My Shard Bearer System - Elias's Legacy
Chapter 176: Into the fire

Chapter 176: Into the fire

The timer hit zero.

The system’s weight smashed down on him all at once—a force that didn’t care if he lived or died, only that the time was up.

Darkness tore through the edges of his mind, ripping past what little focus he had left.

Elias’s body sagged forward.

Face-first into the blood-soaked floor.

The last thing he felt was the sticky warmth soaking into his skin, the last thing he heard was Dot’s faint, desperate hum.

And then the world slipped away.

The first thing Elias noticed was the silence.

Not the silence of death—he knew that sound too well—but a thick, waiting hush that seemed stitched into the air itself.

He opened his eyes slowly, the motion dragging like his eyelids were glued shut. Light bled in — soft, gray, colorless.

The floor beneath him was rough and dry, the texture of packed sand and loose gravel biting against the bare skin of his palms.

He blinked.

Then again.

No blood.

No pain.

No scorched flesh or acid burns eating through his clothes.

He sat up stiffly, hands braced against the grainy ground. His sleepwear clung loose against his body, dry — too dry — when it should have been soaked in sweat and blood. His chest rose and fell in steady, shallow pulls of air. No gas sting. No metallic taste. No wounds blooming across his skin.

It made no sense.

Elias stared down at his arms, flexed his fingers once, then twice. Nothing. No tremble. No ache. His shoulder, which should have been screaming from the blast and blood loss, sat numb and untouched beneath the thin cloth.

For a long moment, he just breathed, trying to anchor himself.

Trying to remember if this was how dying felt.

The ground stretched out around him—gravel and compacted sand forming a vast circle. At the edges of the arena, torches sputtered against the flat gray sky, their flames thin and jagged, casting broken shadows that danced and shifted with every flicker. It wasn’t real sunlight overhead. No warmth. Just that endless, pale dome, pressing down like the lid of a coffin.

He pushed to his feet slowly, boots grinding against the sand.

The air smelled faintly of smoke and oil, but it was clean compared to the battlefield he had left behind. Cleaner than it should have been.

And then he saw them.

A ring of figures stood silently around the arena, lined up like statues on raised platforms that overlooked the fighting grounds. Nearly a hundred of them — Shard Users, their presence palpable even at a distance. Some leaned forward slightly, hands folded behind their backs. Others simply stood motionless, unreadable.

All of them watched.

Their faces blurred at this distance, but the weight of their gazes pressed into his skin, heavier than armor. No whispers. No movement. Just stillness.

Waiting.

The platform at the center of the arena stood slightly raised, its edges clean and deliberate against the rough gravel. A low hum vibrated faintly through the air, almost too soft to hear, like a machine buried deep beneath the stone skin of the arena had stirred.

On that platform stood a single figure.

Tall. Lean. Perfectly poised.

The Announcer.

Or the Crafter, depending on whose nightmare you listened to.

His blazer flared at the hem, the jagged cut of the fabric shifting with some invisible breeze that didn’t touch the rest of the arena. Beneath it, his deep V-neck shirt hung open just enough to suggest carelessness—but it was calculated. Intentional. His blue slacks shimmered faintly around the ankles, wisps of phantom steam curling near his polished black shoes.

The silver microphone spun lazily between his fingers, catching the torchlight in quicksilver flashes.

And then there were the glasses.

One lens a red diamond.

The other blue.

Both jutting outward unnaturally, refracting the flat light into slivers of distorted color that carved thin lines across his sharp features.

He was grinning.

Not kindly. Not cruelly.

Just... aware.

Like he already knew how the next hundred steps would play out, and watching Elias realize it was just part of the show.

Behind him, the massive monitors loomed—two giant slabs of broken black, their surfaces flickering faintly, waiting to light up with names, statistics, lives boiled down into cold data.

Elias shifted his weight, boots scuffing slightly in the gravel. The sound barely reached his own ears.

The arena didn’t feel alive.

It felt like a stage.

A place built to watch something important happen, and bleed into the sand when it did.

Somewhere beneath his ribs, the shard pulsed once.

Heavy. Measured.

No system prompt hovered above him.

No timer.

No mission.

Just the endless hush, and the Announcer’s steady, unreadable grin.

Elias exhaled slow, feeling the tremor in his arms only now.

He glanced down once more at his hands.

Still clean.

Still wrong.

He raised his eyes back to the center platform.

The silver microphone spun once more between the Announcer’s fingers, catching a final flicker of broken torchlight.

Then — and only then — the monitors behind him began to glow.

The monitors flared to life in sudden unison, twin bursts of searing red that split the gray hush overhead. Their glow washed over the arena’s rough gravel floor, casting sharp lines across the packed sand, warping the jagged torch shadows into long, skeletal fingers clawing at the edges of the circle.

Elias stood frozen at the center, boots half-sunk into the loose grit, his breath tight and shallow against the crushing stillness. Every hair on his arms prickled under the sudden heat of the lights, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t even blink. The silence of the arena — the oppressive, unnatural quiet of ninety-one Shard Users standing in wait — pressed against his skin harder than the cold.

Above him, the pale gray sky sagged low, featureless and smothering, a lid sealed tight over the world. The air hung thick with the sharp tang of iron and old smoke, every breath dragging dry against his throat like breathing through cloth.

His shard pulsed once beneath his ribs — a faint, sluggish throb that barely reached the surface. The dull blue glow bled through the thin weave of his sleepwear, too faint, too distant. No blood soaked the cloth. No rips, no burns, no scars. As if the nightmare at Cube X had never touched him at all.