My Shard Bearer System - Elias's Legacy-Chapter 179: Active Fighting

[Shard Combat Protocols: Active.]

The air thickened.

The world narrowed.

Kikaru stood across from him, framed by the wavering torchlight.

Her stance was iron-tight — shoulders squared, legs planted, hands loose but ready at her sides. Her golden hair caught the light, forming a burning halo around her rigid frame, but there was no angel here. Only a blade sharpened to an edge that didn’t waver.

Her one good eye — the other still swollen and bruised from Cube X’s chaos — locked onto him without hesitation.

There was no visible rage.

No raw fury.

Only cold, relentless calculation.

She wasn’t angry.

She wasn’t emotional.

She was sealing off the part of herself that might have hesitated.

The golden orb Ikona — Light — hovered at her shoulder, its glow burning sharper with every second, radiating a silent, searing readiness that seemed to cut the distance between them.

Elias shifted his weight instinctively, gravel crunching under his boots.

He lifted his hand slightly — not to fight, not to threaten — but to reach across the chasm widening between them.

"Kikaru—" he started, voice low, breathless, the words nearly lost against the hum of the arena. "I didn’t mean—back there in the hub—it wasn’t—"

She didn’t answer.

She didn’t blink.

Elias’s stomach twisted, the arena tilting around him for a breathless moment.

Memories slammed into him — raw, heavy — flooding his mind in jagged flashes he couldn’t hold back.

Training in A Block’s cramped quarters, where the recycled air always smelled faintly of metal and sweat.

Kikaru’s dry, sharp laugh cutting through the grind of sparring drills, her voice steady even when everyone else faltered.

The way she’d grabbed his arm once, steadying him after he’d stumbled against the shock of his first real wound — a quick, hard squeeze, no softness, just certainty.

Under the flickering lights of their shared pod hallways, she’d said it once, low and almost annoyed:

"We’ll get out together, Elias. Don’t fall behind."

Not a promise made with naivety.

A statement of expectation — that he’d endure, because she would, and that was the way it had to be.

They weren’t children playing games with sticks.

They were survivors sharpening themselves into weapons inside Cube X’s throat.

They hadn’t known each other before A Block.

But in the months trapped together under the Wardens’ cold system, something had forged between them — something closer than alliance, heavier than friendship.

A trust built in the unspoken moments between drills, between bruises, between the ragged panting of two bodies refusing to break.

And now, because of what he had done —

because he had bound her to save Junjio —

because he had gambled her freedom without asking —

that trust lay shattered between them.

Elias’s mouth went dry.

He opened it anyway, the words scraping up his throat before he could stop them.

"Kikaru," he rasped, voice raw, low, cracked at the edges — a plea he hated himself for needing. "We don’t have to do this — we can—"

Her head tilted slightly, the barest shift of motion — as if she couldn’t believe he would dare.

Then her voice came, cutting clean through the heavy air.

"Shut up," Kikaru snapped, her tone so sharp the flickering torchlight around her seemed to flinch away.

Her good eye — the one not swollen and bruised from the hub’s collapse — burned into him, steady and merciless.

At her side, Light flared brighter, golden energy crackling against the oppressive gloom like a silent, gathering storm.

"You don’t get to talk after what you did," she hissed, the words thick with something that wasn’t rage, wasn’t grief — but something harsher.

Resolve.

"You tied us up, Elias. You left us so you could do a stupid quest to get stronger!"

The golden glow of her Ikona sharpened, rippling hotter, forming faint distortions in the air around her silhouette.

"I’ll make you feel it; just how far you are beneath me.!"

The air trembled — just faintly, just enough for Elias to feel it through the soles of his boots.

Above and around the arena, the ninety-one Shard Users lining the platforms stirred for the first time.

The silence that had wrapped the arena like a shroud cracked open, splintering into low murmurs — a ripple of sound that traveled the circle like a whispering tide.

Anticipation.

Dread.

A hunger sharpened by the arena’s ancient, blood-stained expectations.

Their gazes pressed down from every direction — heavy, suffocating — pinning Elias and Kikaru in place at the center like insects under glass.

Off to Elias’s left, on a platform just high enough to catch his eye, Junjio stood small and trembling.

The oversized jacket he wore — one of Tidwell’s, stolen during the chaos — hung off his thin frame like a collapsing tent.

His portal Ikona clung dimly to his shoulder, its ring a flicker of pale light barely visible against the red wash of the monitors.

Junjio’s lips moved, voice breaking free in fragments Elias could barely hear:

"Not them... not now... they can’t die here..."

The words cracked against the stone and smoke like a child’s last prayer to gods who had already stopped listening.

Junjio’s hands clutched at the jacket’s sleeves, twisting the fabric until his knuckles turned white.

His wide, frantic eyes darted between Elias and Kikaru — helpless, desperate, seeing futures collapse before they could even be lived.

Elias’s stomach twisted tighter, but he didn’t let himself look away.

He couldn’t.

Not now.

On another platform, slightly higher, Asurik leaned casually against the railing, arms crossed over his chest.

The molten glow of his Ikona — Magma — simmered quietly at his side, casting faint ripples of red light across the broken glass seams of the platform.

He watched the center of the arena with a predator’s patience, his posture lazy but his eyes sharp, hungry.

A thin smirk tugged at the edge of his mouth — not cruel, not kind — just cold, the smile of someone watching the inevitable.

"Let’s see if he’s worth the trouble," Asurik muttered, the words low and almost lazy, carried more by the feel of the arena than by any real volume.

The glow from Magma brightened briefly, a slow pulse of molten breath.

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