Arata approached one of the golden cube's sides and raised his hand toward it, stopping just before contact. He lowered his Aura to nothing before touching the surface—not reduced, not suppressed, but erased, as if it had never existed. A single fragment of his energy leaking into the barrier could make things much harder later on. Knowing Arthur's level—the creator of the Golden Cage—he could easily analyze even a trace sample of his Aura and identify exactly what he was dealing with. Being a Candidate was his only trump card left, and he needed the surprise effect intact for the right moment.

  He pressed his palm flat against the surface.

  Arata was one of a kind in terms of power control. When he'd discovered he was an anomaly—a Candidate who had awakened years before the standard eighteen-year threshold—he understood immediately that the secret needed to be preserved with absolute discretion. A single slip, a single moment of carelessness, and everything he'd built would collapse. So he'd spent years learning to confine his energy completely, training himself to compress his Aura to a state so perfectly contained that it produced no external signature whatsoever. What he had achieved was something perhaps one in a million fighters could replicate: the ability to exist, from an energy-detection standpoint, as an entirely ordinary human being.

  ***

  Every fighter, not just Candidates, could develop Aspects—unique power natures that manifested differently from person to person. These were rarely random. Power signatures were largely hereditary, passed down through dominant genetic expression, the strongest power of the bloodline asserting itself across generations like any other dominant trait. The mechanics weren't unlike standard Mendelian inheritance—a parent with a fire-natured Aspect and a parent with a reinforcement-natured Aspect would most likely produce offspring whose power leaned toward whichever nature carried the dominant allele. Mutations existed, of course. The same way a single nucleotide polymorphism could alter protein folding during DNA replication, introducing variance at the molecular level, power expressions occasionally deviated from their expected inheritance pattern—sometimes producing minor variations of the parent nature, sometimes generating something entirely unrecognizable from the original bloodline. But these cases were statistically rare, and the fundamental nature of a fighter's energy remained almost always traceable back to its genetic origin.

  ***

  He analyzed the barrier carefully, his palm flat against its surface.

  It's strong, he thought, tracing the energy distribution through passive physical sensation rather than active Aura perception. Stable. Dense.

  He tilted his head slightly.

  At first glance it looks like the same structure as the exterior barrier, but in reality, it isn’t even close.

  The Golden Cage had a quality to it that felt almost organic, like something grown rather than constructed, every potential weakness anticipated and reinforced before it could develop. This barrier felt different. Manufactured. Rigid in ways that suggested its creator had compensated for a lack of intuitive understanding with raw energy output.

  It's strong... but if I go all out, I think I could breach it just enough to get out.

  He pulled his hand back.

  But the problem is what comes after. I don’t think I will have enough energy to continue further. Not in this state.

  He looked at the crew members resting between the cages in the distance, talking among themselves without urgency.

  Maybe that explained why he'd heard sounds earlier—the creator of this barrier was far from being as talented as Arthur, according to everything Jacob had described about his brother's abilities and the sophistication of his barrier work. Which meant certain assumptions about its capabilities needed re-examination.

  There was no way whoever had constructed these cages was monitoring them all simultaneously. The energy required would be prohibitive given the hundreds of barriers spreading in every direction. And if this wasn't Arthur—which his hypothesis strongly suggested—then the probability of this secondary barrier manipulator having developed a sufficiently complex monitoring system dropped even further. The conclusion was simple: the barriers were automatically soundproof, programmed in advance to block any sound passively.

  But since that is the case, the sound he heard earlier in what seemed like speakers is coming from another source.

  Arata looked up.

  Bingo.

  Running along the ceiling of every cage, connecting each barrier to the next in an unbroken chain, were plasmatic conduits of the same golden-yellow energy that constructed the cages themselves—thin luminous channels he'd mistaken for structural reinforcement, now clearly visible as something entirely different. They were subtle enough that a casual observer would dismiss them as part of the cage architecture.

  He understood immediately.

  This was the communication system. Primitive, but functional. Instead of injecting Aura individually into each cage to relay sound—a process that would require enormous and sustained energy output proportional to the number of cages, scaling impossibly as the Undercroft expanded—the barrier manipulator had constructed a single continuous conduit network. By injecting a relatively small amount of Aura into the system at one point, sound could propagate through the entire chain simultaneously, reaching every connected cage at the cost of a single controlled input. The energy expenditure remained constant regardless of how many cages were connected.

  It was efficient, simple and scalable.

  But simplicity always came with consequences.

  Because the conduit network was unified rather than individually controlled, it transmitted in one direction only—outward, from the injection point into the cages. The channels had no mechanism for capturing sound from within individual cages and relaying it back to a central monitoring point. They were broadcast infrastructure, not surveillance infrastructure. The whispers Arata had heard earlier weren't a malfunction or a deliberate transmission—they were bleed-through from other inmates whose voices had accidentally entered the network through proximity to conduit junctions, fragments of ambient sound absorbed and carried alongside the official broadcast. The main speaker—whoever had delivered the announcement—had simply amplified their voice within the network to dominant amplitude, overriding the ambient noise from the inmates and ensuring their message reached every cage clearly.

  Such a system was so primitive and outdated compared to Arthur's Golden Cage that it couldn't register sound coming from inside to gather intelligence—it was simply suppressing it. But even then, he couldn't risk disturbing it with his Aura, since any barrier, even a low-level one, could relay such critical information to its creator.

  Ultimately, that meant he could make any sound inside and nobody around would hear a thing. He grinned. Time to use what little energy he had left.

  ***

  The sound of fists hitting rock filled his cage.

  Arata drove his knuckles into the ground with everything his physical body could produce—no Aura, no reinforcement, nothing but raw force. His fists split open against the surface immediately, blood mixing with dirt as he hit again and again, the impacts sending pain shooting up his arms and colliding with the existing damage from the beatings. His other wounds protested loudly. He ignored them and kept going, the rhythm steady and purposeful until the ground beneath him began to fracture.

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  He worked his fingers into the crack, prying at the rocky surface, and a dark fragment came loose in his palm. He held it up and examined it briefly.

  This will do.

  He moved to the center of his cage and lowered himself to his knees, the motion careful and slow. Then he began to write.

  He worked methodically across the ground, the dark rock scraping against the lighter stone in deliberate strokes. First the calculations—precise geometric estimates of Undercroft's dimensions cross-referenced against his guard rotation observations, spatial coordinates mapped and confirmed against the cross-sectional layout he'd established. Then the message itself, constructed and deconstructed and reconstructed until every word was exactly right, carrying precisely what it needed to carry and nothing more.

  He stood and looked at the result.

  Perfect.

  He sat back against the cage wall and fixed his eyes on the guards in the distance. Now all he had to do was conserve whatever remained of his energy. In survival situations, every unnecessary expenditure was a debt the body couldn't afford to carry—movement, thought, even sustained attention all drew from reserves that were already running dangerously low. He let his breathing slow, let his muscles go slack, kept his mind at minimum operational capacity.

  He waited.

  ***

  Hours passed without anything happening.

  The artificial light in the Undercroft never changed—no variation in intensity, no shift in color temperature, nothing to mark the movement of time except the slow internal deterioration of his own body. His energy levels continued their quiet decline. The brief physiological clarity he'd been operating on was beginning to fracture at the edges, thoughts arriving slightly slower than they should, calculations requiring marginally more effort than expected.

  Where are they?

  His throat was burning. The absence of water had moved beyond discomfort into something more systemic—a heaviness behind his eyes, a subtle trembling in his hands that he couldn't fully suppress.

  How long has it been.

  No way to know.

  Come on.

  His eyes were drifting closed when footsteps approached his cage. He forced them open. A guard was walking toward him carrying what appeared to be a food tray, the contents indistinct from this distance but real enough that Arata's body responded before his mind could.

  Finally.

  He extended his hands as the guard entered through the barrier opening, his entire focus narrowing to the tray.

  The guard looked at him.

  Then dropped it face-down on the floor.

  The first blow landed before Arata fully processed what was happening. His vision was already compromised and the strike came fast, and after that it became difficult to track individual impacts—this beating was categorically worse than the first, his body having nothing left to absorb it with, the existing wounds reopening instantly under renewed pressure. He stayed conscious through effort alone, the kind of stubborn mechanical refusal to go under that had less to do with strength and more to do with the fact that losing consciousness here, in this state, with no one coming, felt like a death sentence.

  The guard left when he was done.

  He straightened his maritime security cap, brushed the dust from his uniform with short precise movements, and walked back toward his comrades with fury still visible in the set of his shoulders. He spoke to the nearest crew member in clipped sentences. The crew member's eyes widened. He raised his radio immediately, speaking quickly and nervously into the device.

  ***

  Alexander Thorne cut into his steak with the focused satisfaction of a man who had earned his meal. Across the table, Jacob sat with his food untouched, watching it go cold one minute at a time.

  "Eat up, little weakling." Alexander didn't look up from his plate. "I prepared this buffet to reward you for your excellent work." He raised his glass of wine and drank deeply, the gesture unhurried and deliberate.

  The table was excessive even by Alexander's standards—whole roasted duck in orange glaze, rack of lamb with herb crust, towers of oysters on shaved ice, a cheese board arranged with the precision of a still-life painting, bread baked within the hour. All of it untouched on Jacob's side.

  Jacob had spent the past three days alone in his room. Even if it was the fourth time he had sent one of his new friends to the Undercroft, this time carried different weight. He felt specifically responsible—as if it could have been avoided if he had understood sooner what Thomas and Travis were capable of, if he had been smarter, less desperate, more careful about those he trusted.

  Then he raised his eyes toward his father.

  Alexander was pouring himself another glass, the motion practiced and indifferent. Jacob looked at him with something he had never quite allowed himself to feel before in its full clarity—not the usual distant resentment, not the hollow sadness of a son who had long since stopped expecting anything, but something hotter and more focused. Alexander noticed. He lowered his glass slowly and looked at his son's expression, and then he started laughing, loud and genuine, as if Jacob's hatred were the most entertaining thing he'd encountered in months.

  The radio on the table crackled to life.

  A brief burst of static, then the channel opening tone—the distinctive double-click of a direct personal line being accessed. Alexander looked at the device with visible irritation, the laughter cutting off. A crew member from the Undercroft calling him directly on his personal channel was irregular enough to be worth addressing. He clicked it on without setting down his wine glass.

  "Speak."

  "Sir." The crew member's voice was tight. "I apologize for the direct contact. We found something written on the floor of an inmate's cage. A message, sir."

  Silence.

  "What message."

  A pause. The sound of the man double-checking, making sure he had it right.

  "Death to Alexander, with nowhere left to flee, left with a sword piercing his core, for the right to ascend."

  Arata! Jacob thought.

  The wine glass hit the table hard enough to crack the base.

  Alexander swept the nearest plates from the surface in a single motion, porcelain shattering across the floor, food scattering across the expensive wood. Jacob didn't flinch.

  "Give him a beating," Alexander said, his voice dropping to the quiet register that was worse than shouting, "severe enough that whether he survives it is no longer your concern. Am I understood."

  "Yes, sir."

  The line closed.

  Jacob was already on his feet, using the chaos of his father's rage as cover. Alexander was staring at the ruined table with the cold fury of a man running calculations, and Jacob walked out of the dining room without a word, moving faster once he reached the corridor, nearly running by the time he got to his room.

  He grabbed paper and a pen and wrote the message down immediately before the exact phrasing could blur.

  "Death to Alexander, with nowhere left to flee, left with a sword piercing his core, for the right to ascend."

  He stared at it.

  Checked letter frequencies. First letters of each word—D, T, A, W, N, L, T, F, L, W, A, S, P, H, C, F, T, R, T, A. Nothing. Positional encoding, every second word, every third word. Nothing obvious. He tried reading sections in reverse. He mapped the syllable counts against numerical sequences.

  He put the pen down and pressed his palms against his eyes.

  I'm too stupid for this.

  The thought lasted a couple of seconds before he eliminated it.

  Arata had taken a beating to transmit this message. The idea of Jacob abandoning the attempt because the pattern wasn't immediately apparent wasn't an option he was willing to consider. He picked up the pen and started from the beginning, approaching it differently, looking for something simpler, something that didn't require complex encoding because there hadn't been time for complex encoding.

  What would Arata actually do?

  He looked at the message again.

  Death to Alexander, with nowhere left to flee, left with a sword piercing his core, for the right to ascend.

  ***

  Back in the Undercroft, Arata was smiling.

  It hurt to smile. Most things hurt now and his vision had narrowed to a soft-edged tunnel that made the far walls of his cage look slightly out of focus. Cuts covered every surface of exposed skin, the older wounds layered with fresh damage in patterns that had stopped making individual sense and became simply the general condition of his body.

  But he was smiling.

  He had complete faith in Jacob. He couldn't have articulated exactly why—Jacob had failed before, by his own admission, multiple times—but Arata's instincts about people were rarely wrong, and something in Jacob's fundamental nature made failure feel like a temporary condition rather than a permanent one.

  He slowly raised his eyes.

  A cluster of guards had assembled in front of his cage, more than had come for either previous beating, standing in a loose formation and staring at him with expressions that had moved past professional hostility into something more personal.

  Ha.

  He held their gaze without moving.

  I wonder what my odds of surviving this are.