Damian challenged me publicly at the Aster Rift Festival.
The festival was part sport, part concert, part monster hunt, and part excuse for the city to sell glowing snacks at criminal prices. Teams entered controlled rift zones and competed to clear monsters, rescue mannequins, and collect cores while drones broadcast everything. It was not politics. It was entertainment with a survival hazard.
Damian invited me with a smile so sharp it could cut wire. Everyone knew it was bait. I accepted immediately.
Grace said that was not the lesson she had been trying to teach me. Harper said she could fit cameras inside my coat buttons. Riley asked if the festival allowed vehicle entries. Owen asked if the snack stands were inside or outside the danger zone.
My team understood me.
The festival arena was built around an old stadium reinforced with crystal barriers. Artificial rift gates opened into rotating environments. Ruined streets, fake forests, subway tunnels, broken office blocks. Monsters came through under supervision from anchor machines. The rules were simple. Clear the zones. Save the targets. Do not kill other raiders. Do not destroy the audience stands.
I promised nothing about the stands.
The crowd was huge. Damian stood across the arena in a white coat, surrounded by elite fighters. I stood with Harper, Riley, Grace, and Owen, who had somehow become our official banner holder because he refused to fight but wanted a good seat.
The announcer asked for final words. Damian spoke about discipline, strength, responsibility, and the danger of reckless power. The crowd gave polite applause.
Then the microphone floated out of his hand, drifted across the arena, and landed in mine.
"I hope the snack stands survive," I said.
The crowd went wild.
The first zone opened into a ruined subway. Damian's team moved professionally, cutting down monsters with clean strikes. They were good. I never denied that. Powerful, trained, coordinated. The crowd cheered.
Then my team entered.
I touched the rails. The entire fake subway woke up like an angry dragon. Trains that were supposed to be props rolled forward under my control. Ticket gates snapped shut around monsters. Advertisement screens flashed false exits, leading beasts into dead ends. Harper's drones rode the ceiling lights. Riley drove a maintenance cart at speeds that violated common sense. Grace rescued every mannequin while also yelling at me for making a train do a backflip.
For the record, the train did not fully backflip. It performed an aggressive hop.
We cleared the zone in half Damian's time.
The second zone was a dark forest with no machines. The crowd expected me to struggle. Damian smiled.
I looked at the ground, the wet leaves, the monster tracks, the hidden anchor devices maintaining the rift, and the nervous little pulses inside the tracking collars on the rescue targets.
No machines, please. The arena itself was a machine.
I sent a soft current through the underground barrier grid and mapped every creature by the way its body disturbed the field. Invisible wolves appeared in my mind as moving shadows. I guided Riley through gaps with tiny sparks on the ground. Harper used battery drones as fake prey. Grace found the targets by following the pulse trail I painted in the air.
The alpha wolf jumped me from behind. I ducked, slapped a glowing sticker Harper had given me onto its nose, and the sticker exploded into a disco light. The alpha froze, hypnotized by rage and confusion. I patted its head with an insulated glove and knocked it out with a focused nerve pulse.
The crowd laughed so loud the arena shook. Damian stopped smiling.
The third zone was the trap.
It looked like a modern office tower. Too modern, too clean, too full of powered devices. Exactly the kind of place where I should dominate. That was what made it suspicious.
The moment we entered, every device turned against us. Desks unfolded into turrets. Elevators dropped. Ceiling lights fired cutting lasers. Security drones poured from vents. The crowd gasped. The announcer shouted that something was wrong with the arena control, but the barriers stayed locked.
Damian's team had already cleared their version of the zone. This one had been modified. Not by invisible game nonsense, but by someone with access to the anchor machines before the match. Someone who expected me to grab the circuits and get bitten by them.
I felt the trap immediately. Every machine was laced with black crystal pulses designed to reflect my control back into my nerves. If I tried to take command directly, it would be like grabbing a live wire with my soul.
So I did not grab. I lied.
I sent tiny fake signals into the office machines, weak enough to look like mistakes. The turrets adjusted. The drones followed. The lasers recalibrated. They thought they were tracking me. They were tracking a ghost made of bad math.
Harper caught on first and started laughing. She amplified my fake signal through her drones, creating dozens of phantom versions of us running through the halls. The turrets fired at empty corners. The elevators opened for nobody. The lasers carved motivational posters into confetti.
Riley used a rolling office chair as a vehicle, because her sense of dignity had never recovered from meeting me. She flew down a hallway, kicked off a wall, and knocked three drones into each other. Grace moved behind her, calm as ever, disabling traps near the rescue targets.
Owen, who had sworn he would stay at the entrance, got chased by a robotic coffee machine and accidentally discovered the hidden control room. He screamed my name. I turned into lightning, traveled through a floor outlet, and burst out of the coffee machine just as it cornered him. The machine sprayed espresso foam everywhere. Owen looked betrayed by technology.
Inside the control room, I found the black crystal relay powering the trap. It pulsed with Damian's signature, the same rhythm I had felt from his ring.
The obvious move was to destroy it, so I left it intact. I rewired its signal.
When the zone opened and the crowd saw us step out alive, the arena screen suddenly displayed the relay data, the hidden modifications, and the path of the tampering signal leading back to Damian's prep area. Not enough to rely on paper or boring arguments. Enough for every engineer, raider, and viewer to understand what had happened with their own eyes.
The crowd turned. Damian's perfect face cracked on every screen. He still tried to smile.
Then Owen, still covered in espresso foam, pointed at him and shouted, "He tried to murder us with a coffee machine!"
That did more damage than my evidence.