CHAPTER 13: SCARLET DATA, AMETHYST VEIL
The air in the Defense Hall wasn't just air; it was a palpable entity, a thick, soupy broth of ozone from discharged energy cells and the cloying, expensive perfume of unearned arrogance. It was a vast, circular coliseum of learning, its tiers of polished obsidian seeming to drink the light, swallowing the whispers and shifting forms of the students who populated them. All focus, by cruel design, was funneled down to the sunken combat floor—a stage of worn, resonant stone under the merciless, sterile white light of a dozen floating lumen-orbs. There, two figures traced silent, predatory circles in the charged air, their shadows long and dramatic against the pale stone.
Aurelia moved with a contemptuous, spider-like grace. Her dark hair, intricately braided into a severe crown, was a frame for a face that was a monument to analytic disdain—all sharp angles and a perpetually furrowed brow that suggested she was constantly running complex equations on the universe's many inefficiencies. Her every step was a calculated placement, her breathing a metronome. Across from her, Athena, scion of the revered Aethelgard bloodline, flourished her practice rapier in a whistling, theatrical arc that was more performance than prelude to combat.
"Your footwork is a publicly available textbook of predictability, Athena," Aurelia stated, her voice a low, unmodulated hum, devoid of inflection. A diagnostic report, not a taunt. "You consistently over-compensate on the lunge by a margin of three-point-two centimeters. A systemic flaw in your kinematic chain. It leaves your right flank exposed for a window of point-four seconds. It's not a matter of if I will exploit it, but a simple calculation of when."
Athena's smile was a tight, practiced line, a diplomatic shield against the relentless barrage of data. "Words, Aurelia. Analysis is a poor substitute for action." She adjusted her grip, the leather of her glove creaking.
"Incorrect." The reply was instantaneous, a synaptic reflex. "Analysis is the architect of action. Action without it is just noise, a random entropy that reliably, and often embarrassingly, leads to failure." Aurelia's blade, a simple, unadorned estoc, remained almost unnervingly still. She didn't fence; she dissected. She was a spider at the center of a web of her own spinning, feeling for the inevitable, foolish vibration. And when Athena, her pride pricked into recklessness by the prolonged silence, finally committed to the precisely predicted lunge, Aurelia didn't parry. She simply sidestepped the exact three-point-two centimeters, her own blade a grey streak that tapped, with surgical precision, against the vulnerable sensor node on Athena's padded jacket.
Chime.
The sound was clean, final, and utterly anticlimactic.
"Point. Aurelia," Magister Valerius intoned from the shadows of the judge's dais, his voice dripping with a boredom so profound it seemed its own form of high art. The class offered a smattering of applause as polite as it was perfunctory. The outcome was a foregone conclusion; Aurelia was a force of nature, a glacier—slow, inevitable, and soul-crushingly cold.
Then, the interruption.
The great obsidian doors at the summit of the amphitheater groaned open, a sound like a mountain clearing its throat. A figure was carved into a sharp silhouette against the stark, flat Dutch light flooding the corridor—a visual assault on the hall's curated gloom. Every head, as if pulled by a single, invisible string, swiveled in unison.
The figure descended the steps with a rhythm that was entirely her own—a confident, almost musical stride that seemed to mock the gravity holding everyone else down. As she entered the pitiless pool of lumen-light, the details resolved into a stunning, impossible whole. Hair the color of spun sugar and shock, a vibrant, electric pink, was styled in an artful, severe undercut. Her skin was a living canvas of dichotomy: one side pale as a winter moon, the other a rich, deep ebony, the line of separation a perfect, impossible razor's edge down the bridge of her nose. Her uniform, the same as everyone else's, had been subtly but defiantly altered—taken in at the waist, the sleeves rolled to the elbow to reveal a tapestry of intricate silver tattoos scrolling up her forearms. And her eyes—one a light, tawny hazel, the other a deep, soulful brown—scanned the room with the amused curiosity of a tourist at a zoo.
Magister Valerius cleared his throat, the sound like gravel shifting. "Class, we have an… addition," he announced, the pause before the word speaking volumes. "A transfer student from our sister institution in Rotterdam. This is Alessia Dune."
Alessia's smile was a brilliant, public-facing event, all perfect white teeth and calculated warmth. "A genuine pleasure," she said, her voice a warm, melodic alto that seemed to physically push back the room's inherent cynicism. "The facilities here are… impressive. Very… gothic." She let the word hang, a delicate insult wrapped in silk.
Aurelia, who had not even deigned to look up from meticulously wiping down her estoc with a pristine cloth, felt a familiar, prickling annoyance flare in her neural implant. A distraction. An uncontrolled variable. A splash of garish color on her monochrome spreadsheet of a day.
"Ms. Dune was inquiring about our physical training regimen," Valerius continued, a sly, almost malicious note entering his voice. He enjoyed throwing wrenches into well-oiled machines. It was his one true passion. "Perhaps you could enlighten her, Aurelia? You are, after all, our most… dedicated practitioner."
Aurelia finally lifted her gaze. Her dark eyes swept over Alessia with the clinical dispassion of a scanner assessing a piece of irregular baggage. "We train. Tuesdays and Thursdays. Four-hour blocks. The schedule is on the central network. Access code seven-delta-four." She delivered this information like a automated answering service and turned on her heel, the conversation clearly filed away as 'completed.'
Alessia's smile didn't so much falter as it sharpened, the warmth evaporating to reveal the steel beneath. "Whoa, hold on, that's it? No personal insight? No… pro-tips from the top of the food chain?" She took a step forward, her boots clicking on the stone. "I'd heard the legendary Aurelia was a bit more… hands-on."
Aurelia paused, her back a rigid line of affronted dignity. "Legends are inefficient narrative constructs, typically born from a populace's inability to process statistical outliers. My hands," she said, holding one up, "are occupied with things that possess actual, quantifiable consequence."
"Like beating second-rate duelists with statistical parlor tricks?" The question hung in the air, sweet, light, and utterly venomous.
The entire hall inhaled as one. You could have heard a pin drop, and then sold tickets to the echo.
Aurelia turned. The motion was slow, deliberate, like a turret acquiring a new target. "My methodology," she said, her voice dropping to a dangerously calm register, "is built on an immutable foundation of observable fact and statistical probability. 'Parlor tricks' is the terminology used by those who lack the processing power to comprehend the underlying algorithm. It is the battle cry of the willfully ignorant."
"Right. The algorithm." Alessia took a few more steps forward, closing the distance into what most would consider confrontational territory. The silver tattoos on her arms seemed to catch the light, shimmering with a latent energy. "It's just, all this theory… it's so terribly bloodless, don't you think? All head, no heart. I learn by doing. The feel of the hilt in your hand, the shift of weight in your hips, the moment it all clicks." Her mismatched eyes glittered with challenge. "Maybe you could show me? A simple spar. Swords. I'm a bit rusty, but I've always been a quick study."
The frozen sea of silence in the amphitheater became absolute zero.
Inside Aurelia's mind, quantum processors whirred, cooling fans spinning up a notch in her skull. Risk: public spectacle with an unknown, potentially volatile element. Reward: public neutralization of a disruptive variable, re-establishment of operational dominance. Conclusion: immediate and decisive engagement is the optimal path.
"Very well," Aurelia said, her voice flat and devoid of any emotion save for a kind of weary inevitability. "The resulting data set should be… illuminating."
The news propagated through the academy's psychic gossip-chain in a nanosecond. By the time they had selected practice longswords—heavier, more visceral weapons than the rapiers—the obsidian tiers were a seething, whispering mass of bodies, students spilling into the aisles. The air was now thick with a new scent: anticipation.
Up in the stands, Iris was already live-streaming on her palm-comm, her voice a frantic, excited whisper. "—you are not going to believe this, folks! The new girl, Alessia Dune, just called out the Ice Queen herself! This isn't a drill! The absolute audacity!"
Beside her, Sloane, her nose buried in a sensor-laden datapad, murmured, "Fascinating. The collective anticipation is generating a measurable low-level psionic field. Adrenaline, cortisol, theta-wave activity… The audience isn't just watching; they're a bioactive component of the event. The emotional feedback loop is amplifying the combatants' own states."
On the floor, the last vestiges of civility evaporated with the first, shocking, bell-toned CLANG of steel.
Aurelia began as she always did: a diagnostician. She probed, her blade a metallic tongue, testing Alessia's guard, measuring her reaction speed, the elasticity of her muscles. The data that flooded her HUD was… anomalous. Inefficient. Alessia's form was a chaotic, unorthodox blend of styles—a flash of Capo Ferro here, a hint of German messer there—full of wasteful, flourishes and theatrical spins that served no logical purpose, yet she moved with an innate, fluid grace that defied Aurelia's initial kinematic models.
"You're relying on muscle memory from a non-standardized, likely incomplete, and frankly, sloppy system," Aurelia stated, mechanically deflecting a sweeping cut that was more dance than death-blow. "It's inefficient. Aesthetically busy, but functionally redundant."
"It's called steeze, darling," Alessia shot back, spinning away from a thrust with a pirouette that would have been at home in Swan Lake. "Style. With ease." A ripple of laughter from the stands, quickly stifled.
Aurelia's lips compressed into a bloodless line. The variable was introducing irrational noise into her clean data stream. Annoying. She increased the pressure, her attacks becoming a relentless, precise torrent—a high-speed calculation of angles and vectors. She was a firewall, and Alessia was a torrent of chaotic code trying to break through.
And then, the algorithm found a solution. A feint high, a lightning disengage that was pure geometry, and a powerful, flat-bladed smack across Alessia's shoulder that sent the pink-haired girl stumbling back with a sharp, genuine gasp of pain.
The hall erupted. It was the sound they'd been waiting for. Aurelia stood, poised, her sword tip hovering an inch from the floor. "The data suggests your 'steeze' has a critical vulnerability to applied physics and tactical foresight."
Alessia straightened up, slowly, rubbing her shoulder. The brilliant, public smile was gone, wiped away and replaced by a focused, predatory intensity. The tourist was gone; the hunter was here. "Is that all you've got?" she asked, her voice dropping an octave, losing its melodic quality for something guttural. "Let's see how your precious algorithms handle this."
She didn't raise her sword. Instead, she clapped her hands together with a sound like a gunshot. The silver tattoos on her forearms flared with a sudden, deep violet light, lines of power burning under her skin. The air around her hummed, thickened, coalescing, and with a sound like a thousand wind chimes made of glass shattering, jagged shards of raw, purple amethyst crystallized from nothingness, orbiting her like a swarm of lethal, beautiful insects.
Aurelia's analytical mind stuttered. Error. Somatic activation. No visible focus. Non-standard energy signature. Material generation from ambient psionic particles. Re-categorizing subject: Alessia Dune. Threat level: Epsilon. Re-calculating entire combat paradigm.
"Well, that's… new," someone whispered from the stands, the understatement of the century.
With a flick of Alessia's wrist, the amethyst shards shot forward. Aurelia's sword became a blur of motion, a whirling dervish of deflective parries. The projectiles shattered against her blade with surprising force, each impact jarring her arms to the bone, spraying the air with glittering, harmless dust that smelled of ozone and crushed rock. But it was a magnificent distraction. While Aurelia was occupied playing a frantic, high-stakes game of asteroid blaster, Alessia closed the distance, her longsword singing a deadly aria toward Aurelia's exposed side.
Aurelia twisted at the last possible nanosecond, the practice blade grazing her ribs with a bruising impact. The shock of the near-miss was electric, a jolt of pure, un-filtered adrenaline her system usually filtered out. This was no longer a test of skill; it was a battle of paradigms. Logic versus Chaos. Order versus glorious, technicolor Anarchy.
"A crystallokinetic," Aurelia breathed, her mind racing through internal databases of known esoteric abilities. "A rare and volatile discipline. Prone to psionic feedback loops and emotional flux."
"Call it what you want, you walking spreadsheet," Alessia grinned, summoning another cluster of crystals, this time forming them into a rough, defensive shield on her forearm, blocking a swift counter-thrust with a shower of purple sparks. "It gets the job done."
The fight escalated into the realm of the mythic. Alessia wove her crystal generation into her flamboyant style, creating momentary barriers to deflect attacks, launching surprise volleys from unexpected angles, and even using small, quickly-formed crystal platforms to alter her footing mid-step, executing moves that defied Newtonian physics. Aurelia was forced into a relentless, high-speed calculation, her mind overheating as she tried to model the unpredictable emergence of solid matter. She was a supercomputer trying to predict the path of a lightning strike in a hurricane.
She adapted, her survival instincts overriding her pride. She began using the crystal shards' trajectories against Alessia, angling her blade to deflect them back toward their creator, forcing the pink-haired girl to dodge and weave away from her own reflected attacks. It became a grueling, brutal war of attrition. Sweat plastered Aurelia's severe braids to her scalp. Alessia's breathing was ragged, the constant, flashy use of her power clearly taking a heavy toll. A deep, angry cut on Aurelia's arm welled with blood, staining her white sleeve a blossoming scarlet. A long, bleeding graze on Alessia's cheek testified to a near-decapitation by a deftly deflected crystal shard.
The audience was utterly silent now, hypnotized by the brutal, beautiful spectacle, the only sounds the clash of steel, the shatter of crystal, and the ragged gasps of the two combatants.
"This is pointless!" Aurelia finally snarled, a raw, frustrated edge—a system error—creeping into her voice for the first time. "We are past scoring touches. We are past pedagogy." She lowered her sword point until it aimed at the floor between them, a gesture of finality. "Let's make the victory condition absolute. The first person to yield, or be rendered unable to continue, loses. No rules. Just result."
A collective, sharp gasp ripped through the amphitheater, followed by a wave of frantic, excited murmuring. Magister Valerius leaned forward, his boredom finally, truly, shattered.
Alessia's mismatched eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed into slits of pure, unadulterated focus. A slow, dangerous, and utterly genuine smile touched her lips, a stark contrast to the blood trickling from her cheek. "Now," she breathed, the word a puff of steam in the suddenly cold air, "you're speaking my language."
The final phase of the battle was a descent into pure, desperate violence. Alessia, pushed to her absolute limit, stopped generating small, manageable shards. With a guttural cry that tore from the depths of her soul, she slammed her palms onto the stone floor. A forest of thick, sharp amethyst spikes erupted from the ground, a tidal wave of jagged purple stone racing toward Aurelia with terrifying speed.
Aurelia dove sideways in a desperate, ungainly roll, the crystalline spears tearing through the fabric of her trousers and drawing a line of fire across her thigh. She scrambled to her feet, ignoring the blinding pain, her mind screaming one clear, calculated thought. Power expenditure is unsustainable. She is vulnerable post-cast. This is the window. NOW!
She charged through the dissipating cloud of crystal dust, a phantom of vengeance. Alessia, panting and utterly drained, her hands on her knees, raised her sword in a feeble, last-ditch guard, but the fight had left her. Aurelia's practice blade smashed into Alessia's guard, once, twice, a third time with brutal, piston-like force, beating it down through sheer, relentless impact. With a final, disarming twist that wrenched a cry of pain from Alessia, she sent the girl's longsword clattering across the floor like a discarded toy.
Alessia stumbled back, defenseless, her hands raised in a gesture of surrender, her face a mask of exhausted, bloody defeat.
It was over. The silence was absolute.
But as Aurelia stood over her, sword pointed at her throat, she saw not surrender in Alessia's eyes, but a final, grim, terrifying resolve.
"You fight well… for a machine," Alessia whispered, her voice a hoarse ruin. "But you can't calculate for everything."
She brought her hands together one last time, not in a clap, but in a complex, twisting gesture that looked ancient, painful, and utterly forbidden. The silver tattoos on her arms blazed with a light so violet it was almost black, a void of color. Instead of crystals, a wave of pure, oppressive psychic energy erupted from her—a forbidden spell of mental intrusion, a key designed for a lock that was never meant to be opened.
It wasn't a physical attack. It was an invitation to a nightmare. A key slammed into the ignition of her soul.
And Aurelia, her mental defenses already frayed to breaking by the prolonged combat and the alien, chaotic nature of Alessia's power, recognized the psychic signature instantly. It was a distorted, desperate, but unmistakable echo of the same corrosive energy that permeated the dream realm Violet controlled. This is it. This is the connection. This is a clue, delivered via a psychic shiv to the cortex.
The realization was a shattering blow, more devastating than any crystal. The world tilted on its axis. The sharp, clean edges of the amphitheater blurred and ran like wet paint. The sterile white lights of the lumen-orbs smeared into long, violent violet halos. The forbidden spell didn't knock her unconscious; it unmoored her completely. It ripped her consciousness from her body with the violence of a plane being torn from the sky, not into peaceful oblivion, but into a violent, wrenching translation through dimensions.
The solidity of the stone floor dissolved into a swirling nebula of amethyst and indigo. The cold, the pain, the roar of the crowd—all of it was stripped away, replaced by a falling sensation, not down, but through, into a depth that had no end and acknowledged no laws.
[The Journey, leveled up....]
[Level 1-> Level 2 attained....]
[Xp Lv.: Level 2:(10/400)]
A shimmering, silver interface, cool and utterly impersonal, materialized in the heart of the swirling chaos. Its glyphs burned with sterile, electric light, appraising her shattered state with the detached interest of an autopsy report.
SYSTEM APPRAISAL INITIATED...
USER: AURELIA
STATUS: CRITICAL - PSIONIC INTRUSION / FORCED REALM TRANSITION
VITAL SIGNS:
· HP: 43/150
· PSIONIC INTEGRITY: 12%
· STAMINA: DEPLETED
· NEURAL LOAD: 298% (CRITICAL OVERLOAD)
PHYSICAL CONDITION:
· CONCUSSION: MINOR (COGNITIVE DAMPening -8%)
· LACERATION: LEFT TEMPLE (Superficial, Bleeding Controlled)
· DEEP BRUISING: RIGHT SHOULDER, RIBCAGE
· MUSCULAR STRAIN: BILATERAL, UPPER EXTREMITIES (Severe)
· PUNCTURE WOUND: RIGHT THIGH (Moderate, Crystalline Residue Detected)
MENTAL/PSIONIC CONDITION:
· PRIMARY DIAGNOSIS: FORCED ONEIRIC INCURSION
· MENTAL COHERENCE: FRAGMENTED
· PSIONIC SIGNATURE: CONTAMINATED (Foreign signature: ALESSIA DUNE // VIOLET-ARCHETYPE)
· AFFECT: DETACHED, ANALYTICAL, LATENT HOSTILITY
NOTABLE ABNORMALITIES:
· UNKNOWN CRYSTALLINE ENERGY SIGNATURE DETECTED IN BIO-FIELD (AMETHYST RESONANCE)
· EXTERNAL PSIONIC ANCHOR DETECTED: "THE PRESENCE" - HOSTILE/UNKNOWN
· REALITY COHERENCE: 74% AND FALLING...
The appraisal vanished as quickly as it appeared, its cold, hard data points searing themselves into her wavering awareness. She had won the battle. She had beaten Alessia Dune into the dust. But in her moment of victory, Alessia's forbidden, desperate spell had succeeded in its true, hidden goal: it had flung Aurelia headlong into the very dream realm that Violet wielded like a weapon, forcing a confrontation on a battlefield where logic was a ghost and dreams were a terrifying, solid, and murderous truth.
... to Be Continued...