Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 773: Aurelian Champion

They found a quiet corner of the terrace before the match, away from the crowd already gathering along the Aurelian ring’s edge.

"We could ask for a delay," Almond said. "Give the crowd someone else to watch first."

"We could," Lily agreed. "But that just moves the problem an hour down the road. It doesn’t solve it."

Almond was quiet for a moment. "Then we fight it honestly. Full effort. No holding back to spare the other’s feelings."

"Anything less would be an insult," Lily said. "To both of us."

He almost smiled at that. "When did you get wiser than me."

"I’ve always been wiser than you," Lily said. "You’ve just been too busy reading everything else to notice."

---

The ring called them a few minutes later, and the crowd’s noise settled into an expectant hush the moment both names lit the board together.

Rudra and Ainen watched from the terrace rail, and neither of them said much, because there wasn’t much worth saying that the fight wouldn’t answer better.

"Strange, watching this one," Ainen admitted.

"Necessary," Rudra said. "They both know it."

Almond and Lily faced each other across the ring’s open floor, and for a moment neither moved, two people who had crossed oceans and drowned kingdoms and a hundred impossible rooms together, now standing on opposite ends of something neither of them had ever had to share before.

"Ready?" Almond asked.

"Ready," Lily said, and drew her whip.

---

Almond opened the way he always opened, reading the air between them for the truth sitting at the core of her Dreadlings, and found, for the first time in longer than he could remember, absolutely nothing waiting for him.

Not resistance. Absence.

"You’re already doing it," he said, half startled, half something close to proud. "You’re erasing my read before I finish it."

"I’ve watched you win a hundred fights with that trick," Lily said. "I know its note better than anyone alive."

She had found it somewhere in all those shared battles, the faint, particular hum his essence-reading carried when it reached toward something, and the Unheard Absolute closed around that hum the instant it rose, silencing his greatest advantage before it ever had the chance to answer him.

Almond adjusted fast, because adjusting fast was the only thing that had ever kept him alive against anything worth fighting. He called Alfred instead of relying on a read, silver rapier meeting her whip in a rapid, precise exchange that owed nothing to essence at all.

"Fine," he said, almost laughing despite himself. "We do this the honest way."

"That’s all I wanted," Lily said, and pressed the attack.

---

The fight that followed had none of the quick, efficient endings either of them had handed their earlier opponents.

Galvaren rose off Almond’s soul in a burst of storm-light, lightning arcing down toward Lily’s flank, and she met it with a whip-crack of pure silence that swallowed the bolt whole before it landed, sound and fury alike simply ceasing to exist in the space between them.

"You’ve gotten better at that," Almond said.

"I’ve had a year of practice against exactly this," Lily said. "Try harder."

He did. Nyssara answered next, frost and flame together, one side of the ring freezing solid while the other scorched black, and Lily moved through the narrowing gap between them with the same patient precision she’d once used to erase an entire drowned army.

Her Dread Sovereign flickered into being at her shoulder, healer’s light ready the instant either of them needed it, and Almond read that too, not with essence this time, but with the same plain understanding he’d have used on anyone he’d fought beside for a year.

"You brought support," he said. "That’s not fighting fair."

"You brought four Spirit Lords," Lily said. "We’re well past fair."

Benedict’s shield rose to catch a strike meant to open Almond’s guard, bastion sigils flaring, and for a moment the two of them traded blows in a rhythm that looked, to anyone watching from the terraces, less like a duel and more like two halves of the same fight remembering how to move without each other for the first time.

"This is the longest match today," someone in the crowd murmured, and nobody near them disagreed.

---

It was Almond’s own patience that finally opened the door Lily needed.

He fell back on old habit in the fight’s later stretch, reaching for essence out of pure instinct rather than conscious choice, forgetting for one crucial half second that the trick no longer worked against her.

Lily felt the reach the moment it happened, the same familiar hum rising one more time, and this time she didn’t just silence it. She followed it back to its source, the same way she’d once followed a thread’s tension to the will controlling it, and found the narrow half second where Almond’s own guard had opened to make room for a read that was never going to land.

Her whip caught his wrist clean, disarming the nearest Grimblade before he could recover it, and the tip came to rest at his throat a heartbeat later, silence humming faint and total along its whole length.

The ring went still.

"Yield," Lily said, quiet enough that only he could properly hear it.

Almond looked at the whip, then at her, and let out a breath that had less resignation in it than pride.

"Yield," he agreed, and the board overhead lit with her name a moment later, bright and final.

---

The crowd’s applause rose slow and then all at once, the particular respect an arena saved for a fight that had actually earned it, and Lily lowered her whip and offered Almond a hand up from where the exchange had left him kneeling.

He took it.

"You beat me," he said, and there was nothing but honesty in it.

"I beat your habit," Lily said. "Not you. There’s a difference."

"Is there?"

"You’ll figure it out," she said, "next time you catch yourself reaching for the easy answer instead of the honest one."

Rudra and Ainen met them at the ring’s edge, and Ainen, predictably, got there first.

"That," he said, "was the single most Regalon fight I have ever watched. Two people who love each other, trying very hard to hurt each other properly, out of respect."

"That’s an accurate summary," Rudra said, and clasped Lily’s shoulder briefly. "Well fought."

"Well fought," Almond echoed, and meant it completely.

The board above the Aurelian ring finished its update a moment later, one name standing alone where a hundred and twenty-six had once crowded the field.

Aurelian Champion: Lily Regalon.

She looked up at it for a long moment, and then back at Almond, and whatever complicated thing had sat between them since the bracket first lit their names together finally, quietly, settled into something that felt like exactly what it was.

Family, still intact, on the other side of the only fight that had ever asked them to stand apart.