The moment the moderator declared the competition's winners, Solanky and Elisa were pulled from the trial grounds and teleported out. The moderator asked them to follow him to receive their rewards from the city leader, the grand elder, Elena, and the king of the Bayoka clan. Behind them, the arena emptied in a rush as the crowds scattered back to their home planets and clans. The moderator led them through a hidden passage — one that seemed to shift and reposition itself with every step — until it opened into a vast hallway.
They emerged into the main hall. Three smaller thrones stood arranged before a single towering one. The lesser thrones rose two meters high; the great throne behind them stretched eight meters into the air. As they approached, a blurred figure coalesced out of nothingness, as though stepping through from some separate dimension entirely, and settled onto the largest throne.
The moderator bowed low and greeted the figure, then introduced him — the city leader, overseer of the fiery crimson star system, a being half a step from dimensional godhood. Solanky and the others bowed at once. Elena did not.
The moderator froze, unsure how to respond — some instinct in his blood told him not to correct her, that whatever she was, it outmatched the city leader by far. The city leader's brow lifted at the slight, but Elena only glanced around the hall, entirely unbothered.
He let it go, turning instead to Solanky and Elisa. "The two of you have performed remarkably. As the one who organized this competition, it falls to me to reward such an outstanding showing." He snapped his fingers, and the hall around them dissolved, replaced by a space rippling with countless spatial distortions.
The king, the moderator, and Barusi all went rigid — even the faintest brush against distorted spatial energy could unmake them entirely. The city leader spoke again, but this time his words were aimed elsewhere. "How much longer do you intend to wear that disguise, your supreme highness?"
Elena turned toward him, an easy smile on her lips. "Is it really that unconvincing, Papa Niko?" He answered without hesitation. "I wouldn't dare say so."
He crossed the space between them and knelt at her feet in a full kowtow. The moderator, the king, and Barusi stood frozen, reeling at the sight. Elena smiled down at him, then lifted her gaze and let out a slow breath. Instantly, the spatial distortions unraveled and vanished, and the space itself began to shift and reshape. A distant, thunderous boom rolled through the air — everyone but Elena turned toward the sound, catching only a blinding flash of light where it had come from. The city leader bowed again, gratitude and joy plain on his face, then settled back to watch the light fade.
Elena turned to the moderator, the king, and Barusi, and smiled. It was not a comforting smile — all three felt, in that instant, as though every secret they carried lay bare before her.
She raised a hand and closed it into a fist. The space around them began to shrink, folding in on itself, and the hall snapped back to its ordinary form. What remained of the distorted space had compressed down into a small, glowing ball. Elena tossed it to the city leader. "This holds countless possible configurations for restructuring and creating a million galaxies. Study it, experiment with it — it should help you break through to the dimensional god level." The city leader's face lit with pure elation; the gift she'd handed him was the kind dimensional gods themselves would kill for.
With that, Elena bid the city leader farewell and vanished, taking the Bayoka clan with her. Left behind, the moderator — who had never once seen his city leader so openly thrilled — seized the moment to ask about her. The city leader only shook his head. "It's fortunate you didn't offend her. She is a being of power far beyond the dimensional gods. But I won't speak of her origins — doing so would draw danger to you, and forge a bond of cause and effect between the two of you. Trust me. You don't want that."
Elena and the others returned to planet Sabiru within seconds — a distance so vast that the speed of it left everyone reeling. One step forward, and they stood again in the main hall of the Bayoka clan.
Elena told the grand elder she needed to inspect the planet, that she'd be gone two days, and that she wasn't to be disturbed. Then she vanished from where she stood.
She reappeared in the frozen wastes of planet Sabiru. Crouching low, she called on her ancient dragon eye technique to peer through the ice beneath her feet — and found something sealed deep beneath the frozen layers. She wove a series of seals with one hand, and pink flames kindled to life around her, melting through the ice as she descended. Behind her, the melted ice sealed itself shut again, erasing any trace of the passage she'd carved.
She descended fifty thousand kilometers before finally coming to a stop, and what she found there struck her still. She shifted into her dragon form — though this time, barely a few meters in length — and moved forward through the ice, until she saw him: a man curled within a thick shell of frozen ice, bound by layer upon layer of seals and ancient engravings.
He wore a grey robe, and above his head hung a golden halo bearing just two words. Elena drew closer, read them, and murmured, "The Voice." The instant the name left her lips, the man's eyes opened, and he looked at her.
Elena went still, a memory surfacing unbidden — a man from her past who bore this same face exactly. In that memory, he had gifted her a castle woven from countless individual spaces, and a temple. And then it struck her, sudden and sharp: the statue in the Temple of Fate, the one holding the scroll. It was him.
The figure closed his eyes again. "It is not yet time. Elena, you must leave this plane of existence within the next two months — or you will expose his location to the gods of creation and the devils of destruction alike."
Then he fell silent. Elena sat with the shock of it — she had never imagined an early-stage source god could be lying dormant in the depths of planet Sabiru. She rose swiftly to the surface and laid down countless restriction seals and spatial lockdowns around the site, sealing it tight behind her.