[ONE WEEK LATER — THE GRAND ARENA]
The arena was massive.
Five hundred meters in diameter, ringed by towering stands that could hold ten thousand spectators. The floor was polished white stone, inscribed with intricate defensive wards that pulsed with soft golden light—Sixth Circle constructs designed to contain even the most destructive spells.
And every single seat was filled.
Students. Professors. Noble families. Church officials in their white-and-gold robes, watching with cold, calculating eyes.
I stood in the center of it all, hands in my pockets, staring up at the crowds with a lazy grin.
So this is what it feels like to be a spectacle.
The morning air was crisp and cold, carrying the scent of ozone from the active wards and the faint metallic tang of anticipation. I could hear the roar of the crowd—a living thing, pulsing with excitement and bloodlust.
Perception Limit was already active at low intensity, feeding me information without overwhelming my senses.
Heartbeats: 10,347. Mana signatures: 8,923 active. Hostile intent: 47 sources. Church agents: 23 confirmed.
Forty-seven people in this arena wanted to see me fail.
Twenty-three were here to eliminate me if I became too dangerous.
Good odds.
"Nervous?"
I glanced to my left.
Selis stood beside me, dressed in light combat robes—blue and silver, marking her as a Second Circle Adept. Her silver hair was tied back in a practical braid, and her purple eyes sparkled with barely contained excitement.
"Why would I be nervous?" I asked.
"Because you're about to fight people three times your age with three times your training?"
"Four times, actually. My first opponent is fourteen."
She threw her hands up. "That's not helping your case!"
I grinned. "I'll be fine. Worst case scenario, I get my ass kicked and learn something."
"Worst case scenario, you get erased and I have to explain to your mother why I let you fight a Fourth Circle Battle Mage."
"Fair point." I scratched my head. "But to be honest, I'm more curious than worried."
"Curious about what?"
I looked up at the stands—at the Church officials watching with their cold, predatory gazes.
"About how far I can push before they try to stop me."
Selis followed my gaze and paled slightly.
"Rin... be careful. Please."
I bumped my shoulder against hers. "Always am."
Liar, whispered a voice in my head that sounded suspiciously like one of my mirror reflections.
[THE FIRST MATCH]
The arena floor shimmered, and a magical announcement boomed across the space:
"FIRST TRIAL: RIN VALDRIS VERSUS MARCUS THORNHILL."
The crowd erupted.
Half cheering. Half jeering.
I walked to my starting position—a circle of light thirty meters in diameter—and waited.
My opponent emerged from the opposite gate.
Marcus Thornhill. Fourteen years old. Third Circle Scholar. Lightning affinity.
Tall, lean, with short-cropped brown hair and sharp green eyes that crackled with barely contained energy. Golden lightning danced between his fingers, and I could see the mana coursing through his body in intricate patterns—a well-developed Core, refined through years of training.
Third Circle. Elemental specialization. Fast attacks, high burst damage. Weak sustained defense.
He stopped at his circle and stared across the arena at me.
"You're the Null kid," he called out, his voice carrying easily. "The one who thinks he's special."
I yawned. "Think? Nah. I know I'm special."
His eye twitched. "We'll see how special you are when I turn you into charcoal."
"Creative. I like it."
GONG.
The sound of the starting bell reverberated through the arena.
Marcus moved.
Lightning Step—a Third Circle technique that converted the user's body partially into electrical energy, allowing near-instantaneous repositioning.
He crossed thirty meters in 0.2 seconds, appearing directly in front of me, palm wreathed in crackling golden lightning.
"Thunderbolt Strike!"
The smell of ozone flooded my nostrils—sharp, acrid, electric.
The air itself seemed to scream as his palm thrust forward, carrying 50,000 volts of concentrated electricity capable of stopping a human heart instantly.
Speed: 42 meters per second. Voltage: lethal. Attack pattern: direct, no feints. Confidence: high. Fatal flaw: tunnel vision.
Spatial Limit: Infinity.
His hand stopped.
Not slowed. Not deflected.
Stopped.
Frozen in the infinite space between us, electricity arcing harmlessly across the invisible barrier.
Marcus's eyes widened.
"What—"
I reached up casually and flicked his forehead.
The force wasn't much—maybe equivalent to a gentle push—but amplified through Red Force: Minimum Output, it was enough to send him stumbling backward three steps.
The crowd gasped.
"Rule one," I said, my voice carrying across the silent arena. "If you can't touch me, you can't hurt me."
Marcus snarled and leaped back, both hands crackling with power.
"Lightning Cage!"
He slammed his palms against the ground.
Golden electricity erupted from the point of impact, spreading across the arena floor in a complex web of interconnected bolts—dozens of them, creating a three-dimensional cage of pure lightning that contracted rapidly toward me.
Voltage: 100,000 volts distributed across 47 connection points. Cage radius: shrinking at 3 meters per second. Escape vectors: none if caught. Lethality: absolute.
A good technique. Trapping the opponent, limiting their movement, then delivering a devastating finishing blow.
Against a normal opponent, it would have been devastating.
I raised my right hand.
Blue Force: Wide-Range Attraction.
Every single bolt of lightning curved toward my palm.
Not because I was conducting electricity.
Because I was attracting the space where the electricity existed.
The entire Lightning Cage collapsed inward, forty-seven bolts of golden energy spiraling into a sphere of crackling power the size of a basketball, hovering above my open palm.
The light was blinding. The heat radiating from it made the air shimmer. The smell of ionized air was so strong it made my eyes water.
Marcus stared, mouth open.
"That's... that's my entire mana reserve—"
"Yeah." I compressed the sphere smaller. "Pretty impressive. Probably took you years to develop this level of control."
The lightning sphere was the size of an apple now.
Then an orange.
Then a marble.
"Unfortunately," I continued, "control doesn't mean much when your opponent can just... take it."
I closed my fist.
The sphere imploded silently, all that electrical energy collapsing into a point so small it ceased to be dangerous—just a faint spark that fizzled out against my skin.
Gone.
Marcus fell to one knee, gasping.
Mana exhaustion.
He'd poured everything into that attack, and I'd just... erased it.
"Yield," I said quietly. "You fought well, but this is over."
He looked up at me, sweat dripping down his face, and I saw the moment reality set in.
He can't win.
He never could.
"I..." He clenched his fists. "I yield."
The crowd erupted—half in excitement, half in shock.
"WINNER: RIN VALDRIS."
I offered him my hand.
He stared at it for a moment, then took it, and I pulled him to his feet.
"Good technique," I said genuinely. "Your mana control is clean. Keep refining it."
"How?" he asked, voice barely above a whisper. "How do you just... take magic like that?"
I smiled. "Because I don't see magic as something you use. I see it as something that exists. And if it exists..."
I tapped his chest lightly.
"I can change it."
[SECOND MATCH — THREE HOURS LATER]
My second opponent was Lyara Nightshade.
Fourth Circle Archmage. Seventeen years old. Shadow and illusion specialist.
She was gorgeous—long black hair, pale skin, violet eyes that seemed to see through everything. She moved like liquid darkness, her robes trailing shadows that writhed independently.
Fourth Circle. Illusion-based combat. High intelligence. Tactical fighter. Weakness: relies on misdirection rather than direct power.
We stood across from each other.
She smiled—cold, calculating.
"I've been studying you, Valdris. Watching your patterns. Your spatial manipulation is impressive, but it has a weakness."
I raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"
"You can only defend against attacks you perceive. So..."
She raised her hand.
"Abyssal Mirror: Thousand Faces."
The world shattered.
One moment I was standing in the arena.
The next, I was surrounded by darkness.
Not absence of light—darkness as a tangible thing, pressing against my skin, filling my lungs, drowning my senses.
I couldn't see. Couldn't hear. Couldn't feel the ground beneath my feet.
Perception Limit flared desperately, trying to make sense of the environment—
Error. Sensory input: contradictory. Visual data: none. Auditory data: white noise. Spatial awareness: fragmented. Reality consensus: degraded.
An illusion. But not a visual trick. She's manipulating my actual sensory input—
Something moved in the darkness.
Then another.
Then hundreds.
Figures emerging from the void—each one wearing my face.
My reflections.
But wrong. Twisted. Eyes bleeding. Mouths stretched into impossible grins.
They whispered:
"You're not real."
"You died, remember?"
"This is just a dream."
"You're still bleeding on that pavement."
"Mom's waiting."
My breath hitched.
No. This is—this is just an illusion. It's not real—
But the voices were so convincing.
Because part of me believed them.
Part of me still wondered if this entire second life was just a dying hallucination—my brain's desperate attempt to cope with death.
The reflections closed in, reaching for me with cold, dead hands.
"Stop," I whispered.
They didn't stop.
"Stop."
They grabbed me—dozens of hands, ice-cold, pulling at my clothes, my hair, my skin—
And something inside me snapped.
[LAYER FOUR: REALITY LIMIT — PARTIAL AWAKENING]
"I SAID STOP!"
The word carried weight.
Not sound—weight.
Reality itself buckled.
The illusion shattered like glass, fragments of false darkness falling away to reveal the arena again.
But I wasn't done.
My mind was racing, adrenaline flooding my system, Perception Limit pushed to its absolute maximum—
And I felt it.
The structure of the illusion. The way Lyara had woven her mana into my sensory perception, creating false inputs, hijacking my brain's interpretation of reality.
If she can manipulate perception...
Then I can manipulate the rules of perception.
I raised both hands.
Blue light in the right. Red in the left.
But this time, something else emerged between them.
Purple light.
"Domain Expansion."
My voice was cold. Flat. Mechanical.
"Infinite Boundary."
REALITY FRACTURED.
The arena didn't disappear.
It multiplied.
Suddenly, Lyara and I weren't standing in one space—we were standing in infinite space.
The arena stretched in every direction—up, down, left, right, forward, backward—repeating endlessly like facing two mirrors.
But it wasn't just visual.
It was everything.
Every sound echoed infinitely.
Every sensation repeated.
Every thought, every perception, every input was multiplied by infinity and force-fed into her consciousness.
THE INFINITE BOUNDARY.
A domain where all limits ceased to exist.
Where the boundaries between "here" and "there," "now" and "then," "real" and "unreal" were stripped away.
Where everything became everything all at once.
For someone like me, whose mind was built to process infinite information—
It was uncomfortable.
For someone like Lyara, with a normal human brain—
It was hell.
She screamed.
Not in pain. In overload.
Her mind was trying to process infinite sensory input simultaneously—seeing every possible position, hearing every possible sound, feeling every possible sensation.
All at once.
Forever.
She collapsed to her knees, hands clutching her head, blood trickling from her nose.
"Stop—please—I can't—too much—"
I lowered my hands, and the domain collapsed.
Reality snapped back to normal.
The arena. The crowd. The silence.
Lyara was on the ground, trembling, tears streaming down her face.
Medics rushed onto the field immediately.
I stood there, staring at my hands.
They were shaking.
What... what did I just do?
The Infinite Mirror flickered in my mind.
A reflection stepped forward—this one with empty, hollow eyes.
"Layer Four. Reality Limit."
"Congratulations. You just showed them what true power looks like."
"And now they'll never see you as human again."
I looked up at the stands.
Ten thousand faces staring at me.
Not with excitement.
With terror.
Even the Church officials had gone pale.
"Winner..." The announcement was hesitant. "Rin Valdris."
No cheers.
Just silence.
I walked off the arena floor, hands in my pockets, that lazy grin plastered on my face.
But inside, I felt nothing but cold.
[MEDICAL TENT — ONE HOUR LATER]
I sat on a medical bench while a Fourth Circle Healer examined me.
"Any pain?" she asked.
"No."
"Dizziness? Nausea? Sensory distortion?"
"Nope."
She frowned, studying the diagnostic spell hovering over my chest. "That's... unusual. You just performed what appears to be a domain-class technique. The mental strain alone should have—"
"I'm fine," I interrupted.
She didn't look convinced, but nodded. "Very well. You're cleared for your next match."
I hopped off the bench and—
Pain.
Sharp. Sudden. Blinding.
I gasped and stumbled, catching myself against the bench.
The Healer was at my side instantly. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing, I just—"
I looked down at my hands.
They were covered in small cuts—dozens of them, paper-thin, leaking blood.
When did—
Backlash.
The domain. Forcing reality to bend beyond its natural limits. It had cost something.
"These wounds..." The Healer frowned. "They're not physical. They're... conceptual? I've never seen anything like this."
She began casting a healing spell—
But before the golden light could even touch my skin, the cuts closed.
Not healed in the traditional sense.
Reversed.
Like watching a video play backward—blood flowing back into the wounds, skin knitting together, until there was no trace they'd ever existed.
The Healer stared.
"How did you—"
"I didn't." I flexed my fingers, examining them. No pain. No scars. "It just... happened."
[REVERSE FLOW]
I stepped outside the medical tent, mind racing.
The wounds reversed on their own.
Like the damage was... undone.
I found a quiet corner behind the arena and sat down, focusing inward.
Perception Limit turned inward this time, examining my own body at a microscopic level.
Cells. Molecules. The flow of energy through living tissue.
Everything has a direction. A flow.
Forward: growth, damage, entropy.
But what if I could reverse that flow?
I focused on a small scratch on my arm—barely noticeable, from training yesterday.
Energy Limit: Layer Three.
But instead of attraction or repulsion—
Inversion.
The scratch unwounded.
Skin cells that had been damaged suddenly weren't. The injury didn't heal—it ceased to have ever happened.
I stared at my unblemished arm.
"Reverse Flow," I whispered. "I can reverse entropy itself."
The implications crashed over me like a wave.
If I can reverse damage...
I can survive anything.
As long as I have energy, I can't die.
[THE FINAL MATCH — EVENING]
My last opponent of the day was the one I'd been waiting for.
Cael Ashford.
We stood across from each other as the sun set, painting the arena in shades of blood-red and gold.
He'd won all his matches—brutally, efficiently, without mercy.
Fourth Circle at age ten. A prodigy even among prodigies.
And now he stood before me, sword drawn, those cold gray eyes burning with something that might have been excitement.
"No holding back," he said simply.
I grinned. "Wouldn't dream of it."
GONG.
Cael exploded forward.
Not Lightning Step. Not Blink Step.
Acceleration.
Pure mana-enhanced speed, his body moving so fast he left afterimages.
Speed: 67 meters per second. Sword technique: Flowing River Style, seventeen-strike combination. Each strike capable of cutting steel.
Spatial Limit: Infinity.
His blade stopped millimeters from my throat.
But this time, he didn't look surprised.
He smiled.
"Mana Burst: Pressure Wave!"
He channeled raw mana through the blade—not cutting, but creating a shockwave of pure force that bypassed my spatial defense entirely.
BOOM.
The pressure wave slammed into my chest like a hammer.
I was thrown backward twenty meters, tumbling across the arena floor.
Clever. He attacked the space itself, not me directly—
Pain bloomed across my ribs. Probably cracked.
But even as I pushed myself up, I felt it—
Reverse Flow: Automatic activation.
The damage unwound.
Cracked ribs knitting back together. Bruised tissue returning to normal. Pain fading like it had never existed.
I stood, brushing dust off my clothes, and grinned.
"Nice trick. But you'll need to hit harder than that."
Cael's eyes widened slightly.
"You... healed yourself?"
"Something like that."
[THE REAL BATTLE]
What followed was war.
Cael attacked with everything—sword techniques I'd never seen, combination spells, mana manipulation at a level that would make most Fourth Circle mages jealous.
And I countered each one.
Blue Force to redirect his strikes.
Red Force to create distance when he got too close.
Spatial Limit to lock down his movement vectors.
Reverse Flow to heal any damage that slipped through my defense.
The arena floor cracked beneath us. The protective wards flared repeatedly, struggling to contain the sheer amount of energy we were throwing around.
The crowd was silent—not from fear this time, but from awe.
This wasn't a spar.
This was two absolute monsters testing their limits.
"Domain Expansion," Cael suddenly called out.
I froze.
He has a domain?
"Sword Saint's Sanctuary."
The world around us changed.
Suddenly we were standing on an endless white plane, and floating around us were thousands of swords—each one glowing with condensed mana, all pointed directly at me.
His domain. A manifestation of absolute offense—
"Every sword here," Cael said calmly, "carries my full power. Ten thousand blades. Simultaneous attack. Can your Infinity stop them all?"
I laughed.
"Let's find out."
"STRIKE."
All ten thousand swords launched.
A wall of death descending from every angle simultaneously.
The sound was deafening—a metallic screech of thousands of blades cutting through air.
Analysis: Impossible to dodge. Spatial Limit can block approximately 73% of incoming attacks. Remaining 27% will breach defense. Estimated wounds: 2,700. Lethality: absolute without healing factor.
But I had a healing factor.
And I had something else.
"Domain Expansion."
"Infinite Boundary."
TWO DOMAINS COLLIDED.
Cael's Sword Saint's Sanctuary met my Infinite Boundary.
Order versus Chaos.
Finite versus Infinite.
Limit versus Limitless.
The two domains fought for supremacy—and the space between them screamed.
Reality itself began to fracture, cracks spreading across the white plane like breaking glass.
The swords slowed. Multiplied. Became infinite copies of themselves.
Cael staggered, blood running from his nose. "What—"
"Your domain creates ten thousand swords," I said, my voice echoing infinitely. "Mine makes everything infinite. So now you have infinite swords..."
The swords multiplied endlessly, filling every possible space—
"...Which means you have none."
Because infinity and zero are the same thing from certain perspectives.
The swords dissolved into light.
Both domains collapsed.
We stood in the arena again, both breathing hard.
Cael dropped to one knee, exhausted.
I was still standing—barely.
"I yield," he said quietly. Then he looked up and smiled. "That was incredible."
I offered my hand and pulled him up.
"You too. That domain was no joke."
"Neither was yours." He shook his head. "Where do you even learn something like that?"
From dying, I thought. From being reborn. From seeing infinity and surviving it.
But I just shrugged. "Instinct, I guess."
"WINNER: RIN VALDRIS."
The crowd erupted—finally, the silence broke, replaced by thunderous applause.
But I wasn't listening.
I was looking at the Church officials in the stands.
They weren't clapping.
They were planning.
And I knew—
This was just the beginning