[AGoDR] Congratulations on your loss.

The tension in Jude's shoulders seemed to visibly fade as Aria took over, bringing up... losses? That was what it sounded like. At first he couldn't help but have a wait, are they saying I'm the biggest loser?, before realizing that it was something more like perserverence. There was no mandatory minimum on the number of matches someone had to participate in, and he imagined that a lot of people got their first loss and then called it a day, leaving the tournament with a 0-1 ratio. He had some wins, but he also had a lot of losses, and he'd explicitly credit that to knowing that the 'prize' was a bit of a... well. It wasn't good.

For a moment, Wolfgang looked like he was going to make a comment, but after a quick glance to Cornelius he decided to keep his mouth shut.

The tension slid right back in on ask something of you first, and then... honesty. A truth. His brain was running a mile a minute, thinking of all the possible options, only to hear that Aria already had something in mind - something he should have realized on his own.

Someone else might have been able to claim ignorance, to say I don't recall, but Jude couldn't. He mentally rewound to the exact moment, picking through it in his head. He was far enough away from it emotionally to know the answer, to be able to say exactly why he'd left as he did, even as he grimaced, giving Cornelius a small glance before deciding he wouldn't care. What about Wolfgang? Jude shot him a brief look, and Wolfgang nodded in return.

"I'll get-"

Jude shook his head.

"The point is... is honesty. So you might as well stay here."

Just as long as he didn't mention it to Jude's dad... but he'd deal with that later.

"KirMir was talking about... the lethality of weapons and the laws. They were right that, at home, you didn't want lethal weapons going around. Even when dealing with dangerous criminals, you wanted non-lethal as much as possible. But then they asked 'Would you hesitate to take a life?' and that was... that was a bit too close to me. I'd never killed anyone back home, but I had to here. Maybe two weeks before our challenge. I had to kill someone in self defense, and I didn't hesitate for it, and it was..."

His voice cracked, and his eyes went down. There was no way he was making eye contact.

"...hard," he finally finished.

It was a mercy, Jude reminded himself. She asked in private. She wasn't the type to spread it around. She seemed to understand the weight of it, and she was sympathetic, and what he was getting out of it was vastly more valuable than what he'd given. But even so he felt like there was a stone in his belly, a weight that hadn't been there before. Mostly he tried not to think about what had happened. He didn't want it brought up. He wanted it in the past. Something that existed in the past, not in the present, that didn't color his daily life in any way at all.

Even if it did.

He tried to focus on the positives. Pocket dimension. That would be nice. A pocket dimension was useful for a variety of things, regardless of the exact nature of how it worked. It was something that he could work on with Broen, who was already vastly more skilled, and..

Oh right she had her hand out.

Jude caught himself (Maybe a little bit too slowly), reaching out to take Aria's hand and giving it a nice firm shake. The kind of handshake you practiced, because he had.

"Thank you," he said after a moment. "I'm sorry it interrupted the challenge in the first place. I'd have liked to have finished, but I suspected I'd have lost anyway." Mostly because, you know, KirMir was all but impossible to read.

Jude didn't particularly like Cornelius. A small part of that was the fact that Cornelius had effectively tricked him on their second ever meeting. The rest was the fact that the entire tournament was... well, sketchy. Poorly handled, as Jude would say. It was just a way to shuffle his responsibilities off onto someone who was ill prepared and unaware of the consequences.

But that wasn't going to stop him from being nice and formal.

He turned to Cornelius, giving him a small bow.

"Thank you for this," Jude said, in his very polite talking-to-the-sponsors tone. "I'm going to do my best to make good use of the ability."

He gave Aria a quick glance, and then straightened up, giving a small crack of his neck. He was going to have to deal with his arm, and then... well, then he could probably practice it to see how it worked.

He gave another small bow - to both of them - and then straightened up.

"It was good seeing you both again though." He suspected he'd see at least one of them again soon.