Ten Minutes to Midnight - The Masked Trial in the Valley
Valley #3 smelled of
Trial in the
Valley #3 smelled of stagnant clay, wet horse manure, and the sour sweat of a hundred beaten aspirants.Felix
Lin adjusted the heavy, cold iron visor of his mask.
The metal dug uncomfortably into the bridge of his nose, distorting his peripheral vision and turning his own breathing into a hollow, metallic echo inside the helm.
Over his grey cadet tunic, he wore a shapeless, mud-splattered wool robe designed to obscure his height and build.In
Aethelgard’s anonymous trial arenas, names were completely worthless.
Only credits, survival, and raw performance mattered.Across the sunken, pit-like mud ring, his opponent stood waiting.
The other freshman wore a matching iron mask, but no mask or heavy robe could completely rewrite human muscle memory.
The way the boy rolled his right shoulder to ease a tight collar, the stiff, squared-off posture of his upper back, and the impatient, rhythmic tapping of his left boot heel against the wet clay gave him away instantly.Caleb
The capital noble who had been nursing a grudge ever since his cousin
Julian screamed into the crowd that he was a pig.The heavy iron bell hanging from the valley’s stone gateway clanged once, cutting short the damp afternoon silence.Caleb didn’t waste time with a formal bow.
He surged forward with a burst of bright, fiery red
Aether light flaring across his chest—a classic capital fencing charge taught in the private academies of the
A heavy wooden quarterstaff hissed through the damp air as he brought it down in a vicious, overhead arc aimed straight at
Felix’s helmet.Felix didn’t try to block the blow head-on.
With his bruised ribs still protesting every sharp twist, he dropped his weight low, letting the heavy wood graze his shoulder as he slipped neatly to the side.Caleb grunted, overextending his momentum in the sticky mire.”Too slow,
Vance,” Felix muttered through the metal bars of his mask, his voice muffled and altered by the valley’s acoustic dampeners.Deep within his chest,
Felix’s double-chambered
Aether core flared—a sudden, dense pulse of amber energy flooding his legs.
He didn’t use a flashy capital technique or a textbook academy form.
He used a dirty, low-slung sweep he had learned watching old soldiers brawl in the ditches along the northern road.Felix drove his right heel into the clay, pivoted on his toe, and lashed out with a vicious low kick straight behind
Caleb’s left knee.CRACK-SQUELCH.Caleb’s knee buckled backward under the sudden
Aether-boosted impact.
With a startled, undignified yelp, the noble lost his footing entirely, spinning sideways in mid-air before crashing face-first into a thick, foul-smelling puddle of black valley mud.Silence dropped over the stone ledges surrounding the pit.Felix stood over him, casually shaking a glob of grey clay off his boot, before turning calmly toward the judges’ elevated alcove to collect his trial credits.