We thought it was done, but it was only the prelude. The true show, the true lesson, was yet to come. We beheld his feats with pride and admiration, but it was when he truly reclaimed our honor that we were left breathless. Whatever the cost, whatever the tribulations, whatever the consequence—none of it mattered after that glorious moment. He gave us back not just our spirit, but our agency, and for that we would love him like family forever more.

  A window appeared on the projector screen, and the grim face of Arenicos—no longer confident and self-assured—appeared within it, seated in the cockpit of his Aegean. His eyes were faced toward the ‘camera’, though Circe knew it was not the crowd he was looking at. He was using the arena’s open communication system to talk to the only other person within it.

  At least, the only other one left alive.

  Arthur.

  “You have made your point, Knight of Leos,” Arenicos said grimly while his Eidolon assumed a defensive posture. “Your skills are laudable, and though your tactics are distasteful, I recognize your ruthless efficiency and salute it—but this has gone far enough. Your machine is badly damaged, and you have already made four new blood enemies for your House… there is no need to make a fifth.”

  Arthur said nothing, and the Hoplite continued to advance steadily, one step after the other, its damaged right leg leading its relatively intact left.

  “You are certainly a pilot of rare skill, Ser, but you cannot expect to defeat me in a machine that is falling apart from the strain of its own performance. I know well the specifications of your Hoplite,” he stated and his voice regained some of its superiority while he spoke. “You may have reinforced the magnetic joints and lubricated the articulation motors, but your leg servos are failing. You have pushed that Eidolon to the limits of its capability.”

  Arthur’s machine finally came to a halt, and Circe glanced at her father in question.

  Menelaus simply watched with a smile.

  “Ah. So, you have seen reason,” Arenicos said with growing confidence. “Very good. You have fought very well, Ser Knight, but it is a wise man that acknowledges when his…” Arenicos trailed off at the same time as a murmur of surprise radiated through the crowd, and Arthur’s Hoplite started walking again.

  “What are you doing?” Arenicos asked with a hint of anger.

  Arthur did not deign to reply.

  “You are throwing away a chance at life, Ser!” Arenicos continued.

  Still, Arthur did not speak.

  “This is not how gentlemen settle their conflicts!” the Strategos snarled.

  The Hoplite broke into a limping sprint.

  “Very well then!” Arenicos spat. “Do not say you were not warned!”

  The Aegean’s engines roared to life with a flash of plasma, and it surged forward to meet the limping Hoplite.

  One hundred meters.

  Arenicos raised his xiphos.

  Seventy meters.

  The Hoplite stumbled again on its right leg.

  Fifty meters.

  Arenicos dropped his hoplon, and the Strategos committed both hands to the sword.

  Thirty meters.

  Arthur’s machine stumbled again.

  Ten meters.

  Arenicos thrust his blade forward with a triumphant sneer.

  The Hoplite moved with a flash of thrust, stepped smoothly onto its damaged right foot, and pivoted quickly around what should have been a fatal stab. It did not merely dodge the strike, but did so in such a way as if to signify that it found the very attempt contemptuous. Arenicos’ expression in the still-active video feed went from triumphant sneer to shocked disbelief in seconds, just in time for the Hoplite’s hands to take hold of the Aegean’s wings and stop the charging Eidolon short.

  A scream of metal followed a moment later when Arthur ignited his engines and rocketed forward with his left knee, using his spinal thrusters and remaining foot thruster to slam the reinforced steel into the center of the enemy Eidolon’s vulnerable wing unit.

  The resultant explosion of the already damaged flight system sent the Aegean sprawling forwards, and Arenicos’ expression turned from shocked to angry again—and in that anger, Circe saw fear.

  “You do not know what it is you are doing! I am the son of a powerful family! I have been the Strategos of House Drakos for seventy years! You cannot—!”

  Arenicos cut off abruptly when Arthur’s Hoplite slammed its damaged foot onto the Aegean’s back, and bent almost languidly to pull the man’s rifle from his machine’s side with slow and deliberate action.

  “Do not do this!” Arenicos bellowed. “You do not have to do this! We only wanted the Lion bitch! Once we had her, everything else would have fallen into place! Please! PLEASE! I HAVE CHILDREN!”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  The Hoplite stilled at Arenicos’ words, and Circe wondered for a wild moment if the old man had actually gotten through to Arthur. Her Knight had been so relentless until that point that the sudden stop was jarring.

  Abruptly, the Hoplite stepped back, and a new display window opened on the ballroom’s holoprojector. Within its rectangular frame, Arthur’s helmet was visible.

  When he spoke, his voice was cold enough to chill Circe’s blood.

  “Pick up your sword,” Arthur commanded.

  Arenicos’ face froze in momentary confusion, and then, without further hesitation, he complied. The Aegean spun to its feet, and the old veteran snatched up his blade.

  “Now say her name,” Arthur continued.

  “What?”

  “Say her name.”

  Arenicos stared at the screen for a moment, and then abruptly gunned his thrusters toward Arthur in an attempted surprise attack. The plasma sheath activated across the xiphos, and he swiped deftly at the Hoplite’s ‘weak’ side.

  Arthur slid out from under the slash with a burst of his shoulder thrusters and then darted in, guiding an armored limb up to slap the Aegean’s slash wide, which allowed him to push the barrel of his plasma rifle into the Dakos Eidolon’s armpit.

  Circe’s smile was savage with approval.

  Arthur squeezed the trigger.

  The Aegean’s right arm exploded off its body in a burst of flame.

  Arenicos bellowed in rage and pain from the neural feedback, and Arthur’s machine surged backward with a flash of thrusters and screech of metal on metal where his Eidolon’s feet slid along the arena floor.

  “Say her name,” Arthur said again as if nothing had happened.

  Arenicos’ eyes were wild on the screen, and in full view of all the assembled guests—including a furious-looking Konstanin and seething Sebastian—he spun his machine around and raced for the edge of the arena.

  A plasma shot to his Eidolon’s right ankle sent him crashing into the arena, and the Hoplite advanced with unhurried thudding footsteps.

  “Say her name,” Arthur commanded again while closing the distance between them steadily.

  “Say whose name?!” Arenicos spat while attempting to push the Aegean back to its one good foot, and fell to its knee instead.

  Another beam of plasma punched through the Strategos’ left arm, and the old man howled again in pain.

  Still, the Hoplite advanced.

  “Say her name,” Arthur said once more, “and I shall grant you mercy.”

  Circe felt her heart racing at the scene, and felt eyes upon her—which she ignored.

  Arenicos’ expression flickered, and with the look of a cornered man, he spoke up.

  “Circe!” he shouted desperately. “Circe Leos!”

  Her father reached over to grip her hand with his, and Circe squeezed back fiercely.

  The Hoplite advanced until it stopped before the kneeling Aegean, and Arthur’s voice came through the screen one more time.

  “You forgot to say ‘Lady’,” Arthur proclaimed coldly.

  The rifle flashed with discharging energy.

  Arenicos vanished in plasma and fire.

  The Hoplite lowered its rifle and turned its eyes up to the camera.

  Silence filled the ballroom. Utter, overwhelming, and inviolable silence. What they had witnessed, Circe knew, defied every concept of reality inherent to the Ascendancy. They had not merely seen a battle, they had witnessed the impossible made into reality—and nobody, not even the Kings, were exempt from the shock that gripped them like a vise.

  “Ser Arthur,” Menelaus called over the stunned silence of the assembled guests. “Please step out of your machine.”

  A moment of silence passed before the cockpit hatch unsealed, and Arthur stepped out onto the waiting steel of the Eidolon’s opened chest. His hands reached up and gripped his helmet, and he pulled it from the black and red of his flight suit with a single calm motion. His hair, blond and lightly styled, fell in handsome waves along his shoulders and toward the top of his spine—and he opened his blue eyes to look up at the camera at the same time as it zoomed in.

  His expression was absolutely calm.

  He wasn’t even sweating.

  “Your Majesties,” Menelaus said with a smile, “my lords, my ladies, honored guests, allow me to present Ser Arthur Magellan, the newest Hetairoi of House Leos.”

  Circe’s eyes sought out the Drakos Patriarch where he sat observing the feed of Arthur with a mix of calculation, judgment, and quiet consternation. For all that he was a grandstanding blowhard, Circe had to admit that Konstanin Drakos was as cunning as he was vile. He showed not a whit of the panic he must surely have been feeling.

  At his side, Sebastian sat with a far less dignified expression, and seemed to be staring at Arthur like someone looking down the barrel of a gun. His features were taut, his jaw locked, and he seemed entirely oblivious to the eyes already turning across the room toward him and his family.

  Toward the grieving remnants of the other Strategii’s own bloodlines.

  The crowd’s eyes then moved from those weeping remnants and hard-faced nobles, all of whom Circe knew had been made enemies for their foreseeable future, and instead looked to the high table—to Menelaus. They observed the Lord of Leos, standing proud and assured, and after drinking in that confidence, they moved on.

  To her. They stared with expressions that ranged from disbelief, to suspicion, to wonder, and—in the case of many of the women and even some of the men—so too did they stare with awe. Envy and fantasy were entangled in those expressions, and Circe could not truthfully bring herself to blame them. She could scarcely focus beyond that last exchange.

  “Say her name,” Arthur had commanded, with cold wrath lacing every syllable. “Say her name,” he had thrown out at Arenicos, even while the Drakos Strategos struggled and fought to stay alive—in a machine that should have outclassed Arthur’s Hoplite in every conceivable way.

  “You forgot to say ‘Lady’,” he had uttered with the finality of an executioner.

  As if her honor and title were more important than the lives of five champions.

  As if her image and worth were placed beyond the caliber of the greatest of pilots.

  Circe felt her cheeks warm and her heart spike as she looked at Arthur’s unblinking image on the screen and watched as he simply stood and waited—his blond hair tousled and tossed by the ocean breeze rolling across the arena even then.

  She smiled and buried her face in her goblet to hide the expression at the same time as Pericles rose to his feet.

  “Lord Leos,” the Attican King said in a voice that drew every eye. “What was it you said at the start of this demonstration? The phrase? ‘Show us the realization of the Myth’?”

  “That is correct, my King,” Menelaus said with a nod.

  “The Myth…” Pericles said with discerning eyes. “You do not mean the divine myth?”

  “The very same, your majesty.”

  Pericles’ eyebrows rose, and he spoke in a recollecting manner. “‘And so the gods did bequeath unto their seers a vision, and of that vision was the truth, and of that truth was the secret of the divine. For in the darkness of the eternal there is no room for doubt, and in the Myth, God is Force.’”

  Mutters followed the pronouncement.

  Pericles lifted a hand.

  Utter silence filled the ballroom.

  “So you have found the answer to the Myth, Menelaus,” Pericles said with what Circe almost thought might have been an amused smile.

  “You have found yourself a God of War.”