Chapter 46: For the Foxgirls

{Kohaku}

The chances that I was going to lose this fight were going up with every interaction. In all honesty, I was beginning to feel pretty bad for Marisol, who I could only assume was going to go broke in a few seconds.

He lunged forwards. I snapped to the side, and his sword may as well have been a homing missile the way it twisted to follow me.

[What the fuck!?]

He was good. I knew that, obviously, but this moment made it so much clearer. I had treated him like an abstract thing going into this but, yeah, those years of training were on full display, and if it wasn’t for all the training I did myself, plus my mana core expansion, I would be on my ass right now.

"See? SEE!? How dare you pretend like we’re even in the same league!?!?" He yelled out with a crazed smile and wide eyes.

He pushed me back. I blocked horizontally and, to be honest, he probably could have just kicked me out right then and there. But, judging by the way the grin on his face was expanding, he was clearly enjoying this.

[Okay, okay... Kohaku, you gotta do something here. The whole world depends on it. Your hammock, your foxgirls... All of it!]

That thought firmly planted what was at stake back in my mind.

Right. This wasn’t about me. It wasn’t about my pride, my ego. It was about the fact that if that Champion’s Benediction didn’t land in Lily’s hands, this world was fucked. All before I’d even gotten to lick a drip of foxgirl sweat off another girl’s back. Unbelievable.

I couldn’t let this happen. But what could I even do?

[Well... You gotta get crafty.]

"You know what I actually can’t stand about you?"

He was walking a slow half-circle around me with the sword down, and I realized about two seconds late that he was talking to the crowd more than he was talking to me.

"Everybody’s got a mouth," Perrin said. "What gets me is that you got given something. You were an F. Everyone saw it, it was posted, and now you’re a C in two months, and I’ve been swinging a sword since I was five years old. Five! My father used to take my breakfast off the table if my forms were sloppy. Do you know what that does to a person?"

[Uh. Yes? I do, actually. I wrote it in your bio.]

"So no, I don’t think you earned it. I think somebody handed it to you, and I think everybody in this building has been so busy clapping for the cute little scholarship girl that not one of them stopped to ask how."

[You know... He’s not wrong. At least, not entirely.]

He swung. I got out of the way of most of it.

"And they’ll clap for you again after this. That’s the part that gets me. I’ll put you down and they’ll all go home talking about how brave you were. Are you listening to me?"

"Not really!"

He came in. I blocked and my whole arm went numb to the elbow.

The crowd had gone quiet and couldn’t work out who they were supposed to be on the side of anymore. Somebody up in the shaded side yelled at him to shut up and swing, and a good chunk of the standing section picked it up.

"SHUT UP AND SWING!"

Perrin’s head snapped toward the noise.

[What the hell? They’re turning on him!]

That would have been great, except I needed them hating me instead of him, and that whole plan was on fire now. I’d walked in here to steal four minutes of villainy off a boy and he’d taken it all back in the blink of an eye.

He came at me again.

I Snapped left and he cut me off. I tried to duck under his arm and he brought his elbow down on the back of my neck and my face went into the sand.

I got up. I don’t know how, but I got up, and I got maybe three meters of distance before my legs told me the mana bill had come due. My Coating was gone and so was my Snap. The weasel was flat against my collarbone and had gone quiet.

He hit my blade, and it left my hand.

I watched it land about eight feet away, half buried.

Then he kicked me in the chest.

I went off my feet, backward, damn near flying. The white line was right behind me.

"This has gone on long enough!" He yelled out and slashed forward.

[Oh fuck.] I thought, my eyes widening. [Come on, don’t lose like this!]

Suddenly, I got an idea.

Banking on the fact that this wasn’t my original body, I tried to test my limits a bit. I bent over backwards, like I was about to do a flip, and the sword went over my head.

He didn’t see it coming. He’d almost certainly bet that I would try to block.

And it worked! This new body of mine may have been weak, but it was flexible.

"What!?" He yelled out as his own momentum launched him forward.

[WEASEL, IT’S NOW OR NEVER!]

Heroically, the weasel threw itself at him, using TAUNT mid-air. Perrin had been about to correct his position but the TAUNT did it.

He went over the line.

The crowd gasped.

I corrected my position and turned as fast as I could.

I’d done it. I’d won.

---

"It really doesn’t look that good..." Lily said.

"What? Come on, give it a chance!"

We were behind the arena. The day’s fights were over, and the staff was packing everything up to go. Which was strange since they’d put it all back soon but whatever. In Lily’s hands was a cone filled with mint-flavored ice cream. I remembered it after the duel, I’d written a little place around here where students could get this.

[Great idea, past me.]

"Eh, I dunno..."

"I can’t believe this betrayal!" I said in a dramatic voice. "You won’t even try the exotic-flavored ice creams I recommend... You hate me!"

"N-No, it’s not..."

Lily looked back and forth between me and the ice cream. Then, she just went for it, and absolutely stuffed her mouth with it.

So, naturally, the inevitable happened.

"Ow, ow, ow! What’s happening!?"

I couldn’t help it. I cracked up.

"Okay, okay, sorry. You love me! I see that now!" I declared, giving her a big kiss on the cheek that made her face go red.

Anyway. He lost.

That’s the important part, and I’d been trying to focus on it all afternoon while Lily slowly recovered. Perrin Alderltoft got knocked out of the round of sixteen by a scholarship fox, in front of four thousand people. That beat had been delivered. Slot filled. I’d been checking my MP every ten minutes like a woman refreshing an inbox.

The problem was everything else about it.

Because the point of that match was that the crowd hates the winner and pities the loser. That’s the whole mechanism. Serena stood over him and the four thousand people in that arena decided the boy on the ground was worth something, and one of them decided it very specifically.

Instead, Perrin gave a speech about breakfast and got booed off the sand by his own school.

[He was supposed to look brave. He was supposed to get up. He was supposed to be the guy who lost with dignity, and instead he was the guy screaming about how nobody appreciates him, and the entire academy watched it happen.]

Which meant the beat landed and Reindl’s half of it might not have.

[Probably why the Manuscript is taking its sweet time giving me my points. It’s probably trying to decide whether this counts or not.]

I was still turning that over when somebody said my name behind me.

"Um. Miss Sakana?"

Reindl Ashcombe was standing about ten feet away with her healer’s kit still over her shoulder, and she’d clearly been building up to this for a while, because she started talking before I could say anything.

"I wanted to apologize. For him. For what he said out there, about you being given things, because that wasn’t fair. He was just... he’s very tired and his father is coming tomorrow and I don’t think he’s slept properly all week." She took a breath. "That isn’t an excuse. I know it isn’t. But he wouldn’t come and say it himself so I thought somebody should."

I did not have a single word ready.

"And, um. For what it’s worth." She looked at the ground, then made herself look back up at me. "You were very brave!"

Then she bowed, twice, and left.

I stood there with a cone of melting ice cream in my hand.

[No. No no no no. No! Hang on. She’s supposed to think HE’S brave. Him. The tall one. I was the villain! I was extremely mean to her all week! I threatened her with a throat gesture, in public, on a Tuesday!]

Then, an announcement bell went off from inside the arena, and the boy in the tabard came out onto the steps with the sheet for the round of eight, and read it to whoever was still hanging around.

I only heard one line of it.

"Quarterfinal, match one. Sakana, Commoner Scholarship. Versus His Highness Aldric Stellaris-Vane, Knight Course."

The ice cream fell out of my hand.