Chapter 53: Divine Intervention 3

I got my guard up and Aldric came in again.

I set my palms. He hooked wide, I had to break the stance to block, and the mana scattered.

[Attempt two, failure.]

I circled and he let me. My ribs hurt every time I breathed, and the weasel was breathing hard against my collar. It had maybe three MENDs left in it and I’d already burned one getting off the floor.

Aldric stepped in. I pulled my hands back and started the gather, and he saw my shoulders drop and read it before I had the first syllable out. His foot came down on my arc, cut the space, and I had to bail or eat another pommel.

[Three.]

Attempt four, I actually got a syllable out.

"Hah-"

He kicked my front leg out from under me.

[HE SWEPT MY LEG!]

I didn’t really see that coming, but all I could do was persist.

I reset. I reset again. I reset three more times on the back foot while he walked me around the ring like a dog he was exercising. He was stopping me, cutting angles and closing distance, forcing me to either abandon the gather or take a hit I couldn’t afford.

I looked past his shoulder into the stands. Serena had both hands on the rail. Our eyes met.

[You told me there was a window.]

She looked away.

[SERENA! YOU SAID HE’D FREEZE! HE’S NOT FREEZING! HE’S VERY MUCH NOT FREEZING!!!]

She was looking at her feet now.

[I’m going to strangle her. Assuming I survive this, I’m going to do it with her own hair.]

Aldric paused.

"You keep trying the same thing."

"It’s the only thing I’ve got, Your Highness. I’ve been a fighter for about a month."

He thought about that for a moment and then knocked me over again.

"It’s not going to work," he said, and he sounded sorry about it. "Whatever you’re trying to do, it’s too telegraphed. I mean, the way you set your legs and hunch over. I immediately know you’re going for something and I have to be honest, I have no intention of finding out what."

[Oh, he’s coaching me. The man who is about to end my life in front of four thousand people is workshopping my form.]

I took a breath.

[Okay. The technique works fine, it’s the setup he keeps eating. So I need one he’s never seen, which means it can’t be a stance at all.]

I looked down at my collar. The weasel looked up at me.

[Buddy. I need you to do something stupid, dangerous, and probably humiliating.]

It chittered.

[Great. Here’s the plan.]

As soon as I was done explaining said plan to my spirit friend, Aldric came in again.

I buckled. My knee went forward and my whole body folded, and I hit the sand on my side and rolled, and it looked like I’d given out.

I let go of my sword on the way down. It landed a foot from my hand and I left it there, and he’d watched me hang onto that thing through nine knockdowns.

The crowd gasped.

Aldric pulled the swing and stopped. He stepped back with his sword half-lowered and his head tilted, and then he came forward to offer me a hand.

[You beautiful, chivalrous idiot.]

CREEEEE!

The weasel hit him in the face.

It came out of my collar with its claws out and every ounce of its tiny body committed to chaos, landed on his nose, scrambled across his eyes, and bit his ear. Aldric shrieked. He swatted, the weasel dodged, and then it was up his arm and across his shoulders and down his back while he spun trying to track it.

I was on my feet with my palms already set.

But then, he looked at me, and the chivalry drained straight out of his face.

He came in faster than he’d moved all match, and he had to split his attention between closing on me and not standing on the creature currently trying to unravel his hair. I pulled the gather. His sword came down and I twisted, and it caught me across the shoulder and chest in a single flat clean line that lifted me onto my toes.

And finally, finally, Aldric Stellaris-Vane did the thing a certain hot futa villainess told me he would do. He froze, took a moment, and gathered himself, as if this was a duel with a proper ref.

Immediately, my hands were already back.

"HAH."

His head came up.

"RAH."

His eyes went to my palms, and I watched him understand all of it in about a third of a second.

"MEH!"

The beam took him in the chest.

I squinted. I’d written this move to be edgy-looking, black and purple and all that, but as soon as it was my turn using it I realized... having this much light coming out of your own palms, right in front of you, is rather inconvenient.

That is to say, I couldn’t see shit.

[The shounens don’t talk about that part, huh?]

It was messy and ugly and about a quarter of it went into the sky. It still picked the crown prince of Stellaris up off the ground and moved him backward whether or not he had agreed to that. His arms went out and his heels dug two lines through the sand.

He hit the edge and stopped.

His heel came down an inch inside the boundary and his back foot came down a pace behind it, and he was still in the ring. One goddamn inch.

[FUCK!]

He stood there with his chest heaving and a scorch mark down his breastplate, and the weasel slid off his back and hit the sand.

Then his eyes moved past me, to the front row, where Cassian was standing at the rail with his arms crossed.

I could practically hear him yelling out "you taught her that!?" in his head.

Cassian just held the prince’s eyes over the rail, as if to say "yep, I did."

When Aldric turned back to me he looked different. Now, he was very, very angry.

He raised his sword and he came at me.

And I smiled.

[Good. I needed you angry.]

He was mid-stride with his weight forward and his whole body aimed at my center, fully committed, and I stood there with my hands empty.

And then, in my head, I said:

[Now!]

The weasel had circled behind me while he was busy staring at Cassian. It shot past my heels, over the line, out of the ring, and stood up on its back legs in the dirt outside.

"TAUNT."

This was the plan.

Taunt was less effective on people than on monsters, but it was still a pull. It makes the little guy the single most important thing in the world for about four seconds, and Aldric was already committed with no plan whatsoever for a target that had relocated.

He carried one more step, and then his head turned, and then his trailing foot crossed the boundary by three inches before he understood what had happened to him.

"W-What!?" He stammered out, looking behind him.

And at that moment, four thousand people went completely silent.

"BOTH FEET," Prue said, very quietly, directly into the crystal. "THAT IS BOTH FEET OUTSIDE THE ARENA. WINNER, BY RING-OUT, KOHAKU SAKANAAAAA! NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL A DUEEEEEEEL!"

The stands came apart.

People started frothing at the mouth. One wolfgirl tore her shirt clean off in celebration.

Aldric was stuck in his stare. He looked at his feet, then at the line, then at the weasel, who was still standing there on his hind legs with his paws out.

Then he looked at me with his mouth slightly open, and it was worth every single thing that had happened to me in the last week.

I raised my hand.

"Good match, Your Highness."

Somewhere in the noise Lily was screaming my name over four thousand people, and Cassian hadn’t moved at all. The beastkin were losing their collective minds. Marisol was nodding as if she knew this would happen. Odette was gawking, not even hiding her shock. Reindl was cheering.

And two rows behind Reindl, Serena was staring at me with her mouth open.

[Yeah. I know. I’m as surprised as you are.]

My legs went out from under me and I sat down hard in the middle of the ring. The weasel climbed my leg, got into my collar, and collapsed.

[Good job, little guy. We did it.]

Lily came over the rail. An official put a hand out and she went straight past him, and then she was on her knees in the sand next to me.

"Leave the bruises," I said. "I earned those."

She fixed everything anyway.

Aldric lowered his sword, took a breath, and laughed.

"Heh, rule sixteen, huh?" He asked, shaking his head with a wry smile.

[Rule sixteen, indeed.]