They sank it in the lake and hoped that would be enough.

Nobody remembers who built Ouroboros Omega, only that it was the first blade ever launched and that it never stopped turning. Not that day, not that year. It out-spun every blader who tried to take it, and then it out-spun the ones who came to take it from them.

The old bladers could not beat it, so they did the next best thing: they sank it in the lake in the middle of the meadow, and they locked the water shut with eleven badges — one held by each of the strongest of them. As long as the badges stayed apart, the water stayed closed.

That was the arrangement. It held for a very long time.

The lake was the second problem. The first one was already in the sky, and locking it out took more than a pond.

So they made 8 of them. Eight beys, each one built past its final form, each one set down in a different region and told to turn there and not stop: a scarab in the flats, a stone on the ridge, something in the bog that the bog helped build. People grew up thinking they were monsters that happened to live nearby. Farmers walked around them. Bladers dared each other to get close.

They were bolts. Eight of them, driven into eight corners of the map, holding a door shut.

Centuries of that story got sanded down into a circuit. The eleven who held the badges became 11 Bey Captains, each one running a dojo in the region they were given, handing their badge to anyone who could take it off them. Most of them no longer know exactly why the badge matters. They know you do not give it away cheaply.

The city grew around the middle of it: a launcher shop, a league dish, streets full of bladers who will stop you for a match, and a house near the fountain that has been there longer than any of it.

And somewhere in every stadium they built, they kept the rail — a raised groove around the lip that whips a blade round the bowl and fires it back down at whatever is in the middle. The old bladers put it there deliberately. They knew what they might one day need to hit.

You start in the meadow with a starter blade and no idea what is under the water fifty paces away. You beat wild blades, you catch some of them, you take badges off captains who did not expect to lose them.

Eleven badges is not a completion percentage. It is the key. Take them all back to the lake, give them to the water, and the arrangement ends: Ouroboros Omega, the Drowned Crown, comes up out of the bottom of the pond with a few hundred years of not being beaten behind it.

That is one ending. It is not the last one.

Nobody told you the Titans were load-bearing. You worked through them one region at a time because they were the strongest things on the map and you wanted to know if you could.

With the last one down, the sky is not shut any more. Aetherion Ragnarok, the Sky-Splitter, has nowhere it lives — it has never needed anywhere — which means the one decision left is yours: pick the ground. Any region on the map. It comes down there, in front of you, and you find out whether eight Titans were enough of a warning.