The bronze combat gong sounded with a deafening ring.
*BWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOONG!*
The deep metallic chime rolled across the stone tiers of the Grand Arena, rattling the banners and vibrating in the teeth of ten thousand spectators.
In that same split second, Julian moved.
He didn't hold back. He didn't test his opponent with light probing strikes. The fury that had been boiling inside his chest for the last half hour erupted like an uncapped volcano.
"Die in the brilliance of the sun!" Julian roared at the top of his lungs.
He drove the tip of his Sun-Cleaving Broadsword straight up toward the noon heavens.
A torrent of blinding golden mana surged from his dantian, coursing through his arms and flooding the red steel of the blade. The air above the arena warped and twisted under intense thermal distortion.
Then, the sky caught fire.
*SHING! SHING! SHING! SHING!*
Above the arena, ten thousand translucent golden blades condensed out of thin air. Each sword phantom was three feet long, forged from compressed solar sword qi, and honed to a razor edge that could slice through dragon scales.
They formed a glittering, celestial dome of death that completely blotted out the blue sky.
"The ultimate art of the Spellblade Order!" a disciple in the upper bleachers screamed, jumping onto his seat with wild excitement. "The Ten Thousand Golden Sun Sword Rain! Brother Julian has perfected the seventh stanza!"
"The squatter is finished!" another disciple yelled, pumping his fist. "Nobody below the Seventh Tier can survive that barrage! He will be turned into minced meat before he can take a breath!"
In the front row of the Second Spire cheering section, Julian's three sworn cronies banged brass shields against the stone parapet.
"Brother Julian, show no mercy!" they barked in unison. "Cleanse the academy of this sleeping beggar! Let his blood wash our flagstones!"
On the eastern judge platform, Elder Raymond nodded with a cold, superior smile. "A bit excessive for a junior squatter, but a necessary lesson in hierarchy. The academy has no room for parasites."
Down on the sand, Julian sneered through his golden visor. His muscles strained as he held the immense weight of the hovering sword formation above his head.
"Rain down!" Julian commanded, slashing his heavy broadsword downward with both hands. "Turn him to ash!"
Ten thousand golden blades tilted their tips downward, aiming directly at Felix Vance's wide straw hat.
At that exact moment, Felix felt something uncomfortable.
Down inside his right straw slipper, right under the fleshy ball of his heel, a sharp little object poked against his skin.
"Ow," Felix mumbled.
He looked down at his foot.
"A rock," Felix muttered, his brow furrowing in deep irritation. "How did a sharp gravel pebble get inside my sock? I swear the collision detection on footwear in this game is completely broken."
Felix was not looking at the ten thousand glowing swords hovering directly over his skull.
He was not looking at Julian's bloodshot eyes.
All Felix cared about was the annoying sharp pebble poking into his heel.
To get the pebble out, Felix shifted his weight.
He planted his left foot firmly into the sand, lifted his right heel, and prepared to shake his slipper loose. He took half a step backward to balance his hips.
It was the most ordinary, mundane movement a human being could make.
Millions of people around the world shook pebbles out of their shoes every single day.
However, none of those millions of people had a 1.0-Earth-Mass terrestrial planet spinning inside their lower abdomen.
Deep within Felix's dantian, the celestial core responded to the sudden shift in posture.
When Felix lifted his foot and relaxed his calf muscle, the internal equilibrium of his core tilted by a microscopic fraction of a millimeter. His passive idle breathing hitched for less than half a beat.
And because his balance shifted without conscious mana circulation, the gravitational containment matrix surrounding his miniature planet slipped.
Just a tiny bit.
Zero-point-zero-zero-one percent.
The consequence, however, was not tiny.
*VUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUM.*
Reality did not make an explosion. It made a deep, subterranean groan that resonated through the bedrock of the entire mountain peak.
The ambient gravity within a fifty-yard radius of Felix's left heel instantly multiplied by one hundred times.
One hundred Gs.
Nine hundred and eighty meters per second squared.
The physics of the Grand Arena broke down in the span of a single nanosecond.
High in the sky, Julian's glorious Ten Thousand Golden Sun Sword Rain had just begun its majestic descent. The blades were supposed to sweep down in elegant, spiraling arcs of crimson flame.
Instead, the moment the ten thousand swords entered the one-hundred-G perimeter, they didn't fly.
They were violently yanked out of the air like iron anvils tossed off a cliff.
*CRASH! CRASH! CRASH! BOOM!*
The entire formation of ten thousand golden blades was dragged straight down at terminal velocity. They slammed into the granite floor at nearly the speed of sound.
They didn't even have time to explode with sword intent. The sheer downward kinetic force crushed them instantly into harmless golden sparkles that puffed out across the flagstones like stepped-on fireflies.
"What—?!" Julian's battle roar choked in his throat.
He had no time to process where his ultimate attack had gone.
Because the gravity hit him next.
Julian wore seventy pounds of master-forged golden lamellar armor. In normal gravity, his trained Tier-6 body carried that steel like a second skin.
Under one hundred Gs of sudden, violent gravitational downforce, that seventy-pound armor instantly weighed seven thousand pounds.
Three and a half tons of solid metal bore down on Julian's shoulders in a microsecond.
His broadsword, which weighed forty pounds, suddenly weighed four thousand pounds. It tore itself out of Julian's grip and slammed into the granite floor with a sickening *CLANG*, burying half the red steel blade straight into solid rock.
"GURGH!" Julian gasped.
His knees didn't just bend; they buckled with the sound of snapping timber.
*CRACK!*
Julian's knees smashed into the arena flagstones so hard that twin craters spiderwebbed across the floor.
The downward pressure didn't stop there. It grabbed Julian's golden chestplate, his shoulders, and his golden helmet, dragging him relentlessly toward the earth.
*SLAM!*
Julian of the Spellblade Order, the pride of the Second Spire, the golden genius of the academy, was pancaked flat against the granite.
His face was pressed so hard into the dusty rock that his lips were squished outward like a flattened toad. His cheekbones scraped against stone chips. His golden lamellar plates groaned and warped, bending inward against his ribs under the crushing weight of his own armor.
He couldn't lift his head. He couldn't lift a finger. He couldn't even draw enough breath to scream.
He was pinned to the floor like a paper cutout pasted to a tabletop.
"Urrrgh... hhhkkk..." Julian wheezed, little bubbles of blood and saliva frothing at the corner of his mashed mouth.
Around the edges of the duel ring, Julian's three inner-circle cronies had been leaning over the low stone wall to cheer.
The edge of the hundred-fold gravity wave clipped them.
*THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!*
All three disciples were ripped over the railing as if hooked by invisible fishing lines. They crashed onto the arena floor, flattening spread-eagled beside Julian like dropped sacks of wet grain. Their jade pendants shattered. Their enchanted swords snapped into jagged pieces under their own magnified weight. Their silk robes ripped along the seams.
Even the dust in the air wasn't spared.
A cloud of arena sand that had been kicked up by Julian's entrance was violently plastered against the granite floor, forming a perfectly smooth, dark ring of compacted dirt.
Ten thousand spectators in the stands froze.
The shouts, the cheers, the waving banners—everything stopped dead.
Sitting on his floating platform, Elder Raymond rose half an inch from his cushioned chair, his mouth hanging wide open in complete incomprehension. His tea cup slipped from his fingers and shattered on the wooden floorboards, but he didn't even notice.
Beside the combat ring, Lyra Ashford stood completely upright, her eyes wide with sacred wonder.
She had felt the localized edge of the pressure wave brush past the hem of her white tunic. Ordinary gravity could never explain this; this was the absolute, crushing majesty of a primordial celestial body waking from slumber.
*Senior Brother did not even raise his sword,* Lyra thought, her chest trembling with religious awe. *He did not even look at his opponent. With nothing more than a casual shift of his heel, he bent the laws of heaven and earth to crush ten thousand swords into stardust. To him, an entire army of swords is no heavier than autumn leaves.*
Down in the center of the crushed, sunken arena floor, Felix Vance was busy.
He had his right foot lifted in the air.
He gave his straw slipper two sharp, rhythmic shakes against the heel of his hand.
*Tap. Tap.*
A tiny, gray pebble tumbled out of the frayed straw weave and bounced harmlessly onto the compressed sand.
Felix lowered his foot and slid his heel back into the slipper. He wiggled his toes comfortably.
"Ah," Felix sighed in deep relief. "Much better. Nothing worse than a rock in your shoe when you're trying to walk around. Sand gets into everything."
As Felix planted both feet firmly on the ground, his posture returned to its natural slacker slump.
His weight settled. The planetary core in his dantian slipped back into its balanced, low-power idle orbit.
The hundred-fold gravity well vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
The suffocating pressure in the air evaporated, leaving behind only the faint smell of crushed ozone and scorched stone.
A small system tooltip blinked in the lower corner of Felix's vision:
Felix rolled his eyes and tapped the notification to dismiss it.
"Yeah, yeah," Felix grumbled. "Blame the user for walking. Typical indie developer attitude. Fix your collision physics before you lecture me about posture."
He glanced down at the crater five feet away.
Julian was still lying there, flat as a flounder, his golden armor bent out of shape and his face covered in gray granite dust. His fingers twitched weakly against the cold rock, unable to lift his chin even half an inch.
Felix tilted his head, activating his HUD:
【Target: Julian of the Second Spire】 【Status: High Atmospheric Compression / Extreme Emotional Shock】 【HP: 82% (Bruised Ribs, Minor Concussion, Crushed Dignity)】 【Inspector Note: Current posture resembles a flattened gingerbread man. Low threat level.】
Felix scratched the back of his neck.
"Did you trip?" Felix asked, looking down at Julian with mild concern. "You shouldn't run so fast in heavy boots. The flooring here is really uneven."