Outworld Liberators-Chapter 192: Turmoil Hardens in the Light

Tabulae shoved her face into dirt and mud. Even with her eyes clenched shut, the light still flashed behind her lids until it felt like it was drawing veins on the inside of her skull.

When she lifted her head, her vision swam, but she was one of the least affected.

She forced herself up at once and looked around, counting breaths, counting distance.

A dozen steps away, Youngbanners rolled on the ground, groaning, his flag sprawled beside him like a cut limb.

All around, people were doing the same. Crying. Cursing.

Tabulae’s hands moved fast, snatching two, running from the crowd, and looking for a hiding place.

The flags were small. The pole was only as long as an adult’s arm. The fabric was not a grand banner either.

It was only about the size of two heads stacked one over the other. Small enough to hide. Small enough to steal.

Tabulae did not want attention.

She understood treasure attracted disaster, the way the math books Master Radeon had given her explained it in cold numbers.

Her grandfather had pawned those books away shamelessly, but the lessons had stuck in her bones anyway.

So she shoved the flag down into her pants.

She was malnourished, a thin youth with dirt on her face and grime under her nails.

Inconspicuous. Easy to overlook. She kept her shoulders slumped and her eyes dull, acting like she had nothing worth taking.

As people roused from the blinding burst, another light appeared overhead.

Beams. Long and pale. Each one only ten meters wide, but there were two hundred of them hanging in the air like spears made of day.

These were the exits Eldric had promised. The ones with the right flags moved first.

Some did it like idiots, waving their flags high as if bragging was a shield.

Some just blended into the crowd and let bodies be their cover.

The true flags were limited. Only enough for the next round.

Two thousand forty eight. Then something changed in the beams.

People stared up as letters began to etch themselves into the light, strokes forming in the air as if the exits were being given names.

[Flag Collection Ranking]

(1) [Sackmace] [11]

(2) [Reelfisher] [11]

(3) [Lonequiver] [11]

(4) [Almsgiver] [8]

(5) [Irongrit] [7]

(6) [Raj] [7]

(7) [Ropefist] [5]

(8) [Raxutus] [4]

(9) [Whiteblade] [4]

(10) [Youngbanners] [4]

(11) [Tabulae] [3]

(12) [Hatcheteer] [3]

(13) [Manpowder] [3]

(14) [Joyhide] [3]

(15) [Speedy] [3]

(16) ...

It was not only a few names.

The letters on the light did not stop at ten or twenty.

They kept etching and etching, line after line, until it became clear what Eldric had done.

The beams were listing the names of everyone who held a true flag.

A map of targets.

Greed rose in the empty handed participants like a sickness.

The ones with nothing left to lose stopped thinking about rules and started thinking about solutions.

Solutions with maximum benefits.

Groups formed in a blink. Some men moved to block the places where the light pillars would descend, forming walls of bodies, hoping to trap winners in a choke point.

Others hid near the landing zones like fishermen at a riverbank, waiting to snatch a flag the moment a chance appeared.

Some simply sat down and waited for a beam to take them home, because fear had finally beaten ambition.

Up in the arena seating, the watchers went silent. Rooted. A million people held their breath and watched the light pillars lower from the sky, as if judgment itself was coming down in tidy columns.

On another set of linen screens, a second event unfolded.

The skeletons were still there, but they were no longer idle. They began to move together.

A few clumped into small groups. Those groups gathered into larger ones.

Soon it looked less like scattered threats and more like an army assembling itself.

Archers. Swordsmen. Spearmen.

Even riders. Skeletons mounted on skeleton horses, the dead carrying the dead.

What they sought was simple. To extinguish life.

In their vision, only one thing burned bright. Vitality. Warmth. Pulse. Anyone still breathing.

The giant skeletons did not join the marching ranks. They were worse in their own way.

It sent a chill crawling up the spines of both participants and the seated audience.

The giants began uprooting trees. They ripped stone out of the ground like a man pulling weeds.

If there was nothing convenient to use, they discarded their bone mallets and shoveled great amounts of soil into their bony palms, then compacted it with methodical patience.

The first giant to lift a boulder raised one leg like a pitcher winding up.

Its skull rattled as it turned toward the thickest knot of people. Then it threw.

Large projectiles began to rain over Radeon Terraces. Every plan about stealing flags collapsed in an instant.

Men who had been plotting ambushes abandoned them without a word.

They scrambled the moment they heard the whistle of a tree trunk or a stone cutting through air.

Greed could wait. Now, love for life mattered more.

People ran in blind patterns, shoving, falling, crawling, anything to get away from the shadow of whatever was coming down.

On another side of the arena, a young boy stood atop a giant skeleton and shouted with all the strength in his lungs.

"Everyone. Come here. I’ll protect you."

Around him, nearly a thousand skeletons clustered, and ten giants skeletons loomed like moving towers.

Almsgiver kept shouting, earnest and loud to his own ears, but no one paid him any mind.

"Strange," he muttered, baffled. "Why are they running away?"

It was not sarcasm. It was simply youth. His voice could not travel far enough.

Most people only saw the army of skeletons and ran before they could ever hear a boy offering help.

Then a beam of light descended over his chubby body.

"What’s this?" Almsgiver said, blinking up.

The light lifted him. He rose into the air with a little gasp of surprise, then grinned and started posing like he was swimming in a river, unafraid of the height.

He waved down at the dead that had become his companions.

"Goodbye, master skeleton. Goodbye, senior skeletons. Take care."

And then he vanished into the sky.

Below, the skeleton army clacked and turned as one, then marched toward the largest gathering of vitality, drawn to warmth like hunger drawn to scent.

The giant skeletons began to walk back toward the places they had stood before, as if their work was done and they were returning to their posts.

Poison was banned, true. Sleeping potions were not. They were legal on paper because they did not carry death or lasting harm.

That loophole let trained mortal assassins enter the field. Men who did the dirty work when the target was another mortal, the kind whose ruthlessness made even some cultivators watch their backs.

Ropefist had crossed paths with that sort before. He did not dare show his face now, not with his name plastered on the light pillars like a bounty.

He came prepared. Ceramic tubes flared his nostrils and ruined the shape of his nose. Horsehair became thick false brows.

A paste of insects and crushed leaves darkened his skin into a hard brown tan.

He tossed the extra flags he had gathered, every dud God Eldric had said did not matter, leaving nothing to advertise his success.

Then he hunched his shoulders, dragged one foot like a cripple, and wandered like a useless man who had tried his luck and failed.

Elsewhere, the top three were under heavy fire.

Sackmace, Lonequiver, Reelfisher. Fame was a kind of fatality.

Their flags were the worst part, too conspicuous, too many.

Each of them lacked only one more to turn a handful into a dozen, and the sight of that cloth made empty handed men forget they still had a life to protect. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

Still. Sackmace, Lonequiver, and Reelfisher had wanted this in a way.

Childhood friends who dreamed of cultivating together. Of earning their rise together.

If ten thousand men came for them, then ten thousand men would have to pay.

Sackmace’s sack snapped open and extended outward, unfolding into a fine chainmail canopy, an umbrella of metal meant to swallow arrows and thrown blades.

Reelfisher adjusted his rod with quick clicks until it lengthened into a rigid pole, bracing the canopy like a spine.

His net was not decoration either. It stretched and stiffened into a tin wall that locked into Sackmace’s setup, turning their defense into a moving shell.

Lonequiver went on the offensive, firing bolts through gaps in the steel curtain, each shot meant to steal attention, break legs, force a moment of doubt, and keep the crowd from closing in all at once.

On the stages, those who had bet on the names on the list clenched their fists.

Those who had bet on Sackmace, Lonequiver, and Reelfisher roared and howled wilder than beasts. Their voices went hoarse as they cheered the three.