted by grains and centimeters only when it absolutely had to. Shards and swords and spears screamed past her, shearing the air so close they combed her hair, and still, still, she did not flinch.
When the smoke lifted, she was there, exactly centered in the crater of calm her presence had carved.
He took the hint and tried to end it the only way endable. He leaped from a spine of rebar with an ice blade big enough to shame a cathedral arch, falling through her blind angle in a perfect decapitation arc.
Contact.
The neck shattered.
His, not hers.
The Rose that stood there bloomed into a mine of white; the contact triggered it; ice detonated outward with surgical violence. Frost surged up his arms and into his skull faster than his nerves could confess failure. He said "I miscalculated", his body popped to white and vanished.
The real Rose stepped out of the haze behind where he'd been, palm open, ice fading from her fingers like she'd shaken off water.
"Enough warm-up," she said, and kept walking.
A wave of speed users approached; speed-users that blurred like spilled ink, gravity-masters that made air a vise, pyroclasts that tried to turn the rubble into furnaces, shadow-weavers who melted into alleys and struck with whispered daggers. Then came the worse kind—campers: men and women who buried themselves in cornered power, snipers conjuring void-lenses, ritualists with slow killing spells. All of them had come to win, and most had come to test themselves against a legend.
Rose smiled, and the smile had no cruelty—only the thin, cool amusement of someone watching an art unfold. "Come at me," she said, voice clear enough to guide like a bell. "I'll keep the tempo."
A speed-user—thin, pale, called Lys—took advantage of the debris-field and darted in, a dozen footfalls before you could blink. She flashed, a knife-shaped blur aimed at Rose's ribs. Rose pivoted on one heel; without drawing her blade she swept a hand. The air condensed into a narrow blade of glass-blue ice that coiled like a serpent and caught Lys mid-run. For an instant Lys looked stunned, trapped inside motion; the blade didn't maim—just held the motion. Rose tipped her head. "You move like you're being chased by yesterday."
Then the blade melted into dew and Lys went down, breathless, dignity intact. She bowed, not in defeat but in recognition. Rose exhaled and turned, never slowing her pace. The pattern had been set: disarm without cruelty; dispatch without spectacle. Each opponent got a lesson, and the lessons taught them only that they had been unprepared.
There was variety in the field. A giant—hewn like a mountain and named Brynn—charged with stone fists. Rose met him with the feint of a dancer and a foot-stamp that shivered the plaza. Ice rose in a dome, a translucent cathedral that lifted Brynn's momentum and spread it into shards that scattered harmlessly. The giant slid, cursed, and rose red-faced with awe.
Another presence pushed wind aside.
The speed user came like a crack in film, turning distance into a lie. His footwork knitted the street into a path only he could see, angles stealing force, hips stacked like a blade thrown from a god's hand. A knife aimed for her throat.
Rose didn't flinch. Ice walked her arm and found shape—not a gaudy scythe, just a thin, strict edge from wrist to knuckle. Steel met winter with a sound like a bell being taught manners. Three cuts turned aside with economy; on the fourth she stepped into him and closed her palm around his neck. Frost went from surface to core. An armored snap and he was light. The speed cut away into nothing.
She exhaled once. The arena hissed its adoration.
Then the street filled in. They'd let the first two test the water; the rest came like a tide.
A bruiser whose fists steamed. A lightning-caller with eyes white and hands hungry. A shadow that crawled up a wall and down again, black fingers counting odds. There was a crane of bone and ice on a rooftop: an archer with a polar aether bow already pulling a second draw. There were five more you'd never look at in a crowd unless they were killing you.
Rose looked at all of them as if she had already decided where they would fall.
A molten fist, first: big, honest, all forward. She rolled her shoulder and it polished itself to clear ice you could have used as a mirror. The punch became a teachable moment and his forearm armor cracked like brittle candy. He bent. Her knee rose. He blinked out.
Lightning raked her back. She didn't turn. A plane of ice lifted behind her like a gentleman's coat placed over a puddle. The bolt hit, slid, lent itself to physics. The mirror returned it, twice for courtesy. The boy convulsed and was gone.
Shadow tried to make hubris out of her poise, reaching where eyes aren't. Ice licked the ground in a lazy loop, met darkness, and hardened like it had found an old friend. She towed it hand over hand, threw the shadow back into its caster, and taught him about edges with the sole of her foot.
Street left, rooftop right—she raised her gaze and the archer misjudged the gift in it. A second round leapt his string; an ice rod grew between her fingers, thin, balanced, gone. The arrow and the rod met each other mid-air and argued; neither lived to report the outcome. Her return shot wasn't one piece. It arrived as six slivers, a syllable with more consonants than breath, and chewed his stance out from under him. He ended off-screen and off-contest.
The ruined city adjusted around her. Air condensed where she told it to. Runes vibrated asleep in the road and turned on their faces to watch.
Die," said a voice that loved itself too much to be loud.
He didn't walk so much as let inevitability make him a path. Black irises poured outward past their borders, turning his gaze into a hole. Instant death—hushed in dorm corridors, frowned upon at dinner, adored in private. The crowd's sound collapsed inward. He raised a palm. It's not a gesture you survive.
Rose turned to greet him. Her eyes went glass-bright. Her throat didn't move. The floor beneath her feet frosted and then… spidered.
The crowd swore. Someone laughed from the stress of it.
The thing that fell into shards wasn't her.
The clone broke cleanly, the way an idea breaks once it's finished teaching you. The real Rose was already past him, between thought and breath, palm on the back of his head with no hate in it at all. His armor dented with an ugly softness and then popped him away like a cork.
"Too soon," she said, not unkind.
She then noticed a plaza and headed there to take a nap.
Codex Record: The Ruined City Dimension
Twenty thousand years ago, long before Sylvanyr rose to become the heart of the Elven cosmos, the World Tree faced one of her earliest trials — the arrival of humans.
A great time gate had torn open between realms, spilling countless mortals into the Elven dominion. Weary, ambitious, and clever, the humans came bearing honeyed words — promises of unity, trade, and shared growth. But beneath the smiles were hands itching to measure, to divide, to claim.
The Elves of that age were pure-hearted, many still learning the meaning of deceit. And so, to shield her people without staining their kindness, the World Tree wove a prison of mercy: a vast, walled realm — the Modern City Dimension — where the newcomers could thrive without ever threatening Sylvanyr's roots.
She raised gleaming towers of crystal and marble, spread rivers through streets of gold, and laced the skies with aurora light — a paradise meant for coexistence and reflection. Here, humanity was given all they needed: soil, water, and endless sky.
But humans… would always be humans.
Curiosity became greed, and ambition turned to hunger. The discovery of mana—a force they first saw in the hands of Elves—changed everything. They learned to channel it, then weaponize it. Kingdoms rose overnight, empires burned within decades. In time, those blessed with mana declared themselves gods among mortals, and the unawakened grew resentful.
The paradise crumbled into factions, then nations, then war.
The awakened unleashed mana storms, twisting the very air into weapons. The unawakened, desperate, answered with nuclear fire. What followed was not victory, but a Dimension of Ruins. Cities melted. Skies blackened. The mana-born and the powerless perished alike, choking on the ashes of their ambition.
When the smoke finally cleared, the World Tree mourned.
She could not undo the folly, but she could cleanse the wound. She purged the radiation, sealed the toxins, and left the city standing — hollow, scarred, silent. What remained was a monument to self-destruction, a mirror of what pride unrestrained could do.
Now, the Ruined City Dimension endures as both trial and testament. Its skyscrapers lean like relics of regret; its avenues whisper with phantom footsteps. The air hums faintly with residual mana — not enough to harm, only to remind.
To the Sylvanyr, the place is history — a battlefield frozen between tragedy and wisdom.
To the contestants of the Conflux, it is an arena — sprawling, treacherous, alive with the ghosts of human arrogance.
No radiation remains, no sickness lingers — only lessons carved into stone and silence.
Here, every echo is a warning. Every shadow, a memory.
And every victor walks the same streets where humanity once tried — and failed — to conquer the divine.