The Panja Conspiracy

  Six hours at altitude, and then Panja.

  The airport was larger than anything in Habas, organised with the specific efficiency of a country that had decided long ago that infrastructure was a point of pride rather than a necessity. Mizi and Azraie walked through it with the particular alertness of people in an unfamiliar place, and the first thing Mizi did was try to buy a Caco Laco from a vending machine using Habas coins.

  The machine considered the coins. It returned them. Mizi tried again. The machine returned them again, with what felt like increasing patience.

  People were watching. Not rudely, just with the natural attention people give to someone performing a repeated action that isn't working. Mizi pocketed the coins and walked away with the specific energy of someone exiting a situation they have decided did not happen.

  Outside the terminal, a limousine. Long, silver, driven by a man who greeted them in their own language with the easy fluency of someone who prepared for this particular arrival. He took them through the city, which had a density that Habas's capital approximated but did not match, and deposited them at the Great Panja Arena in time for a match that the whole country already knew about.

  Lucid King was the local champion, which in Panja meant something different than it meant back home. The crowd received him the way crowds receive people they have decided belong to them. His opponent, Spaniard, was the Nachi State champion, and he summoned the Bone Crusher, a flying serpent of fused bone and cartilage, skeletal wings, legs like a centipede's, built from components that shouldn't have worked together and somehow did.

  Lucid King summoned a demon-headed monster that looked at the Bone Crusher the way things look at problems they've already solved.

  The match did not begin.

  Spaniard's Fighter Beacon disconnected. Not a malfunction. A disconnection. Spaniard fell from it and did not get up, and when the officials reached him the stadium produced a silence that was different from anticipation or suspense. The announcer's voice found him from a distance, through his skull. A single shot. Clean.

  The police filled the arena from all directions simultaneously. Lucid King was moved. Mizi and Azraie were moved. The car took them to the hotel while the city began to understand what had just happened inside it.

  The Vision and the Bloodline

  That night, Mizi lay in the dark of a hotel room that smelled different from home and listened to Azraie sleep, which Azraie did immediately and completely, with the specific talent of someone whose body treats rest as a scheduled task.

  Mizi's mind treated it as a negotiation.

  He got up. The bookshelf beside the window had a row of hardcovers in Panjanese, which he couldn't read, but the images inside them told a different kind of story. The Devil Phaoh sign, which he recognised from the arena. The evolution of weaponry across centuries, from metal to firearms to something that wasn't either. A man with fanged teeth that weren't an illustration choice but a feature.

  And on the last page, looking back at him from the page with the specific quality of something he had already seen tonight: the demon-headed monster. Lucid King's summon. Identical.

  Mizi sat with the book open on his lap and the city lights coming through the curtain gap and understood something he couldn't fully articulate yet. This book was a family history. The demon-headed monster wasn't a summon Lucid King had found or learned. It was inherited.

  He went to sleep finally, and in the place between sleep and somewhere else, a voice said: We chose light. You are one of them. You are destined to complete it. Moonlight through clouds, and the dragon mark on his forehead warmed rather than burned, which was different from the other times it had activated.

  He woke at the sound of gunshots.

  The hotel's perimeter. A figure on a rooftop three buildings over, silhouetted against the city glow. The front desk called almost immediately: their driver had been found dead in the car park, a single shot, and the man on the rooftop was already in motion, jumping from the building with the control of someone who has done this, and summoning on the way down.

  The Devil Phaoh materialised on the hotel's edge.

  Mizi summoned the Golden Dragon Lord from the window, which was not the ideal summoning position but was the available one, and the Dragon rose to meet the Phaoh with the immediate aggression of something that has been called to a fight and knows it.

  From a second rooftop, a sniper round. It found the Dragon Lord's face, not a killing shot but a direction shot, limiting the Dragon's angles, holding it in place while the Phaoh found its timing. From a third position, another barrel. Three men, coordinated, with a plan.

  The Golden Dragon Lord caught the Phaoh's axe at the parry point and held it, which required everything the Dragon had, and in the space the hold created, Mizi directed the Dragon's mouth toward the Phaoh's chest and released the Blaster Light.

  The Phaoh went through the wall of the adjacent building. The Dragon followed, claws first, and finished what the light had started.

  Mizi turned to face the three men across the rooftop gap. The dragon mark was lit, casting his face in its gold. He chose the name he was born with rather than the shortened one he used at school.

  "You don't know who you're dealing with. I'm Hamizi."

  The leader studied his forehead for a moment. Then, to the man beside him: "So that's the Chosen One. Might have something to do with Zar." A pause. "Doesn't matter." He raised the gun and fired.

  Mizi pressed his forehead. The barrier that formed slowed the bullet's approach in the specific way of time dilation that he hadn't known he could do until the moment he needed to, and he stepped out of the bullet's revised path and felt it pass.

  Special Forces came from the stairwell behind the three men, fast and coordinated, and the three men left over the rooftop's far edge with the speed of people who had an exit already planned. Mizi stood at the window and looked at the space they'd occupied and breathed.

  Azraie appeared in the doorway behind him. He had called the Forces, it turned out, from his phone while the fight was happening, which was exactly the pragmatic, quiet, completely effective thing Azraie would do.

  The Girl from the Plane

  Morning came with the specific hostility it has for people who did not sleep well, and Mizi discovered the side effect.

  The Golden Dragon Lord's power was not free. Every ounce of force it exerted passed through him in some proportion, and the proportion was currently expressing itself as a collection of injuries he hadn't received directly, bruising and swelling and a bone-deep ache that had no single location. He bandaged what could be bandaged and lay carefully back on the bed.

  A knock.

  He assumed Azraie. He opened the door to the girl from the plane.

  She was shorter than he'd registered in the cabin, and the mark on her forehead had the same quiet luminosity it had had at altitude, the letter A glowing with the patience of something that has been there a long time. She looked at his face, at the bandaging, at the state of the room behind him.

  "Don't worry," she said, in their language, with the ease of someone who has been practicing it. "I can speak your language."

  Her name was Athira. She sat on the edge of the sofa and spoke with the directness of someone who has decided that the relevant information needs to be delivered before anything else.

  "Lucid King sent those men. His real name is Nishimura Mishima Tamahime." She said it the way you say a name you've known a long time. "He was my ex-lover. He killed his own family for power, and then he killed my father." She looked at her hands. "He wasn't always like this. He changed when he found the ancient book. The one that showed him how to summon the Evil Demon Lord. Something in that book changed what he was."

  Mizi sat across from her and thought about the Lucid King family history book he'd read last night and the monster on the last page, and the connection between those things and what Athira was telling him settled into a shape he could see clearly.

  "Thank you," he said. "For coming here."

  She looked surprised by this, briefly, and then not. She stood and held out her hand toward the door. "Come. I'll show you the city. It helps to understand the place you're in before anything else happens in it."

  Panja was layered in the way of old cities that have grown vertically rather than outward, markets stacked above markets, transportation running at three different heights simultaneously. Athira moved through it with the ease of someone for whom this is home, and Mizi moved through it with the alertness of someone cataloguing everything in case he needed it later.

  A woman in cat ears stopped them at a stall corner, extended a ticket toward Mizi with the specific warmth of a stranger offering something free.

  Athira pulled his arm back before his hand completed the reach. "Don't accept things from people you don't know," she said, in the flat tone of a rule rather than advice.

  "Panja people are really something," Mizi said.

  Athira pinched him. The pinch was precise and effective. "Only some of us. Don't label everyone." He nodded, absorbing both the correction and the pain with equal seriousness.

  The Tournament Resumes

  While Mizi was in the city, the International L-Fight Tournament opened its broadcast to every screen in every country that had sent a participant, which was most of them. Sensei K, Nuria, and Azizan watched from home around a screen that Sensei K had positioned so that he could stand in front of it without blocking the view of the others.

  The ranking board appeared. Sensei K moved toward the screen with the focus of someone looking for a specific word in a long document.

  When he found Hamizi at No. 1, the sound he produced was not words.

  Nuria and Azizan allowed this to continue for a moment.

  The first match was Shino versus Hinaru. Shino's Cactus King against Hinaru's Gami Seki Lord, a giant in the shape of a man but with a turtle's shell and horns that spun at speed, drilling rather than stabbing. The Grass Cutter Rotation was Hinaru's signature, the horns reaching their maximum speed and becoming essentially a horizontal saw. Shino read the timing of it and triggered the Thorn of Death in the window before the rotation completed, and the Cactus King's thorns found the Gami Seki Lord in the moment of its vulnerability. The turtle giant dissolved before its best move could land.

  Shino won. Azraie was next, and the match between them had the quality of a technical problem being solved efficiently. The Fox Lord's versatility against the Cactus King's power, and Azraie's patience against Shino's aggression, and patience won in the way patience tends to win against aggression over the course of a full match rather than the first exchange.

  Azraie moved to the next round.

  At the hotel, in a room that had acquired the quiet texture of a temporary home, Athira had fallen asleep on the sofa with the sudden completeness of someone who had been running on less sleep than they'd admitted. Mizi's phone rang and he took it to the window, where the city light was coming in orange through the curtain.

  His mother's voice arrived from Habas with the specific warmth of someone who has been waiting to hear his voice and is trying not to make that obvious.

  "I'm fine," he told her. "Everything here is fine. I'll come home when it's done."

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  She asked about the girl she could hear breathing in the background.

  "I'm alone," Mizi said. "You must have heard the television."

  He hung up and looked at Athira sleeping on his sofa and felt the specific weight of a lie told to protect someone who doesn't know they need protecting.

  Across the city, in a residence that had the organised silence of a place where surveillance is routine, a man called Binoshi sat at a screen and worked. The hack took twelve minutes. The profile it produced was thorough. Name: Hamizi bin Abd Jalal. Age: fourteen. Summon affinity: Golden Dragon Spirit. Status: student. Notable history: involvement in a world war, memory of which is lost.

  Binoshi read this last part twice.

  Nishimura read it over his shoulder. He asked Binoshi to find the current location. Binoshi sent the drone. The feed came back showing a hotel room, and in the hotel room, on the sofa, Athira.

  The expression on Nishimura's face changed in the specific way of expressions that are managing multiple feelings at once and losing control of the management.

  He put on his mask. He left.

  The warning Mizi received was not verbal. It was the dragon mark activating in the fraction of a second before the window's glass admitted a bullet. He moved, and the bullet found the wall instead, and when he turned, Nishimura was already in the room with a sword, having come through the door in the time it took Mizi to register the shot.

  Athira woke.

  "Nishimura," she said. Not afraid. Resigned, in the way of someone who has been expecting this.

  Nishimura said nothing. He attacked Mizi, and Mizi moved around the sword with the instincts of someone who has been in worse situations than this and understood that engaging a blade on its own terms was the wrong approach.

  "Fight me like a person," Mizi said. "Put the sword down."

  Nishimura looked at him for a moment. He set the sword on the floor. He opened his stance into something formal and structured, a martial arts foundation, the kind that has been built over many years of deliberate practice.

  Mizi raised his hands.

  Nishimura's kick covered the distance between them before Mizi's guard was complete. It landed flush and sent Mizi across the room into the wall, and the wall registered the impact in Mizi's spine in a way that would still be there tomorrow.

  Athira summoned. The Angel Fighter appeared in the confined space of the hotel room with its wings folded and its staff ready, and from somewhere outside a shot found it before it could raise the staff, Binoshi with his line of sight through the window, and the Angel Fighter dissolved.

  Nishimura straightened. He looked at Mizi on the floor.

  "If you are truly the Chosen One," he said, "I will see you in the arena."

  He picked up the sword. He left.

  Mizi sat against the wall and breathed carefully and thought: why does my life keep becoming more dangerous than the one before.

  The Ancient Truth

  The Finger-inator arrived the following morning in the hands of a Special Forces courier who handed it over with the neutral efficiency of someone delivering a package they have not opened and have not asked about.

  It was small and metallic, designed to fit over the index finger like a sleeve, with a surface that had the faint warmth of something that has been charged. The hologram it produced was brief and informational: Professor A had built it for the Chosen One specifically. Four times the summoning power. The L-Fight Book had recorded the prediction. This was the tool the prediction required.

  Mizi held it and thought about the book in his bag, the one he'd taken from Sensei K's stall on Sports Day, and took it out.

  He and Azraie spread it open on the bed and looked at the page he hadn't fully understood before. The painting was old in the way of things that have been copied from older things, the original intent preserved through translation. A man standing in a sun. Below him, a golden dragon. Above him, a face that matched Athira's Angel Fighter with a precision that was not coincidence. In front of them all, a black dragon below a crimson moon, and on the moon's face, the shape of the Evil Demon Lord.

  The next pages told the history that had been deliberately unmade. The ancient summons were not invented. They were dimensional beings, extradimensional protectors that had existed before humans had words for what they were, drawn into the world by summoners to build and protect and fight. The octagonal citadel in the Tpyge country. The tower in Mor that had no engineering explanation for its height. The wall in Nachi that was too long to have been built in the time historical record assigned it. All of them built with summoned help. All of that history subsequently erased, the books destroyed, the knowledge buried, by an organization that traced back to the Evil Demon Lord's human form.

  Two books remained. The one Mizi was holding. And something called Launch of Rising.

  The letter L in that title was not an initial. It was the first letter of an ancient word, Lembr, which meant the Past.

  Azraie studied the symbol on the cover while Mizi went to find Athira. He used the Fox Lord's eyes in the quiet of the hotel room, the ability that allowed him to see things at their historical depth, and the symbol moved. The lines of it resolved into something three-dimensional, two pillars standing above a spiral, the spiral around a darkness at its center, and Azraie understood with the specific certainty of someone who has studied something long enough to have it suddenly become clear: he was looking at the Waterway Galaxy. The pillars were real. The dark center was Aquarius A.

  Mizi's full power was the black hole at the center of the galaxy. This was not a metaphor.

  Azraie went to find Mizi and found the room empty.

  In the Beko region, several hours by bullet train and then fast bus, Mizi and Athira found the temple with the sun symbol on its facade. They rang the bell. Their foreheads responded to each other's light. The portal opened behind them.

  Inside, the altar was old in the way that predates estimation, and Athira translated the carvings quietly, moving along the wall with the focus of someone reading something important.

  An Angel had guarded humans. The Evil Demon Lord had defeated the Angel and destroyed what the Angel protected. Golden Dragon spirits had come from another dimension and given humans the power to use summons, to turn the dimensional beings into weapons and allies. The war had weakened the Evil Demon Lord. It had promised to return. The priests who built this altar had looked forward and seen what was coming and recorded it: a Chosen One would arrive, helped by the Golden Dragon spirits and the reincarnation of the Angel of Peace, and the Evil Demon Lord would be defeated finally.

  Athira looked at Mizi.

  "You are the Chosen One," she said. "And you are destined to defeat Lucid King."

  "I lost to him before," Mizi said.

  "You hadn't read this yet," she said, and held up her hand, and the Angel mark on her forehead answered the Dragon mark on his.

  Sabotage

  They closed the portal and came back through the bus and the train and arrived at the tournament venue to find a match already in progress that should not have been in progress yet. Azraie was on the beacon. His face was wrong. The wrong colour, the wrong set to it, and as Mizi got closer to the monitor screens he could see the source: Azraie's nose had been broken and two of his ribs were moving in a way that ribs shouldn't move.

  Before Mizi had been in the Beko region, Azraie had been looking for him. He had walked into two men in a corridor who had been waiting to be walked into. What they had done to him in the time available had been thorough and specific, designed to impair without hospitalising, to leave him functional enough to be forced to fight.

  Fox Lord against the Evil Demon Lord. Azraie summoned with everything he had, which was compromised by everything they'd done to him, and it lasted long enough to be a real fight, and then the invisible sniper found Fox Lord and the match ended instantly.

  Zero.

  Sensei K's voice, from a screen on the other side of the ocean, said what it said with the weight of someone watching something they cannot prevent: "This is unfair."

  Mizi walked to the center of the crowd.

  "This match is unfair!"

  The spotlight found him because spotlights find voices that have certainty behind them. The crowd turned. The broadcast cameras turned. The Emcee, who had been managing the transition to the next bracket, stopped managing it.

  Mizi told them what had happened. He told them in the specific way of someone who was not asking for anything but stating a fact that the audience deserved to have. Azraie had been attacked before the match. The timing was not coincidental. The sniper inside the arena was not an accident. This was a competition that had been interfered with by the person who was supposed to be its champion.

  The arena absorbed this in stages. First silence. Then the particular sound of a crowd that has been told something it suspected and is deciding whether to be angry.

  At the edge of the arena floor, Lucid King stood without the expression of someone who has been caught. He stood with the expression of someone who has been waiting for this conversation.

  Mizi looked at him across the floor. He raised his hand and put the Finger-inator on his finger and felt the four-times amplification run through his arm and settle behind his chest like something clicking into the right position.

  A pillar of amber light came from the arena floor and the Hyper Golden Dragon Lord stepped out of it, scales catching the arena lighting and returning it as something finer, horns present in the specific way of something that has always been there and is only now visible.

  Lucid King looked at it without urgency. He raised three fingers.

  The shadows bled horizontally from the dark corners of the arena, gathering at the beacon point, and the Evil Demon Lord came out of the shadows the way darkness comes out of darkness, without contrast, simply present where it had not been.

  The two summons looked at each other across the arena floor, and the stone beneath them cracked in a circle from each impact point.

  The audience understood that what was about to happen was not a match for the bracket.

  The Tide Turns

  The first shot came from the hidden position before a blow was exchanged.

  Mizi felt it in the Dragon Lord before the HP indicator confirmed it, the specific reduction in connection that comes from damage, and the display materialised in the air before him:

  Summon HP: 80%

  A sniper still in the arena. Working from somewhere the broadcast cameras couldn't find. He had expected Azraie's match to be the last time this happened, and he had been wrong.

  "Hyper Light Attack."

  The beam was four times what it had been without the Finger-inator, which was the difference between an attack and a statement. Lucid King watched it arrive.

  "Hell Mirror."

  Dark glass rose from the arena floor, jagged and angled, and the beam found it and refracted, and the refracted beam came back along its own origin line.

  Summon HP: 60%

  Lucid King did not wait for Mizi to stabilise. "Hell Darkness Attack."

  The void the Demon Lord released was not a projectile. It was an environment, absolute darkness spreading forward with the specific quality of something that does not stop at edges, that treats armour and distance and aura as irrelevant obstacles. The Golden Dragon Lord's counter-light met it and the counter-light was sufficient and then it was not, and the darkness came through the golden aura and found the Dragon Lord's interior.

  Summon HP: 20%

  The crowd had the quality of people watching something happening faster than their responses can match. Mizi felt the Dragon Lord's damage in his own body in the way he had learned to read it, the distributed ache that mapped to the Dragon's wounds, and beneath the tactical problem was something simpler: he was going to lose.

  Another shot. The sniper had found a new angle, and this one was not a direction shot.

  Summon HP: 3%

  Three percent. One more strike and it ended. The Demon Lord was full, undamaged, patient.

  Mizi looked at the Dragon Lord's HP indicator. He looked at Lucid King's face, which had the specific expression of someone watching the last few moves of a game they have already solved. He looked at the shadows at the edges of the arena, at the creeping dark that Lucid King's Demon Lord emanated simply by being present, spreading outward from the beacon into the audience's space.

  He reached into his bag and took out the book.

  The dragon mark responded to the leather cover before his fingers had fully closed on it, heat blooming from his forehead with a quality that was different from the other activations, older, like something being re-found rather than triggered. The sigils on the book's cover moved in the specific way of things that have been waiting for this moment.

  His vision went gold.

  His hands moved.

  The Supernova

  The peace sign came first. Then the second, both hands, the double gesture he had thrown once before in the state tournament against the combined beast.

  He had not known the word then. The word arrived now through the channel that bypassed decision-making, the same channel the lion had used in a different story, in a different kind of arena.

  "Supernova."

  The three percent did not refill. It was the wrong word for what happened. The HP indicator ceased to be relevant because what it was measuring had changed into something the indicator was not designed to measure. The Golden Dragon Lord dissolved, and the dissolution was not destruction but transformation, each scale becoming light, the light becoming something that did not have scales, that did not have the specific weight of a summon but the specific weight of a star in the moment before its expansion.

  The Supernova Golden Dragon Spirit did not fly to the Demon Lord. It was at the Demon Lord's back before the audience had processed its departure from the front. A single claw, white-hot and precise, found the darkness of the Demon Lord and moved through it with the specific indifference of plasma moving through shadow.

  The Demon Lord's HP dropped to zero in the time it takes light to travel between two things that are next to each other.

  Lucid King took a step backward. This was not planned. The step backward was the first unplanned thing he had done in this entire sequence, and it communicated that he had encountered a limit he had not known existed.

  The crowd's response came a half-second later, delayed by the need to understand what they had seen.

  An Unexpected Mercy

  Lucid King's face moved through the sequence from disbelief to something that was not acceptance, the specific expression of someone who has built their entire identity on a condition that has just been disproven and has not yet found the next thing to build it on.

  His hand went into his coat.

  The revolver was small and real and had nothing to do with summoning, which was the specific choice of someone who has decided that if the game cannot be won, the game can be ended.

  Before the barrel came level, a shadow fell from the rafters.

  Athira landed between them, not combatively, without a weapon or a stance. She was simply present, which was the specific presence of someone who has a history with the person they're standing in front of, and history creates a different kind of obstacle than strength does.

  She leaned in. She pressed her lips to his face, at the edge of his jaw.

  "Enough," she said. Her voice carried across the silent arena in the specific way of voices that are not trying to project. "Nishimura. Stop."

  The gun hand lowered by degrees. The tension that had been in Nishimura's shoulders since the moment he walked into the hotel room three nights ago came down with it, and what was left when it was gone was something that looked, briefly, like the person he had been before the ancient book and the Evil Demon Lord and the three consecutive years of dominating a tournament that he had needed to dominate to prove something to himself.

  The revolver hit the arena floor.

  Mizi let out the breath he had been holding since the Demon Lord's HP reached zero, a long and specific exhale, the breath of someone who has used every resource available and is now in the process of becoming aware of it.

  He looked at the cratered arena, at the scorch marks from the thermal fight and the glass shards from the Hell Mirror and the dark stain where the Demon Lord had last stood, and at Athira with her hand on Nishimura's arm, and at Azraie somewhere in the seats with his broken nose and his ribs and his absolute refusal to leave the building.

  "That," Mizi said, quietly enough that only the Dragon mark and the arena's silence could hear it, "is a good ending."

  He sat down on the arena floor, cross-legged, and let his body start its accounting of everything it had absorbed over the past seventy-two hours.

  Outside, the broadcast was still running to every country that had sent a participant. Sensei K was watching. Nuria was watching. Azizan was watching. The old man in the L-Fight Museum, in the cave on the hill in Habas, was watching through a lens that was not a television, and saying nothing, and the young man beside him, who kept his golden wolf power ready and waiting, asked if it was done.

  "This part," the old man said. "Yes. This part is done."