Chapter 51: Divine Intervention 1

I dreamed of a field of flowers.

It smelled amazing. The warm sun on my skin made me smile. I looked across the field and there was Lily, skipping toward me.

So, I started skipping toward her. We had these big, dumb smiles on our faces as we finally met in the middle.

And then, our faces inched closer, until we-

My eyes opened.

It was still night. It was cold too, with the moonlight pouring in from the parted curtains. Lily was in my arms.

[When the hell did this happen?] I wondered, looking down at her. [Eh, whatever. Free cuddles.]

I closed my eyes, hugged her tighter, and went back to sleep.

---

On the morning in which my death sentence was to be carried out, I decided to take a walk.

I figured it was a good time to smell the flowers... in real life, this time. The academy was as gaudy and brilliant as I’d written it to be, tall and imposing, with so much personality and such little care for financial constraints.

I liked it. I would have loved it if I’d been reborn in here with some cheats, but since I wasn’t, I settled for liking it.

[Okay, so, the gameplan. I go in against Aldric, I try to survive until he gives me an opening, and then I do my beam attack. He gets pushed out of the ring, I pat myself on the back, and then I go tease Lily for the rest of the day. That’s the ideal scenario, anyway.]

I did not believe the ideal scenario was going to happen, but yeah.

[And now, all I can do is wait until things kick off. Damn, I hate feeling this nervous.]

At one point, I sat down and waited. I tried to picture the fight in my head, visualize it and all that, but I stopped quickly, because every single visualization I came up with ended with me losing.

[... Fuck.]

"Tough task ahead, huh?" A voice spoke to my left.

I looked and found Serena standing there, hands behind her back, looking down at me.

"... You could say that."

[What in the fuck is she doing here?]

She took a few steps, put her hands in front, and sat down next to me on the bench. She crossed one leg over the other. I had to look away because her skirt had ridden up a bit, and if I looked for a second longer at those pale thighs, I would die.

"You’re probably going to lose today."

"Really? I had no idea!"

"I’m serious," Serena said. "I’ve watched every match he’s had since he was thirteen. You’re going to lose. But there’s a version of losing where you get one clean shot at him first, and I’ve decided you should know about it."

"...You’ve decided?"

"I have."

Again, another rare instance of Serena Frostfall’s kindness.

[Doesn’t matter. I need all the help I can get.]

"Okay. Sure. Hit me."

She looked out at the grounds instead of at me.

"He was trained for formal duels," she said. "Not tournament duels, formal ones. House instructors, judges, the whole ritual. In a formal duel, when you land a clean touch, you stop. You step back, you drop your guard, and you wait for the judges to confirm the point, and then you begin again. It’s manners."

"Right."

"He’s never stopped doing it." She uncrossed her legs and crossed them the other way. "It’s not something he thinks about anymore. Every single time he lands a hit that he considers clean, he takes a step back and lowers his sword and waits. It lasts about a second and a half. Nobody has ever taken it from him because by the time he’s landed a clean hit on somebody, that somebody has usually stopped being interested in fighting."

[A second and a half.... A second and a half is enough. That’s more than enough. That’s a whole eternity in beam-attack terms, probably, I don’t actually know, I’ve never timed it.]

"Wait," I said. "So the way to get him is to get hit?"

"The way to get him is to get hit properly. He has to believe he scored." Serena finally looked at me. "So he’ll hit you as hard as he intends to hit you, and you’ll need to still be standing afterward, and knowing him, that is the part of this plan that will kill you."

"Cool. Love that. Great plan, thanks."

She stood up and brushed her skirt down, and I want it on record that I did not look, because I have some dignity and also I was busy thinking.

Here’s what I was thinking.

[Why is she doing this? Cassian’s spent four days building me into a weapon specifically so Aldric loses in front of Serena. That’s his whole thing. And now Serena shows up, unprompted, at seven in the morning, to hand me the exact piece of information I need to make that happen.]

I paused.

[So they’re working together. Which means she’s in on it. Which means-]

My eyes widened.

[Oh my god. She’s into him too!!!]

Of course. It was obvious now.

[She’s into Cassian. That’s why she sponsored me, that’s why she keeps orbiting this whole mess, she’s got a thing for the boy in the trench coat and they’ve been coordinating behind my back like a pair of teenagers passing notes.]

I felt genuinely bad for her for about four seconds.

[Poor girl. That man communicates exclusively in the word "again."]

"You’ve gone quiet," Serena said.

"Sorry. Just processing." I stood up too, and my legs mostly cooperated. "Look, whatever your reasons are, thank you. I mean that. Nobody else gave me anything useful and you just handed me the only real opening anyone’s found."

Something happened on her face. It was small and gone almost immediately.

"It isn’t charity," she said.

And she left, and I stood there in the garden with a second and a half in my pocket.

---

The stands were full by noon.

Serena went first. Her opponent was a third-year from the Knight Course named Gerrit Vashon, who was big, and who had spent the last two weeks telling people he had "a plan for her".

Well, as the person who literally made Serena as OP as she was, I wanted to see this shit.

But, when the fight kicked off...

[Yeah, that’s about what I expected.]

He got to use approximately none of it. She let him come in, parried his blade to the right with a movement I could not see the beginning of, and put him on his back with the flat of her sword across his chest.

Fourteen seconds, all in all. The crowd made a noise, and Vashon lay there staring at the sky like he was reconsidering his major.

Serena walked out of the ring without so much as looking at him.

Cassian was second. His opponent was a Mage Course boy who opened at range and stayed there, throwing everything he had from a safe distance. Now, this plan I actually liked. Good on you, nameless extra!

Cassian, however, just walked through it with his forearm up, got inside, and ended it in about forty seconds with two hits.

No beam required.

[Smart. He’s not going to show it. If he shows it today, Aldric watches it, and then Aldric spends an hour thinking about what it looks like when somebody sets their palms together. He’s keeping the whole thing in the bag so it comes out of mine.]

He walked off the sand and past the tunnel where I was standing and didn’t slow down at all.

"Don’t flinch," he said.

Then he was gone.

Prue’s voice came up over the grounds.

"AND NOW! Quarterfinal the third! From the Knight Course, three-time champion of the Spring Trials, heir to the Stellaris throne, His Highness, ALDRIC STELLARIS-VANE!"

The stands lost their minds. Somebody threw flowers. Somebody threw a lot of flowers, actually, and I watched a groundskeeper start gathering them up while Aldric walked out into the middle of it with his sword on his shoulder and his chin at the angle I described at one point in the story as "regal."

"AND HIS OPPONENT! Commoner Scholarship, Rank C, the fox who beat Greywild and, uh..." Prue paused. "...the fox who beat Greywild! KOHAKU SAKANA!"

[Great intro. Really worked on that one.]

With that ceremonial announcement, however, my time had come. I could stall no longer. All the planning I did, all the endless running around and vaguely nostalgic beam attacks would have to work out. If it didn’t, the Calamity Queen would probably take over, and it would be my fault for failing to get my own story on the damn rails.

I checked my collar. The weasel was in there, awake, warm against my neck.

[Let’s do this, big guy!] He chirped excitedly and, that was that.

I walked out, head held high.