Read Novel Full Chapter 790: Exit, Get Together, Wondergate Relay
Chapter 790: Exit, Get Together, Wondergate Relay
The stone arch closed behind Ainen, the last of the four to take his turn in this second round, and the notice that greeted all four of them on the other side landed with less ceremony than any of the last four had.
[Deck-Modification Attempts Remaining: 0]
[Further attempts require additional Champion-position event victories. Five 1st-place finishes will guarantee one new attempt.]
Rudra read it twice, unsurprised. "That tracks. Nothing in this layer hands out a second helping for free."
"Five wins," Lily said. "Not five attempts. Five outright championships."
"Then we’d better start winning outright more often," Almond said, and there was no complaint in it at all, only the same flat readiness he brought to everything.
"Music to my ears," Ainen said. "I was starting to miss losing to things that weren’t caves."
---
They went home to a kingdom that hadn’t slowed down in their absence.
Natalia’s group was back to training every morning alongside the rest of the family, five decks apiece now. Everyone was working hard, whether that meant training, entering events, or handling the day-to-day running of the Empire.
It was Marcus who brought the notice that changed everyone’s week.
"New event," he said, pulling it up for the gathering ground to see. "Open registration, mixed team size, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that could get us a fast championship if we field the right roster."
Almond read the header, and something in his usually flat expression came close to actual interest.
[New Event Detected: The Wondergate Relay]
"A relay," Lily said. "That’s new."
"That’s fun," Ainen said. "I don’t trust it."
---
The rules, when the whole combined roster finally gathered to hear them properly, turned out to be exactly as strange as the name promised.
A single silver token, the Wondergate Baton, would be handed to the first runner at the starting gate. From there, a chain of seven wildly different trial gates opened in sequence, each one testing something completely unlike the gate before it. Clearing a gate handed the Baton forward to whichever teammate the team chose next, and no one could run the same gate twice.
The Bladed Carousel came first, a spinning ring of blades and moving platforms that rewarded speed and reflex over raw strength. The Sphinx’s Pantry followed, a room that answered only to wit, riddles baked directly into shelves of food that rearranged themselves with every wrong guess. The Tumbling Peaks came third, a mountain range that refused to hold still, testing balance and patience over brute climbing power.
The Feast of Trials sat fourth, an eating challenge that was, according to the posted rules, "significantly more dangerous than it sounds, please read the full waiver." The Mirror Maze of Echoes followed, a hall built to confuse perception itself, punishing anyone who trusted their own eyes too completely. The Thunderdome Ring came sixth, a straightforward gladiator’s pit against a rotating champion provided by the event itself, no tricks, just a fight. And the Final Bell waited last, a challenge that could only be solved by the whole team arriving together, no matter how the first six legs had scattered them.
"Whoever crosses the Final Bell first, as a complete team, wins the whole relay outright," Marcus read aloud. "Second and third place still bank points toward the kingdom leaderboard, but only first place counts as a Champion-position finish."
"So we need the win," Rudra said. "Not just a good showing."
"We need the win," Almond agreed.
---
They spent the better part of an hour arguing, cheerfully, over who ran which gate, and the assignments that finally settled out felt less like strategy and more like thirteen people who had genuinely learned, over the last few months, exactly what each other were actually good at.
Kira and Noah took the Bladed Carousel, speed answering speed. Marcus and Maya claimed the Sphinx’s Pantry without much debate, because nobody else in the family had ever wanted to argue with either of them about a riddle. Jian took the Tumbling Peaks alone, citing patience earned the hard way in a place none of the original four had ever set foot in.
Ainen took the Feast of Trials so fast nobody else got a vote. Lily and Kayla claimed the Mirror Maze together, one reading truth and one holding the line if truth turned out to be slower than expected. Julian and Emma took the Thunderdome Ring, hungry for a straight fight after a relay full of tricks. And the Final Bell would take all thirteen of them together, however the first six legs left them scattered.
"That’s the whole roster," Big D said, watching from the edge of the gathering crowd with something that looked, on him, almost like pride. "Go show this layer what a family with five decks apiece actually looks like."
The starting gate lit gold across the field, and the Wondergate Baton settled, cool and humming, into Kira’s waiting hand.
[The Wondergate Relay will begin in ten seconds.]
Thirteen people took their places along a starting line built for exactly this kind of ridiculous, dangerous, entirely welcome distraction, and the countdown began.
---
The countdown ended, and the first gate opened wide.
The Bladed Carousel was not a ring at all, once Kira and Noah actually stood in front of it. It was a full sphere, blades curving along every inner surface, platforms rotating independently at speeds that had nothing to do with each other and everything to do with making sure no two people ever found the same safe path twice.
"After you," Kira said.
"Absolutely not," Noah said. "After you."
They went together in the end, because neither of them had ever been built to hang back and watch the other take the risk alone.
Kira went in first, ice climbing ahead of her in a thin, careful bridge, Frostbind Snare locking the nearest three platforms into a fixed rotation just long enough for her to cross them. A blade swept low behind her, and she answered without looking, Gale Fang cutting a channel of wind that shredded through it before it finished its arc.
Noah followed a half step behind, Twinfang out in both hands, parrying two glancing strikes off blades that had never once slowed down for anyone. When the platform under him lurched sideways without warning, he planted Wanderer’s Edge into the shifting surface and let the blade decide, mid-fall, exactly how heavy it needed to be to hold him steady.
"Left!" Kira called, spotting a rotation about to close.
Noah didn’t ask why. He moved, and a blade passed through the space he’d occupied a half breath earlier.
They reached the sphere’s far side together, breathing hard, and Kira caught the last swinging blade on a wall of Mirrorfrost, throwing its own momentum back into the mechanism that swung it, jamming the whole apparatus just long enough for both of them to step clear.
"Gate one," Noah said, and the Baton pulsed warm in his palm, already lit for the next hand-off.
---
The Sphinx’s Pantry did not look dangerous at all, which was, Marcus decided within the first ten seconds, exactly the point.
Shelves rose floor to ceiling in every direction, laden with dishes that steamed and shifted the moment anyone looked at them too long, and a voice with no visible source posed the first riddle before either of them had finished crossing the threshold.
"Answer wrong," the voice said, almost cheerful about it, "and the shelves rearrange. Answer wrong enough times, and they stop being shelves."
"Charming," Marcus said.
Maya was already reading the room the way she read everything now, Farsight Loom unspooling threads of second sight across every shifting shelf at once, searching for the pattern underneath the chaos.
"It’s not random," she said. "The dishes that answer true riddles smell different. Sharper."
The first riddle came and went in seconds, Maya’s nose and Marcus’s markers working together, his Vanguard’s Mandate tracking which shelves had already shifted while her Truthweave settled over the room like a held breath, separating honest answers from decorative ones with a clarity that made the whole trial feel almost unfair.
The third riddle turned hostile. A shelf lunged, wood and iron reshaping into something with teeth, and Marcus’s Bastion Line snapped up between it and Maya without either of them needing to discuss the decision first.
"Focus on the riddle," he said. "I’ve got the shelf."
Riposte Engine answered the shelf’s second lunge before Marcus fully finished his sentence, the creature’s own strike rebounding into a beam that had never expected to hit anything at all, and Maya, uninterrupted, gave the room its answer a half breath later.
The shelves stilled, all at once, and the far door unlocked with a small, satisfied chime.
"That’s two," Maya said, handing the Baton off.
---
Jian entered the Tumbling Peaks alone, the way he’d insisted on from the start, and understood within his first three steps exactly why nobody had argued with him about it.
The mountain range did not sit still. Whole peaks rose and sank like slow breathing, footing shifting under him with every step, gravity itself seeming to forget, occasionally, which direction it preferred.
He planted his first real foothold with Graniteguard, stone climbing up both legs, weight settling into the mountain’s own rhythm instead of fighting it, and for a long stretch he simply climbed, patient in a way this whole trial seemed built to punish anyone who wasn’t.
A peak sank without warning beneath his third step, and Jian didn’t fall so much as choose to, Galewrought carrying him sideways in a burst of raw wind-speed onto a rising ridge that hadn’t existed a full second earlier.
"You’ll have to move faster than that," a voice said, carried on wind that belonged to the mountain rather than to him.
"I’ve been faster than I needed to be my whole life," Jian said. "Patience is the part I had to learn."
He crossed the last unstable stretch with Stormfist crackling faint along both knuckles, not attacking anything, simply reading the mountain’s own current the way lightning read a storm, and when the final peak tried to buck him off entirely, Thunderquake split the stone beneath his feet just enough to give him somewhere solid to land that the mountain hadn’t planned for.
He crossed the finish marker without ever once looking like he’d been in a hurry, and the Baton passed into Ainen’s waiting hand a moment later, humming.
---
"My turn," Ainen said, cracking his knuckles with entirely too much enthusiasm for a challenge the posted rules had specifically warned people about. "Let’s see what a kitchen can’t handle."
The Feast of Trials opened its doors in front of him, and somewhere far behind, on the sidelines, the rest of the family settled in to watch, because everyone already suspected this leg of the relay was going to be the strangest one yet.