Chapter 151: A Candle Against the Sun

Gifts were uncommon in this world. Most people had mana, but they did not have a Gift. Only about one in five among the common folk had one at all, and most of those fell into the same few categories.

The most common category, by far, was some ability to control the elements. Water. Fire. Air. Earth. Lightning. The next category, almost as common, held the Gifts of physical enhancement. Enhanced strength was a frequent one. Or one could have something as strange as the Gift to balance perfectly on one foot, as if they were standing on two. Then there were the Gifts that granted some kind of minor 'healing factor'. Even if a person did have a Gift, there was a very good chance it gave them only something common. Something they could replace entirely with the right kind of Magical Implement.

And of all the common Gifts, none was more mundane than the power to control Earth. Unless one was extremely powerful, either in terms of raw mana or absurd control, it was common wisdom to just use a Magical Implement instead.

"Begin!"

The announcer called out, and the moment he did, the ring turned to chaos.

Fire came first. A great gout of it spewed from a boy on the near side of the ring, and it made it halfway across before a wall of water rose to meet it, the two dissolving into a cloud of hissing steam. Lightning crackled somewhere through the arena's center, bright enough to leave lines across my vision. Children charged one another through the haze, steel rang against steel, and the crowd's roar was almost deafening.

A pink-haired girl simply rose into the air. Mira Falke drifted up over the ring and hung there. She was laying down on nothing, lazily watching everything happening below.

Damian was the only one on the stone who didn't move. He stood near the far edge in that wide-armed stance of his, and simply watched.

"Kinda lame, but I get it," Violet muttered.

I agreed with that. If everyone was distracted with everybody else, there was no need to go looking for a fight.

A stray ball of fire hurtled toward him. Damian raised his hand, and a wall of earth blocked the flames before they could ever reach him.

To his left, a boy and a girl were dueling with swords. The girl had the edge. She was faster than the boy, and it was all he could do to keep her from slipping past his guard. Even so, he was slowly but surely being forced toward the edge. Then the girl feinted. The boy moved to guard against a strike that would never come, and her leg was already sweeping out. It seemed we would have the first elimination already-

A burst of air struck them both from the side. Neither had any time at all to react before they tumbled out of the ring entirely. They lay on the grass for a stunned moment, and then they both looked up. At the pink-haired girl floating lazily above the ring, one arm still extended.

"That'd get me pissed off," Violet murmured next to me. Around us, more than a few of the waiting fighters nodded along.

Some Gifts were simply unfair. How exactly was anyone supposed to eliminate a person who never touched the ring at all?

We were already down to eight. I turned back to Damian, and found him fighting properly now. And he was fighting Roland Vesscher.

Roland stood almost a full head over him, and the two of them were trading blows barehanded. The taller boy threw out a fist that Damian turned away with one hand. Then a kick, which Damian's other arm swept aside.

So that was the point of the stance, then. More blows came, and Damian either avoided them all or turned them all away, his knees just slightly bent to keep him nimble, his feet planted wide enough that even when Roland rammed a shoulder into him, he barely staggered. I had never seen the stance before, but I could guess well enough where it had come from.

They were close enough to our side that I could hear every word. "You're just going to run?!" Roland demanded. "At least stand like a man and let me cut you down."

"I'm standing just fine," Damian said back. "Seems the trouble is in the cutting."

The taller boy blinked. Then he snorted. His arm came around in a wide arc, and even as it moved, a green spear coalesced into his hand. It was a surprise attack, and Damian's stance was never going to answer it. A pillar of earth shot up from the ring instead. It caught the blow mid-swing and knocked the spear clean out of Roland's grip. The weapon clattered somewhere behind him, already dissolving into motes of light.

"So now you use your meager Gift," Roland said. He extended his arm to the side again, and there was the spear again. It was taller this time, very nearly taller than the boy himself. He held his other arm out, and there was another.

"A stance with two damn spears?" Violet muttered beside me. "You need both hands on a spear, or it's just a long stick."

Roland Vesscher charged anyway. He thrust out both spears at once. A wall of earth rose to block the twin strikes, and the spears pierced through it like it wasn't even there. I saw Damian's eyes widen. He leapt back as Roland charged again, colliding with another boy who had been looking the opposite way. The boy cursed and turned, but Damian had already twisted away, dodging the twin strikes. The boy who had just turned did not have the same luxury.

Both spears took him in the back. For one moment I fully expected them to run him through. Instead, his skin flashed silver just as the blows connected. Some kind of defensive Gift, then. It saved his life, and it did nothing at all for the force. The boy shot forward off his feet, and directly out of the ring.

There were now six left from my quick count. Someone else had gotten themselves eliminated while I'd been watching Damian.

"You're rather good at running, I'll give you that," Roland shouted. His voice carried. He was projecting it with mana. "Where is your honor, boy?"

Damian stopped running. He took a deep breath, and stone covered his hands and forearms, all the way to the elbows. That, at least, I recognized. Then he charged forward. Roland Vesscher grinned. The crowd cheered, and the two of them met in the middle.

Roland was all wildness and fury. Compared to that, Damian was surprisingly calm. He kept both hands raised in front of him, waiting for whatever came. When a spear lanced for his throat, he batted it aside and stepped inside Roland's guard. He threw out a punch, one that should have knocked all the air from Roland's lungs. One that should have shattered a rib at the least, if not worse.

The boy skidded back two steps and gasped. He did not even fall over. "Guess you have an arm, at least." Roland spat blood onto the stone, and he did it standing perfectly straight, which made no sense at all for someone who had just coughed out blood. Damian stared at him.

I had been watching, and while Roland did cover himself in mana, it was nowhere near enough to have taken that blow.

Tenet. Vaelin murmured distantly.

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The inward application of a person's Gift. It took no genius to guess that his Edict conjured those green spears. Which made his Tenet... what, keeping his own back as straight and unbending as one? What a strange pair, though maybe that was also how he'd used his two-speared stance. If his Tenet kept his grip as rigid as his spine, he'd never need to use a spear two-handed.

Roland Vesscher raised a hand, and the spear that came to it this time glowed. Its tip shone, and the air in front of it warped. Then he threw it. He threw it hard. It crossed the distance in less than a second. Damian got his hands up in time to shield his face, but only just. His arms blocked the blow, and I could see the cracks webbing through his rock gauntlets.

And Roland wasn't done. More spears came, faster and faster, conjured and hurled. It was almost astonishing just how quickly he could make them, and how hard he could throw what he made. Walls of earth rose from the ring between them, and each spear tore through those walls, leaving holes the size of my fist.

And still Damian kept raising them even as he gave ground. I didn't see the point. They barely did anything at all to block those spears, and he would run faster if he didn't spend the time to make defenses that didn't do anything.

He dodged one spear by darting to the side. The ring in front of him exploded in a rain of debris as Roland tried to cut him off. He darted back the way he had come. Two boys were fighting there, grappling on the floor at the center of a small crater. When exactly they had managed to make a crater was a mystery. One of them must have had an Earth Gift too, because I hadn't seen anything flashy enough to make a small crater in the ring. Damian leapt clean over the both of them, a spear very nearly knocking him out of the air.

Violet was grinding her teeth next to me. We both knew what we were seeing. Damian was getting tired. His breathing was coming harder and harder, and sweat covered his brow. Roland did not look nearly as winded.

"All it's going to take is one," Violet said. "He should attack instead of just running away. That bastard is just going to slowly bleed him out."

"He's not trying to attack," I said, and I was sure of it. "Maybe he doesn't want to show too much this early in the tournament."

Violet looked at me, frowned, and turned back to the ring. It made sense to me. Damian had a very simple Gift. Even among the elemental Gifts, there was truly nothing simpler or more mundane than moving earth. If Damian had a trick up his sleeve, it would be silly to show it so early. That said, how he was planning on making it past here was a mystery. Maybe he was just buying time, waiting for enough people to get eliminated so that he qualified anyway?

The crowd, it seemed, had reached a far less charitable conclusion judging from all the booing that was getting louder and louder. All of the children around us had their own comments.

"He's just going to run the whole match?"

"That's supposed to be Cassian Everstand's little brother? You're joking."

"And here I was, glad I didn't draw his group. What a waste."

There were five people left in the ring now. This time I had caught the elimination from the very corner of my eye. A boy scrambling back from a rolling wave of someone else's flame until he backed up so far he fell out of the ring entirely. Mira Falke had not so much as twitched after the two she had eliminated. With the way she drifted lazily, she looked very nearly asleep. Nobody had bothered to attack her, and I doubted anyone would. Which meant two more had to fall. There were two obvious candidates. At the far side of the ring, where two children with fire Gifts were hurling gouts of flame at each other in what seemed like some strange contest of ego that both boys did not want to walk away from. That... might take a while.

Damian kept dodging. And he was closing distance while he did it, I realized. Then a spear came in low, and he was one half-step too slow. The point opened a line across the outside of his left leg. He staggered, and went down to one knee.

I could see the blood from here. Violet let out a hiss. The crowd cheered.

Anias's words came back to me then, unbidden. Even in the junior division, an arena was the easiest place in the world to kill someone and call it an accident. My right hand had curled into a fist. I made myself keep watching.

"Ladies and gentlemen, could we be witnessing an upset in the making?!" the announcer cried. He had been narrating the entire fight, and I had been doing a good job of ignoring him until now.

Roland walked toward Damian slowly. "I'm disappointed," he said. "I expected more because of your last name. Truth be told, I had hoped to draw the Hero's group instead." So I hadn't imagined that look of his after all. "Alas. You will have to do." He raised a hand in the air, and another spear condensed into it, its point angled lazily down at Damian's throat. "I am no barbarian. Surrender, and you may keep what dignity you have left."

Damian looked up at him. "I don't have much mana," he said.

Roland paused. "...What?"

"Compared to some of the monsters around me, my mana core might as well be a candle compared to the sun." Damian's voice was even. He was not projecting it, but I could still make it out anyway. "So I always have to be efficient. I never get to do anything fancy."

"How tragic for you," Roland said blandly. "Perhaps you should have learned your place, then, and stayed where you belong. There's not enough talent in House Everstand for two."

Damian shrugged. "Maybe." He set one cracked gauntlet flat against the stone, as if to push himself up. "Or I could just be smarter with how I use what I have."

"What?"

The ring opened up underneath Roland. Cracks raced out from beneath Roland's boots in every direction, and an entire swath of the ring sagged and collapsed inward into a crater.

"You bastard, you were fucking with the r-"

Then Roland Vesscher dropped straight through the breach and out of sight, down into the hollow beneath the raised ring. There came a distant, deeply undignified thud.

And I finally understood. Every wall Damian had raised had to come from somewhere. He didn't have the mana to change the entire ring in one go. But if he did it slowly and patiently, it was a different story. Ah. So that explained the crater too then.

Clever. Vaelin murmured, and there was genuine approval in it.

The cracks were still spreading. At the far side of the ring, the two fire wielders were still throwing their flames at each other. The ground beneath one of them split. The boy's eyes widened, and then he was tripping. He was already standing near one of the ring's edges, and this was enough to send him out entirely. There were only three left in the ring. Well, two in the ring and one floating lazily above it.

For one long moment, the whole coliseum was silent.

An examiner raised his arm. "Ring out! The ground beneath the ring is ground beyond it. Roland Vesscher is eliminated!"

"Well, folks, it looks like we have our three qualifiers!" the announcer cried. "Damian Everstand, Mira Falke, and Moss Terren advance! Of course, they've made a right mess of my beautiful ring doing it!"

Then there was cheering, the loudest I had heard yet. The ones who had called him a coward had, I noticed, gone very quiet indeed. Nobody was booing, or if anyone was, the cheering drowned them out.

"Huh," Violet muttered. "Didn't think he could do something like that."

"I didn't think he could either," I admitted.

Up on the ruin of the ring, Damian pushed himself to his feet and began limping toward the stairs. He made it perhaps five steps before a pink-haired girl drifted down out of the sky and hung in the air directly across his path, her feet a lazy foot above the stone.

"Well, that was fun," Mira Falke said. "I could feel it from above, y'know. I just thought it was so funny, and I wanted to see what would happen."

"Thanks," Damian muttered, and limped around her.

"Ooh, you are fun," she said to his back.

An examiner helped him down the last of the steps, and another was already kneeling at his leg, pale green light pooling around her hands. Violet and I rushed to his side a moment later.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"I'm amazing," Damian said blandly, and then winced as the healer's light sank into the wound.

"That was awesome, rockboy," Violet said.

Damian smirked. "Yeah. It was kinda cool, wasn't it?"

"And here I thought you'd have some fancy trick," Violet said.

"I do," Damian said. "I just didn't want to use it right away."

I nodded slowly. So my guess had been right after all.

Behind us, the repairs were already underway. One of the examiners clearly had an Earth Gift of his own, because the crater was slowly filling itself back in. Two more had climbed down into the hollow beneath the ring, where they were attempting to excavate Roland Vesscher from the mound of rubble he had landed in. He was buried very nearly to the chest, screaming a genuinely impressive variety of curses, and through every last one of them, his back remained perfectly, immaculately straight.

"Well, I did my part," Damian muttered. He looked at Violet. "You better do yours."

"Count on it," Violet said, and her grin was all teeth.

It took the examiners a remarkably short while to make the ring whole again.

"And now, ladies and gentlemen, the moment I know a great many of you have been waiting for! Fighters of the second group, take the stage!"

Violet rolled her shoulders and hefted the great black warhammer up across her back. I caught her by the arm before she could go.

"Good luck," I said.

She turned back to me, and gave me a feral grin. "You should be saying that to everyone else."

Then she was walking toward the ring, one of ten. The tall girl was shooting daggers at Violet's back with her eyes. Violet did not appear to notice that she existed at all.

All nine of them were going to need a lot of luck.