Dran fought the next day, the order having been set by seniority, late in the morning, and Atlas barely recognized the man he thought he knew.
There was no hesitation this time, none of that tremor that usually ran through every one of his movements outside the sand circle. Dran walked into the arena with his back straight, his eyes already fixed on his opponent with a clockmaker's coldness, as if someone else had taken his place. When the signal fell, he didn't lunge. He simply advanced, as if distance itself were nothing more than a problem to solve rather than a danger to face.
His opponent, a massive man from a coastal arena, tried first to impose his sheer size, wide, powerful blows, the kind that should have been enough to break any bone in their path. Dran barely blocked a single one of them directly. He simply made sure never to be where the blow landed, fighting with a methodical intelligence that wore his opponent down, a lateral step here, a retreat calculated to the millimeter there, as if he'd already watched this exact fight play out dozens of times before it even began.
The fight lasted under two minutes, but it had a beauty all its own, the beauty of an expert showing off a craft, and his opponent could do nothing to stop it.
Every blow Dran landed seemed to have been decided long before it was thrown, a sequence of openings his opponent, a solid fighter in his own right, never saw coming. Not one wasted motion. Not a trace of the rage Atlas had just discovered in himself the day before. Just an almost insulting precision, every strike finding its mark with the economy of someone who'd already run the math a thousand times in his head before ever setting foot on the sand.
The death, when it came, was clean. A blade between the ribs, exactly where it needed to be, and the man collapsed without a cry, almost with relief.
The crowd applauded, less hysterical than the day before, but with a kind of respect Atlas hadn't yet seen in those stands.
Back in the cell, Dran sat down against the wall, wiped his blade with a rag they'd been given, and said nothing for a long while. Then he came to take his place beside the Crahar's representatives, next to Hercles and Atlas, the way he always did.
"You're not shaking anymore," Atlas finally observed, now sure enough that he was himself again not to keep the remark to himself.
"Not in there." Dran didn't look up from his blade. "It's strange. Everything else terrifies me now. The streets, the crowds, even you, sometimes, since yesterday. But in the circle, with a weapon in my hand, I know exactly what I'm doing. I always have."
"That's why Isaac sent you here."
It wasn't really a question, but Dran nodded anyway. "I think it's the only part of me no one's ever needed to fix."
Atlas stayed quiet for a moment, looking for the right way to ask what he actually wanted to know.
"And the rest of the time?" he finally said. "That fear that never lets go of you, everywhere else?"
"The rest of the time, I don't know. I can't get past it. Every time I close my eyes, I see them again. The Primitives. There's nothing I can do about it," Dran answered, with no apparent bitterness, as if he'd made peace with that fact a long time ago. "In the arena, at least, I'm someone precise. I forget, and I remember who I am. That's already something."
The remark settled somewhere against Atlas's own hole in his memory, that clean absence still covering everything that had happened after he disarmed Ilena. Dran knew exactly what he was doing, every second, every strike landed in full awareness, even if the rest of his existence slipped away from him. Atlas, on the other hand, had needed someone else to tell him about the one moment his own strength had finally revealed itself in full, and after that, nothing. No one had told him what it felt like, from the inside.
I never want that to happen again. Not like that. Not without knowing, he thought, aware that the power carried by these other selves inside him went beyond anything he'd imagined, the resolve forming in him with an almost physical clarity. Whatever it takes. Once we're out of Tra, I'll find a way to understand what I am. How to actually master it, instead of just letting it move through me however it pleases.
He didn't know yet where to start. He didn't even know if there was anyone, anywhere on this continent, capable of teaching him such a thing. But for the first time since waking up in chains, the resolve itself was enough to calm something in him, a promise he was making to himself more than to anyone else.
The end of the second day was marked by flat, uninspired fights, no one really committing, everyone too aware of what death had cost the day before. Even the new Sceau had eventually slipped away, no doubt held back by more important obligations, and part of the crowd spent the rest of the afternoon booing, disappointed.
The next day, Tra no longer looked like the city Atlas had walked through three days earlier. It was finally the day of the official investiture.
From dawn, every street leading to the arena was already packed, a crowd so dense the guards had needed to set up entire corridors just to let the official convoys through. The red banners, already everywhere, seemed to have multiplied overnight. A smell of burnt oil and grilled meat hung over the whole city, that particular mix of collective excitement that always precedes major events, whether joyful or terrible.
The arena itself was packed tighter than the two previous days combined. For the first time since their arrival, every regional delegation seemed to have shown up in person, entire sections reserved for representatives whose colors and crests looked like nothing Atlas had seen before. A silver lion rampant on black, for northern states where iron and snow fought over the land in equal measure. A white wave breaking over deep blue, for eastern port cities whose ships had, it was said, once charted half the continent. Further off, a plain gold circle on green, almost austere next to the rest, belonging, someone had murmured near the cell, to a province that no longer had much reason to exist since its one resource had run dry. Unfamiliar banners snapped in the wind like that, alongside others Atlas had already spotted crossing the city, a patchwork of the entire continent condensed into a single circle of red stone.
One section, higher up, set apart, carried colors Atlas didn't recognize yet, but whose presence seemed to unsettle even the guards, as if no one here was entirely comfortable with the idea that those people had thought it worth showing up.
"The Capitol," one guard had murmured to another, not far from the cell, with that particular tone people use for someone they aren't really allowed to criticize out loud. "They hate being provoked like this. But they'd hate it even more if we noticed they weren't here."
Atlas, crossing the corridor toward the gladiators' stands, let his gaze drift for a fraction of a second onto that elevated section, without quite knowing why. A woman stood there, younger than the others, flanked by two figures he couldn't make out any further. Something about that particular direction struck him as strange, a weight he couldn't name, like a shiver climbing up his neck for no apparent reason. He looked away before he could understand what it was, the sensation already fading, swallowed by the noise of the crowd.
Probably just tired, he thought, without quite believing it himself.
Tête Brûlée gathered them one last time before the festivities began, with that same bite they were all used to by now, his burned face more tense than usual.
"Alright, dogs. Today's different," he said, without the usual insults that came with his instructions. "Sceau Renn officially receives his title tonight. Whatever happens in this arena today, the whole continent is going to hear about it, one way or another." He shot Atlas a look that promised nothing good, before turning to Hercles. "Isaac expects a lot from you."
"Meaning what," Hercles asked, without much surprise in his voice, as if he already knew.
"You." Tête Brûlée gave a joyless smile, his burn scars standing out even more under the expression. "Against Tra's own champion. Last fight of the day, in front of everyone, right before the crown even touches that arrogant little man's head. He wants a show."
Hercles said nothing, but something in his posture shifted, imperceptibly, that same drift Atlas knew well by now, that slide toward someone prouder, hungrier.
"Obviously," was all he answered.
"One more thing." Tête Brûlée lowered his voice, choosing his words with a care that didn't suit him. "Every faction of the Capitol is represented up there today. Every single one. Which means if anything goes wrong, this stops being a matter between the Rohar and some provincial Sceau. So everyone behaves. All of you."
"The Capitol?" Atlas asked.
"You don't even know what the Capitol is?" It was Hercles's turn to look surprised.
Dran explained it to him gently. "It's the highest authority on the continent. The centralized power. Every powerful Awakened anyone's ever heard of comes from there, one way or another."
Tête Brûlée said nothing, as if he'd already expected as much, after whatever Isaac had let slip to him about Atlas.
He looked at each of them in turn, lingering a little longer on Atlas than on the others, before turning on his heel without waiting for a reply.
The hours that followed passed in a blur of fights Atlas watched without really seeing, names he forgot the moment he heard them, bodies falling or rising again by rules that, for the first time since his arrival in Tra, felt almost beside the point. Two women from a mining state fought bare handed for nearly half an hour, a war of attrition the crowd ended up cheering as much for the endurance as for the outcome itself. An old fighter, whose reputation seemed to precede every step he took, crushed his opponent in under a minute, and no one looked surprised. Atlas barely retained a single one of those names.
What is this feeling, he wondered, as a strange impression seemed to seep into the air itself, a diffuse heaviness, like a bad omen settling in for no clear reason.
He waited, like everyone else in that arena, for the moment the sun would start to dip and Hercles would walk out onto the sand for his own fight.
Before Atlas even had the chance to mention it to Hercles, to tell him what he was feeling, his turn came.
When the moment finally arrived, the entire crowd rose as one, a wall of voices so dense Atlas felt it vibrate all the way into his own bones. Even Renn's golden tribune seemed to lean forward slightly, as if the Sceau himself refused to miss a single moment of what was coming.
Facing Hercles, on the other side of the circle, stood a man nearly as tall as he was, a short axe in each hand, his face marked with old scars that told, on their own, of dozens of fights already survived. Tra's champion carried, etched into his forearm, the same sigil as the city's banners, two crossed swords over a purple heart, as if he'd made his own skin an extension of the crest he defended.
Tra's champion wasn't smiling.
Hercles was. As Someone arrogant and dominant had just taken his place.