The five combatants from each side stepped into the center of the Mortal Arena. For the Jade Palace: Kaito and Yun in front, a solid wall of **Jingdao**; Yuan and Li Fen on the flanks, their **Shidow** auras shimmering; and Liang at the rear, his energy flickering with grim focus.
Opposite them, the Silver Serpent five fanned out. The silver-dusted youth who had spoken—**Silv**—stood at their center. To his left were two young men, one with a cold, analytical gaze, the other with a predatory grin. To his right stood two young women. One was stern, her face a mask of concentration. The other, **Flore**, was strikingly beautiful. Her eyes, however, held a playful, dangerous light, and they swept over the Jade Palace line, her gaze lingering with amused interest on the dense musculature of Kaito's shoulders.
Silv alone spoke, his voice smooth and carrying. "I have a tradition. I allow my opponents to test the weight of their despair before I hand it to them in full. Consider it a courtesy." He gestured dismissively. "The first move is yours. Try not to disappoint."
*They're strong,* Liang thought, his Mastery Eyes picking apart the dense, disciplined energy of their opponents. *But so are we. So why am I so uneasy…* His eyes darted back to Flore, who was still studying Kaito with that unsettling smile. *It's her. That's the real threat.*
"Work as one!" Elder Mei's voice, sharp with tension, cut through from the sidelines. "Remember the principle of the Jade Needles. Their power came not from a single point, but from their perfect alignment. Be the needles!"
They nodded, taking their final stances. Kaito and Yun grounded themselves, their **Jingdao** flaring—Kaito's like dark, unyielding granite, Yun's like tempered steel. Li Fen settled her breathing, hands ready to shape the world around her. Liang braced, feeling the inadequacy of his own thin **Jingdao** shield.
Yuan didn't wait for another signal. His impatience, his rage at the Bliss Palace and all its proxies, erupted. "Let's see your despair!" he shouted.
He didn't just run. He used **Shidow**. He didn't manipulate the air to fly; he grabbed the very wind around his legs and *spun* it into tight, violent cyclones. With a thunderclap of displaced air, the cyclones detonated downward against the stone, launching him forward like a living bolt. The concussive blast tore across the arena, whipping robes and hair back, a dazzling, aggressive opening.
Silv moved. His **Jingdao** didn't flare in a brute aura. It condensed, layering over his skin in a pattern of shimmering, interlocked scales. He met Yuan's meteoric charge not with a clash, but with a serpent's grace. His arm shot out, not to block, but to *guide*. His scaled forearm met Yuan's fist at a precise, glancing angle. The terrifying force of the wind-propelled charge was deflected, redirected up and away with a screech of shearing energy. Silv used the momentum to slip past Yuan like water, flowing directly into the space between Kaito and Yun.
"Two against one," Silv observed, almost bored, as Kaito's mountain-crushing fist and Yun's pinpoint spear-hand came at him from both sides.
He didn't overpower them. He *slithered*. He turned his body, letting Kaito's fist graze the scales over his ribs, the force dissipating across the layered defense. He raised his other arm, the scaled skin there rippling, and caught Yun's spear-hand on the meat of his forearm, not to stop it, but to absorb and reroute its energy down and outward. With a subtle twist of his core, he released the built-up force, shoving Yun back a single, stumbling step, breaking the harmony of the two-front attack.
Behind him, the stern Serpent girl acted. Her **Shidow** wasn't for movement. It was for violence. She whipped her hand out, and the air in front of her solidified, twisted, and snapped forward with a sound like a cracking bone—a whip of pure, compressed atmosphere that lashed at Kaito's ankles, forcing him to adjust his rooted stance.
And Flore… she smiled. She raised a delicate hand, and the **Shidow** energy around her didn't lash out. It turned *inward*. She manipulated the air and light immediately surrounding her body, bending it, weaving it into a perfect, seamless cloak of distortion. To the eyes, she didn't vanish; the space where she stood simply became a confusing, shimmering mirage, a heat-haze that refused to hold a shape. One moment she was there, a beautiful phantom. The next, she was a blur of nothingness.
A collective gasp rose from the Jade Palace disciples.
Li Fen didn't hesitate. She dropped her hands, palms facing the arena floor. Her **Shidow** plunged into the earth, not to attack a person, but to command the terrain. The ancient stone groaned. Thick, gnarled roots of rock and packed soil erupted in a jagged forest across the battlefield, breaking lines of sight and charge, trying to trap the intangible.
"Liang!" Li Fen called.
Liang's Mastery Eyes burned with strain. He saw the world as a tapestry of flowing energy. He saw Silv's dense, scale-like Jingdao. He saw the whip-girl's violent threads of Shidow. And he saw, on the left flank, a concentrated knot of bending, warping energy—a signature so refined it was like trying to look at a star through fog. "She's still there! Left side! But her manipulation… it's too complete. She's not hiding behind anything; she's made the air around her *unwilling* to be perceived!"
Before he could elaborate, a fist sheathed in that same, scaled **Jingdao** materialized from the shimmering distortion and slammed into his hastily raised guard. *CRACK.* The force, precise and shocking, drove the air from his lungs and sent him skidding back on the broken stone. He gasped, trying to pivot, to catch the side-kick he knew was coming, but his senses betrayed him—the attacker was already gone, reabsorbed into the confusing haze.
Yuan, having recovered and circled back, let out a sharp, defiant laugh. "A parlor trick! No worry, I have them covered!" His own wind-manipulation swirled around him in a disruptive vortex, a localized storm meant to tear apart any subtle approach.
From the spectator steps, Gen watched, every fiber of his being screaming to move. He leaned forward, muscles coiled, his own hollow core aching with useless power. He was a weapon locked in a sheath of his own broken flesh.
"This is treachery!" a disciple next to him whispered, voice trembling. "That girl… her Shidow mastery is terrifying. How can you fight a ghost?"
Gen's jaw was so tight it hurt. He didn't look away from the desperate fight. "This is the Jade Palace," he said, the words a low, heated vow meant for himself as much as for them. "We do not bend."
Some of the surrounding disciples looked at his profile, saw the unextinguished fire in his eyes despite his powerless state, and found a sliver of their own courage, nodding silently.
High in the elders' section, slightly removed from the crowd, Elder Kwan observed it all. His hawk-like nose twitched. His spider-like fingers made the faintest, most minimal stirring motion at his side. A thread of his own **Shidow**, exquisitely controlled, peeled away from the chaotic winds generated by Yuan's vortex and the clashing energies in the arena. This thread, invisible and subtle, carried within it a cargo of fine, iridescent powder—the pollen of the Sleeping Deity. He did not blow it in a cloud. He wove it into the existing currents, letting the natural turbulence of the battle disperse it molecule by molecule, a slow, inevitable poison mist descending on the combatants below. His cold eyes watched the struggling forms of Kaito, Yun, Li Fen, Liang, and Yuan. His thin lips permitted themselves a faint, grim curve. The serpent in the arena was a visible threat. The true venom was now in the air they breathed.