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This’s probably mapped out from the harvest, I had thought when I saw it. There were probably tens of thousands of years of individuals coming into the forest and mapping it out, and this showcase was proof.

The rider ducked and weaved between plants, went around shooting vines, released an ice spell at a nest of bugs, avoided the brivelts, increasing in altitude to get around a monster den, then dipping down as low as possible when spider-like creatures in trees shot down from canopies. For a moment, I thought that he had a serious chance—

—then he made it out into a field of dragons who were alerted and ready. They shot at him with speed that would require a playback mode to see clearly. The rider weaved around trees and threw spells, and tried to run, but he was overwhelmed in seconds.

Suddenly, the camera shook from some violent ultrasonic attack, and the head of the golden bird he was riding suddenly exploded, and they both crashed into the ground.

The Bramble was brutal—

—and if I even wanted to challenge it, I needed to make it through the dragon’s nest first.

"I can’t take this…" I tried to swipe the feed aside for a while, but that’s when a series of strange occurrences started to spiral out of control.

It began when the dragon rider, from the start of the ceremony, decided she had studied enough and was ready to challenge the trial. That got me interested—considering that she was likely the person bringing me my stuff. So I watched her fly to the podium, where someone was packing their mount with mock gear. Instead of waiting, the person preparing suddenly stopped and unloaded and flew away.

No one complained.

According to the announcer, her name was Railain Vestra, the First Domain Scion of a Beast Taming family—and also a mage.

The reaction toward her was strange. Those who were forced to fly sighed deep breaths of relief, shoulders relaxing as they gave thanks to the sky. Those who were there for ambition looked at the ground, trembling indignantly as if the matter was already settled.

Looks like this’s it, I thought.

Yet before she even loaded up her crates the cheering and excitement turned to chaos, pandemonium breaking down. Two camera angles suddenly flashed to the skies, where a massive dragon, far larger than the woman’s, flew toward the sight. Its movements were choppy and broken, and its wings looked broken and weak, skeletal even.

"And he’s done it!" the announcer boomed with a big smile. "Those in the know know that there was someone with a quest to tame a cursed one, and it looks like he did it! The strongest of the lot—a vraxle. The same thing killing all the best competitors thus far!"

A camera switched to the man’s face as he rode the dragon’s neck with the help of a specialized mount. He looked uncomfortable and unbalanced, strapped onto the beast like a physical object, but his eyes were determined as if he had taken a boatload of Adderall before a college exam.

What the hell’s going on?

The vraxle successfully navigated to the waiting site, where sharply dressed workers brought the wheezing, wincing, broken dragon different elixirs. There were close-ups of people creating water spheres and mixing in red and blue and green liquids, blending them on, and shooting them at the skeletal wings.

Another camera showed the original dragon’s rider arguing with staff, while another angle showed her parents arguing with sharply dressed "family" members at the front. There was a full-blown conflict brewing in real-time.

"Forgive us for the delay," the announcer said. "There’s a disagreement about who should go first. Railain was there first, but the Claustra are arguing that Aiden should go first because he was the only person who got a separate quest to tame a cursed avian and complete this Domain Quest."

A shot of the families saw many furious, turning to the massive dragon in the distance—feeling that they had been cheated. It would get nasty.

"I understand the confusion. Please… calm down. Please let me explain…!" Jeering spectators and family members turned to the announcer, whose face was pale. She coughed and cringed and continued. "This neophyte’s name is Aiden Roe. We don’t know how he fared in the multiverse rankings, but the Oracle had him take his trial in the Third Ring after a ’shocking’ performance during the standard testing. The Areswood Defense Alliance was ordered to allow him access to the Cursed Aviary before the domain announcement. This was nearly two weeks ago."

The crowd calmed and looked at the displayed screens, showing Aiden speaking to the fiery brunette, who had taken off her helmet and was glowering at him, eyes sharp as jagged stone.

Both looked into dead space for a moment before they split off, both boldly striding away.

A worker ran from their location to the announcer, who informed the public.

"The Oracle’s decided to let Railain go first. If she makes it, she’ll get the right to take it. But Aiden’ll still get a chance to challenge the Bramble. If he succeeds, he’ll be a backup in case Railain fails. Looks like this’ll be one hell of a competition this year!"

Confused excitement spread through the crowd, and people started pounding drinks and sending for more. Some people brazenly made bets on camera. The camera locked on a group arguing over who would win, and most people were saying variations of the same thing about the vraxle: How long has that thing been in captivity? It looks like a skeleton.

Confidence in it was low.

My confidence in it was low. That’s because it would be facing its own kind, looking like a half-radiated wolf shedding its fur. I just couldn’t imagine that it could win that confrontation. Yet I felt nervous excitement as I watched a team of healers spreading alchemic resources on holes in its wings, binding them together as staff brought full animals for it to eat.

The man riding it kept looking at the families defiantly, gentle features ugly and twisted with rage. This was personal.

Suddenly, the crowd went wild when the crew finished tying the mock equipment to his competitor’s dragon and she put on her helmet and waited for the horn.

The horn sounded, and the dragon shot across the wall. I experienced the most intense three minutes of my life. The beast was too big to take the sneaky way through the forest, so she blasted right through the forest, taking the flying piranhas head-on. They trailed her as the dragon bit through some of them, flapping its wings with major gusts and breathing fire—yes, they actually breathed fire—at a group of them.

Railain didn’t rely primarily on the dragon’s sight, trusting it as she shot magical arrows at the birds that followed them like homing missiles. All of them hit—none stopped the swarm. They were individually weak, but I knew full and well that these creatures were second-evolution beasts at a minimum, swarm type, and far scarier than the reiga or the shalks.

Railain ran.

She suddenly dipped and shot and weaved and used wind magic as they approached the cloud. Instead of dipping into the sentient canopies, they used wind spells to blow away the gas temporarily, using it to make it past a hurdle before dipping low again.

Creatures unforeseen shot aerial attacks at the dragon and rider, each landing shots and leaving both battered—but they fought on, waving and biting and shooting ice and wind and rocks and fire, killing as many things as they could along the way.

It was a vicious four minutes but they made it out into the dragon nest—and curved.

Speed. Their trump card was speed. They shot out with acceleration magic so fast that an aerial shot captured after images, and the wild dragons gave chase.

Railain didn’t despair when they caught up. She shifted course right into the poison cloud, wrapped in a barrier, and the dragons followed her in, coughing and wheezing for a second, realizing they were duped. Then Railain shot out at a random place, making it to the other end of the Bramble—

—immediately turning back in the confusion and returning.

Railain Vestra completed the Trial of Survival, gaining the right to take my gear. I should’ve been happy about that, right? That performance was masterful, and this individual, though lacking the magical might to harm even the weaker beasts, was skilled. She came from a beast-tamer family and rode the beast mount that was offered to the cause. She was perfect—so why did I feel nervous?

Aiden’s vraxle could barely fly. It was a third evolution beast—but it could barely fly. Its ribs looked like they had already been skinned and stripped of fat, and its eyes had lost the fire of all other beasts I had seen that day. It didn’t seem practical.

It was their appearance.

It isn’t something that I can explain. Seeing Aiden there felt… wrong. He didn’t look like he wanted to be there. His facial expressions weren’t hardened, and his body wasn’t bulky, and he didn’t hold himself well. Even furious and drugged up—which was painfully obvious—he couldn’t make eye contact with people and gave what appeared to be short answers.

The vraxle was even worse. This quest allowed beasts to fight for their freedom, but this one seemed annoyed rather than vengeful. It didn’t sneer at people. It simply accepted the healing on its wings as fact and looked at the gate.

This team wasn’t there because they wanted to be there—they were there because they had a reason to be there—something to strive for.

My heart rattled when Railain returned to a cheering crowd, pumping her fists as her family smirked and looked at other wealthy people snidely, and dismounted, allowing the vraxle to take the podium.

It was huge—a Boeing 747 cargo plane of a beast. Its wingspan was far larger than most dragons, and for the first time, it was clear to most that it was bigger than the other dragons in the Bramble.

It was a king.

I echoed the thoughts of so many people the camera caught speaking:

What the hell’d that guy need to do to tame that thing…?

It didn’t make sense, but I had plenty of time to ponder it. It took large ladders and flying beasts to get onto the massive creature, and it became a logistical nightmare to figure out how to strap the cargo to its back. The only way they found was to paint arrays that glued down the cargo on its back, and the vraxle looked like he was second away from sacrificing it all to eat everyone in the area. But it happened. An hour later, they had mock equipment on the dragon’s back and it stood, staring at the gate, a complex expression on its face.

Aiden looked scared yet determined, sending a final glance at the families defiantly on camera before turning to the gate. It was time to move.

Aiden had put magical and mental interference plugs into his ears, cutting off all noise but the grating sound of his circulation system, chugging like a steam train fueled by his pounding heart. Even though he couldn’t hear the crowd, he could feel their screams—the reverberations rattling his skeletal frame. It was intense—but not nearly as much as his situation.

Aiden had never ridden a horse for long distances, let alone raced one. Now, he was competing in a match where the competitors weaved through obstacle courses like Olympic competitors. It seemed absurd—if he wasn’t drugged, he would have thought twice. Yet he didn’t. Now, he was going off to his death.

I can hear your thoughts, Halten chuffed, shaking his body. Have some faith. If I couldn’t do this much, I would have killed myself rather than face the shame.

Okay… but… your wings.

Halten snorted. Tamed two cursed beasts and still knows nothing of curses… just sit there. I’ll take care of the rest.

Aiden nodded and waited, becoming in tune with his pulse, embracing shallow breaths—feeling his mind losing focus from oxygen deprivation. Then they gave the announcement.

He couldn’t hear it, but he could feel the crowd cheering. Then his body shook as Halten rocketed to the sky, giving him so much gravitational pressure that he thought he was in a rocket ship.

It was so intense he thought that he had the fastest mount there—unaware that he was one of the slowest and the many were jeering or laughing or lamenting their bets. He also didn’t know the wobbles he was feeling were from Halten’s broken wings, which hadn’t flown for a century. He didn’t know many things, but he learned what everyone else did once Halten flew over the wall—

—curses were a big fucking deal. Because the moment they crossed through this suffocating membrane that left Aiden’s limbs tingling like electricity passing through them, Halten exploded with so much magical energy and soul force that Aiden blacked out. When he came too, he could barely breathe, and his body was experiencing intense waves of dysphoria like his nervous system had been unlodged from his mind.

He opened his eyes slowly and found Halten hovering in the sky above the forest.

Close your eyes, Halten said.

Aiden did, but not before he saw a swarm of multicolored birds blot out the skies around them.