My Shard Bearer System - Elias's Legacy
Chapter 177: Curtain Calls

Chapter 177: Curtain Calls

But it had.

And standing here — whole, untouched — felt more wrong than dying ever had.

The arena stretched out around him, a vast, brutal circle of sand and stone. The floor, closer now under the harsh light, revealed patches of glass-paneled stone between the compacted gravel, dark seams snaking through the surface like veins beneath the skin of a dead thing.

Torches lined the perimeter, their flames hissing and flickering under the unseen currents of the dead air. Each one cast a jagged pillar of shadow stretching inward, long enough to cross the distance between Elias and the first line of silent figures watching him.

Nearly a hundred.

Raised platforms ringed the arena, stacked in uneven layers like the stands of some ancient, broken coliseum. Figures stood atop them — motionless, statuesque — their faces blurred by distance but their presence cutting clean and sharp into the stagnant air.

Some leaned forward slightly, hands tucked behind their backs like soldiers awaiting judgment. Others stood rigid, arms folded, silhouettes unreadable against the flat gray sky.

None of them spoke.

None of them moved.

Their silence gnawed at the edges of the world, a collective breath sucked in and never released.

Elias shifted his stance instinctively, boots grinding against the sand, but the sound seemed to vanish before it even left his body. The vast arena swallowed every small motion, every tiny noise, as if punishing him for breaking the illusion of stillness.

The sky overhead remained as it was — pale, dead, heavy — a reminder that no matter how big the space felt, there was nowhere to run.

Nowhere to hide.

Elias’s hands flexed instinctively, fingers brushing the coarse layer of gravel and sand beneath him. The grains bit into his skin, rough and dry, anchoring him back to the strange weight of his own body. His sleepwear hung loose against his frame, untouched — no blood, no sweat, no jagged tears — when every fiber of him still remembered the carnage he’d clawed his way through.

His chest rose and fell, shallow and slow, the air pulling clean and crisp through his lungs.

Too clean.

So clean it scraped against his memories like a lie.

The battlefield he had left behind — the gas, the smoke, the smell of burning flesh — clung faintly to the back of his throat, a ghost that refused to die. His shoulder, which should have screamed with every breath from Vira’s strike, sat numb beneath the thin cloth, as if the arena itself had erased the damage, wiped his body clean to better fit whatever spectacle was about to unfold.

The shard in his chest pulsed again, slow and heavy, the dull glow bleeding through the loose weave of his shirt. A new prompt flashed sharply across his vision, white text burning against the backdrop of torchlight and ash:

At the edges of his sight, the "Save a life" prompt still hovered — stuck, frozen at [2 minutes remaining], suspended there like a noose that hadn’t decided whose neck it belonged to yet.

The arena didn’t let him breathe.

It didn’t let him run.

It just made him watch.

At the heart of the arena, on a platform just high enough to command every gaze, the Announcer — the Crafter — stood.

He was tall, a clean six-foot-two, lean but composed with the coiled ease of something far older than it looked. His blazer flared around his hips in jagged cuts, the fabric shifting subtly in the dead air like it had a will of its own, ragged shapes caught in a breeze that didn’t touch anything else.

Beneath it, a deep V-neck shirt hung loose across his chest — casual, almost lazy, but sharp in its intent. His blue slacks shimmered faintly near the ankles, as if they were shedding some thin vapor only visible at the edges of sight. Each time he moved, the glossy black leather of his shoes caught the low torchlight and sliced it into mirrored flashes across the platform.

The lenses of his glasses — one red diamond, one blue — jutted unnaturally from his face, refracting the monitors’ harsh red glow into slivers that danced across the sharp angles of his grin.

That grin — wide, confident, aware — never touched his eyes.

It simply existed, permanent and unsettling, like the grin of a man who had already read the end of the story and found it amusing.

The silver microphone spun lightly between his fingers, the motion lazy but perfectly balanced. Torchlight sparked off the polished surface, throwing quicksilver flashes into the stagnant air — flashes that didn’t brighten the arena so much as carve new shadows across it.

Elias didn’t need him to speak to know that something irreversible had already begun.

The Crafter’s voice cracked through the silence like a velvet blade, smooth and cutting all at once.

"Welcome, shard users, to the next act of our grand contest!" he boomed, the silver microphone catching the torchlight as it spun once more in his gloved fingers.

The sound reverberated across the arena, bouncing off the glass-paneled stone beneath Elias’s boots. Each dark seam in the floor seemed to shimmer with the echoes, twisting the vibrations into something almost alive — a low, endless murmur stitched into the bones of the arena itself.

The monitors behind the Crafter pulsed brighter, bleeding deep red light outward until it swallowed the edges of the fighting grounds. Names began to cycle across the twin screens, spinning in lazy, ruthless rhythm — stats, affiliations, Ikona profiles — the data flickering like a heartbeat, fast, mechanical, unfeeling.

Each line was a life.

A life boiled down to numbers.

A cold tally of survival and death.

The Crafter grinned wider, the lenses of his glasses refracting the shifting light into sharp red and blue streaks across his face.

"We stand at ninety-one," he announced, voice rich with feigned pleasure, almost teasing. "A fine number, but not quite fine enough."

He turned slightly on the platform, the movement smooth, predatory.

"Let’s thin the herd, shall we?"

The words settled over the arena like a curse, final and absolute.

Elias’s chest tightened until breathing became a conscious act. His shard pulsed harder against his sternum, the steady beat breaking rhythm, skipping like a drum too tight to hold its skin.

The system prompt burned across his vision:

[A Block Status: Soul Energy Critical.]

[Subjects: Kikaru, Faye, Tidwell, Paul, Wes — Collapse Imminent.]

Their names hammered into him one after another, sharper than any blow he had taken at Cube X.

His hands clenched reflexively at his sides, the rough gravel biting deeper into his palms, scraping raw lines into skin that still didn’t bleed.

Behind his eyes, their faces flared like flares in a dark sea:

Kikaru’s distrust, burning bright and brutal.

Faye’s raw fear, her Ikona trembling out of tune.

Tidwell’s blood pooling fast, too fast, between shattered pods.

Paul’s quiet despair, written into the sag of his shoulders.

Wes’s spark — steady, stubborn — flickering against the inevitable drain.

Each memory wrapped itself around his ribs, a chain he couldn’t break, a weight he couldn’t lift.

He needed to get back to them.

He needed to tear down whatever stood between him and their survival.

But the arena’s rules held him here, unseen hands tightening around his throat with every passing second — a prisoner shackled by shard links, by system bindings, by choices he hadn’t even realized he was making.

The gravel shifted slightly underfoot as Elias staggered a half step forward, barely catching himself. The monitors flashed again, the next set of names rising into sharp focus.

The show was just beginning.

And he was part of it, whether he wanted to be or not.