The clouds dissipate, revealing the valley. Chatter subsides.

Lucinda sighs and clasps her hands behind her back. “And so it begins.” We’ve been speaking about Remorse affinity for the past several minutes. I try to keep up with her questions, but my limited experience is painfully obvious. Probably out of respect for me, or perhaps just out of a desire for privacy, we’ve conducted our discussion using Remorse.

“Do you sense the competitors’ minds?” Lucinda asks, tapping her foot twice on the transparent floor.

“Of course.”

Her lips curl. “Mundane sight is often insufficient to observe competitions like these. The entire valley will be occluded by smoke, water, debris, et cetera within moments.”

“Your concerns are unnecessary.” I’d planned to rely on my vital vision to watch the competition, and the only time that might be occluded is if competitors are buried under dense rock, or Life or Death practitioners smother the field in swarms of the living or dead.

She ignores my dismissal. “To visualize the competitors and the field, I construct a mental map with each person’s consciousness as a marker. I feel their minds move across the field and can tell as soon as someone dies. They’ll respawn back in the basement chamber they waited in, but as you can see, they’ve replaced the ceiling, preventing onlookers from seeing those who respawn.”

The chamber’s ceiling is laced with End arrays, Maria observes. It’s warded against observers.

Is it strange that I feel like she’s trying to help me? I ask.

If you only feel and don’t know, your Beginning is even weaker than I thought, Maria chides. You’re an ancient, and she knows you’re a new one. She also doesn’t think you have affiliations with any organizations. Maria lets her thoughts sink in. What do you think she’s intending?

She wants to give a good impression, I say, though she’s not exactly succeeding. Conversing makes me nervous, like I’ll reveal more than I intend at any moment.

She’s giving you veiled suggestions for how to use Remorse, Maria states. She’s probing you, certainly, but at the end of the day, she’s helping you because she wants you to join the black faction.

I’ve kept Euryphel plugged into our conversation by transmitting our thoughts, even though he can’t join in. Still, I ask him, “Do you agree with Maria?”

He imperceptibly bobs his head, nodding.

Huh. Why does Lucinda think she’ll succeed? She’s the only one who’s tried thus far. The other organizations haven’t bothered, assuming–or perhaps learning in Regret scenarios–that I’m not interested in tethering myself to a faction.

I follow Lucinda’s eyes down to the valley, where Holiday begins a short speech announcing the competition’s commencement. He leaps to the observer platform while the competitors spread across the valley. I can barely see him over the heads of the other ascendants.

My gaze drifts back to the transparent floor and the dispersed combatants. Now that they ring the valley, they’re far enough away that I can’t tell which figure belongs to Red. I can sense their vitality, but not clearly due to the distance. Recognizing him by his vital signature is near impossible.

Maybe Lucinda was right after all–even using vital vision, I’ll be hard-pressed to follow the combatants. Following her advice, I attempt to create a map of minds.

Doing so requires a deft touch. Trying to skim people’s surface thoughts, at least outside of Regret scenarios, is considered incredibly rude. This is one step less invasive.

After ten seconds of intense concentration, I sense the minds of the competitors, but the sparks of consciousness don’t have clear physical locations, even relative to one another. I vaguely sense their direction and distance, but that isn’t sufficient to make a map or track their movements.

Distracted, I barely notice when Holiday gives the final signal: “Begin!”

Smoke suddenly covers everything. The ground buckles and collapses, shorn walls grinding together and immediately snuffing out the lives of two ascendants. I can’t use my vital vision to see immaterial attacks like those made from Light or Dark affinity, or even fire elementalism. But that doesn’t matter: Those attacks tend to have the most distinctive visual effects and are impossible to miss as they pierce through the smoke.

An ascendant escapes the buckling earth and fends off a fiery blast with a spinning orb of water. A flower of Dark affinity blossoms like a firework, destroying everything in its path. It sheds its petals, which turn into whirring blades that slice deep into the craggy earth.

I notice that none of them fight by sundering the veil and using its impossibly sharp edges. Moreover, for every ascendant that makes a large show of power, several others hide their strength while responding defensively. I get the sense that they’re waiting for something.

A Life practitioner chooses that moment to go on the offensive, massive, gnarled roots sprouting from the sundered earth with impossible speed. A searing beam of plasma–the kind I’ve come to expect from Sun and Light dual practitioners–torches a cluster of roots, but only leaves a sooty, cosmetic stain. On the other side of the field, the giant orb of water collapses into a wave that washes over the roots, then freezes, glowing with red ascendant energy from the inside.

The roots, too, glow red, but can’t break free. But the trapped roots are only a small section of the whole. The Dark affinity flower reforms and slices the roots, but the attack is inconsequential. The roots are inexorable.

“Devil’s snare is as potent as I remember,” Lucinda says, reopening our mental channel of communication. “The competitors should not recognize it unless they have traveled the plains extensively.” She chuckles softly. “It definitely feels like Crimson Teeth’s doing.”

I assume that’s the plant taking over the valley, I think to Maria. I thought that was just the creation of a Life practitioner.

The roots strangle the ground in a writhing mass of thorned tendrils, forcing the competitors out of the ground and into the sky. The platform elevates, preventing us observers from entering the line of fire.

Only a handful of the competitors have perished, and most of those died in the first five seconds; most have kept themselves alive by acting defensively, covering their bodies with ascendant energy and creating bulwarks with elementalism.

While the ascendants dance around the roots and engage each other in standoffish attacks, the roots suddenly explode, shooting out tiny spines. Due to the close proximity, the spines–empowered with ascendant energy by opportunistic Life practitioners­–pierce through defenses and into unprotected flesh. Most spines fail to break the skin, but over ten ascendants are affected–including Red, who had been playing semi-aggressively, trying to get himself killed without being too obvious.

He should’ve predicted the spine attack with his Regret affinity, but the omnipresence of the spikes and their red ascendant energy coating likely made dodging an impossibility. Red had been trapped.

Lucinda looks at me and raises an eyebrow. “Did your protégé let himself get hit? The only ones who failed to defend themselves were caught by surprise, but he is a Regret practitioner, so surely…”

Y’jeni, I’d give a hundred prismatic soul gems just to converse normally with Euryphel and gain intelligence from the future. Instead, my mind races to process the data that is known to me. My Beginning affinity leads me to believe that the spines are coated in poison. Assuming Lucinda is right that Holiday is behind the presence of devil’s snare, he wouldn’t have picked a plant that simply kills the competitors. That would be far too anticlimactic for a battle royale. Even if the poison is deadly, it should have secondary effects.

Following my line of thought, Maria offers a hypothesis. The poison is either something that causes them to hallucinate or incites extreme aggression.

My affinity affirms her conclusion, so I offer it to Euryphel, asking him to shift his weight either to the right or left to indicate one of the options. If neither is remotely correct, I tell him to do nothing.

This entire conversation happens in a brief moment. Euryphel shifts his weight to the right.

It’s a berserker poison, I inform Maria. I fix my gaze on Lucinda, moving my head languidly in an attempt to seem nonchalant. “My protégé doesn’t like fighting. Devil’s snare may reveal a more interesting side of him.”

The afflicted ascendants convulse, then explode with energy, the poison rapidly taking effect. While before, fifty ascendants evaded the attacks of five main aggressors, an additional ten plunges the battleground into chaos.

Red is the only one whose actions don’t make any sense. He stays close to a vine, dodging left and right to evade its thorns as the vine shifts like a tree-sized snake. The vine is white with vitality, but it isn’t controlled by a Life practitioner directly. As a result, its movements are quick and powerful but predictable.

“I think I better understand why you brought your protégé along,” Lucinda comments. “It is a shame he can’t wield red energy.”

What does she mean? Does she see something that I don’t?

While the violence escalates, Red remains alone with the vine. The others seem to have dismissed him, not seeing the one competitor with non-combat affinities and blue ascendant energy as a threat. I can’t blame them.

Red’s vine stops moving. Red grins, a frenzied, wild look in his eyes.

Then all the vines halt.

An instant later, the plasma-wielding fire elementalist snipes Red from afar. That Red doesn’t dodge means that in all possible futures, he’d be unable to escape his fate. In his impaired state, I don’t think he’d be aware enough to throw the match.

My head swims. What exactly did Red pull off that attracted the attention of one of the principal combatants, as well as Lucinda’s interest?

He controlled the vines with Remorse, Maria says. None of the Sun affinity practitioners here bothered with plant control–probably because the vines have been under the control of Life practitioners.

Or because a Life and Sun affinity dual practitioner dominated the plant, I say. I recall there being one such competitor. But I don’t understand how Red could have done anything with Remorse. Plants don’t have minds. I think I would have noticed by now.

Your Remorse possibly isn’t high enough, Maria retorts. But in all fairness, I don’t remember any Remorse practitioners from our world having the ability to commune with plants.

The round wraps up in the next minute. The lone survivor is the Dark practitioner who created flowers with his affinity.

Holiday snaps his fingers. It resounds over the platform and valley, silencing the musings of the observers. A small square of the field disappears. The resurrection chamber for the ascendants is completely intact, its structural integrity probably guaranteed by a member of the hall of ascension. The number of competitors within is reduced by fifteen.

As the Dark practitioner flies down to the chamber to join the others, Holiday speaks. “Ascendant Meng of the Void Forge is the victor of the first round.” I had walked by the organization’s booth earlier; it specializes in creating void storages and other space-manipulating artifacts. “The next five rounds will build upon one another. Breaking from tradition, they will require audience participation.”

The ascendants still at this declaration, some frowning, others smiling grimly. I’m not sure if they’re reacting to what he’s saying now, or what he’ll say in the future. I could ask Eury, but it’s ultimately pointless; I’ll find out soon enough.

I dismiss Euryphel a few seconds early, then summon him again. He meets my gaze, and his lips tighten, his head shaking almost imperceptibly. My stomach drops. What has he seen?

“Each participant may choose one ascendant from the observers to assist them in the coming challenges. The nature of the challenges will not be disclosed. The assistance to be rendered will be revealed as each round commences. Observers will all be under the following restrictions, regardless of round. They may only utilize one affinity at a time, chosen at the beginning of each round, after the rules have been explained. They may only change their affinity between rounds.”

I was worried for a moment, Maria says, but this may actually be good for you–

“However, observers may not utilize ascendant energy in any form, and they may not utilize items.” Holiday pauses. “We will now break for thirty minutes. Competitors must select their observer before the break elapses. Any questions or concerns, please talk to me or a representative of the Hall of Ascension.”