Chapter 178 - 179: Odds Are for the Unprepared

Chapter 178: Chapter 179: Odds Are for the Unprepared

The betting stall was a wooden booth at the bottom of the stands, with a crooked sign that read OLD MONEYFACE: ALL BETS HONORED, SOME WITH SMILES.

Daniel leaned on the counter and slid a freshly stamped guild voucher across the wood.

The man behind the counter was fat, cheerful, and wearing a tiny gold hat. He picked up the voucher, squinted at the number, and blinked.

"Ten thousand gold."

"That’s right."

"On what?"

"The three late entrants clearing the third test." Daniel pointed over his shoulder at the sand, where three small figures stood in a nervous cluster. "All three."

Old Moneyface looked at the figures. He looked at Daniel. He started to laugh, a rich, wheezing, honest laugh that shook his hat.

"Son, I have got fifty-to-one against the cat girl alone. The odds on all three clearing are two hundred and fifty to one."

"I know."

"Nobody has ever won that bet."

"Then you’ve never had me." Daniel tapped the voucher. "Write it down."

Behind him, a voice sneered. "Throwing good gold at ex-slaves?"

Daniel turned. It was one of the Iron Mountain disciples, a broad young man with a bruise on his jaw and a stack of betting slips in his fist. His friends were grinning behind him.

"They’ll be flattened in the first minute," the disciple said.

"Did you bet on that?"

"Everything I have."

"On which?"

"That all three fail."

"How much?"

"Two thousand gold."

Daniel smiled at him with all of his teeth.

"What a wonderful coincidence," he said. "So did I, on the other side."

The disciple stopped grinning.

---

POV Switch: Fluffy

Fluffy’s colossus was not as big as Master’s.

That was the first good thing. It stood only seven meters tall, grey and heavy, with a flat stone face and fists like barrels, and when she stepped onto the platform it turned its head slowly and looked at her like a very large, very bored cow.

"Hello!" said Fluffy. "I am Fluffy! I am four feet tall!"

The colossus said nothing.

"Master says you have a weak spot. Fluffy will find it."

She drew both daggers. They gleamed in the sunlight, thin and bright, and for a moment she felt the whole arena looking at her, thousands of eyes, and her ears flattened against her head.

Then she heard a voice in the third row, bright and clear and absolutely certain.

"FLUFFY!" Daniel was shouting. "SHOW THEM!"

Her tail went straight up.

"Shadow Step!"

The world went soft and grey. She slid across the sand like a drop of ink, and the colossus’s huge fist swung down through the place where she had been. She ran up its arm. Its shoulder. Its neck, tiny feet pattering on the stone, and every second she was listening, her ears turned like little satellites.

*Thump. Thump. Thump.*

A heartbeat. Behind the plate on its back, a little to the left. Just where Master had pointed.

"Found it!" Fluffy cried.

She stabbed.

The dagger sank into a thin seam where two plates met, and the stone shuddered. She pulled it out and stabbed again, in exactly the same place, and again, and again, a small blur of fur and steel, until a long bright crack ran across the colossus’s back.

The giant reached over its shoulder to swat her. She laughed, bounced off its fingers, and stabbed the crack one more time with both daggers together.

CRACK.

The plate burst. A pale crystal tumbled out of the opening, rolled across the sand, and went dark. The colossus froze. Then, very slowly, it sat down, like a tired man at the end of a long day.

"Done!" Fluffy yelled. "Fluffy is done! Fluffy broke a small mountain!"

"FORTY-ONE SECONDS," said Elder Jian’s voice. "LATE ENTRANT FLUFFY HAS CLEARED."

The crowd roared.

Fluffy leaped off the colossus’s shoulder, landed on her feet, and waved at everyone with both daggers, grinning so wide her fangs showed.

---

POV Switch: Cheeky

Cheeky had never been looked at by so many people.

She had been a slave in a market, and people had looked at her then. Hungry looks. Calculating looks. Looks that weighed her like fruit. But this was different. They were not looking at what she cost. They were looking at what she might do.

It was so much worse. And so much better.

Her colossus was nine meters tall and plated in dark iron, and it came at her like a falling building.

"Iron Skin," said Cheeky.

[Skill activated: Iron Skin. Duration: 1 minute. Cost: 10 MP.]

Her skin turned the color of steel. It did not hurt. It felt like putting on armor she had always owned. The fist hit her square in the chest.

The sound was tremendous. She skidded across the sand, boots carving two long furrows, and the crowd gasped. When the dust cleared, she was still standing, hands raised, hair stirring in the wind. There was a dent in her gauntlet. She was not hurt.

"Is that all?" Cheeky asked, and was startled to find she meant it.

The colossus hit her again. And again. Each blow staggered her, and each time she rose, steady and unbroken, a woman made of iron. She was not fighting. She was waiting.

She looked up at the huge, iron-banded chest. At the heavy bands of dark metal wrapped across its torso. At the great, thick plates that guarded its core.

*Metal,* she thought. *It’s all metal.*

She had always had the gift. She had never known what to do with it. As a child she had bent forks for fun and been whipped for it, and as a slave she had hidden it, shame hot behind her ribs. But now there was a name for what she was.

*Metal Manipulation.*

"Come," Cheeky whispered, and stretched out both hands.

The colossus’s iron bands shivered.

Then they began to move.

They peeled away from its torso like strips of ribbon, writhing and curling, and wrapped themselves around its arms. They crossed over its wrists. They tightened, a hundred meters of heavy iron bending to her will, until the giant stood bound like a man in chains, arms pinned to its sides, and let out a deep groaning roar of confusion.

The whole arena had gone silent.

"Metal Storm," said Cheeky.

[Skill activated: Metal Storm. Cost: 20 MP.]

A thousand blades of steel bloomed in the air around her, glittering like a flock of silver birds. She pointed at the colossus’s chest. They flew.

The sound was like a hundred smiths striking a hundred anvils at once.

When the cloud of sparks cleared, the colossus stood perfectly still. Its chest plate had been scored through to the core. A neat, round hole glowed in the middle, and through it, Cheeky could see the crystal, whole and gleaming.

She walked up, reached through the hole, and plucked it out with two fingers.

It went dark in her palm.

"CHEEKY," said Elder Jian, "HAS CLEARED. ONE MINUTE, TWELVE SECONDS."

She stood there in the ringing silence with a dead crystal in her hand and tears running down her cheeks. She did not know when they had started.

In the third row, Daniel stood up and started to clap.

Then Lyra. Then Paul. Then all five thousand of them, rising to their feet, and the sound rolled across the arena like thunder over a sea.

At the stand’s edge, Clerk Wu was staring down at her with his mouth open and his little stamp fallen from his fingers.

Cheeky looked up at him.

She smiled, very slowly, and she saw him go white.

---

POV Switch: Mittens

Mittens’s colossus was the smallest in the ring.

It was only five meters tall, and it had been polished until it shone, and its stone face had been carved into a mild, vaguely kind expression, like a statue of a friendly grandfather. It stood in the middle of her platform and looked at her with perfectly empty eyes.

Mittens trembled.

She did not have a class. She did not have a skill. She did not have a gauntlet, or a dagger, or a gun. She had a tail, two cat ears, a paw print on a paper, and the little white seal clutched to her chest.

And she had a very long way to fall.

*I’m going to die,* she thought, with perfect clarity. *I’m going to die in front of everyone.*

The colossus lifted one huge hand.

It came down slowly, deliberately, like a man swatting a fly. Mittens leaped sideways. The fist smashed the platform where she had been standing. The ground shook, the sand jumped, and a high ringing noise filled her skull.

She clapped both hands over her ears and screamed.

It was not a battle cry. It was just a scream, thin and high and terrified, the sound of a little cat in a very big house. But it made the colossus pause.

Its head tilted.

Mittens stopped. She blinked, with her hands still pressed to her ears. A strange sound was in the air, thin and high, almost beyond hearing. She had always heard it. The ringing. The hum under the world. Every loud noise made her ears hurt, because every loud noise had a second sound inside it, a whisper behind the roar that nobody else could hear.

Her whole life, it had been a curse.

She listened.

There was a hum coming from the colossus’s chest. A single high, pure note, steady as a held breath, ringing from the crystal behind its ribs. She had been hearing it since the moment she stepped onto the sand. She had thought it was just the ringing in her ears.

It was the core. It was *singing*.

*Everything has a note,* said a very small voice in her memory, an old woman’s voice, a cook in a kitchen long ago. *If you strike a glass at the right note, it will shatter.*

Mittens lowered her hands.

She took a very deep breath, and she opened her mouth, and she sang.

It was a tiny sound. It was a thread of sound, thin and shaking, one clean high note pitched exactly to match the hum in the colossus’s chest. It wavered. It cracked. And then it held, and she poured every ounce of her fear and her shaking and her stubborn little courage into it, and the note grew sharp and bright and clear as a needle.

In the colossus’s chest, the crystal began to hum louder.

The colossus froze. Its fist hung in the air.

The hum climbed. The note rose. Cracks, fine as spiderwebs, spread across the front of its chest, bright with inner light, and the stone around them began to tremble.

Mittens held her note until her lungs burned.

The core burst.

The colossus did not fall. It simply stopped, a polished grey statue with a kindly face and a hole in its chest, and slowly, very slowly, it sank to its knees and bowed its head.

Dead silence followed.

Mittens stood alone on the platform, breathing hard, with tears on her face and her hands trembling at her sides. She did not understand what she had done.

"MITTENS," said Elder Jian’s voice, in a tone she had never heard from him, soft and strangely warm, "HAS CLEARED. ONE MINUTE, FIFTY-TWO SECONDS."

The arena did not roar.

It was quieter than that. It was five thousand people, slowly rising to their feet in perfect silence, and then someone began to clap, and someone else, and in the third row, a small girl in grey had put down her dumplings and was clapping with both hands.

Mittens turned and looked up at the stands.

She found Daniel at once. He was standing at the rail, with both arms raised, and his face was shining, and he was shouting something she could not hear over the noise.

*You did it,* he mouthed.

Mittens burst into tears and ran toward him.

---

The rest went quickly.

Lyra cleared in ninety seconds. She stood in the center of her platform and fired six bullets, one after another, each one guided by Sure Shot into the exact same hairline seam in the colossus’s back, until the stone split like a walnut. She blew the smoke off her barrels and winked at Daniel across the ring. He pretended to faint.

Paul cleared in a minute and twenty. He called a cyclone of wind and sand, a roaring brown column that scoured the colossus’s joints until they ground to dust, and then he pushed it over with one finger and bowed to the crowd. A group of young women in the third row shrieked and threw flowers. Paul looked deeply, privately pleased.

Brick Head cleared in forty seconds, though not in a way anyone had planned.

He had wrapped both arms around his colossus and squeezed. "I’m sorry!" he kept saying, with tears running down his face. "I’m so sorry! I don’t want to hurt you!" And the colossus’s stone ribs had creaked, and then cracked, and then split in half with a noise like a falling tree. Brick Head had stood there holding two enormous pieces of statue, sobbing, while the whole arena laughed.

Su Wan cleared in nine seconds.

She did not move for the first eight. She stood perfectly still on her platform with her sword at her side, watching the colossus swing at her, and when it was close enough to touch her, she took one step, drew her blade, and cut. There was a sound like a bell being struck underwater. The colossus’s chest fell away in two neat halves, and the crystal rolled out onto the sand, cleanly bisected.

She sheathed her sword and walked off the platform without a glance at the crowd.

On the far side of the ring, Long Tian was standing with his arms folded. He had broken his own colossus in twenty seconds. He was watching Su Wan walk away, and his face was perfectly, terribly still.

Daniel saw him look.

Daniel saw, too, how Su Wan walked straight past Long Tian without looking, shoulders back, head high.

[Affection Level: Su Wan: +2%]

Daniel stared at the notification.

"*Plus two*," he whispered.

"What?" said Lyra.

"Nothing."

"You’re grinning."

"I’m having a good day."

"You are unbearable."

"I’m having a *very* good day."

---

When the last colossus had fallen, Elder Jian rose to announce the results.

"The third test is concluded. All one hundred participants have cleared. All three late entrants have cleared." He paused, and the faintest hint of a smile touched the corner of his mouth. "A first in the history of the exam."

Daniel did not hear the rest.

He was too busy watching Old Moneyface, who had gone as pale as paper and was staring at a ledger in a trance. After a moment, the little fat man looked up, caught Daniel’s eye across the stands, and made a very small, very exact gesture with his hand.

A little bow, from one gambler to another.

"Two hundred and fifty to one," Daniel murmured. "On ten thousand."

"How much is that?" Paul asked.

"Two and a half million gold."

Paul fainted.

Behind them, at the end of the row, an Iron Mountain disciple had stopped moving entirely. He was holding a slip of paper in both hands. He seemed to be trying to read it upside down.

"I’m going to cry," said the disciple, in a small voice.

"There, there," said Daniel kindly. "It’s a very small amount of dust."

---

It was past midnight when Daniel climbed onto the roof of the guest hall.

The stars were thick and bright over the gorge. A cold wind moved through the paper lanterns. Far below, the camp was dark, and he could hear someone snoring, and someone else very faintly crying, and it did not sound unhappy.

She was already there.

She sat on the ridge of the roof with her legs drawn up, bare feet on the tiles, a paper bag in her lap. She did not look up when he sat down beside her. She just held out the bag.

He took a dumpling.

It was still warm.

"Where do you keep getting these?" he asked.

"I know a cook."

"At midnight?"

"She likes me."

"Everyone likes you."

"No," said Yun Xi, calmly, "they don’t."

They ate in silence for a while. Down below, in the dark, a cat’s tail flickered across a window.

"I have something to say," said Yun Xi.

"Is it about the race?"

"No."

"Is it about the dumplings?"

"No."

"Is it about whether I’m handsome?"

"*No.*" Her ears went faintly pink, but her voice was steady. "It is about my sister."

Daniel set down his dumpling.

Yun Xi was looking out at the stars, and she did not turn her head. In the starlight, her profile looked very small and very tired.

"She has slept for eleven years," she said. "She does not move. She does not speak. She breathes, but I have never once seen her wake." She drew a long breath. "Today, in the arena, when you struck the colossus, she stirred."

The wind had stopped.

"She stirred," Daniel repeated.

"Her fingers moved. For the first time in eleven years." Yun Xi’s voice had gone very quiet. "I do not know why. I do not know what you did. But I think..." She finally turned and looked at him, and her eyes were shining. "I think it was you."

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

[Affection Level: Unable to read.]

[Partial signal detected: Curiosity. Amusement. Interest. Trust.]

[Warning: A new reading has been detected: Hope.]

Daniel stared at the last line.

Beside him, Yun Xi had gone still, her breath held, waiting.

"I don’t know what I did, either," he said softly.

"I know."

"But I’d like to find out."

For a long moment, she said nothing. Then she gave him a very small, very crooked, very real smile, the smile of a girl who has carried something heavy for a long time and has just, for one second, put it down.

"Good," said Yun Xi. "Because I intend to make you."

She stood up on the roof, brushed off her robe, and held down a hand to help him up.

Daniel took it.

It was small and cool, and her grip was stronger than he expected. She pulled him to his feet and stood there for a moment, very close, her bare toes against his boots, her head tilted back to look up at him.

"Dumplings," she said, in a very low voice, "forever."

"I’m working on it."

"Work faster."

She let go and walked off along the ridge of the roof without a sound, her grey robe vanishing into the dark. Daniel stood there, a dumpling in one hand, staring at the place where she had been.

"Oh," he said quietly to the stars. "I am in so much trouble."

Far below, in the darkness of the camp, a very small, very pale hand moved on a white blanket, and went still again.