troy francisco

During Foley and Saimallah’s matches, Noah dealt with Reiss’s corpse. He laid the body on the ground and pulled out two magical tools, each with a different enchantment. All the time spent runecrafting was for situations just like this. He stabbed the body with the first tool, the hollow rib of a powerful aquatic monster, prompting blue runes to glow along the side, and then water began to shoot out like a straw. It was water magic, draining all of the moisture from Reiss’s body and causing him to shrivel up like dried fruit.

After Cain’s fight, the seventh match proceeded without a hitch, and as always, Seraph stepped into the ring for the final battle of the round. Though his earlier wins had been desperate and narrow, the prince’s arrival brought a chorus of cheers from the audience. One might expect this noisy support to bolster his confidence and turn him back to how he was, but he remained humble, or perhaps ‘fearful’ would be a better word. Every win would plague him with doubts, doubts that he was really strong enough to have defeated his opponents. All of his accomplishments were surely due to plain luck, or maybe his enemies had been paid off to let him win.

He then tossed Viktor aside and left both the ring, and a fearful and disillusioned audience. Looking into the stands, he spotted Falco and gave him a thumbs up. Hopefully, this made up for sabotaging him in his fight. Many knights were also in the stands, all having sudden flashbacks to the last Knight’s Day. Watching Reiss tear Viktor apart reminded them of when the Wandering Spirit pummeled Seraph until he tried to kill himself. The brutality was precisely the same, imparting the unforgettable chill upon their spines.