Chapter 147: The Faceless Champion

The Faceless Champion learned to kill in four seconds, and it was embarrassingly good at it.

It stood in the broken vault with its shoulders through the ceiling, a silver giant stitched together from six hundred and fourteen fighting styles. Where its face should have been there was only a smooth plate that showed the freed champions their own reflections. It raised one fist wrapped in an imitation chain and fired the thing it had copied from Jace.

[OVERWRITE PULSE: COPIED]

A black ring edged in red crossed the vault. It reached the freed champions and found nothing to command. Six hundred and thirteen of them were shouting their names, and Penelope Ardent stood on a stack of broken cages reading the roll off her ledger in a voice that could have stopped a train.

[OVERWRITE PULSE COPY: FAILED]

[NO ACTIVE COMMAND NETWORK DETECTED]

[SELF-NAMED TARGETS CANNOT BE CLAIMED]

[LANDING ON THE SAFE ZONE: 3 MINUTES, 02 SECONDS]

A gold window flared beside Jace's head. Seraphina looked like she had not slept since the last century. "It copies the strongest move used against it, and it grows after every exchange. Twelve seconds ago it was a statue. Also, your dead friend's file is open. The reconstruction finished on the Forge's last cycle, before you tore it out. The Forge was not only healing the cages. It was printing him."

Jace looked at Caleb, who was standing now, pale and steady, with a gold lattice still curled around his wrists.

"I would like to stop being a discovery," Caleb said.

"Later," Jace said. "Right now I need it to learn something stupid."

He pointed at Alexander. "Give it the seventh edict. From the right."

Alexander stared at him. "You want me to teach it my worst habit."

"I want it to love your worst habit."

Alexander and Scarlett struck together. Falling Verdict and Ember Rend collided against the giant's chest and made a red cross the width of a street. The Faceless Champion absorbed the blow, shuddered, and rose another sixty feet.

[FACELESS CHAMPION: FALLING VERDICT + EMBER REND COPIED]

[SIZE: GROWING]

The giant answered with both techniques at once. The seventh stroke came down from the right, and a sheet of flame ran along it. The impact flung Jace across the vault, and a burning edge raked his side.

[HEALTH: 235 -> 224]

It was a perfect copy, tell included. Jace had been waiting for the tell.

He came off the floor already moving, slid inside the stroke on the right, and slapped his palm against the silver ribs where the armor plates met in a red seam.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

[ROOK BLADE SEAL: ACTIVATED]

[TARGET: BOUND SEAL]

[COST: STAMINA]

The seam opened. A dozen plates the size of billboards slid off the giant's flank and crashed through the floor.

[COMPOSITE ARMOR: SEAL BROKEN. LAYER 1 CRACKED]

The Faceless Champion screamed without a mouth. It turned toward the loudest enemy in the room and copied the next strongest thing it saw. A girl with a lightning sigil on her forearm stood on a pillar with her arms raised, and a shield man planted himself beside her and lifted a wall of nine plates.

"Now," Jace said. "Both of them. At the same time."

Skybreaker Chain and Ninefold Wall hit the giant together. It copied both. Its left arm became a shield that refused to move, and its right arm became a lightning whip that refused to stop. The two forms fought inside one body. The armor locked, sparked, and started to tear itself apart.

A bolt leapt from its own elbow and struck Jace anyway.

[HEALTH: 224 -> 215]

Then the vault changed color.

Gold light poured from the giant's chest and laced across the ceiling, the floors, and the walls. Every strand knotted into a lattice the size of a district. Jace knew the shape before the panel finished loading.

[FACELESS CHAMPION: ADAPTIVE CONTAINMENT, PERFECTED]

[SOURCE ECHO: CALEB MARR]

The lattice closed on the freed champions, and the giant spoke in a voice it had borrowed from a dead man.

"Recovery remains active."

Caleb went white. "That is what I said when I died."

A hole opened in the center of the gold, the exact size of a man standing with both hands raised. Jace understood it at once. The ship had read Caleb's record and built its perfect trap around the thing it knew he would do, which was to step into the gap and hold the line until the line killed him.

Caleb took one step toward it.

"Caleb," Jace said.

"I know." Caleb reached into the cage behind him. The Forge had copied more than his body. His old marking kit waited inside, complete with dented stakes, a worn brush, and a bucket of red paint scarred by half a war. He pulled out a stake and lifted the brush. "The record knows how I fought. It never learned what I was afraid of."

He did not step into the gap. He knelt, drove the stake into the floor beside it, and painted a circle of red around the anchor of the whole lattice.

"Boundary," Caleb said, white to the lips. "Nobody crosses it."

The ship's lattice read the map. A system built from his habits obeyed his habit, and the gold folded inward along the paint line like a wall closing on itself. The perfected containment locked around the Faceless Champion's own chest, and every plate on its torso stopped moving.

[ADAPTIVE CONTAINMENT: TURNED INWARD]

[IDENTITY CONTINUITY: UNVERIFIED]

"System still says unverified," Jace said.

"Then the system never watched me paint," Caleb said, and wiped the brush on his sleeve.

"Everything we have," Alexander said, and Scarlett stepped up on his left. "Now."

Falling Verdict and Ember Rend rose together into one red sun above the vault. Penelope shouted six hundred and thirteen names into the ceiling. The freed champions struck the giant from every side, and the bound lattice pinned its limbs wide.

Jace wrapped the Gravity Chain around his fist and threw the end into the giant's own gravity well.

[GRAVITY CHAIN: ACTIVATED]

[CHARGE: 67 -> 62]

The giant's weight turned on itself. Jace hauled, and the whole boundary collapsed inward with a crack like a mountain splitting. The lattice squeezed his ribs as it went.

[HEALTH: 215 -> 203]

The red sun fell.

[TEAM COMBINATION: VERDICT ECLIPSE]

[COMPOSITE ARMOR: DESTROYED]

The Faceless Champion came apart in a column of white fire. Silver plates rained across the vault, and what remained was a black seed the size of a house, humming at the center of the ruin. Jace dropped to one knee and found that his legs had decided they were finished.

[STAMINA: SEVERELY DEPLETED]

[TEAM-COMBINATION PROFICIENCY: INCREASED]

Above them the ceiling opened.

A hand the size of a cathedral came down through it and closed around the black seed. The hull groaned. The folded stars went dark.

[ARENA ENGINE: CHAMPION FAILED]

[ARENA ENGINE: ABSORBING]

[TITAN PROTOCOL: INITIATED]

The floor tilted as the whole ship began to stand.

[LANDING ON THE SAFE ZONE: CANCELED]

Health: 203/420.

Charge: 62/140.