Chapter 36: A Single Winner

She wasn’t going faster than the speed of sound, because, in the early morning, Cass heard her whistling, and even deduced her parabolic trajectory; her mind, which functioned with excellence, even calculated that she was describing a perfectly parabolic arc thanks to the “magic” of the video game: in reality, air resistance would have bent her path.

Cass bent her knees, and with a leap that left a mark in the ground, sprang higher than the mast. She intercepted Ariane mid-air, and pushed her back again with the flat of her hand, sending her flying once more into her own camp. The seven-league boots.

She got back up as the spectators were waking. She drew from her toga an old parchment which she unrolled - immediately, she duplicated: there were not one but eight Arianes. The Mages’ Duplication Scroll, someone exclaimed in the distance.

The eight Arianes charged head-on and Cass increased her pace to intercept and repel them all: once, twice, three times - that was the original Ariane. The copies vanished, and Ariane stood again. She drew from her griffon a sapphire-blue trident, and when she struck it to the ground, a tsunami rose before her to sweep over the village, blotting out the morning sun; Cass clung to the mast, impossible to dislodge because it was coded that way, while the inhabitants and the houses were carried off into the taiga. Ariane, finally, smashed a glass vial, black, and darkness became absolute: Cass couldn’t even see her own hands. But she could hear. Ariane moved almost silently, but a trained Wau could have sensed even the faintest air displacement from several meters away. Cass pushed her back one last time, and again, her purse vibrated, indicating the issuance of a new fine for assault.

Ariane did not rise again. She was curled up on the ground, at Methodios’s feet. She was crying. Great sobs, a wail that finished destroying her voice. She cried until midmorning, dismaying all the other players who, for the most part, had long envied and hated her. Methodios lifted her and carried her into a tent where her sobs could still be heard well into the night.

The sun of the third day rose. Before noon, in a state of shock, Ariane, her face undone, without even her crown, approached.

Very simply, with an obscene sort of ordinariness given the extraordinary circumstances, in a sentence spoken with a colorless voice, she granted a high connection to the Empire of the Black Star.

A roll of thunder echoed across all of Trust, and the players who weren’t stunned began to scream with joy. A divine voice, one that most people here hadn’t heard in ten years or more, began to thunder from the sky as a black layer of clouds covered it.

TWO EMPIRES HAVE MERGED

THE THRONE OF THE GODS FINALLY OPENS

HAIL STELLA NORI EMPRESS OF THE BLACK STAR,

ULTIMATE SOVEREIGN OF THE WORLD OF TRUST!

Yes, there were boos, yes, someone shouted the word “cheater,” but many applauded. Others looked around so as not to miss a moment of what they had waited for so long. Ariane, meanwhile, was tending to her hamlet, impervious to what was happening outside - likely suffering deeply inside.

A column of light fell from the sky onto Stella, and the ground shook. A stone platform raised the earth of the village and carried Stella into the air. It was not a simple platform: an immense cone of stone ... a Tower of Babel, without stairs. The world below became smaller and flatter, and she passed through the cloud layer, for a long time, as if the clouds were as thick as the virtual world was vast. Finally, the tower descended, and Cass’s feet landed gently on a floor of bluish marble.