Chapter 76

Chapter 76: Chapter 76

I didn’t step back to swing my sword again. If I gave Aurio half a step of breathing room to reset his feet, he would take my sword out of my numb right hand inside three exchanges.

Instead, while his blade was still down past my left hip from the missed cut, I let go of my bastard sword’s grip with my left hand, slammed my own heavy blade downward vertically until the sharp point buried itself four inches deep into the frozen clay right between Aurio’s front boot and Dross’s shield rim—pinning the flat of Aurio’s low blade against the side of his own shin—and threw my free left arm straight around the back of Aurio’s neck, grabbing a fistful of his black leather brigandine collar and his crimson Rank One sash.

Up in the bleachers, nine hundred students let out a collective, shocked roar as I dragged the Student Council President nose-to-nose with me in the dirt.

"You’re fighting like a ditch-digger, Elvit," Aurio breathed, his amber eyes wide and blazing with golden heat three inches from my face as he tried to wrench his trapped sword out from behind my planted blade.

"I am a ditch-digger, Gentrimio," I grunted through my teeth, tucking my chin tight against his right shoulder so he couldn’t bring his steel pommel up into my jaw, and hooked my right boot hard behind his front ankle to keep him from stepping back out of the clinch.

Ten feet away on the wings, with Aurio and me locked together like two dogs in a pit and Luckas trading frantic, close-range kicks and pommel strikes with Valen Dross against our backs, the other half of the arena turned into a desperate race against the clock.

Corbin Vane and Cassia Thorne saw their captain tied up in the middle.

They didn’t rush in to pull me off Aurio—if they bunched all four of their squad into a six-foot circle, Luckas’s fire would cook all of them at once. Instead, Corbin and Cassia turned their blades squarely on Nia and Kaelen on the left wing to get the two eliminations they needed to end the match.

Corbin moved like a fourth-year who had spent three summers hunting boars in the southern hills. His seven-foot ash spear didn’t jab straight in and out like Redgrave’s had in the dark quarry; the eight-inch leaf blade at the tip flickered in tight, figure-eight circles that came at Nia’s knees, throat, and bruised left ribs all at the same time.

Nia gave ground step by step toward the south wall, her teeth clenched so hard her jaw muscles bulged under her pale skin, punching her twelve-inch iron buckler left and right in a shower of bright steel sparks to keep the razor-sharp spearhead off her throat.

Every time Corbin’s heavy shaft glanced off her buckler, the shock jarred straight into her taped left ribs. On the fourth block, a muffled cry tore out of Nia’s throat as her bruised left side cramped hard, dropping her shield elbow two inches too low.

Corbin didn’t hesitate. He flipped the butt of his spear up, drove the sharp steel edge of the leaf blade through the two-inch gap above her buckler rim, and sliced a four-inch gash clean through the boiled leather pad on top of Nia’s left shoulder—drawing a bright, immediate ribbon of red blood across her grey wool sleeve—before slamming the flat wooden shaft against her side to knock her off her feet into the clay.

"First blood and knockdown on Valerius!" the south wall judge bellowed immediately, throwing his red flag onto the sand so Corbin wouldn’t stab her on the ground. "Valerius is out! Stay down on the sand, Cadet!"

One to zero for Squad One. If Kaelen or Luckas went down next—or if Aurio got his right hand free to put his pommel into my ribs—the match was over.

Corbin started to pull his seven-foot spear back from standing over Nia so he could pivot left and take Kaelen in the back while Kaelen was trading lightning-fast saber blocks with Cassia Thorne ten feet away.

He couldn’t pull his spear back.

As Nia had gone down onto her back in the yellow clay with the judge’s red flag fluttering beside her boot, she hadn’t let go of her weapon the way a proper tournament duelist was supposed to when the flag dropped. In the half-second before the judge’s shout finished echoing off the wall, Nia had hooked the curved iron boss of her buckler over the steel collar of Corbin’s spearhead and rolled onto her right hip on the ground, sitting squarely on the front two feet of his wooden shaft in the dirt.

"Leggo the wood, First-Year, you’re out!" Corbin barked, yanking hard on the ash pole with both hands to free his point before Kaelen or Luckas could turn on him.

Nia immediately opened both hands and held them up in the air so the judge couldn’t penalize our squad for holding a live weapon after being called out—though because her hundred and twenty pounds of dead weight was already lying flat across the front end of his spear shaft in the dirt, it took Corbin one full second of tugging to slide the broad leaf-blade out from under her padded hip.

One second in Pit One was a lifetime.

In the center of the ring, Luckas heard the judge call Nia out.

He was bleeding from a split lower lip where Valen Dross had clipped him with the steel rim of his kite shield, and his midnight-blue tunic was torn open down the left sleeve. The instant he saw Corbin tugging at his trapped spear shaft six feet behind Dross, Luckas stopped trying to push Dross into Aurio.

Luckas opened all three mental valves in his chest at once.

He didn’t throw a wide wave of fire like he had against Mercer. He pressed the flat of his silver longsword straight against the center of Dross’s steel kite shield and released a single, blindingly loud concussive burst of superheated air right between the two flat pieces of metal.

BOOM.

The trapped pocket of expanding air acted like a powder charge going off inside a stove pipe. The blast threw Dross backward into me and Aurio while propelling Luckas himself backward across the sand like he had been kicked by a mule—sending him tumbling heels-over-head right into the six-foot gap between Corbin Vane and Cassia Thorne.

Corbin had just yanked his spear point free from under Nia’s hip when Luckas came rolling out of the smoke cloud at his boots.

Luckas didn’t even wait to stand all the way up. Rising off one knee with his face black with soot and red blood running down his chin, he swung his blazing silver longsword upward with both hands, catching Corbin’s seven-foot ash spear shaft six inches behind the steel socket—and sheared the wood cleanly in two in a shower of burning splinters.

Before Corbin could drop the headless wooden stick and draw his side-dagger, Luckas surged to his feet, kicked the big fourth-year squarely in the breastplate to knock him flat onto his back against the low stone arena wall, and planted the live, smoking point of his silver sword half an inch from the hollow of Corbin’s throat.

"Vane is pinned!" the south judge roared, raising his second flag. "One to one! Keep that point still, Vance!"

Now there were only six seconds left before everything in the center came apart.

Against my chest, Aurio Gentrimio felt Corbin go down.

The polite representative was gone.

Aurio didn’t try to pull his trapped sword out of the dirt anymore. His golden Ember surged so hot that the leather collar of my tunic began to smoke under his chin. He let go of his longsword hilt entirely with both hands, grabbed my right wrist and my left elbow with his bare leather gloves, and used pure, overwhelming fourth-year physical leverage to pry my grip off his collar and throw me backward off my feet.

My resin-taped right wrist gave a sharp, tearing crack under his fingers as he broke my hold.

I hit the frozen yellow clay hard on my left shoulder five feet away, leaving my own runic bastard sword still stuck upright in the dirt beside Aurio’s blade.

Valen Dross recovered from Luckas’s blast at the same second, lifting his heavy broadsword to charge across the sand and knock Luckas off Corbin—while Aurio bent his knees to yank his pale longsword out of the clay and finish me before I could get up.

Except Kaelen was already done with Cassia Thorne.

While Cassia had turned her head for half a heartbeat when Luckas’s fire-blast went off three yards behind her, the fifteen-percent speed boost from the crown mineral in Kaelen’s shoulders had paid off in full.

Kaelen hadn’t tried to out-fence a Rank Nine fourth-year with his bruised left arm. The instant Cassia’s eyes flickered toward the explosion, Kaelen had stepped straight inside the scissor-arc of her twin curved sabers—taking a shallow, four-inch slice across the padded leather of his left forearm guard that drew a thin line of blood without cutting the tendon—hooked his right leg behind both of her knees, and slammed her flat onto her back in the frost with both of his live steel shortsword points crossed tight against the sides of her neck like a pair of iron tongs.

"Wait—pin on Thorne!" the north wall judge shouted, his voice cracking with shock as he threw his red flag into the air half a second before Aurio’s hand touched the hilt of his sword in the dirt.

The arena warden didn’t even use his whistle; he hit the bronze gong on the wall with his iron baton hard enough to dent the metal.

BONG. BONG. BONG.

"HALT! LIVE STEEL HALT!" the warden roared, jumping straight over the low stone barrier into the sand between Valen Dross and Luckas. "Two eliminations on Squad One—Vane and Thorne! Match concluded! Drop your points!"

For three full seconds, nobody in the entire twelve-tier amphitheater made a single sound.

I lay on one elbow in the yellow clay, my chest heaving for air, looking down at my right gauntlet where the resin tape had split open inside the leather, while a slow drip of bright red blood ran out of my left nostril from where my face had scraped against Aurio’s studded shoulder pad in the clinch.

Ten feet away, Luckas stood leaning heavily on his smoking silver longsword over Corbin Vane, his chest rising and falling like a blown racehorse; Kaelen knelt in the frost with his twin blades frozen half an inch from Cassia Thorne’s carotid artery; and Nia sat in the dirt by the south wall with her right hand pressed tight over the bleeding