Chapter 157: Into the Flooded City
The world didn'tt fade; it shattered into a roar of pressure and cold. Blue-black light swallowed everything, then spit them out into chaos.
Taitusi hit the ground first, the impact shuddering up his legs. He skidded across slick, moss-covered stone, arms pinwheeling. Rain, sharp and cold as broken glass, hammered down from a bruised, lightning-veined sky. He was in a plaza, or what was left of one. The cobblestones were cracked, some tilted at mad angles, and the center was a churning canal that tore through the space with the sound of a freight train. Across the rushing water, maybe fifty feet away, Luis Fuentes was already pushing himself up, his dark hair plastered to his forehead.
“Are you kidding me?!” Taitusi yelled into the downpour, his voice barely carrying. The cold was immediate, seeping through his clothes. He scrambled to his feet, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs. “A straight-up flood zone? What’s next, sharks?!”
“Stop complaining and move!” Luis’s voice cut across the plaza, sharp and commanding. He was already scanning the crumbling facades, the jagged rooftops, the shifting architecture. He pointed to a higher tier of the drowned city, a series of connected balconies and ledges that snaked upward. “High ground! We need a vantage point before the cores even manifest!”
“Yeah, brilliant, let’s climb the slippery death buildings!” Taitusi shot back, but he was already moving, his eyes on the same route. His charm was gone, stripped away by the violent reality of the water. He took two steps toward a fallen column that led to a lower balcony, and his foot slipped on the wet stone.
He went down hard, elbow cracking on the stone, a grunt of pain lost in the storm. The momentum carried him sideways, over the broken edge of the plaza, and into the frothing canal.
The cold was a visceral shock. It stole his breath. The current was a living thing, an immense, muscular force that wrapped around him and yanked him under. He tumbled, disoriented, the world a blur of dark water and flashes of lightning from above. Panic might move faster than planning here, the insane thought flashed. He stopped fighting, went limp for a terrifying second.
The current slammed him against a submerged archway, then spat him out the other side. He broke the surface, gasping, clawing at the air. He was in a narrower channel, the current slower. And there, nestled in a recess in the wall, was a circle of calm, glowing water. It pulsed with a soft, eerie blue light. A Seeing Pool.
“You idiot!” Luis’s voice came from above. Taitusi looked up, blinking rain from his eyes. Luis was already twenty feet higher, clinging to a stone ladder embedded in a tower. “You just gave up thirty meters! Control, Taitusi! You have to control the variables!”
“Control this!” Taitusi coughed, paddling toward the glow. He heaved himself onto a submerged ledge beside the pool. His laughter was ragged, almost hysterical. “I’m in the variable, man! Maybe the plan is to have no plan!” He didn’t hesitate. He thrust his head into the glowing water.
The vision was instant and overwhelming. A map burned itself into his mind’s eye. He saw the plaza from a bird’s perspective, saw the three pulsing crimson markers of the Sight Cores. One was deep in a flooded temple to his left. Another was atop a rotating spire ahead. The third was in a submerged tunnel network. But more importantly, he saw the waterways shift. He saw a pressure gate about to seal a main artery, and a faster, darker channel opening up beneath a crumbling walkway just ahead of him. He saw Luis’s intended route, a longer, more deliberate climb, and saw where it would dead-end because a tower was about to rotate, cutting off access.
He pulled his head out, gasping. “Left!” he shouted, though he knew Luis couldn’t hear him now. “The gate’s gonna close! The fast lane’s left!”
On his ledge, Luis saw Taitusi dive into the Pool. A spike of irritation, sharp and professional, shot through him. Reckless. Undisciplined. But effective? He watched Taitusi emerge and immediately launch himself back into the main current, letting it carry him toward a low, half-submerged archway. Luis calculated. The Pool had given him a shortcut. Luis’s chosen high road was safer, but slower. He needed to compensate.
He saw a stone walkway, a giant millstone of a structure, slowly rotating to connect his ledge to the next building. It was his only viable crossway. He took it, sprinting across the slick surface. He was halfway when the mechanism groaned. With a sickening lurch, the rotation reversed. He lunged the last few feet, landing in a heap as the walkway ground away, leaving a ten-foot gap of roaring water behind him. A pressure gate he hadn't seen, triggered by his weight, slammed down where he’d been standing moments before, sealing off his retreat with a crash that vibrated through the stones.
He lay there for a second, heart pounding. Taitusi’s manic laugh echoed from somewhere below. Luis pushed himself up, fury lending him clarity. He couldn’t see the Fijian anymore, but he could hear him whooping as the current carried him.
“Unbelievable,” Luis muttered, water streaming down his face. He was soaked, his careful strategy already in tatters. He looked up. His ladder led to a balcony, but the tower it was attached to was now slowly, inexorably, turning away from the direction he needed to go. His route was gone. He was stranded. Taitusi was ahead.
In the mirrored arena, the transition was just as violent but quieter in its first moment.
Irena and Lusiana materialized standing back-to-back on the sagging center of a fractured stone bridge. The drop on either side was not into a canal, but into a seething, black whirlpool that churned fifty feet below, swallowing rain and debris with a deep, gulping sound. The Watchtower Spine pierced the gloom in the distance, a needle of dark stone wreathed in storm mist.
There was no hesitation.
Lusiana spun, her body coiled. Her polished warmth was gone, replaced by a hunter’s stillness. “No hard feelings,” she said, throwing Irena’s own words from the chamber back at her, her voice flat.
She charged.
Irena didn’t try to hold her ground. Fragility was not weakness. She calculated the angle, the give of the rotting wood under the stone, Lusiana’s momentum. She took two quick steps backward and dropped straight off the side of the bridge.
It was a clean, deliberate fall. Ten feet down, she hit a lower platform—a remnant of a rooftop—rolled through the impact, and came up in a crouch, rainwater plastering her hair to her skull. Her mind was already working, compartmentalizing the fear. Bridge unstable. Current lethal. Lusiana is direct, aggressive. She will follow. Need an alternate route, need a Sight Core location.
A soft blue glow caught her eye from under a collapsed awning to her left. A small, still pool, sheltered from the driving rain. A Seeing Pool.
Lusiana landed on the platform a second later, the impact heavier, less graceful. She didn’t pause. She strode toward Irena, who was already moving toward the glow.
“You can’t outthink water, Irena,” Lusiana called, her voice competing with the whirlpool’s groan.
“You can’t overpower it either,” Irena replied, not looking back. She reached the pool and knelt, plunging her face into the glowing water.
The vision was a shock of information. A three-dimensional schematic of the flooded district superimposed itself over her mental map. The first Sight Core pulsed in a chamber beneath the whirlpool, accessible through a submerged tunnel whose entrance was tucked behind a cascade of water falling from a broken pipe twenty meters to her right. The path was narrow, dark, and currently free of any predatory signatures. The second core was high up, on a weather vane of a spinning tower. The third was in a dry-ish alcove behind a waterfall. The fastest sequence was tunnel, then waterfall, then tower.
She pulled back, gasping. Tunnel first. It’s the closest. But submerged. Unknown length. Risk of disorientation. Her eyes flicked to the roaring whirlpool. The entrance is behind that waterfall. Current is strong there. But predictable.
Lusiana was ten feet away, closing fast. “What did you see?”
Irena didn’t answer. She ran, not away from Lusiana, but parallel to the platform’s edge, toward the rushing curtain of water from the broken pipe.
“Running already?” Lusiana taunted, changing direction to intercept.
Irena reached the waterfall, took a deep, steadying breath, and dove through it without a backward glance. The force of the falling water punched the air from her lungs, but on the other side was a pocket of air and a dark, low opening in the stone, just as the vision had shown. Water poured into it. She didn’t let herself think. She took another breath and slid into the submerged tunnel.
Lusiana reached the spot a moment later. She saw the tunnel entrance. She let out a sound of pure frustration, a sharp exhale. She wasn’t built for careful, pre-planned submersion. She was built for assertion, for forcing outcomes.
She looked at the stone wall next to the waterfall. It was ancient, mortar crumbling. Instead of following Irena into the dark water, she braced herself, turned her shoulder, and slammed into the wall with a raw shout of effort. Stones shifted. A crack appeared. She hit it again, ignoring the pain blooming in her shoulder. On the third impact, a section of the wall gave way, collapsing inward into a dry, dusty corridor that sloped downward. A shortcut. Brutal, loud, and inefficient, but it bypassed the tunnel.
She vanished into the darkness she had made.
High above the twin chaos, suspended on a smooth, dry platform of seamless energy, Antonella Fuentes watched the projections. Two shimmering veils of light showed each arena in vivid detail. The sound of rain and rushing water filled the observation chamber, a constant, oppressive soundtrack.
To her right, Prince Kelmen stood, his bioluminescent veins pulsing with a slow, fascinated rhythm. To her left, at a control podium of sorts, Arkan Veyl was a statue, his mercurial eyes reflecting the flickering scenes.
“The performer adapts,” Kelmen mused, his voice a silken murmur. He watched Taitusi being carried by the current, laughing manically as he shot beneath a bridge, narrowly avoiding a jagged outcropping. “He embraces the chaos. Turns his panic into momentum. It’s vulgar, but… fluid.”
On the other screen, Lusiana was bulldozing through the dry corridor, kicking aside rubble.
“The survivor forces her own path,” Kelmen continued. “She rejects the given option. Creates her own variable. A blunt instrument, but one of undeniable will.”
Antonella crossed her arms. “Luis is trying to play chess while the board is melting. Look at him.” They watched as Luis, now stranded on the turning tower balcony, was frantically searching for another handhold. His composure was fraying, his movements jerky. “He’s reading a map that’s being redrawn every second. He’s wasting time.”
“He is attempting to impose order,” Arkan stated, his first words since the trial began. His voice was like cold water. “A foundational error in a realm designed against it.”
Below, Luis finally committed, leaping across a terrifying gap to a jutting stone gargoyle. He caught it, legs swinging over the void, before hauling himself onto a precarious ledge.
“See? He’s adjusting,” Antonella conceded, though it sounded grudging. “But he’s furious. At Taitusi, at the water, at himself. That’s a drain.”
“And the scholar?” Kelmen asked, his eyes on Irena’s screen. She was swimming through the pitch-black tunnel, one hand on the wall, her movements measured and precise even in total darkness. “She is not fast. But she is… exact.”
“She’s using the information, not just getting it,” Antonella said, leaning forward. “The Pool showed her the tunnel. She’s not just swimming; she’s counting her strokes, feeling for the turns. She’s memorizing the layout. She’s building her own map inside her head.” A flicker of something like respect crossed her face. “She’s not fighting the trial’s logic. She’s learning its grammar.”
On Taitusi’s feed, a new danger emerged. Something large and metallic, shaped like a skeletal eel, broke the surface of the canal behind him, its eye-lenses glowing a dull red. It submerged again.
“Predator,” Arkan noted, his tone devoid of alarm. It was a simple data point.
“Ah, and there is the consequence of luck,” Kelmen said, almost smiling. “The current giveth, and the current taketh away.”
Taitusi, sensing the shift in the water pressure, glanced back. He saw the fading V-shaped wake. “Oh, you have GOT to be kidding me!” he screamed, and his frantic paddling became a frenzied, clumsy thrash. He reached a junction where the current split. The left fork led toward a glowing crimson marker visible in a doorway—the first Sight Core. The right fork curved away into a darker, narrower channel. The eel’s wake was coming from the right.
“Think, think, think!” he yelled at himself. The Pool vision flashed in his mind: the left fork led to the core, but also toward a dead-end if the next pressure gate shut. The right fork was a longer, more dangerous loop, but it eventually circled back. The eel was coming from the right.
With a strangled curse, he threw himself toward the left fork, toward the core and the potential dead-end. The gamble was alive in his eyes.
Luis, from his high perch, saw it all. He saw the predator. He saw Taitusi’s choice. He saw the crimson glow. His own path to that core was now a convoluted nightmare of climbing and backtracking.
“You reckless, stupid—” he snarled into the rain, the mask of the polished consultant fully gone. His fear was no longer of the water, but of losing to such glorious, undignified chaos.
In the other arena, Irena emerged from the tunnel into an air pocket within the submerged temple. Before her, on a slender pedestal rising just above the waterline, the first Sight Core hovered—a palm-sized orb of swirling crimson light. She grabbed it. It was warm, vibrating slightly. The moment her fingers closed around it, it dissolved into her skin. A map fragment, the location of the second core, imprinted itself in her mind: the waterfall alcove.
As she turned, a section of the wall behind her crumbled inward. Not from water pressure.
From force.
Lusiana stepped through the dust and rubble, breathing heavily, a cut on her forehead seeping blood. She saw Irena, saw the empty pedestal. Her expression was pure, undiluted intensity.
“You got a head start,” Lusiana said, water dripping from her clenched fists. “Now we run the same race.”
Irena didn’t answer. She looked from Lusiana to the temple’s flooded exit, then back to the hole Lusiana had made. Two paths. One the water’s, one born of pure will.
The trial wasn’t just about the water. It was about what the water revealed. In one arena, it revealed a man who trusted chaos and a man who despised it. In the other, it revealed a mind that sought to understand the storm, and a force that sought to break through it.
Arkan watched the four projections, his face impassive. He finally spoke, his words hanging in the air like a judgment waiting to be written.
“The water does not care about their strategies,” he said, his eyes on Taitusi’s frantic scramble toward the glowing door, on Luis’s furious recalculations, on Irena’s calm assessment of her opponent, on Lusiana’s bleeding, unwavering stance. “It only measures how deeply they will sink to stay afloat.”
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The Restless Waters, Elarion Trial Dimension — Luis and Taitusi’s flooded duel-city, between the rotating Bell-Tower Canal, the broken pressure bridges, the submerged market tunnels, and the Watchtower Spine where the Eye Gate flashes above the storm. Midway through Trial 7, as the first duel reaches its final stretch.
Midway through Trial 7, as the first duel reached its final stretch, Luis Fuentes had clawed back every inch of his dignity through sheer, frigid will. He moved across the shuddering network of upper bridges like a ghost, his breathing measured, the two absorbed Sight Cores a warm, angry hum against his sternum. Below him, the city churned and roared, a beast he was now skirting the spine of.
Far down in the trench-like canals, Taitusi Rayawa was a mess of motion. He’d escaped the eel by wedging himself into a pipe, scraping skin off his back. Now he hauled himself onto a tilting slab, his laughter a raw, sharp sound that cracked against the stone. “Okay! Okay, new plan! The plan is not to die! Great plan!”
Luis glanced down, a ruler surveying chaos. He didn’t shout. His voice carried, precise and dismissive. “Your panic is audible. It’s like listening to a clockwork toy break.”
“Yeah, well, your face is gonna be audible when this bridge gives out!” Taitusi yelled back, pointing shakily at the rusted irons supporting Luis’s path. He was right. The metal groaned a profound, metallic sigh. Luis didn’t flinch. He accelerated, his feet finding sure spots on the vibrating plates, and reached the relative safety of a stone arch just as a cable snapped, whipping past to slice the water below.
“Calculation,” Luis said, mostly to himself, brushing water from his arms. “Not luck.”
On the observation platform, Antonella let out a tense breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “He’s making it look easy now. He’s studied the rhythm of the collapses.”
“He has imposed a temporary order,” Kelmen corrected, his eyes like dark pools. “He sees the city as a system of failing parts and navigates the gaps. It is impressive. And entirely fragile.”
Luis pressed on, the third core’s signature pulling at him like a compass needle. It was housed in a pressure shrine, a domed cage of stone sitting in the middle of a circular, boiling pool. Black water geysered around it at irregular intervals. He timed it, watching three explosions, marking the four-second lull. He sprinted across a narrow, submerged causeway, the water tugging at his knees, and threw himself into the shrine as another geyser obliterated the spot he’d just left.
His hand closed around the final core. The warmth seared up his arm, the completed map burning into his mind. The direct path to the Watchtower Spine etched itself in lines of cool, logical light.
He turned, looking down into the canal where Taitusi was fumbling with a soaked piece of debris, trying to paddle. “You were entertaining,” Luis called down, the rain flattening his words. “But this was never yours. This was always a matter of discipline.”
Taitusi looked up, water streaming down his face. He managed a wobbly grin. “You keep saying things like that right before the city tries to kill you, man. It’s getting predictable!”
Luis didn’t dignify it with a reply. He was already running, the route clear. He hit a small, calm Seeing Pool nestled in a corner, barely breaking stride as he bent to it. The vision confirmed it: the safest bridge was to his left, a thick, stone arc that would connect directly to the Spine’s main access ramp. Stable. Secure. The logical choice.
As Luis charged toward that bridge, Taitusi stumbled into a larger pool a level down, its glow reflected in his wide eyes. He plunged his head in, desperate for anything. The vision was not a map of safe paths. It was a surge of sensation, a roaring, directional pull. He didn’t see a bridge. He felt the water’s desire, its deepest, most violent current—a sucking funnel that drove straight down under the Spine itself. It looked like a death sentence.
“Control chooses the stable bridge,” Kelmen noted, a flicker of something like delight in his alien eyes. “The adaptor chooses the current’s intention. He has stopped fighting the water. He is asking it for a favor.”
“That’s not a favor, that’s a digestive tract!” Antonella shot back, leaning forward.
Luis reached the base of the Watchtower Spine first, the massive structure a dark column against the flickering sky. A heavy, cog-filled gate blocked a lower entrance, but the access ramp was clear. He saw Taitusi, far behind, flailing toward the ominous funnel whirlpool. A final, strategic move presented itself. Next to the ramp was a large, rusty lever marked with warning glyphs: Floodgate Auxiliary.
He didn’t hesitate. He slammed the lever down.
With a shuddering groan of ancient machinery, the heavy gate he’d bypassed crashed shut, sealing off the lower canals. It worked perfectly. The route Taitusi was being pulled toward was now blocked by a wall of solid, riveted iron.
“Game over,” Luis breathed, a thin smile finally touching his lips. He turned to ascend.
The city had other ideas.
The sealed gate didn’t just block a passage; it violated the water’s chosen flow. The entire canal system, denied its outlet, pressurized in an instant. The force had to go somewhere. It found the path of least resistance: a submerged filtration shaft that ran directly up the central core of the Watchtower Spine.
For three seconds, Luis enjoyed his victory.
Then the world beneath him erupted.
The stone platform he stood on blew apart from a geyser of unbelievable power. It wasn’t water from above; it was a vertical river screaming up from below. The roar was elemental. The current caught Taitusi just as he was despairing at the sealed gate, yanking him under and into the shaft with the force of a slingshot.
Luis was thrown backward by the explosion of water, scrambling to keep his purchase. He looked up, water blinding him.
Taitusi shot out of a grated opening high up on the Spine’s interior like a cork from a bottle, tumbling through the air with a choked yell. He landed on a service platform a full thirty feet above Luis, skidding on his side.
He lay there, gasping, retching up water. He was ahead. The Eye Gate, a swirling aperture of silver light, was right there.
Luis’s face broke. The calm, the precision, the control—it shattered into pure, undiluted disbelief. “NO!”
He lunged up the now-slick ramps, climbing with a furious, graceless speed. Taitusi saw him coming, sheer animal panic overriding exhaustion. He pushed himself up, lurching toward the Gate. The three cores within him responded to its proximity, materializing as glowing red orbs in his shaking hands.
Luis reached the platform. He grabbed Taitusi’s arm, his fingers digging in. “This is not how this ends! You didn’t earn this!”
Taitusi twisted, his laughter gone, replaced by a desperate snarl. “Let GO!” He shoved Luis back with a surprising burst of strength, turned, and slammed the first core into a slot beside the Gate. It flashed.
Luis staggered, then charged again. Taitusi inserted the second. The Gate’s light intensified, humming.
“Stop!” Luis commanded, the word a weapon that failed to fire.
Taitusi slammed the third core home. He looked back at Luis, his expression wild, victorious, and profoundly scared. “You shouldn’ta closed the door, man.”
The Eye Gate opened with a sound like a sigh, the white-blue light consuming everything. Taitusi fell forward into it, and was gone.
The light vanished. The Gate was inert. The only sounds were the storm and the ragged, heaving breaths of Luis Fuentes. The water continued to rise around the platform, circling his knees.
In the observation chamber, the silence was absolute.
Arkan Veyl’s voice cut through it, clean and final as a surgeon’s blade. “The duel is concluded. Taitusi Rayawa is victorious. Luis Fuentes is eliminated from Trial Seven.”
On the platform, Luis didn’t move. He stared at the empty space where the Gate had been. The water climbed to his thighs, cold and indifferent.
Antonella, watching her brother’s figure grow small and still in the projection, said nothing. She didn’t grimace. She didn’t sigh. Her silence was a vast, resonant thing, louder in his head than any scream, any insult, any of his own carefully crafted pronouncements could ever be. It was the sound of his strategy, his control, his very self, crumbling into the rising, restless water.