Chapter 132: Rematch (3/3)

The stacks came up faster than they had at the crater, because this time he was not afraid of them.

```

[ Reaper’s Stride: 1,200 stacks. ]

[ MP: 88% ]

```

Attrition Sovereign had taken thirty-eight percent off his base Speed. It had not taken anything off the multiplier.

’He shrank the number the stacks are built on.’ Logan felt the bonus climb and the strain vanish straight into his MP bar. ’He did not shrink the stacks.’

```

[ Reaper’s Stride: 2,400 stacks. ]

[ MP: 71% ]

```

At twenty-four hundred, a man running at sixty-two percent of himself was still faster than anything on that rock.

Vaerith Solmane felt the change before he saw it. He stopped giving ground, set his feet, and raised his sword into a guard Logan had never watched him use.

"There it is," Vaerith said. "Nineteen seconds."

"You know the number."

"She told me the number." He did not look back at his partner. "She has told me every number you own."

---

Four hundred meters away, Ilyra Tanthess was doing arithmetic that had no good answers left in it.

Alice could see it happening. The stream coming off the Oniniad woman had split cleanly in two, and the two halves were fighting each other for her attention.

One half was solving Alice’s arrows.

The other half was trying to follow Logan, who was now moving faster than it could measure.

```

[ Reaper’s Stride: 3,100 stacks. ]

```

’She cannot track him and dodge me.’ Alice drew and held. ’She has to pick one.’

Ilyra picked.

She stopped dodging.

Not partially. Not with a wider margin or a chosen sacrifice. She turned her back on four hundred meters of archer, faced the fight on the rise, and gave all of her attention to the man she had come here with.

The stream of numbers came back full and clean and pointed entirely at Vaerith.

"Vaerith. Left. Forty centimeters. Now."

Vaerith moved forty centimeters left, and Grimspire Lance passed through the space where his throat had been.

---

Alice understood exactly what she was looking at, and her stomach turned over.

’She is not defending herself anymore.’ The bow did not waver. ’She is spending her whole life on him. She knows I have eleven hundred stacks. She knows what I am holding.’

"Ilyra," Alice said. Not into the sigil. Out loud, across the rock. "Say the word. You carry nothing. It costs you nothing."

The stream did not pause.

"It costs him," Ilyra said. "Right. Twelve centimeters. Drop."

Vaerith dropped, and the lance went over him.

"You will die."

"Yes." Ilyra’s voice was completely level again, which was the worst part of it. "I did that arithmetic a long time ago. He cannot see your partner at this speed without me. I am the only reason he is still standing."

"And when I shoot you?"

"Then he has perhaps four seconds." The stream kept going underneath the words. "I intend for those to be very good seconds."

---

```

[ Reaper’s Stride: 3,900 stacks. ]

[ MP: 38% ]

[ Grimbound Threshold: 11 seconds remaining. ]

```

Logan could not land anything.

He was moving at nearly twenty-eight thousand percent and Vaerith Solmane was not trying to match him. He was not trying to see him. He was listening, and moving exactly where the voice behind him said to move, and it was enough.

’She is doing all of the seeing for him.’ Logan cut and missed and cut and missed. ’He is just the hands.’

Eleven seconds.

’Alice.’

He did not say it out loud. He did not need to. The Accord Sigil at his collar went warm with something that was not a location and not a condition.

---

Alice let go of eleven hundred and forty stacks all at once.

```

[ Starfall Cadence: 1,140 stacks. ]

[ Tempest Cadence: +1,140 Attack ]

[ Arrow Intent: Velocity ]

[ Arrow Intent: Homing ]

[ Starflow Arts: Death Star ]

```

She did not fire eleven arrows. She fired one.

It crossed four hundred meters before the sound of the string reached the rise.

Ilyra Tanthess knew it was coming. She knew exactly what Alice was holding and she had known for some time, and she did not turn around to face it.

She was halfway through a number when it arrived.

"Vaerith, up and"

```

[ Critical strike. Fatal point struck. ]

[ Ilyra Tanthess has been killed. ]

[ Ruby Starviel: +1 Elimination ]

```

---

The voice stopped.

Vaerith Solmane went up, exactly as he had been told, and there was nothing after "and."

For the first time since the ship had come over the horizon, he had to see for himself.

Logan watched it happen. He watched the man’s guard stop being a thing that anticipated and start being a thing that reacted, and at twenty-eight thousand percent, reacting was the same as standing still.

```

[ Reaper’s Stride: 4,300 stacks. ]

[ Grimbound Threshold: 6 seconds remaining. ]

```

Vaerith did not look at the body on the rise. He did not look anywhere except at where Logan was, and then at where Logan had been, and then at nothing.

"Four seconds," he said quietly. "She said four."

"She was right."

"She usually was."

He raised the sword one last time, and it was a good guard. It was the best guard Logan had seen from him in the entire fight.

It was simply in the wrong place.

---

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[ Grimspire Lance ]

```

Eleven feet of condensed death energy went through the gap under Vaerith Solmane’s raised arm and out through his back.

He did not fall immediately. He stood there with the lance through him and looked down at it with an expression Logan could not name at first, and then could.

It was satisfaction.

"You asked me," Vaerith said, "why I wanted this fight."

"You wanted to find out what you are."

"Yes." He was losing color quickly. "I am a man who was very good for as long as somebody was telling him where to stand."

He looked past Logan at the rise.

"That is a worse answer than I hoped for," he said. "But it is an honest one. Thank you for it."

He did not say the word. He had never been going to.

```

[ Vaerith Solmane has been killed. ]

[ Leon Flanke: +1 Elimination ]

[ Killed players drop carried Warlord Badges. ]

[ Warlord Badges recovered: 19 ]

```

---

The window closed a second later and the bill came due.

Logan went down on both knees in the middle of six hundred meters of bare rock. His MP sat at eleven percent. His hands would not close.

The Attrition reduction was still on him and would be for a long while yet. The man who had put it there was gone, and it would have to wear off slowly by itself.

```

[ Grimbound Threshold: expired. ]

[ Attack: -38% ]

[ Speed: -38% ]

```

Kindred Wellspring had fed every Mythic-plus unit on the shoreline back to full off the damage he dealt in those nineteen seconds. It had not fed anything back to him.

Alice reached him at a dead run and did not say anything at all. She got a shoulder under his arm and held him up.

"Forty-one," she said eventually.

"What?"

"Forty-one badges. Twenty-two and nineteen." Her voice was not steady and she did not try to make it steady. "She would not say it, Logan. I told her it cost her nothing and she would not say it."

"I know."

"She spent herself on him and she knew exactly what it would buy."

"Four seconds," Logan said. "She said four and she was right."

Alice was quiet for a long moment.

"I do not like that I understand why she did it," she said.

Logan looked up at the rise, where a folding stool lay on its side next to somebody who had done arithmetic for an entire match and made one decision at the end of it that did not add up.

"I think," he said, "that was the whole point."

```

[ Warlord Badges held: 41 ]

[ Players remaining: 86 / 500 ]

```

Eighty-four players besides the two of them. Fifty Warlords.

And nobody left on the board who could tell anyone where to stand.