Chapter 92: The Apex Vs. Ruven Von Stailor - End

In the upper rows, an upper classman mage had half risen from his seat. "That—" he began, and then, in the flat voice of someone reading a wrong answer off a page he trusted: "He didn’t chant."

"What?" said the student beside him.

"There was no chant or circle. That is a construct. A moving one, over a living body." His hand made a small helpless gesture at the shining shape on the platform. "You need a full verse for that. You need years of verse for that."

The words went out through the seats like a dropped coin through water. People who had written off the rumors from the entrance exam as the usual inflation stopped chewing, stopped whispering, and stared.

Ruven answered the way proud men answer: with more.

Wind tore up off the platform in earnest. The dust that had circled him went streaming across the stone, dragging at sleeves and hair, and the claymore stopped being a weapon Caelus could follow and became a weather he stood inside. Every stroke arrived from a direction the last had made impossible.

Caelus’s hands met each one anyway.

He did not block. Blocking meant stopping force, and stopping force meant breaking. He turned his forearms like doors on oiled hinges and let the edge slide off the water at angles it didn’t expect.

The water crushed to nothing and burst back out, and his knees dipped. The stone cracked under his heel. The shock hit his sternum and shook every rib at once, and what left his lungs was a cough that came back pink on his lip.

He stayed up.

With every impact, a fine spray flew off the water, mist as fine as breath. Ruven’s wind, which took everything, took that too: drew it up into the turning currents around the blade and carried it off into the open air of the arena. Caelus saw it go.

He let it go.

He had been letting it go for four minutes.

"You’re still a cripple hiding behind a trinket!" Ruven roared, and the claymore came down.

Caelus crossed his forearms. The impact drove through him. His circuits burned. The Ring was shouting the whole arena into his skull, the wind, the water, the cheering, the pressure of every strike, and for one bad second he could not tell his own pulse from Ruven’s footfalls.

The smile slid off his face.

Vespera. The rumors, the mockery, the betting counter, his brother’s silent warning in the stands. All of it was familiar irritation, and none of it was worth losing his temper over.

He had been willing to let it begin without blood. Ruven had chosen a public stage and a cheering crowd, and he had spent twenty minutes treating Caelus’s wounds as proof that he could be bullied into silence.

Caelus had accepted the duel because it was an opportunity. He had never promised it would be a pleasant one.

"Is that all?" he asked.

"Shut up!"

Ruven dragged the claymore back over his shoulder, and the wind went with it. He wrapped it around the blade in a tightening spiral, packed so hard that the air along the edge began to scream. The front rows flinched. A girl pressed both hands over her ears. The spiral would make the blade faster and heavier, and Ruven meant it to end the duel. His eyes had gone bright and wet with fury. He had stopped fighting like a knight and was throwing everything he had into one stroke.

Caelus watched his wrist.

The moisture moved. He held, and he waited for the second disturbance, the small hard flicker that meant the wind had been redirected and the blade had committed to its one true line.

He stepped into the claymore.

A gasp went around the benches. The marshal half rose from his stool. Caelus walked toward the screaming steel with his left hand held out in front of him, palm open, like a man testing the heat of a stove.

There was a reason to go in close. A swing is slowest and weakest near the hilt, and his water had to be within reach to answer him. And inside the spiral, with the dust and the grit, hung four minutes of spray, thousands upon thousands of beads each smaller than a grain of salt, packed into the heart of the knight’s greatest attack.

Caelus closed his hand.

Every bead answered at once. They pulled together into drops, and the drops fell.

It rained. Under a sky the color of polished steel, in full noon sun, it rained on one platform and nowhere else.

The spiral worked only because the air in it was light and fast. Now it was full of water. It got heavy, it lost its spin, and the scream along the blade dropped to a wet drone, then to nothing. The wind folded in on itself, and the dust that had been dancing across the stone went flat in a single sodden slap.

The claymore was plain steel again, moving at the speed of a man’s arms.

Caelus caught it.

His bare left palm, wrapped in water, met the flat of the blade with one short, ugly crack, like a branch breaking inside a drum. The force ran up his arm and he felt the bone give by a hair’s width, a hot thin line from wrist to elbow, and stop. His teeth slammed together. White flooded his sight. Blood came from his nose, a thin quick thread.

The blade stopped. It stopped in his hand, in the rain, with the tip a handspan from his sternum.

The light came through the falling water and made a rainbow arc across the whole platform, a stripe of color nobody had asked for. It hung there over two men and one claymore.

Ruven made a sound that was not a word.

He had put every last drop of his Wind Affinity into that spiral, and when it collapsed, the backlash ran home through his own circuits. Blood slid from his nose and from one ear. His arms shook. His hair was plastered to his skull. He reached for the wind again, and nothing came. The air around him just hung there, wet and still.

"What did you do?" he whispered.

Caelus kept his hand on the blade. The rain ran off his chin and diluted the blood.

"Nothing," he said, quietly. "You did it. Your wind picks up everything. It was very thorough."

Ruven looked at the sky, at the beads still falling from air that had not held a cloud all day. His mouth moved. No sound came.

Caelus leaned in, and his voice dropped to a pitch the front row could barely hear.

"I said you’re going to regret it. I’m a man of my words."

Something went out of Ruven’s face. It was not rage. It was the thing underneath the rage, the part that had always known the answer.

Fear.

Caelus released the blade.

The claymore fell. The tip rang once against the wet stone. Ruven’s knees folded and put him down on both of them, then on his palms, coughing red onto the platform. The rain beaded the blood and dragged it in thin pink threads toward the seams of the stone.

Caelus did not strike him. He did not need to. He turned his back on the kneeling knight and let the last of the water slide off his shoulders and fall away.

The marshal stared for three full seconds before he remembered his job.

"Ruven von Stailor is unable to continue," he said, too loudly, then again, quieter, as though the rain might not have heard him. "The winner is The Apex, Caelus Vespera."

The arena dripped.

In the upper rows, the upper classman mage still stood with his mouth open, the way he must have stood the first time he saw real magic as a child. Beside him, the student who had laughed at Caelus’s first wound was looking at his own hands as though they might offer a better opinion.

On the betting counter, Elysia’s one thousand gold coins sat alone in the wet sunlight. They had been a joke an hour ago.

Leon let go of the railing. He had to unbend his fingers one at a time. Eve watched Caelus with an intensity that had nothing to do with surprise at the outcome. She had known he was dangerous. She had not known he could be dangerous and still look bored.

Across the arena, Caelus’s brother remained seated, his face unreadable. Caelus met his eyes for a moment.

Behind him, attendants were lifting Ruven onto a stretcher. The knight’s face was a mask of blood and rain.

Caelus walked to the steps. The tremor in his left hand started at the bottom stair, and he closed it into a fist and tucked it under his arm before anyone in the nearest rows could see. His side had soaked through to the armor. His forearm throbbed in time with every step.

The next ten minutes would be bad, and the night would be worse. He could think about that later.