Chapter 131: Rematch (2)

Vaerith Solmane did not look around.

That was the first thing Logan noticed, and it was worth more than the two arrows Alice had just put into his partner.

The man heard his name said in a voice that had cracked for the first time all match. He did not turn his head. He did not break off, and he did not slow down by any amount Logan could measure.

"Widen your margins," he called back. "Stop trying to be efficient."

"That costs you."

"I know what it costs me. Widen them."

[ Attack: -15% ] [ Speed: -15% ]

Logan took a cut across the forearm that he would have avoided at full stats and felt the Skyrend Emberglass Coat eat most of it.

’Fifteen percent in about ninety seconds of contact.’ He gave ground and did not break away. ’Steady. No spikes. He is not trying to surprise me, he is trying to erode me, and erosion does not need surprises.’

Every instinct he had was screaming at him to disengage.

That was the whole design of the talent, he was fairly sure. Attrition Sovereign did not just shrink you.

It made staying next to the man feel like the mistake, then punished you for the four seconds it took to get clear and the forty it took to get any of it back.

’Xairon worked that out from a decay rate. I am living inside it.’

So he stayed.

Four hundred meters back, Alice had stopped shooting to win and started shooting to occupy.

It was not the same job at all and it took her about six arrows to adjust to it.

[ Starfall Cadence: 620 stacks. ]

Ilyra Tanthess was standing now. The stool lay on its side behind her and she had not picked it back up.

She was still counting. The stream had not stopped, but it had changed shape, and Alice could hear the difference in it from four hundred meters.

’She is splitting it.’ Alice sent nine more arrows at nine different points and watched the Oniniad woman shed all nine with movements much larger than eleven centimeters. ’Half of her is solving me. The other half is still trying to solve Logan’s fight.’

"Logan." She did not take her eyes off the target. "She is not feeding him clean anymore."

"I noticed."

"How?"

"Because he is blocking," Logan said. "He has not blocked anything since the tree."

That was the crack, and both sides saw it at the same moment.

Vaerith Solmane had spent the entire engagement not defending. He had moved, and the moving had been small and correct and perfectly informed, and he had never once had to put his sword between himself and anything.

Now he was putting his sword between himself and things.

[ Attack: -22% ] [ Speed: -22% ]

Logan landed a cut on him. It was not a good cut and it did not go deep, but it was the first thing either of them had touched.

"There," Vaerith said, sounding almost delighted about it. "Now we are actually fighting."

"You are down an oracle."

"I am down about forty percent of an oracle." He came back in without any hesitation at all. "Which is still more than anybody else in this match has."

Ilyra proved him right about eleven seconds later.

She had been retreating across the rise in a straight line, which Alice had read as panic and had been wrong about.

At the top of the rise she stopped, turned, and walked directly into the next volley.

Eleven arrows. She took two.

[ Ilyra Tanthess: 58% HP ]

"She chose those," Alice said into the sigil. Her voice had gone flat. "She let two through on purpose so she could stop computing nine of them."

"Can she keep doing that?"

"For a while. She has fifty-eight percent to spend and she is spending it deliberately." Alice was already drawing again. "She turned her health into processing time."

’That is the coldest thing I have ever watched somebody do to herself,’ she thought. ’And she did the arithmetic on it before she did it.’

Then Ilyra spoke to Alice across four hundred meters without raising her voice.

"You are not trying to kill me."

Alice did not answer. Answering cost a draw.

"You worked out that you do not have to." Ilyra shed the next volley and gave up another eight percent doing it.

"You only have to make me expensive. So you are buying his fight with my attention, and paying for it in arrows you know will miss."

The stream of numbers resumed underneath the words, which meant she had been doing both the entire time.

"It is a good plan," she said. "I would have built the same one."

"Then why tell me."

"Because it will not be enough, and I would rather you knew that now than found out later."

’She is wrong.’ Alice drew again and did not let the thought go any further than that. ’She has to be wrong, because she is measuring what I have already shown her.’

[ Attack: -31% ] [ Speed: -31% ] [ HP: 47% ]

Logan was losing and he knew exactly how much and he did not change anything.

’Thirty-one percent. Four minutes of contact. He is right on the rate Xairon calculated and he has not deviated from it once.’

The hard part was not the damage. The hard part was that everything felt wrong in a way that had nothing to do with pain.

His strikes arrived late. His footwork came up short.

Reaper’s Stride at four hundred stacks moved him a distance that had been correct a minute ago and was not correct now. Every adjustment he made was an adjustment to a body that would be smaller again by the time he finished making it.

’This is what he does to people. He does not beat you. He makes you slowly wrong.’

Billy’s voice came over the sigil, tight with something that was not fear but was adjacent to it.

"Boss. You are at forty-seven percent and you have not used anything."

"I know."

"Say the word and thirty-seven of us come up that rise."

"They will not land anything, Billy. You already tried."

"Then say a different word."

"Not yet."

Vaerith heard none of that, and worked it out anyway.

Logan watched him do it. There was a moment in the middle of an exchange where the man’s eyes went from the blade to Logan’s face, and stayed there a half second longer than the fight allowed.

"You are not going to use it," Vaerith said.

"Use what?"

"The speed skill. The one you took to four thousand stacks at the crater." He gave ground for the first time, three steps, deliberate.

"You have been in contact with me for four minutes and thirty-one percent and you have not touched it. You are not saving it. You have decided not to use it at all."

Logan did not answer.

"Why?"

"Because you are counting on me using it," Logan said.

Vaerith Solmane laughed.

It was not a performance. It came out of him the way laughter does when somebody has genuinely got you, and he did not stop immediately.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, I was."

"Ilyra has your window at twenty seconds and your cooldown at somewhere over nine minutes. The entire shape of this was that you would panic at forty percent and spend it, and then I would have eight minutes with a man who had nothing left."

"I know."

"And you worked that out."

"Alice worked it out." Logan gave ground and gave ground and did not break contact. "Xairon worked out the rest of it. I just decided to be uncomfortable for four minutes."

[ Attack: -38% ] [ Speed: -38% ] [ HP: 34% ]

"You are at thirty-four percent."

"Yes."

"You are not going to last another four."

"No," Logan agreed.

And then, for the first time since the ship came over the horizon, he stopped giving ground.

"Alice."

"Here."

"How many stacks."

There was a pause of maybe half a second while she pulled the number. Logan could hear her breathing through the sigil, fast and even, the way she breathed when she was firing without stopping.

[ Starfall Cadence: 1,140 stacks. ]

"Eleven forty," Alice said.

Vaerith Solmane’s expression did something complicated.

"Say that again."

"One thousand one hundred and forty." Alice did not sound remotely out of breath. "I have been shooting at your partner for six minutes and she has dodged almost all of it. Every single one of those still counted."

’Eleven hundred and forty Attack from Tempest Cadence alone.’ Logan felt something settle in his chest that had been unsettled since the crater. ’On top of everything else she owns. And he spent the entire fight making sure the reduction landed on me.’

"You shrank the wrong one," he said.

Then he triggered it.

[ Grimbound Threshold ]