I didn't sleep.
I found a bench in a public garden near the city center and sat on it until the light changed, and then I kept sitting. My body hurt in ways I'd stopped cataloguing. The panel was still dark. The city moved around me — merchants opening stalls, adventurers heading out in groups, children crossing the square — and none of it connected to anything I was experiencing.
I kept seeing Lecia's eyes.
Open. Aware. Fixed on Max.
I kept hearing the sound her body made.
At some point the sun had fully risen and I still hadn't moved, and that was when the soldiers appeared.
Four of them, in the livery of the city guard. The one in front looked at me the way people look at something they've already categorized.
"Arthur Shozoria?"
"Yes."
They didn't explain. Two of them took my arms — not rough, exactly, but not gentle either — and the other two fell in behind, and that was how I understood the adventurer's warning from the day before had not been optional.
---
The cell was underground.
Stone floor, stone walls, a gap near the ceiling too small to call a window. The smell was old and layered — damp and rust and something biological I chose not to identify. I sat with my back against the wall and stared at the dark space where the panel usually lived and tried to think clearly.
*RedEngine is down.*
*I'm being held for a tribunal.*
*Three people are dead because I wanted to keep going.*
I turned that last one over for a long time. Max had told me the decision belonged to all of them. He'd been insistent about it, at the end, like it mattered to him that I understood. And technically he was right — we'd all voted, all four of us, and nobody had been forced through that passage.
But I'd felt the power in my arms and I'd *wanted* to go.
That was the part I kept coming back to.
I pressed *Yes* on a warning I hadn't finished reading. I'd said *your call* to Max while my face was already showing him my answer. I'd been the one who'd suggested moving forward on floor four when Lecia had said we could stop.
*Your call.* Like I wasn't making one.
I sat with that until the guard came in the morning.
---
The tribunal hall was enormous.
Not a courtroom — something older, built on a different scale, with tiered seating carved from stone that rose up and back in a half-circle like an amphitheatre. The ceiling was vaulted and distant. Sound carried strangely, coming back to you from directions you didn't expect.
Every seat was occupied.
I hadn't expected that. I didn't know why they were all here — whether this was public record, whether tribunal sessions were entertainment in Avalon, whether word had spread specifically about this case. Their faces were turned toward the center of the floor, where I was standing, with expressions ranging from neutral curiosity to something harder.
A woman was sitting in the front row.
Old. Small. Dressed in plain clothes that looked like they'd been put on in a hurry, or maybe just slept in. She was holding something in her lap — I couldn't see what — and she was looking at me with an expression I recognized even though I'd never seen it directed at me before.
She knew who I was.
I looked away from her before I could think too much about what that meant.
The judge was already at the bench — a heavy-set man with the unhurried manner of someone who had done this many times. He waited until the room settled, then looked down at me.
"Arthur Shozoria."
"Yes."
"You understand why you're here."
It wasn't a question, but I answered it anyway. "The tribunal is reviewing my team's conduct during the Hero's Chance event. Specifically, entering floors beyond our registered clearance level."
"Correct." He set down the document he'd been holding. "Your registration authorized your team for floor three as the maximum. Your team reached floor six. Three members of your party died as a result of the encounter on that floor." A pause. "You are the only survivor."
The hall was quiet enough that I could hear the woman in the front row breathing.
"Is there anything you want to say before I outline the charges?"
I thought about what I'd rehearsed in the cell. The careful explanation of how the decision had been collective, how no one had been coerced, how the rules had never been explained to me. All of it true. All of it also, when I looked at it clearly, beside the point.
"I pushed for us to keep going," I said. "Not alone — everyone agreed. But I was the reason the momentum kept building. I had a power advantage on floor five that I didn't fully understand, and it made me feel like we could handle more than we could. When it failed, we couldn't recover." I stopped. "I'm not saying the others bear no responsibility. I'm saying I bear mine."
The hall was very quiet.
The judge studied me for a moment. "How did you survive floor six when the rest of your party did not?"
I'd expected this question. I still didn't have a clean answer for it.
"My teammate Max held the creatures back long enough for me to reach the exit. He made a deliberate choice to buy me time at the cost of his own." The words came out flat. Not because I didn't feel them — because feeling them fully while standing in a public hall felt like something I didn't have the right to do yet. "I survived because he chose that. Not because of anything I did."
Silence.
Then the woman in the front row stood up.
She was smaller standing than she'd looked sitting. Her hands were at her sides — one of them, I could see now, was holding a folded piece of cloth. The kind of thing you hold when you need something to hold.
"May I speak?" Her voice was steadier than I expected. Steadier than mine would have been.
The judge nodded.
She turned to face me.
"My daughter's name was Lecia," she said. "She was twenty years old. She wanted to be an adventurer since she was eight — since before she could cast a basic light spell, she was already planning which guilds she'd apply to." A pause. "Her brother's name was Max. You know that."
I couldn't look away from her. I didn't feel like I had the right to.
"I'm not here to tell you what you owe them," she said. "I don't think you could pay it. I'm not even here to say you killed them — I've spoken to people who were in the pyramid that day, and I understand it was more complicated than that." Her jaw tightened. "But I need you to understand that they were people. Not a team that failed a mission. Not a cautionary example. People who had a mother who is now standing in a tribunal hall holding the last piece of cloth her daughter touched before she walked into a pyramid and didn't come back."
She sat down.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. There wasn't anything to say that wouldn't have been less than what she'd just said, and she didn't want my words anyway. I could see that clearly.
I looked at the floor instead.
The judge let the silence hold for a moment before he spoke again.
"Arthur Shozoria. The tribunal finds that your team violated the terms of your event registration, resulting in the deaths of three participants. The question before this court is the degree of your individual culpability and the appropriate consequence."
He looked at his documents. Then at me.
"You are not a registered adventurer. You have no guild affiliation, no established rank, and by your own account no prior knowledge of the event's regulations." A pause. "These are mitigating factors. They do not eliminate responsibility, but they affect how that responsibility is weighed."
He set the documents down.
"However. A young man with no rank, no registration, and no knowledge of dungeon protocol entered the sixth floor of the Death Pyramid during a ranked event and survived. That raises questions this court cannot simply overlook."
The hall shifted. I could feel it — a collective attention sharpening.
"The tribunal's ruling is as follows." He straightened. "Arthur Shozoria is found guilty of breach of event protocol, resulting in the deaths of registered participants. The sentence is imprisonment, pending a secondary review of the circumstances of his survival. The duration of imprisonment is not fixed — it will be determined by the outcome of that review, which may include a recommendation for execution depending on what that review reveals."
The word landed in the hall without drama.
*Execution.*
Not announced with weight. Just placed on the table with the rest of it, like a document to be filed.
"The prisoner will be returned to custody. The review will be scheduled within the week."
The guards moved.
I let them take my arms again.
As they turned me toward the exit, I passed the front row. The woman was still sitting there, looking at the cloth in her hands, not at me.
I stopped walking for just a moment — the guards didn't stop me immediately, just applied slight pressure forward — and I said, low enough that only she could hear:
"Her name was Lecia. I'll remember that."
She didn't look up.
But her hands stopped moving.
The guards walked me out.
---
Back in the cell, in the dark, I sat against the wall and looked at the place where the panel should have been.
Still nothing.
*Execution pending review.*
I turned the phrase over. It didn't feel real yet. It felt like something happening to someone else, in a story I was watching from outside.
*Max held those creatures back so I could get out. He chose that. And now I'm sitting in a cell waiting to find out if it was worth anything.*
I didn't have an answer for that.
I pressed my back harder against the stone wall and closed my eyes.
Somewhere in the dark corner of my vision, something flickered.
Faint. Barely there.
The ghost of a red light.
I opened my eyes.
The panel was still dark.
But something in the corner — the far edge, where I'd noticed that unclear icon back in the hospital room — was just barely visible.
Not open. Not active.
Just present.
*Still there,* I thought.
I didn't know if that was good news.
But it was the only thing I had.
[End of Chapter 6]