Chapter 145: Investment

Aurelius’s brow furrowed. Hiseyes narrowed as he noticed something that had not been part of the original architecture.

Two pillars.

Enormous columns flanking the Eternal Throne... so colossal that they vanished into the golden mist overhead, so wide that Aurelius’s fifteen-hundred-meter form could barely see past them!

The Sovereign Dominion’s throne room had no pillars. It never had.

Wary, Aurelius strode toward the nearest column and circled it. He circled the second column.

*Where is he?*

The question carried genuine confusion. He looked left. Right. Behind.

Then, as if some instinct was already screaming at him not to... he looked up.

His pupils contracted to pinpoints.

His fifteen-hundred-meter spiritual form shuddered.

Above him a face stared down. It filled the entire ceiling of the domain, so vast that what Aurelius had taken for golden mist was actually the warmth of its breath.

Two eyes, each larger than the Eternal Throne, regarded him with leisurely, almost curious interest.

The pillars were legs!

Theo’s spiritual projection stood with its feet planted on the throne room floor and its head pressing against the domain’s upper boundary, stooping because it could not stand upright.

Its scale was so staggering that Aurelius barely reached its ankle.

A voice like rolling thunder, laced with amusement, boomed across the domain.

"Are you looking for me?"

In that instant, one thought consumed Crown Prince Aurelius of the Eternal Empire.

*Dispel the domain. Immediately.*

He had to collapse the Sovereign Dominion, retreat to his body, and—

A hand the size of a mountain range descended from above.

"Your Highness,"

"you invited me in here. Leaving so soon?"

Aurelius’s instincts fired. He channeled every ounce of dynastic willpower into a single concentrated burst... golden light erupting from his fifteen-hundred-meter form in a nova of ancestral power.

Ten thousand years of accumulated sovereignty, compressed into a defensive explosion.

The golden light struck Theo’s descending palm. And dissipated like a candle flame pressed against a glacier.

The hand closed around Aurelius’s projection.

Gently it lifted him off the throne room floor. Held before Theo’s face, the Crown Prince’s spiritual form was barely larger than his head. A golden emperor, dangling between fingers the color of midnight.

"I could crush you," Theo said. "But I suspect the paperwork involved in destroying a Crown Prince’s spirit would keep me occupied for the rest of my natural lifespan."

He considered the golden figure in his grip.

"Besides... You got back up earlier. That counts for something."

Aurelius forced words through a jaw that was fracturing as he spoke.

"How... is this... possible?"

He could not fathom it. The Imperial lineage commanded ten millennia of unbroken sovereignty.

Ten thousand years of concentrated human willpower, passed from Emperor to heir across forty-seven generations.

And Theo had dwarfed it...

As if the dynasty were a puddle and the Sovereign were the ocean it had mistaken itself for.

*What Is he?*

Theo grinned down at the prince in his palm. And flicked him.

From the outside, the sphere encasing both fighters ruptured in a wave of light that knocked Herald Octavian clean off his podium, sent every projection in the Colosseum flickering, and cracked three more ward-stones along the arena’s perimeter.

When the light cleared, two figures remained on the arena floor.

Theo stood upright. Hands in his pockets. Grinning the particular grin of a man who had just experienced something entertaining and wanted everyone to know it.

Aurelius was on his knees.

The Crown Prince’s body trembled. A line of blood trickled from his left nostril.

He was alive. His spirit was intact. But it had been battered so thoroughly that his hands refused to stop shaking.

Duke Regulus vaulted the observation deck railing before anyone could stop him, landing on the arena floor. He crossed the distance to Aurelius in three strides and caught the Prince’s shoulders.

"Your Highness—"

"I am unharmed," Aurelius said. His eyes were fixed on Theo, and within them burned a question that his dignity would not permit him to repeat.

Theo, being Theo, answered it anyway...

"I know you are dying to find out why," he said, scratching his neck with one hand. "But that is a trade secret."

Aurelius’s cracked lips pressed into a bloodless line. For a long moment, the Crown Prince of the Eternal Empire knelt on the arena floor, held upright by his Exarch protector, staring at the commoner who had just dismantled him in every conceivable arena.

Then he spoke.

"Why is your spiritual sense so powerful?" His voice was hoarse. "My lineage carries ten thousand years of accumulated willpower. How does a single individual exceed that?"

Theo regarded the kneeling prince. For a flicker the grin softened into something that might, under different lighting, have respect.

"Your ten thousand years are impressive, Your Highness. Genuinely. But you are borrowing the will of dead men." He tapped his own temple. "Everything in here is mine."

That was, of course, not entirely true...

A past life’s full catalogue of memories.

The faith of millions flowing through the investment system.

The Parasite class’s accumulated spiritual assimilation from every entity he had ever absorbed.

Nightly Archon-formation grinding that had tempered his psyche like steel in a forge.

Any one of those sources would have been remarkable...

Combined, they produced a spiritual mass that treated a ten-thousand-year dynasty the way an ocean treated a glass of water.

But Aurelius did not need to know the specifics.

"This is not over, Sovereign," the Crown Prince said.

"I know," Theo said.

Aurelius rose. Duke Regulus steadied him. The Crown Prince straightened his robes with trembling hands, turned his back, and walked off the arena floor without another word.

Up on the observation deck, the Pontifex glanced at the teacup she had placed before Duke Regulus’s now-empty seat.

She picked it up, took a sip, and smiled.

"I told him to drink while it was hot."

...

The investment system notification expanded in Theo’s vision as he descended the final arena step.

[Target: Crown Prince Aurelius — Imperial Vanguard Rank #1]