Chapter 155: Luck Is a Skill.

"'You 'know your limits', huh?" Violet drew out each word slower than the last.

I winced. We were walking down a tunnel at the far end of the arena, one that led to some kind of healing area, from what I knew. Everyone else in our group walked on ahead. Everyone in our group who could still walk, anyway. The rest were being carried by the examiners. Including the girl who had made that sound when she'd hit the wall. I had checked on her from afar. She was still breathing, at least.

They had all very deliberately put a gap between themselves and us. And there was another gap between them and the third person who had qualified. His name was… Teo Wick, was it? Sharon Nox was not with us. She had chosen to stay behind and watch the last of the rounds, just as Violet had stayed to watch mine.

"Well, I did know my limits," I murmured. "I just didn't know everyone else's."

Violet muttered something under her breath that I didn't quite catch. "She was trying to do a lot more than just throw you out of the ring. That crazy psycho was trying to hurt you. Or worse."

"Yeah." I didn't have much to say to that, not when it was true. Our little standoff after the match had ended proved that well enough.

"The fuck's her problem?" Violet said loudly. Loud enough that several of the children and examiners walking ahead of us turned back.

"I don't know," I said. "She wasn't exactly explaining."

Violet sighed, and bumped her side into mine, just lightly. "Well, if she tries some shit like that again, I'll snap those freaky arms of hers right off." She said it with genuine conviction. Enough conviction that I believed she really would.

"Let's just hope we don't run into her again. Or her brother, for that matter. I don't think there's any doubt at all that he'll qualify."

Violet looked across at me, then down at my arm. Still pink, and still faintly swollen. "Well, good thing you had enough sense not to stick around and watch."

"I had wanted to," I said. "But there's no point. The whole city is watching, and there are plenty of people with Scrylens. If there's anything worth learning, I'll just ask someone else." That much was the truth. What was also true was that I would rather not spend a single second more around Sharon Nox than I had to.

It wasn't fear. If she attacked me outside of a ring, I would use Vaelin, and I would almost certainly get away with it. I would simply rather not put myself in that situation at all when there was nothing to gain from it.

The line ahead of us wound down two more turns before we finally reached the medical bay. It was a large room, lit by Magical Implements that gave off a glaring white light. The whole place smelled faintly of herbs. Beds lined either side of the room, and on those beds were… children.

I recognized all of them. They were the fighters from the earlier rounds. Brynn Wyls lay in one of the beds, unconscious. She was wrapped in bandages. The only part of her they didn't cover was her face.

"She had it coming," Violet muttered.

"Well… I don't know if you needed to hit her that hard," I said. All Violet had done was hit her once, and that had put the 'youngest B-rank adventurer in Guild history' into this state?! I shook my head.

Roland Vesscher met my gaze the moment we entered, and then pointedly looked away, at a wall. He was doing a rather admirable job of looking anywhere but at me. I didn't even do anything to him. That had been all Damian.

Mira Falke was absently floating above one of the beds, reading a book. Why she was floating instead of lying down, and why she was reading at all right now, were both mysteries I did not have answers to.

Two men and a woman in white robes moved between the beds, tending to wounds. The men had glowing green hands they pressed to one injury or another, and the people they tended stopped their groaning. I had seen quite a few Healing Gifts by now, and most of them looked like this.

The woman moved toward the girl the examiner was carrying. They shared a few hushed whispers, and then the man laid the girl down on an empty bed. The woman folded her sleeves up and held her hands out above her.

Some kind of… white powder began pouring from her palms, drifting down onto the girl. I blinked. I hadn't seen any Healing Gift that looked like that before.

Click. Click.

The world zoomed in, and what had looked like powder was really a thousand tiny crystals. They fell on the girl, and her skin began to glow with that same pale color. The girl coughed. Her strained breathing slowly steadied. The woman wiped her brow, whispered something else to the examiner, and then turned her attention to the newest arrivals.

It seemed the girl would be fine, then. What a useful Gift. I found myself wondering how it compared to Miranda Cirel's.

"Hey, rockboy." Violet waved, and then she was walking toward one of the far beds.

I hadn't noticed Damian sitting there. He had changed out of the tunic and back into the darker clothes he usually wore. His left leg was wrapped in white bandages, exactly where the spear had taken him.

"You both qualified?" Damian asked as we drew close.

"Obviously. What the hell do you take us for?" Violet said proudly, arms folded. "They didn't stand a chance."

Damian looked from her to some of the other people lying nearby. People who were staring far into the distance, as if reliving memories they did not want to repeat. "So that's why they look like that," he muttered. "I was wondering why they were all so quiet. They wouldn't even answer my questions."

Violet just grinned wider, for she had no shame at all. I liked that about her.

"Hey, rockboy," Violet said, "we have a problem."

"Oh?" Damian's brow furrowed, and then he looked at me, as if I might have caused it. That was rather unfair. I did not cause problems. Problems around me simply had a way of enveloping me, whether I liked it or not.

Violet explained the qualifier to him in far more colorful language than I would have used. I was not paying much attention. Now that this round was done, the only thing left was to reconvene the Council, and in so doing, kick off a monster attack on the city.

Before that, I would have to read Count Vance's reports. He was set to return either tomorrow or the day after that, and then I would find out just what fruit his expedition had borne. I doubted he would have solved the issue entirely, but if he had managed to exterminate even one of the dungeons set to overflow with monsters, that would be enough.

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And it would be a good idea to figure out just why these Nox children were going so far out of their way to fight me. Vaelin knew something. As did Aziah, judging by what she had said last time. It wasn't a massive priority, but still.

Lastly… I would like to talk to Cordelia at least once before the attack began. We had a way to, now. I doubted there was anything she could tell me that would change things at this late hour, but I simply wished to talk to her for the sake of it.

"My Lady, your hand."

I paused and looked to my right. The healer from before stood in front of me, her head slightly tipped. She was younger than I had first thought. Looking at her face, I realized she might only be a few years older than I was.

"That requires seeing to," the healer said. She eyed my hand, still pink and still swollen. Then she looked at me with her eyes narrowed, as if she wasn't entirely sure I was real.

"Of course," I said, holding out my arm.

Violet broke off her retelling. She and Damian both watched as the healer worked.

The healer raised her hand, and from it came those strange crystals again. They fell across my exposed arm, and they were… cold. As if I had dipped my hand straight into ice. It was uncomfortable, but not nearly uncomfortable enough for me to reach for my Gift. The pinkness began to fade.

"Is there anything else- Oh." The healer's eyes widened when she saw the dark stain along my side. "Please, lay down, My Lady."

I did. Damian vacated the bed, and I lay on my side while the healer worked. She rolled my tunic up along my ribs, and again came the cold. Damian was pointedly staring at the wall to his right, as if he were trying to see through it. Violet was staring at me instead, and for some reason her face had gone almost as red as her hair. Maybe I should have the healer look at her next.

It took a minute before the healer pulled the tunic back down.

"I have sealed the gash. It should be as good as new come tomorrow. As for your hand." The woman looked at me, and for some reason it felt as though I was being chided. "It is unwise to strain an injury before it has finished healing. Your hand should be well in a day or two. Please, do not injure it again."

So she had figured that part out. Oh well.

The healer turned her attention to Violet next. Violet frowned as the woman peered closer at her cheek. "They did a fine enough job. Do you feel any pain, Lady Violet?"

"No," Violet said flatly.

The woman slowly nodded. "Well, if you change your mind, just know that-"

There were more sounds, and more people streamed in. Every gaze in the room turned toward the newcomers. Nine examiners stepped through the doors, each with a child in their arms. All of those children were injured, to one degree or another. Some had bloody faces. Some had twisted limbs. Some simply groaned from wounds I could not see.

The healer gasped and rushed toward them.

"Just what…" Damian said, "just what happened to them?"

I had a suspicion of exactly what had happened. It had only been a handful of minutes since my own round had ended. The next one should have only just commenced. The thought was absurd, and yet there was no other explanation: the final qualifier was already over.

Violet had reached the same conclusion, judging by the way she looked at me and tugged her braid. Maybe it would not have been such a bad idea to watch the round for myself after all.

It took some time for the healer to tend to everyone. She prioritized two people above all the rest. The first was a tall boy, built like a tree. Both of his arms were bent in ways no body was supposed to bend. The boy was not screaming, which was remarkable. I certainly would have been, without my Gift.

The other was a girl I faintly recognized. She had been there at our registration assessment, and her Gift had been… something to do with swords, hadn't it? She was unconscious, and I saw no sword anywhere now. The healer tended to her second.

From the murmurings of children and examiners both, I knew why. These two were the qualifiers from the fourth group. Though, judging from the state of them, it sounded less like they had won and more like they had simply gotten the luckiest out of a thoroughly unlucky group.

"Hurry it up," one of the examiners said. "The crowd outside is getting antsy, and we're delaying the whole damn tournament like this."

"How about you try waking her up, then?" the healer barked back. I blinked. She had sounded rather sweet when she'd spoken to me or any of the other injured, but it seemed she had quite the backbone after all.

"Do we have to do this?" Violet grumbled next to me.

"We do," I said. "The point of this tournament isn't just to see who's stronger. The point is to give people a show. Without it, we might as well not have a tournament at all."

Violet grumbled something more at that. No doubt a curse I was better off not hearing.

We were to go back on stage. The twelve of us who had qualified. There would be a standing ovation from the crowd, and then they would move on to the Senior Division. No doubt that was why tensions ran so high among the examiners. Someone above them was breathing down their necks to hurry it all along.

Eventually, we were marching back down toward the ring. Nine of us were marching, anyway. One pink-haired girl was absently floating through the air above us. Did she do that everywhere?

The sounds of the crowd came again, and they sounded displeased, judging from all the booing. And no wonder. It had taken quite some time to wake the girl up.

"Please hurry," the examiner ahead of us called.

"We're hurrying!" someone muttered, and several others agreed with him.

"The hell's the crowd's problem? It isn't even that hot. They can keep sitting for a few more minutes," Violet grumbled next to me.

"I don't think any crowd in history has ever been that reasonable," Damian said, from a step ahead of us. "You can't just expect that many people to-"

Something brushed against my hand. I stopped. The others kept walking. I looked down at my right hand, and there was a slip of paper. Paper in a color I recognized. I unfolded it, and found only a few words.

You were hurt. Okay now? That girl… don't like.

And next to the words was a small drawn face that was very distinctly sad.

Ah. I had asked Sere to watch over my father, but I could hardly blame her for coming to check on me. How she had found us down here was something of a mystery, though with her Gift she could have hopped down from the stands themselves and nobody would ever have noticed.

"I'm fine," I murmured. "See?" I held my arm up for Sere's inspection. I could not see her, and did not know where she was inspecting from, but I hoped it would be enough.

"What's the holdup?" one of the examiners shouted from the front. Violet and Damian were both looking back at me, as were half the other fighters.

"Nothing," I called out, and hurried to join them. I made a mental note not to make my friends worry so in the future.

It took remarkably little time for all of that booing to turn back into cheering. It took, in fact, exactly the amount of time we needed to climb onto the stage. There were twelve of us. Ten of us stood together on one side, and after a small gap stood Sharon and Aaron Nox. It seemed nobody wanted to stand near them, and neither of them seemed to care.

"Well folks, it's been a long wait, but they are finally here!" the announcer cried. "The twelve who will be moving on to the next stage of the qualifiers! Every last one of them has shed blood, sweat, and tears to make it this far! Some of them, perhaps, have been a little luckier than others. But I ask you, folks… what is luck, if not a skill?"

There was a wave of laughter at that. There were three people who had qualified by not doing anything at all. And two who had simply been the luckiest out of an unlucky group. They all shifted under the gazes of the crowd.

"You'll be able to see all of these brave fighters again in five days' time, when we cut even these twelve fighters right down to six. But don't you worry, because your day is far from over. In fact, it's just getting started! If you think these rounds were crazy, you haven't seen anything yet! What comes next marks the start of the Senior Division! And to open it, we have a real spectacle…a Four-Way Naval Battle!"

There was even louder cheering at this. I suspected many of these people had just wanted to get on with things already. My intention was to leave. There were many things to take care of, and while this round sounded interesting, it was an indulgence I had no time for.

"It's still bullshit we don't get ships," Violet muttered beside me. "Didn't have to be a massive galleon or something. I'd have been happy with a small one."

I, for one, was happy our round had been as simple as it was. Avoiding Sharon Nox had been hard enough. I didn't want to imagine having to do it on the hull of a ship.

"But for now, ladies and gentlemen, one more time! Give it up for your qualifiers of the Junior Division!"

Ten of us raised one hand and waved at the crowd. We weren't instructed to, but we all did it together anyway. The Nox siblings did not so much as twitch.

Violet's hand reached for mine. She took it carefully. The prickling of dozens upon dozens of Scrylens on my skin. As if they were choosing this moment to focus on me specifically. For some reason, the cheering grew louder, and some of it felt pointed at us. I ignored it.

"Nervous?" I asked her.

"Hell no." I looked over, and Violet had a grin on her face. She always had a certain we she smiled whenever she was truly excited. Something in between a smile and a sneer, and yet neither. "I'm pumped."

I smiled and looked back out at the roaring stands.

Five days. A great deal was going to happen in five days. I only hoped there would still be an arena left to hold a tournament in by the time they were up.