The murmurs within the courtyard did not cease, but they altered in tone.
Where there was once open skepticism, there now hovered a cautious, lingering silence.
Ethan could feel the weight of every gaze pinned to his back.
He maintained a slow, even pace as he walked toward the outer edge of the training grounds.
He preferred the shadow cast by an ancient stone pillar.
It gave him a clear view of the arena without forcing him into the center of attention.
He reached into the small borrowed satchel at his waist and pulled out the flask of water.
He unsealed the narrow opening beneath his visor with a thought.
He took a slow drink.
The water was cool, quenching a dryness in his throat that felt less like physical thirst and more like a nervous habit lingering from his old life.
In his mind, however, the silence was absolute.
Too absolute.
"Krindrus?"
Ethan spoke inwardly.
His voice resonated only within the neural bridge connecting his mind to the entity sharing his soul.
There was no immediate response.
Instead, a subtle rise in pressure radiated from the core of the silver armor.
It wasn't a rise in magical output, nor was it the passive warmth of the Celestari's dormant power.
It was cold.
Dense.
Like the sudden dropping of atmospheric pressure right before a violent, unnatural storm.
"Krindrus," Ethan repeated, sharper this time. "Talk to me."
"They touched us," Krindrus finally answered.
The voice was no longer the calm, analytical observer that had guided Ethan through his existential confusion over breakfast.
It was low, resonant, and dripping with an ancient, terrifying contempt.
"He laid a primitive hand upon the sacred silver of the Celestari."
Ethan paused, his hand freezing as he recapped his flask.
"He shoved a kid, and I stepped in. The armor repelled him. It's over."
"It is not over," Krindrus growled.
The internal frequency of the voice vibrated against Ethan's conscious mind, carrying images that were not his own.
Ethan didn't just hear Krindrus; he saw brief, flashing memories of vast planetary sieges.
He saw towering alien battlements turning to glass beneath orbital beams.
He saw species whose names were erased from star charts standing before the Celestari in chains or turned to ash for the crime of defiance.
"That creature is a minor biological anomaly on a backwater world," Krindrus continued, each word heavy with absolute arrogance. "A being whose entire bloodline has never left the gravitational pull of a single terrestrial rock. He dared to lay his hands upon a Vanguard of the Seven Stars. In the era of the Sovereign, his entire settlement would have been converted into slag to ensure the lesson was absolute."
Ethan felt a sudden, sharp spike in his chest.
His right hand—the hand covered in liquid silver gauntlets—twitching involuntarily.
The air around his feet shimmered.
The tiny, almost invisible pebbles on the stone floor began to float off the ground, caught in a localized gravitational distortion.
Ethan's eyes widened beneath his visor.
"Whoa, whoa, hold on! Krindrus, cut it out!" Ethan commanded, forcing his own willpower down upon the surging energy. "Calm down!"
"You stayed your hand," Krindrus said, the tone verging on outright disgust. "You allowed a lesser lifeform to speak down to you, to threaten you, and then to walk away with his flesh intact. Why do you suppress the absolute authority of what we are?"
Ethan clamped his left hand over his right wrist, using his human mind to aggressively suppress the cosmic mana leaking into the air.
The floating pebbles dropped back to the dirt with tiny clicks.
Ethan took a deep breath, forcing his heart rate to steady.
He had played Krindrus in Heaven Bound Heroes for thousands of hours.
To Ethan, Krindrus was an elite character class, a hero with tragic lore and cool sci-fi aesthetic.
To the universe this body originally belonged to, Krindrus was the product of a war-forged empire that viewed the cosmos through a lens of absolute hierarchy and ruthless conquerors.
The game had smoothed over the dark reality of what a "space-faring warrior race" actually meant when faced with primitive species.
"Because I am not an empire, Krindrus," Ethan stated firmly in his mind, laying down an immovable mental boundary. "And we are not in the middle of an interstellar war. If I start vaporizing people in the middle of an Adventurer's Guild over a minor insult, we aren't heroes. We're monsters. And worse than that, we'd be stupid. Do you want the entire kingdom's army on our backs before we even figure out why the Void Sovereign is waking up early?"
A long, tense silence stretched between them.
The cold pressure in Ethan's chest didn't disappear, but it slowly receded, coiling back into the deep recesses of the armor's power core.
"...Your tactical restraint is acknowledged," Krindrus grumbled quietly, though the dark, bloodthirsty edge remained just beneath the surface. "However... should that specimen cross our path in the combat stage, I will expect you to permit a proper demonstration of our superiority."
"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it," Ethan thought, letting out a hidden sigh of relief.
He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead beneath his helmet.
He had to remember that he wasn't just managing magical spells or sword techniques.
He was coexisting with a warrior consciousness that had been built for total extermination.
His mind was his greatest weapon, not just for calculating spell trajectories, but for keeping his own inner alien warlord on a leash.
Ethan turned his attention back to the courtyard, actively analyzing his surroundings to distract himself from the lingering adrenaline.
Now that his head was clear, he began processing the environment with the methodical precision he had developed back on Earth as a high-tier raid leader.
The examination grounds were far more complex than the simple dueling arenas presented in the game's early chapters.
The central courtyard was surrounded by four massive towers made of gray granite, each capped with a glowing mana-crystal.
Ethan recognized the array instantly from his knowledge of spatial magic.
It was a quadruple-anchor barrier system, designed to absorb high-yield kinetic and magical impacts up to a seventh-tier spell.
The fact that the Guild had activated all four crystals meant they weren't just testing basic adventurer combat.
They were preparing for catastrophic structural stress.
Ethan's eyes scanned the crowd, cataloging the prominent figures like a veteran player checking enemy party comps before a boss fight.
To his far left stood Princess Lyanna Aurelia.
She was surrounded by four heavily armed honor guards wearing the crest of the Golden Gryphon, yet she herself stood apart from them.
She was dressed in light, reinforced mithril chainmail that caught the light like polished silver, with a long rapier resting at her hip.
Her mana output was contained, wrapped tightly around her body in a thin, constant layer—a technique known as Mana Skin.
It showed an extraordinary level of discipline.
She wasn't relying on raw power; she was conserving every drop of her energy for maximum efficiency.
"High control, low physical footprint," Ethan noted mentally. "She's a duelist. If she fights, she'll target joints and gaps in armor."
A few dozen paces away from her stood Prince Cassian of Ardens.
Unlike the princess, Cassian made no effort to conceal his power.
He was a broad-shouldered young man with fiery red hair and a massive greatsword strapped to his back.
The air around him visibly rippled with heat.
His mana was wild, unrefined, and aggressive—a classic elemental vanguard.
He was currently surrounded by several noble applicants who were laughing at his jokes, but Cassian's eyes were continuously darting around the field, sizing up potential threats.
When Cassian's eyes briefly brushed over Ethan, the prince's smirk faded for a fraction of a second, replaced by a subtle narrowing of his stance.
"He's sharp despite his loud personality," Ethan analyzed. "He acts like a brute, but he's checking sightlines and evaluating targets. High threat in open combat."
Then Ethan's gaze shifted toward the northern platform, where the two King-Class mages were standing.
Magnus Hale stood with his arms crossed inside his heavy, dark-blue robes.
He looked bored, his eyes half-closed as if he were taking a mid-morning nap.
Yet, Ethan's celestial senses—heightened by the Celestari armor's passive arcana detection—could pick up the invisible threads of mana floating around Magnus.
He wasn't sleeping.
He was casting passive scrying spells, constantly measuring the mana capacity of every person in the courtyard.
Ethan immediately adjusted his own inner magic, lowering his passive output to mimic that of a standard physical knight with minimal magical capability.
When Magnus's invisible mana thread brushed past Ethan, it slid off without detecting anything unusual.
Magnus didn't even blink, continuing his silent scan of the rest of the crowd.
"Gotcha," Ethan thought with a small smile. "Rule number one of high-level PvP: never show your full build until the fight starts."
However, the second King-Class mage, Selene Vael, was a different story entirely.
She stood near the edge of the platform, wearing practical, dark-grey traveling clothes rather than traditional mage robes.
She held no staff or focus stone.
Her eyes, a piercing shade of pale violet, weren't scanning the crowd randomly.
They were fixed directly on Ethan.
Unlike Magnus, who used subtle magical threads, Selene was using raw, unadulterated visual perception.
She was watching how Ethan walked, how his armor moved, and how he had effortlessly neutralized the bully earlier without emitting a single trace of incantation magic.
When Ethan met her gaze, she didn't look away.
Instead, she offered a small, knowing nod, as if acknowledging that she knew he was hiding something.
"She's an analyst," Ethan thought, feeling a cold drop of sweat slide down his neck.
"Magnus relies on his magical detection, but Selene uses observation and logic. She's dangerous."
Finally, Ethan looked toward the far side of the arena, where a lone figure stood beneath the shadow of the eastern wall.
Codename: Ash.
The individual was wrapped in a ragged, charcoal-colored cloak that completely obscured their body and face.
They didn't move.
They didn't stretch.
They didn't even appear to be breathing.
To an ordinary person, Ash looked like a beggar who had somehow wandered into the training grounds.
But to Ethan, whose celestial vision could see the flow of energy in the atmosphere, Ash was a terrifying anomaly.
The mana around Ash wasn't flowing or pooling.
It was disappearing.
The natural background magic of the courtyard was being drawn into the ragged cloak like water draining into a bottomless hole.
It was a localized magical vacuum.
"That's not human magic," Krindrus murmured internally, his dark mood briefly replaced by professional tactical interest. "It resembles the gravity-collapse spells of the dark star systems."
"No," Ethan replied mentally, studying the faint distortion around Ash's boots. "It's a specialized suppression field. They aren't absorbing magic to use it; they're absorbing it to keep their own power from leaking out. If that field breaks..."
"The results will be destructive," Krindrus finished. "A walking singularity."
Ethan nodded slightly to himself.
The Guild roster wasn't just impressive; it was a powder keg.
If these individuals were forced into direct confrontation, the entire stadium would be wiped off the map, barrier mages or not.
Before Ethan could analyze the remaining applicants, a loud, resounding tone rang across the courtyard.
The sound came from a massive copper gong mounted near the central stage.
The hour of preparation had ended.
Lady Seraphine stepped forward to the edge of the platform.
Her crimson cape caught the wind as she raised a single gauntleted hand.
The instant her hand went up, the noisy chatter of hundreds of applicants vanished entirely.
"Applicants! Form up before the main gates of the central arena!" Seraphine's voice boomed across the field, amplified by a subtle acoustic spell. "The First Stage of the Selection Examination is about to commence!"
The crowd immediately surged forward, hundreds of armored bodies, robes, and weapons clattering together as everyone tried to secure a good spot near the entrance.
Ethan didn't rush.
He deliberately fell back to the rear of the group, maintaining a wide personal bubble.
As he walked, he noticed the thin, poorly dressed boy he had saved earlier hurrying to catch up with him.
The boy kept a respectful distance of three paces, looking up at Ethan's towering silver form with a mixture of awe and extreme nervousness.
"U-Um... excuse me, sir!" the boy stammered softly, keeping his voice down so the surrounding applicants wouldn't hear.
Ethan paused, turning his helmet slightly toward the youth.
"Yes?"
"I... I didn't get to introduce myself earlier," the boy said, bowing deeply. "My name is Toby. Toby Vance. I'm... I'm a scholar-applicant from the lower district of Valenor."
Ethan looked down at Toby.
The boy's clothes were threadbare, and his hands were calloused not from sword practice, but from copying scrolls and handling alchemy ingredients.
He didn't possess high physical attributes, nor did he have a massive mana pool.
Yet, he had passed the written evaluation, which was notoriously brutal.
"I am Ethan," he replied calmly. "You don't need to bow, Toby."
"R-Right! Sorry, Sir Ethan!" Toby straightened up quickly, his face turning red. He swallowed hard before continuing. "I... I wanted to warn you about the first stage. I worked as a assistant clerk in the Guild archives last winter, so I managed to read some of the older examination logs."
Ethan raised an eyebrow beneath his visor.
Now that was useful information.
"Is that so?" Ethan asked, lowering his voice. "What do the logs say?"
Toby looked around nervously to make sure no one was listening before leaning in slightly.
"The Guild advertises the first stage as a test of 'magical control,' so most applicants assume it's a simple target-shooting test or a power-measurement stone," Toby whispered rapidly. "But it's a trap! The first stage is almost always the 'Sphere of Weight.'"
"Sphere of Weight?" Ethan repeated, searching his memory of the game.
He didn't recall a quest by that exact name, but the concept sounded familiar.
"Yes!" Toby nodded eagerly. "It's an ancient enchanted artifact recovered from a ruined sky-fortress. When you place your hand on it, it doesn't measure how much magic you have. It forces your own magic back into your body, multiplied by three! If an applicant tries to push through with raw, unrefined power, the artifact violently reverses the flow. It causes internal mana burns or instantly knocks the person unconscious!"
"I see," Ethan said, his mind instantly running through the mechanics.
It was an impedance test.
It wasn't measuring horsepower; it was measuring the efficiency of the engine.
If a mage had massive mana reserves but poor internal control, the Sphere would amplify their lack of control and blow them backward.
To pass easily, one didn't need to flex their power.
They needed to make their magical output as smooth, balanced, and friction-free as possible.
"The mages who rely on big, flashy spells always fail or get humiliated," Toby added, offering a small, grateful smile. "I saw your armor react earlier... you didn't use any high-tier chants or raw force. You used an instant defensive pulse with zero wasted energy. I thought... maybe you should know so you don't accidentally overload the sphere!"
Ethan looked down at the young scholar, genuinely impressed.
Toby had no combat prowess, but his observational skills and knowledge were top-tier.
In a raid party, Toby was the guy who read the boss mechanics beforehand and saved the team from a total wipe.
"Thank you, Toby," Ethan said, his tone warm and sincere. "That is very valuable information. How do you plan to handle it?"
Toby scratched the back of his neck nervously.
"My mana pool is tiny, so the reversal won't be very strong. If I keep my breathing steady and let my magic cycle slowly, I should be able to hold out for the required thirty seconds. It won't give me a high score, but it will let me pass."
"A solid strategy," Ethan agreed. "Work smart, not hard."
Before Toby could reply, the massive oak and iron doors of the central arena swung open with a heavy, grinding sound.
The applicants flooded into the colossal outdoor colosseum.
The stone stands surrounding the arena were packed with spectators—wealthy merchants, military officers, local nobles, and veteran adventurers who had come to watch the prospective recruits.
In the center of the vast dirt field stood ten stone pedestals, evenly spaced out.
Floating above each pedestal was a metallic sphere, roughly the size of a human head, covered in intricate, swirling runes that glowed with a faint, pulsing violet light.
Lady Seraphine stood on a elevated platform above the field, flanked by twenty high-ranking Guild instructors wearing heavy protective armor.
"Applicants! Form ten single-file lines before the testing pedestals!" Seraphine's command echoed off the stone walls of the colosseum. "The rules of the First Stage are simple!"
She pointed down toward the floating metallic orbs.
"These are the Orbs of Resonance. When called, you will step forward and place a single ungauntleted hand upon the sphere. You must maintain physical contact for thirty seconds while channeling your mana into the core."
The crowd of applicants began whispering, exactly as Toby had predicted.
"Thirty seconds? That's easy!"
"I can channel mana all day!"
"This exam is a joke!"
Ethan shook his head softly beneath his helmet.
They were walking right into the trap.
Seraphine didn't bother correcting them.
A sharp, cruel smile flickered across her face for a split second.
"The sphere will evaluate your control. If you lose control of your mana, or if you remove your hand before the time expires, you fail immediately. If you pass out, medical staff will clear you from the field."
She gestured toward the instructors.
"Line up!"
The crowd quickly divided into ten long lines.
Ethan casually joined line seven, positioning himself near the middle-rear.
Toby joined the line right next to him.
Farther up in line three, Ethan spotted the large bully from earlier, standing with his two friends.
The bully was grinning broadly, flexing his muscular arms and pounding his chest as he looked at the floating orb.
"Watch this, boys," the bully boasted loudly enough for half the field to hear. "I'll show these guild softies what real strength looks like! I'm gonna light that stupid ball up like the sun!"
"He's going to fly at least ten feet," Ethan murmured quietly.
"I'm betting fifteen," Krindrus added, his tone surprisingly dry.
The test began.
The first ten applicants stepped forward to their respective pedestals.
"Begin!" an instructor shouted.
The ten applicants reached out and placed their hands on the floating spheres.
For the first three seconds, nothing happened.
Then, the runes on the spheres began to glow brightly.
Suddenly, a loud THUMP echoed across the field, like a heavy hammer hitting a leather drum.
Three of the applicants gasped violently, their faces instantly turning pale.
One of them—a heavily armored sellsword—was hit by a visible shockwave of golden light that erupted from the orb.
The force lifted his entire two-hundred-pound body off his feet and blasted him backward through the air.
He crashed hard into the dirt, tumbling three times before coming to a stop, unconscious.
"Applicant four! Failed!" the instructor called out calmly, as two medical attendants rushed forward with a stretcher.
Another applicant, a young wizard wearing bright robes, screamed as blue lightning surged up his arm.
His magical control broke instantly, and the orb repelled him with a sharp burst of force, sending him skidding across the dirt on his back, clutching his burned wrist.
"Applicant seven! Failed!"
In less than ten seconds, six of the first ten applicants had been violently thrown back or rendered unconscious.
Only four managed to hold on, their bodies shaking violently as they desperately tried to fight against the feedback loop of their own magic.
The surrounding crowd of applicants went dead silent.
The laughter, boasting, and cocky chatter vanished in an instant.
"What... what just happened?!" someone yelled from the back.
"It attacked them!"
"No," Seraphine's voice drifted down from the balcony, cold and unyielding. "The artifact did not attack. It merely reflected their own undisciplined power back at them. If your own magic destroys you, you are not fit to wield a blade or a staff under the banner of this guild."
Line by line, the test proceeded, and the attrition rate was brutal.
Nearly sixty percent of the applicants failed within the first five seconds.
The field was littered with skidding marks in the dirt and groaning applicants being dragged away by the medical teams.
Eventually, line three advanced, and the large bully stepped up to his pedestal.
He was sweating slightly now, having seen dozens of people get blasted away, but his pride prevented him from backing down.
"I'm a iron-tier mercenary!" he growled to himself, stomping his foot into the dirt. "I ain't failing to some shiny toy!"
He slammed his bare palm onto the top of the metal sphere and immediately began bellowing, forcing massive amounts of unrefined red mana into the device.
The runes on the orb flared blindingly bright.
The sphere didn't just glow; it began to vibrate with a high-pitched, screeching whine.
"He's forcing it," Toby whispered from the next line, wincing. "He's trying to overpower the feedback loop with raw physical strength!"
"An idiot's strategy," Krindrus commented coldly. "A river cannot overpower a dam by simply flowing harder; it merely floods its own banks."
For five seconds, the bully managed to hold on through sheer physical stubbornness, his muscles bulging and his face turning a deep, dangerous purple.
"SEE?!" he roared through gritted teeth. "I'M HOLDING IT! I'M—"
BOOM!
The sphere didn't just repel him; it discharged the accumulated, unstable energy in a violent kinetic explosion.
A shockwave of red light detonated against his chest.
The bully flew backward through the air like a cannonball, clearing twenty feet before crashing headfirst into the wooden barrier at the edge of the arena.
The wooden planks shattered on impact, and the bully slumping into the debris, completely out cold, his armor smoking faintly.
"Line three, applicant sixteen! Failed! Send the medics!" the instructor called out without a trace of surprise.
Ethan chuckled softly beneath his visor. "Fifteen feet was a low estimate."
"I stand corrected," Krindrus replied smoothly. "His trajectory was quite impressive for a primitive."
Soon, it was Princess Lyanna's turn.
She stepped up to pedestal one with effortless grace.
She removed her leather glove, revealing a fair, slender hand, and gently rested her palm on the sphere.
She didn't shout.
She didn't flex.
She simply closed her eyes and took a quiet breath.
The runes on her orb didn't flash blindingly.
Instead, they lit up in a smooth, perfectly steady azure blue.
The light didn't flicker, nor did the sphere vibrate.
The thirty seconds passed in total, peaceful silence.
Ding!
A crisp chime sounded from the pedestal.
"Pedestal one! Perfect Score! Time: Thirty seconds!" the instructor announced loudly.
The stands erupted into applause.
Lyanna calmly drew her hand back, put her glove back on, and walked off the field without a single drop of sweat on her brow.
Shortly after, Prince Cassian stepped up to pedestal two.
He grinned wildly, placing his hand on the sphere.
Unlike Lyanna's steady control, Cassian used a method of violent balance.
He unleashed a roaring vortex of red flame mana, but he kept it spinning in a tight, hyper-compressed orbit around the sphere.
The orb glowed like a miniature sun, casting blinding light across the entire colosseum, but the feedback loop could not break his compressed vortex.
When the thirty-second chime rang, Cassian pulled his hand back and laughed uproariously, waving to the cheering crowd in the stands.
"Pedestal two! High-Yield Pass!"
Then came Magnus Hale and Selene Vael.
Magnus casually touched the sphere with a single finger.
The orb's runes turned a deep, obsidian black, absorbing his magic so efficiently that the sphere actually stopped floating and settled gently onto the stone pedestal, neutralized entirely by his sheer mastery of arcana dampening.
Selene touched her orb, and instead of glowing, the surface of the metal orb transformed into a smooth, liquid-like mirror, perfectly harmonizing her inner mana with the outer enchantment of the artifact.
Both passed with absolute, effortless perfection.
Finally, it was line seven's turn.
"Next group!" the instructor shouted.
Toby stepped up to pedestal six, while Ethan walked calmly toward pedestal seven.
Toby was visibly trembling as he stood before the floating metal orb.
He looked over at Ethan, his eyes wide with fear.
Ethan offered the boy a small nod of encouragement. "Remember your breathing, Toby. Let it cycle."
Toby took a deep, shaky breath, closed his eyes, and placed his palm on the metal surface.
The runes on Toby's orb lit up with a pale, faint green light.
The sphere hummed softly, vibrating slightly against his palm, but Toby kept his eyes closed, focusing entirely on maintaining a slow, rhythmic mana flow.
Ten seconds.
Twenty seconds.
Toby's arm was shaking, sweat pouring down his nose, but he didn't break contact.
Ding!
"Pedestal six! Pass!"
Toby collapsed onto his knees, gasping for air, but a massive, triumphant grin broke across his face. He had made it.
"Final applicant of line seven! Step forward!" the instructor called out, looking down at his clipboard. "Ethan Cross!"
The colosseum fell notably quieter.
Many in the stands had been waiting to see the mysterious silver knight perform.
Down near the barrier wall, Princess Lyanna paused her departure and turned to watch.
Prince Cassian leaned against his greatsword, his eyes fixed on Ethan.
On the balcony, Lady Seraphine and King Aldric leaned forward slightly against the stone railing.
Ethan stepped up to the pedestal.
The floating metallic orb hovered at chest height.
"Ungauntleted hand, please," the instructor reminded him, looking up at the solid silver armor covering Ethan's arm. "The artifact requires direct skin contact to measure mana flow."
Ethan didn't say a word.
He simply raised his right hand.
Before the instructor's eyes, the liquid silver plating covering Ethan's right hand dissolved upward, flowing smoothly like liquid mercury up his wrist and fore arm, revealing his hand.
The skin was pale, smooth, and entirely unblemished, yet beneath the surface, faint, bioluminescent lines of celestial light flickered momentarily before fading.
The instructor blinked, thoroughly baffled by the organic armor movement, but quickly cleared his throat. "C-Channel your magic upon contact. Thirty seconds."
Ethan reached out.
His bare palm touched the cold, enchanted metal of the Orb of Resonance.
In his mind, Ethan didn't attempt to cast a spell.
He didn't draw upon the vast, cosmic ocean of celestial mana stored within the Celestari core, nor did he try to suppress it like Magnus or mirror it like Selene.
Instead, Ethan utilized his ultimate personal skill—the mental processing ability that had made him an untouchable legend back on Earth.
Calculated Synchronicity.
In his mind's eye, Ethan viewed the internal structure of the Orb of Resonance not as a magical mystery, but as a complex string of code and fluid mechanics.
He immediately identified the precise frequency at which the artifact's internal feedback loop operated.
It was a standard tri-phasic resonance curve.
Instead of fighting the loop, or even matching it, Ethan used his hyper-fast mental calculations to feed his mana into the orb in precise, micro-pulses, exactly matching the artifact's internal resistance at every millisecond interval.
He wasn't just controlling his magic.
He was running a real-time mathematical simulation inside his brain, calculating the exact voltage of mana required to render the feedback loop completely null.
To the outside world, the effect was utterly baffling.
The Orb of Resonance did not glow blue like Lyanna's.
It did not flare blindingly like Cassian's.
It did not turn black like Magnus's, nor did it turn mirror-like like Selene's.
The moment Ethan touched it...
The orb simply stopped.
The floating sphere froze dead in mid-air, its subtle hovering movement locking up completely.
The glowing violet runes stamped across its surface didn't flare or dim.
They instantly turned a pristine, motionless, crystalline white.
The subtle humming sound that every other orb had produced vanished entirely.
The air around pedestal seven became so still that even the dust particles floating in the sunlight seemed to freeze in place.
There was no force.
No heat.
No light.
No pressure.
It was absolute, perfect, mathematical equilibrium.
Ethan stood there, his arm relaxed, his body motionless, casually holding his palm against the frozen metal sphere as if he were resting his hand on a porch railing.
Five seconds.
Ten seconds.
Twenty seconds.
The instructor monitoring pedestal seven stared at the orb, then at his mana-measurement gauge, then at Ethan.
The instructor's jaw slowly drifted open.
The measurement needle on the instructor's device wasn't pointing to "Low," "Medium," or "High."
The needle hadn't moved at all because the localized feedback resistance had dropped to precisely zero point zero percent.
Ethan was feeding power into the ancient artifact so perfectly that the artifact's internal system didn't even register that magic was being transferred.
It was receiving energy without feeling the impact of the delivery.
In the spectator stands, Magnus Hale's eyes snapped fully open for the first time all day.
He stood up from his chair, his bored expression instantly replaced by sheer, unadulterated shock.
"That's... that's impossible," Magnus muttered under his breath, his voice trembling slightly.
"He isn't suppressing the enchantment... he's overwriting the fundamental law of the artifact's feedback array! Without casting an incantation?!"
Beside him, Selene Vael leaned forward, her violet eyes wide with fascination.
"He didn't use power," she whispered, her heart beating faster. "He calculated the exact internal resonance of the artifact in his head... in less than a microsecond.
That isn't magic authority... that's absolute mental computation!"
On the royal balcony, King Aldric slowly rested his hand on the hilt of his sword, his eyes fixed on the silver knight.
"Seraphine," the king said softly.
"Yes, Your Majesty?"
"Have you ever seen a grandmaster mage perform zero-variance resonance?"
Seraphine swallowed hard, her emerald eyes fixed on Ethan's calm figure.
"Only in ancient texts, Sire. It requires a mind capable of performing millions of magical calculations simultaneously... a level of mental processing that should turn a human brain to ash."
Ding!
The thirty-second chime sounded.
The sound was shockingly crisp in the dead silence of the colosseum.
Ethan casually withdrew his hand.
The instant his palm left the sphere, the liquid silver armor immediately flowed back down his arm, seamlessly re-covering his hand in pristine, glowing plate.
The orb resumed its gentle floating, its runes returning to their passive, dim violet hum.
Ethan turned to the instructor, who was still standing frozen with his mouth open.
"Did I pass?" Ethan asked politely, his voice echoing softly from beneath his visor.
The instructor blinked rapidly, snapped out of his trance, and frantically marked his clipboard with trembling hands.
"P-Pass!" the instructor yelled, his voice cracking slightly. "Pedestal seven... Perfect Zero-Variance Pass!"
Ethan offered a polite nod. "Thank you."
He turned and walked back toward the gathering area for passing applicants, his heavy silver boots clattering rhythmically against the stone.
As he walked past Toby, the young scholar looked up at him with eyes as wide as saucers.
"Sir Ethan..." Toby breathed, completely speechlessly. "What... what kind of magic was that?!"
Ethan leaned down slightly, whispering so only Toby could hear.
"Not magic, Toby," Ethan replied with a subtle, hidden smirk beneath his helmet. "Just basic arithmetic."
In his mind, Krindrus let out a low, deeply satisfying rumble that sounded suspiciously like a chuckle.
"A acceptable performance, Ethan," Krindrus admitted, his earlier bloodthirst temporarily satisfied by the overwhelming shock of the primitive crowd. "You defeated their grand artifact by simply showing them that their grandest magic is merely elementary logic to us."
"Told you," Ethan replied inwardly, feeling a wave of quiet confidence settle over him as he reached the passing area. "Brain over brawn. Every single time."
He looked toward the center stage, where Lady Seraphine was now looking down at him with an expression that was no longer just curious.
It was intense.
The first stage was over.
And Ethan Cross had just placed a massive target on his own back without firing a single shot.