The spectacle of a patrician scion charging across the arena sand with a drawn lethal weapon, abandoning his beast to personally execute an opposing tamer, was a rule-break of tournament protocol so flagrant that the entire Grand Colosseum froze in stunned disbelief. Referees reached wildly for their whistles, but the rules of the Collegiate Crucible were clear. Combatants stepped onto the sand. Then, no official could enter the ring until a formal yield was declared or a tamer was rendered unconscious.
Aurelius Valerius had fully abandoned his sanity.
His white-gold-blond hair whipped wildly around his face, his eyes bloodshot and dilated with unhinged fury. His royal crimson silk tunic was drenched in sweat, his hands white on the handle of his gold-trimmed dress sword as the high-hum shaking generator buzzed with forty thousand cycles of spark-charged spark power.
Behind him, his two patrician wingmates—cadets from House Moros and House Vance—drew heavy tactical sidearms, sprinting across the sand to provide lethal covering fire for their scion’s decapitation strike.
“Die in the dirt, commoner trash!” Aurelius screamed, crossing thirty paces of boiling glass and sand.
Arthur Vance didn’t draw his ARC-7 Mag-Carbine. He didn’t ask Titus to crush the charging noble, and he didn’t order Pip to drop from the sky to burn up the scion.
