Read Novel Full Chapter 791: Three More Gates
Chapter 791: Three More Gates
Ainen walked into the Feast of Trials and stopped just inside the door, taking it all in before moving another step.
A table ran the length of the whole room, longer than any table had any business being, and every inch of it was covered in food. Steam rose from some dishes. Frost clung to others. A few of them moved, very slightly, when nobody was looking directly at them.
A sign stood at the near end, carved in plain letters that felt almost too calm for what they said.
Eat wrong, and the dish eats back.
"Lovely," Ainen said, cracking his knuckles. "Let’s begin."
---
The first dish looked like a simple soup, pale gold and gently steaming, the kind of thing that would have looked perfectly ordinary on any table in the kingdom. Ainen didn’t touch it right away. He’d learned a long time ago, in kitchens far less magical than this one, that the simplest-looking dish in the room was usually the one hiding the sharpest trick.
He called Spiceweave first, letting the deck read the soup the way Almond might read the truth sitting at the center of a blade. It let him taste, without tasting, exactly what a thing actually was underneath what it pretended to be.
The soup smelled sweet. It should have smelled sour.
"You’re not a soup at all," he said, almost admiring the trick. "You’re a trap wearing a soup’s face, and not a very convincing one, now that I’m actually looking."
He tipped the bowl aside instead of lifting the spoon, and the liquid hissed where it touched the table, eating a small dark scar into the wood. Ainen nodded, satisfied, and moved on.
The second dish was honest, a simple roasted root vegetable, and he ate it without any trouble at all. The third dish waited until his spoon was already halfway to his mouth before it moved, small teeth rising out of its own crust like a joke that had gone on a little too long.
Ainen didn’t flinch. He called Flashforged Cleaver, and his whole arm answered before his mind had finished deciding what to do, faster than thought, faster than the dish’s own half-formed jaw could close around anything at all. He had it eaten, teeth and crust together, before it finished the motion it had started.
"Too slow," he said, mouth full, chewing thoughtfully. "Also, could use more salt. I’ll mention that in my notes."
Further down the table, the dishes grew stranger. One bubbled with a heat that had nothing to do with fire, and Ainen called Feast Golem to test it first, a small fragment of the construct’s own bulk absorbing a spoonful before he ever risked his own hand. The Golem shuddered, thickened, and settled, unharmed, and Ainen judged from that alone that the dish was safe, just unpleasant.
A dessert two seats down had gone hard as stone, clearly abandoned long before he arrived, and he used Cellar Aged out of pure curiosity more than necessity, feeling out how long it had actually sat there. Years, the deck told him, though it looked freshly made. He left that one alone entirely, unwilling to trust anything that lied about its own age that thoroughly.
---
The trial’s real test waited at the very end of the table, past every trick and every trap. A single dessert sat there, glowing faint and gold, and the moment Ainen came within arm’s reach of it, it spoke.
"You may not simply eat me," the dessert said, in a voice like glass chiming softly against glass. "I am owed something first."
Ainen went still for a moment, working through the shape of the demand. He’d built an entire deck around exactly this kind of exchange, and he understood, standing there, exactly what kind of trial this actually was.
"You want hospitality," he said slowly. "Not force. An offering."
"Very few guests understand that anymore," the dessert said, something like relief threading through the chime of its voice.
Ainen didn’t argue with it, and he didn’t try to force the issue the way he might have with a lesser deck. He called Saltbound Covenant instead, and set down a small honest offering of his own cooking beside the glowing dish, the same simple gesture he might have made for any real guest sitting at his own table back home.
The dessert accepted it without hesitation, and the covenant settled between them, quiet and complete, no trickery hidden in either direction.
"Now you may eat me," it said. "Properly, this time, as an invited guest rather than a thief."
He did, slowly, savoring it the way any good meal deserved to be savored, and the gate’s far door swung open the instant he swallowed the last bite. The Baton passed warm into his waiting hand.
"Gate four," Ainen called back toward the others, licking his fingers clean. "Also, for the record, ten out of ten. Would eat again."
---
Lily and Kayla stepped into the Mirror Maze of Echoes together, and the room greeted them with a hundred versions of their own faces staring back from every direction at once.
Every wall was a mirror, floor to ceiling, and every mirror showed something almost right and entirely wrong. In one, Lily’s reflection smiled when she wasn’t smiling. In another, Kayla’s reflection stood a full pace to the left of where she actually stood.
"None of these are real," Lily said quietly. "But some of them clearly want us to believe they are."
She reached for Oathbreak Wraith, the newest deck she carried, built for exactly this kind of question. When she turned its attention toward the nearest wrong reflection, it flinched under the weight of being asked, plainly, who it actually was.
For one brief instant, it had no name at all.
"That one’s fake," Lily said. "It just told me so, without meaning to say anything."
Kayla stayed close behind her the whole way through, Thornveil’s thorns curled ready at her sides, watching the spaces the mirrors couldn’t quite fill with pretend faces. A shape broke free of the glass without warning, built in Lily’s exact shape but wrong around the eyes, empty in a way the real Lily had never once looked, and lunged straight for her back.
Kayla caught it before it closed the distance. Wrathroot’s vines snapped tight around the false shape, and it came apart into drifting smoke the instant it could no longer hold onto a face it had never actually earned.
"Thank you," Lily said, not slowing, not looking back.
"Keep walking," Kayla said. "I’ve got whatever’s behind you. Watch what’s ahead."
They pushed deeper into the maze that way, one of them reading truth out of a room built entirely from lies, and the other guarding every space truth couldn’t watch at the same time. A second echo tried the same trick further in, this one wearing Kayla’s own face, and Lily caught it with Veilfang Reach before it ever closed the gap, draining the borrowed shape from a distance the old her would never have trusted herself to fight from.
When the maze finally tried its cruelest trick, an entire wall of mirrors showing both of them lying wounded on the ground, Kayla didn’t even break stride.
"We’re both still standing," she said simply. "That’s not us. That’s just a room trying to slow us down."
They reached the far door together at last, and Lily’s whip found the one true handle hidden among a dozen false ones, the single door in the whole wall that had refused to lie quite convincingly enough to fool a deck built to sever every false thing down to nothing.
The Baton passed into her hand, warm and humming, and the two of them stepped through into open air, leaving the maze and its hundred wrong faces behind them.
---
Julian and Emma didn’t wait for any kind of introduction. The moment they crossed into the Thunderdome Ring, a wall of sand rose around them, sealing the arena shut, and a champion built from stone and old, patient fire climbed up out of the ground on the far side.
"Finally," Julian said, rolling his shoulders. "A straight fight. No riddles, no mirrors, no talking dessert."
"Please don’t hog it," Emma said, already drawing her light close around both hands.
The champion came in heavy and unhurried, testing them the way stone always tested things, patient and certain of its own weight. Julian met its first strike head-on, Emberclaw catching the blow in a burst of raw flame that held the line without giving an inch of ground.
"You don’t retreat from fire," he said, more to himself than to her. "Learned that one the hard way. It only ever teaches the fire to chase harder."
Emma answered from above, climbing the arena’s low walls with Eclipse Veil folding shadow around her just long enough to break the champion’s line of sight, and Starfall came down a moment later in a rain of small, burning points of light, softening the stone across its broad shoulders before Julian’s next strike ever landed.
The champion turned toward her instead, deciding, wrongly, that the smaller threat deserved its full attention, and Emma met that mistake with a grin.
"Wrong target," she said, and Nova’s Crown answered in a single blinding burst that staggered it back three full steps.
Julian pressed the opening without hesitation. Wildfire Wake spread low and fast across the sand, catching the champion’s feet in a slow, crawling burn that no amount of stone could fully stamp out, and Ashveil’s fine grey smoke rose around its head a heartbeat later, blinding it to the strike that was already coming.
"Together," Julian called.
Cinderstorm answered first, ash turned to burning shrapnel tearing into cracks the earlier fire had already opened, and Emma’s Dawnbreaker followed a half breath behind it, one clean beam of light driving straight down through weakened, softened stone.
The champion cracked down the middle with a sound like a mountain giving up, and did not get back up again.
"That’s six," Julian said, grinning wide as he caught the Baton mid-air.
"One left," Emma said, already turning toward the horizon. "The Final Bell."
They looked out together toward the distant marker where the last gate waited, the one built to answer only to all thirteen of them standing together at once, and for the first time since the relay had begun, the whole scattered team found itself moving in the exact same direction, all at the same time.