CHAPTER 89: HUMILIATION

After listening to his older brother’s words, Kael laughed to himself, but his expression remained as indifferent as ever.

He gripped the long sword in his hand and assumed a relaxed stance full of openings.

"Begin!" announced the referee.

Kael disappeared instantly.

A single sharp sound rang out. When Jasper reacted, he was already flying through the air, his body twisted by a brutal kick that sent him several meters away.

He rolled across the platform like an empty sack until he came to rest on his side, panting. His face showed a mixture of shock and confusion. He hadn’t seen anything. Not a movement. Not an intention.

The first blow wasn’t even with a sword. It was a simple kick.

Rage clouded his vision. This was supposed to be his moment of triumph, his rebirth... and instead, he had been swept away like an insect.

He tried to get up, but noticed a shadow covering him. When he looked up, Kael was already there, standing in front of him, as if he had never moved.

"That’s it? Pathetic," Kael said in a dry, emotionless voice. As if he were describing trash.

Jasper gritted his teeth. But before he could speak or move, he received a second kick, this time directly to the face.

His head spun violently from the impact, and his body rolled again. He tasted the metallic taste of blood filling his mouth.

He tried to get up, but before he could, a foot crushed his head against the ground.

THUD!

Jasper struggled. His body trembled. His legs moved, searching for momentum. But he couldn’t get up. It was as if a mountain was standing on him.

"Move, big brother," Kael muttered contemptuously, his voice as calm as it was cruel. "Weren’t you supposed to be reborn today?"

Every word was like poison.

Jasper had never experienced such humiliation. They weren’t just defeating him physically. They were destroying him from within, crushing every last shred of dignity he had left.

From above, Kael looked down at him with his usual indifference. But in his eyes... something flickered. A dark spark, barely visible. A trace of silent hatred.

The memory came back to life, so clearly that it was as if he were experiencing it again.

It was her mother’s.

When she died tragically in her past life, after a long series of sexual abuse by her brother Jasper and other elderly inmates, she committed suicide.

The memory was vivid: her body hanging from the tree, her neck twisted and her face swollen, stained a grotesque purple. Her legs still swayed in the wind, and thick drops of blood and semen dripped from between them, slowly dripping onto the dry ground.

That was why he left Kiran Mountain and began sailing across the five regions before all the events that would mark a turning point erupted.

The dark gleam in his eyes grew deeper, and he put much more weight on his leg, seeking to smash Jasper’s head like a watermelon. However, he stopped and withdrew his leg.

"Get up, it’s still too early to finish," Kael said. His voice sounded much darker and colder than usual, but his expression remained the same.

Jasper got up with difficulty, feeling a sharp ringing in his ears. His emotions at that moment were in complete chaos. There was a trace of fear in his eyes as he looked at his younger brother’s expressionless face.

But when he remembered the words his mother Scarlett had said to him before the fight, that fear disappeared. He was more afraid of her than Kael, because he knew she would abandon him, and in a clan full of tigers and hyenas, being alone was the same as death.

"Don’t get cocky just because you caught me off guard," Jasper spat, struggling to his feet. His face burned, both from the blow and the humiliation.

He circulated his mana essence to his dantian, quickly transforming it into aura, and launched into the attack with everything he had. He wanted to erase what had just happened immediately. He wanted to regain his dignity.

But his sword didn’t even graze Kael.

With a simple movement of his feet, Kael dodged the horizontal slash.

And without missing a beat, he kicked him straight in the ankle.

CRACK.

Jasper lost his balance and fell back to the floor, clumsy and ridiculous.

Before he could get up, he was kicked again. This time in the abdomen, hard and brutal, as if he were just a ball in the way.

He rolled off the platform.

Kael approached with calm steps that echoed throughout the coliseum, which had been completely silent since the start of the fight.

They weren’t expecting this. They wanted a fight full of emotion like the previous ones, not this cold brutality.

In their minds, they remembered the rumors about Kael being a cold-blooded monster who dragged corpses around like trash. But because of the spectacle he had put on in previous days, they had forgotten about it.

They swallowed hard, waiting for what was about to happen.

Kael crouched down, grabbed Jasper by the hair, looked him in the eyes, and said in a chilling voice:

"If this is what your rebirth was going to be like... you’re better off dead."

Jasper trembled.

It was as if his organs were shrinking at the same time. Sweat began to soak his body, and his will to fight disappeared completely. He felt death breathing down his neck, cold and inevitable.

I’m going to die! He thought in panic, struggling clumsily to free himself.

But Kael simply let him go.

He didn’t consider him a threat. Not even an obstacle. He let him go with the same disinterest with which one discards a dirty rag.

Jasper fell to the ground. And then the unthinkable happened.

He began to crawl. Pathetically. Desperately. Crawling across the combat platform like an insect, searching for the exit, begging in his mind for the battle to be over.

And everyone saw it.

Family members, nobles, commoners. They saw him flee without dignity. Without pride. Without courage.

No one said a word.

Because everyone knew that, at that moment, Jasper Medici had been destroyed.

But Kael had no intention of letting it end so quickly.

Just as Jasper tried to leave the combat platform, a kick hit him in the back and sent him flying back to the center.

He rolled across the floor, struggling to get up.

He tried to run away again, but Kael intercepted him once more. And he threw him again as if he were a weightless doll.

And so it went, over and over again.

Jasper ran. Kael threw him back. The cycle repeated itself before everyone’s eyes.

The audience, which had been watching intently at first, now fell silent. Some gritted their teeth. Others looked away, uncomfortable. No one knew what to say.

This was not the spectacle they had expected from the Great Spring Tournament.

But it was what they were seeing. And they couldn’t deny it.

Just as the announcer had said: this day would go down in history.

And not for glory... but for the utter humiliation of one of the young masters of the Medici Clan.