Chapter 95: Two Legends

By the following morning, Elyndor was still talking about the Ashcrofts.

Every major screen in the city replayed yesterday’s evaluation on a loop: Emily tearing through four C-Rank professionals, her damage record, and the strange argument-by-scoreboard that had somehow hijacked a routine evaluation.

The footage ran on news broadcasts, public displays, Awakener forums, and a handful of advertisements that had nothing to do with the Authority at all.

Headlines kept changing every few minutes like the city couldn’t decide which part was the real story.

[EMILY ASHCROFT DEFEATS FOUR C-RANK PROFESSIONALS IN 1:48.]

[FORMER CHAMPION BREAKS HER OWN HISTORICAL RECORD.]

[EMILY ASHCROFT RETURNS TO ELYNDOR.]

[EMILY ASHCROFT AND HER HUSBAND BREAK CENTURIES-OLD MANA RECORD.]

[WHO IS REINHARD ASHCROFT?]

Before yesterday, Emily had been the story. Now her name came with a plus-one, and the plus-one was somehow getting more airtime than she was.

An older man stood in front of a public display, watching Aeon flash across the screen again, and slowly shook his head.

He’d followed her career since before most of the Awakeners crowding around him had even manifested their Gnosis, and seeing that sword back in her hand had dragged up memories he’d assumed were buried for good.

"She really did it."

His friend beside him nodded. "She didn’t just return. She came back stronger than anyone remembers her being."

...

A few steps away, a cluster of younger Awakeners had turned Emily’s classification into a full sports debate, complete with raised voices and at least one spilled drink.

"She’s still D-Rank," one of them insisted, jabbing a finger at the registry. "That’s not up for argument."

"Technically. Her combat evaluation read C-Rank."

"That doesn’t change the number on her badge."

"No, but it changes what people think she’s actually capable of, which matters a lot more than a badge."

The screen replayed her old damage record getting erased in real time, the number climbing and doubling before the footage froze on the announcement, and the argument quietly shifted without anyone officially conceding anything.

"How long before she’s C-Rank for real?"

"Not long."

"B-Rank after that?"

"After yesterday? I’m not betting against her."

Someone eventually asked the question that would have gotten them laughed out of the crowd a day earlier.

"Do you think she could reach S-Rank again?"

Nobody had an answer, which was exactly why the question kept spreading from group to group instead of dying out.

For the first time since her Gnosis shattered, Emily had a future people could actually picture, step by step, rank by rank, instead of just a past they kept replaying out of nostalgia.

...

A pair of young women who’d never watched her compete at her peak pulled up old championship footage purely out of disbelief, the kind of search that starts with "there’s no way" and ends forty videos later.

One of them watched Emily fold space mid-fight and blinked at the screen like it had personally lied to her.

"I thought the Young Devil King was just an old nickname nobody could actually back up."

"Apparently not."

Then the record exchange started playing, and the first name that popped up was HUSBAND OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD.

"Wait. Who is that?"

"Her husband."

"I know he’s her husband. I’m asking who he is."

That question ended up being asked by roughly half the city before lunch. The public records on Reinhard turned up almost nothing useful.

Married to Emily, present during her recovery, loosely connected to a pile of suspiciously expensive relics nobody could fully trace back to a source. Then the evaluation footage handed people something far more interesting than any paperwork trail.

Power, delivered entirely as an inside joke that happened to also be a national incident.

A pro Awakener rewatched the clip for the third time and laughed out loud hard enough to startle his teammate. "He broke a national record just to answer his wife."

His teammate shook his head. "Then she broke one back to answer him."

"They kept going."

"They never once stopped."

They watched the whole chain scroll past again.

HUSBAND BEING HURT BY HIS WIFE’S ANGER, ANNOYED WIFE, NOT-HAVING-IT WIFE, DEAD MAN, SHAMELESS HUSBAND, all the way to the final tie and the two names that quietly replaced the jokes right at the end.

[REINHARD ASHCROFT: THAT WAS FUN, BUT YOU WIN, MY DEAR WIFE.]

[WIFE OF THE MOST HANDSOME MAN IN THE WORLD: YOU WIN. I’M PROUD OF YOU.]

"The strangest part," the teammate said, "is that neither of them was even trying to show off."

"They were just arguing."

"In front of the entire city, through a government database."

"Not going to lie, I am kinda jealous."

"Of the husband or the wife?"

"Both."

...

"How?"

Director Halden had been asking himself the same question alone in his office, replaying the footage for the third time that morning with a cup of tea that had long since gone cold.

He paused on the moment Emily’s Gnosis destabilized mid-fight, the instant Reinhard rose halfway out of his seat before she waved him back down without even looking at him.

He’d expected Reinhard to stop her.

Most husbands would have, Authority regulations practically assumed it. Instead the man sat back down and trusted her to finish it herself, which was either the most reckless thing Halden had seen all year or the single healthiest thing he’d seen in this particular arena in decades.

Halden leaned back in his chair.

The Emily he remembered had fought like she had something to prove, a constant pressure behind her eyes even when she was winning three events in a row.

This Emily had simply looked satisfied, like winning wasn’t the point anymore so much as a pleasant side effect.

"The girl who left Elyndor wanted to stand at the top," he murmured to the empty office. "This one’s just moving forward. Those aren’t the same thing at all."

Then the record exchange started, and his amused smile held steady right up until the final Mana test, when the readings blew past a mark that had stood untouched for centuries and the machine detonated to prove it, taking a sizable chunk of the evaluation budget with it.

He watched that part three times in a row, less out of disbelief and more because the Authority’s paperwork for "two civilians accidentally destroyed an ancient national record during a routine evaluation" did not currently exist as a form, and someone was going to have to invent one by Monday.

Emily, at least, made sense to him. Her Gnosis had changed, her results had followed. Reinhard had no history at all behind him.

No rankings, no combat record, no classification, nothing except one man who had appeared beside Emily Ashcroft.

And casually kept pace with her like it cost him nothing, mostly because it genuinely hadn’t.

"Who are you?" Halden asked the paused screen.

The screen, predictably, said absolutely nothing back, which only made him want to keep asking.

What stuck with him more than the mystery was the rest of it. Reinhard hadn’t once tried to stand in front of her, hadn’t tried to manage her, hadn’t treated her strength like something that needed his supervision.

He’d simply stood beside her, which Halden suspected was the far harder trick for a man who could apparently end a four-hundred-year-old record on a slow Tuesday afternoon without breaking a sweat.

"Elyndor has two legends now," he said, and went back to drafting a form the Authority had genuinely never needed before this week.

...

Across the city, professional teams were already circling like this was a transfer window. A manager watched the four-C-Rank footage twice, leaned toward his assistant, and spoke in the tone of a man who smelled money.

"Find out if Emily Ashcroft has signed with anyone."

"And the husband?"

"Find out whatever you can." He paused. "Carefully."

Eternal Dawn had more personal reasons to care than most. Inside their headquarters, a row of executives sat around a long table watching the same footage the rest of the city had already memorized frame by frame.

Nobody in the room was laughing anymore by the time the record exchange reached its last two names.

"They asked to speak with Emily Ashcroft," one executive said, like he was still hoping to hear something different the second time.

The leader didn’t look away from the screen. "I know."

"We assumed they meant the woman who recovered her Gnosis. A fresh start, new terms, a clean introduction."

"No." He finally turned from the display, and the room went noticeably colder. "They meant Emily Ashcroft. The one we sponsored, built an entire marketing campaign around, and quietly dropped the moment she stopped being useful to us."

That landed hard across the table. Nobody argued with it, mostly because the sponsorship file open in front of him made the argument for them, success after success, campaign after campaign, right up until the payments stopped the same month her Gnosis shattered and her name quietly vanished from every press release.

An executive cleared his throat like it might help. "Our new-Awakener sponsorship program is still active, for what it’s worth. Several of our current top recruits came through it."

The leader nodded slowly, not quite looking satisfied.

"And her husband?" someone asked, pulling up a file thin enough to be almost insulting.

No classification.

No professional history.

No confirmed Mana capacity.

One unverified rumor about Eclipse connections. The only hard data in the entire folder was a single ancient record with his name freshly attached to it, like the universe had only just started keeping a file on him.

The leader studied the final messages on the loop one more time, considering a man who had apparently wrecked a piece of government property by accident.

And then apologized to his wife for winning, and allowed himself a small, careful smile that didn’t reach the rest of his face.

"Interesting." He closed the file. "But she asked to speak with Emily Ashcroft specifically. So that’s who we’ll meet. Her husband can stay a mystery a little longer."

...

By the time the Ashcroft family made it to a hotel, the city had already turned yesterday into a dozen separate legends.

Each one slightly more exaggerated than the last. Maki found the worst version first, scrolling on the couch while Lily leaned over her shoulder, already laughing before she’d finished reading the caption.

"Someone made a highlight reel," Maki said, turning the screen around. "Just the record names. In order. Set to music."

Emily watched her own insults scroll past in chronological order, scored by something with far too many trumpets in it, and felt her ears start to burn. "How many people have seen that?"

"Millions."

"I was already famous."

"Not like this," Lily said, positively delighted by her sister’s suffering.

Yuna didn’t even look up from her own screen. "People are asking how fast you’ll hit C-Rank."

"Already?"

"B-Rank’s trending too," Maki added. "A-Rank as well."

"And S-Rank," Lily said, grinning like she’d been saving the best one for last. "That’s everywhere. People are running actual betting pools on your timeline."

Emily went quiet for a second. For years, every conversation about her strength had circled back to the same bitter question: what could Emily Ashcroft no longer do.

Now the city wanted to know how far she could still climb, which was, all things considered, an enormous upgrade in problems.

"I’m going to reach S-Rank soon. I’m thinking in six months or less." she said.

Maki’s eyebrows shot up. Lily pumped a fist in the air like she’d personally called it. "There she is."

Reinhard, who had been reading a separate report and very much minding his own business, glanced over with the particular calm of a man who could already feel an argument closing in on him from several directions at once.

"That’s ambitious."

"You promised me a party when I got there."

His smile dimmed by exactly half a watt. "I did say that."

"Then you’d better start saving," Emily said, settling back against the couch with the smug satisfaction of a woman who had just converted an old throwaway joke into a binding long-term financial obligation.

Lily lost it completely. Maki shook her head like she’d seen this exact trap being built in real time and simply hadn’t warned him. Yuna didn’t even try to hide her grin anymore.

Reinhard let out a long, theatrical sigh. "I have a feeling S-Rank is going to be extremely expensive."

Emily laughed, and for the first time in a long time she wasn’t thinking about everything her Gnosis had cost her.

She was thinking about the party budget she’d just assigned her husband without his consent, and about everywhere she still had left to climb.

...

Reinhard smiles before opening up the Akasha interface to get his next set of rewards from competing with Emily for the records.

[S-Grade Investment Complete.]

[Legendary Reward Granted.]

[Calculating Rewards...]