Chapter 26: Stepping Stone

Serena kept her word, and Lily and I ended up with sponsorships.

So, that meant we had a tournament to get ready for.

I have never held a real sword in my life. In my first life I was a woman who sat in a chair for eleven hours a day and once pulled a muscle reaching for a charger. I don’t know how a blade is really supposed to move through the air, I don’t know what a parry really feels like in the wrist, and if you put me in a ring against an actual swordsman, I would die. Plain and simple.

But I know how swordsmanship works in this world, because I made it up.

So every morning that week I took Lily out to the practice field behind the dorms and coached her out of my own book.

"Feet wider. Wider than that. Okay, now the mana goes down the arm, not into the blade, that’s the whole trick. If you push it into the steel it just sits there and gets hot and looks pretty. You want it in the arm and the shoulder, so the swing is fast, and then you dump it at the last second. Ready? Do the Falling Star."

"The Falling Star?" Lily repeated.

"Yeah. The, uh, thing I showed you."

"Kohaku, who names these?"

"Just swing!"

She swung, and the air made a snapping noise. A divot came out of the ground four feet in front of her.

[It’s obscene how good she is.]

Sword arts in the Kingdom come in Forms, and Forms come in three tiers, and every Form is a specific pattern of mana routing paired with a specific movement.

Learn the pattern, learn the movement, and it works, every time, for everyone.

There’s no talent involved in the pattern part. Talent is just how much mana you can shove through it without your arm going numb.

Which means an F-rank with a good memory can teach an unranked girl six upper-tier Forms in five days, as long as the F-rank happens to remember Chapter thirty-one of her own novel, where Lily learns them all in that one training montage.

"Again."

"My... My arms are noodles."

"And those noodles are gonna win this whole tournament. Again!"

She got through eleven more before she stopped, propped the practice blade against her shoulder, and got that look she gets when she’s been holding a question in for two days.

"Can I ask you something?"

"What’s on your mind?"

"... The sponsorship."

"Oh? What about it?"

"I don’t understand it," Lily said. "I’m a commoner scholarship student. I don’t have a house, I’ve never spoken to anyone from one, and then the entry office sends a runner to our door saying my slip is already filed and approved, and nobody will tell me who signed it. Was it Professor Corvaine? It has to be Professor Corvaine, right? Because she likes you, and you probably begged her, and now I feel awful because I know how she is about paperwork and I’ve made her do extra."

I thought about lying. Honestly, only for about a second. In the original, these two barely exchanged a paragraph until volume two, and in this timeline they’ve swapped one sentence in a hallway about moving out of the way, so there was nothing to protect. No history, no rivalry, no reason it would land as anything but trivia.

"It was Serena," I said.

Lily’s blade came off her shoulder and hit the grass.

"... Serena?"

"Frostfall. White hair, tall, calls me a dog."

"I-I know who she is!" Lily said, at a volume she doesn’t usually reach. "Why would she, that doesn’t, why would Serena Frostfall sign for me?"

[Because she intended to sign me and I said I wouldn’t participate unless you did.]

"I guess she’s just nice like that."

She picked her sword back up, and then she stood there holding it for a while, staring at the middle distance with her jaw doing something complicated.

"Right," she said eventually, bright as a bell. "Well! That was very kind of her. I’ll thank her. I will absolutely thank her, when I see her, in the tournament, where I’m allowed to hit people."

[... Okay.]

"Lily."

"Falling Star again?"

"...Sure."

The divot she took out of the field that time was the size of a bathtub.

[Huh. Guess she’s got some feelings about charity.]

---

I decided to go around and ask about the mysterious sponsorship.

Because I still had the hooded person’s slip. I’d filed Serena’s pair, since a Frostfall signature is the most bulletproof piece of paper in the kingdom, and kept the mystery one folded in my coat, and for six days I’d been showing that little stamped sigil to anyone who’d hold still.

The heraldry tutor said it wasn’t a Stellaris house. Odette said it wasn’t in the registry, and Odette has read the registry for fun.

So somebody with a house that apparently doesn’t exist wanted me in this tournament, and I had no leads, no MP, and a first-round match.

[Great. Love it. Let’s go get hit with sticks.]

---

The Duel Festival was built to operate for almost a whole month. After all, it was a festival first and a tournament second. There were food stalls along the west green. There was a lantern thing. Half the town came up the hill for it.

Opening ceremony filled the arena to the rafters.

The entrants walked down the ramp one at a time and posed. There was a panel of three judges holding up numbered paddles. A second-year knight did a full spin with his sword, using magic to set it ablaze, and got an eight. A mage did nothing at all and got a two, and the crowd booed her.

Then Ollivant Prue climbed onto the commentator’s platform in a hat with a feather in it, and I braced myself, and he opened the festival by bellowing:

"WELCOME, ONE AND ALL, TO THE DUEL FESTI-VALL!"

And then they brought out the cage.

[Oh god.]

Fourteen doves, each with a name ribbon on its leg, released to land on the bracket board while a choir sang the Kingdom’s anthem. Four of them landed correctly. Six flew straight up into the rafters and stayed there. One landed on one of the judge’s heads.

The rest did what birds do above a seated crowd for eleven minutes while the choir kept singing.

[Ew.]

They finished the draw by hand out of a hat, in silence, while a man on a ladder tried to coax a dove down with bread.

The bracket went up. Low ranks first, unranked and E and D on day one, because you save the monsters for the closing weekend and open with the people who can’t hurt each other. My name was on the afternoon slate.

Lily’s was first on the card.

Her opponent was a second-year from the Knight Course named Emmett Bask, D-rank, and he came down the ramp with a big confident wave and did a pose that got him a six. The crowd gave him a decent cheer. He had friends in the stands with a banner that said his name. He looked like a genuinely nice guy.

Then Lily walked out with her practice blade and stood in the ring squinting up at the noise, and she found me in the front row and gave me a tiny wave, and about nine hundred people made an awww sound at the same time.

[Sorry, dude. You’re about to become a stepping stone for the heroine!]