Chapter 28: The Only Solution

I sat back down.

The arena kept going around me. They swept the ring, Prue read out the next card, Emmett Bask’s friends were hugging each other over the banner, and I sat in the front row and had a little moment.

[Somewhere out there, in whatever hole she’s sitting in for the next four years, the Calamity Queen just felt something good happen and doesn’t know why. She’s dancing in her grave. She’s got her arms up. She’s got a little conga line of demons going.]

Lily came around the barrier a few minutes later with her sword under her arm, sand in her hair, brushing at her sleeves.

"Well," she said. "That was embarrassing."

"Lily."

"No, it’s fine! Really." She dropped onto the bench next to me and let out a breath. "I’m surprised, that’s all. I thought I’d at least last a bit longer, and he was quite strong, and, um. I gave it everything I had, so there’s nothing to be upset about."

[Babe, no you didn’t. You gave that man about a fifth of what you had. If you’d given him everything he’d be a stain on the floor. The Knight Course would be holding a service.]

"You got distracted," I said instead.

"I-I did not."

"You turned your head."

Lily went red from the collar up in about a second and a half, and she started very intently picking sand off her knee.

"There was something in the stands," she said.

"Something?"

"Yes. A thing. It was distracting, and it isn’t important, and I’d rather talk about literally anything else on this continent." She stood up. "I’m going to go clean up. There’s dirt in places I didn’t know had places. You’ve got your match this afternoon, don’t forget to eat something, and, um, good luck."

"Mm," I said.

She waited a second for more than that, and then she went off toward the wash-house.

Okay. So.

I sat there while two D-ranks had a match I did not watch, and I worked the problem.

First option, the appeal. Problem: there isn’t one.

I wrote the rules and I wrote them short, because long rules are boring, and "the ring-out is final" was a phrase I put in a Chapter to make a different match feel tense. No protest, no rematch, no bracket reshuffle. Lily’s tournament ended when her back hit the sand.

Second option, get the Gift somewhere else.

In the whole novel there are five Divine Gifts. One belongs to the archbishop, who has it and isn’t going to part with it just cause I asked nicely. One is inside a Demon Empire vault, which is on the other side of a continent and a war. One doesn’t get dug up until volume four, by a man who dies doing it. One is Aldric’s, and it’s already in him. And one is the Champion’s Benediction, awarded at the closing ceremony of the Duel Festival.

So it’s this one or it’s nothing.

Third option, and this is where I stopped and actually sat up straight, because I’d been thinking about it wrong the entire time.

I remember writing this bit. I remember being fifteen and deciding that a hand on the head and a nice speech was lame, and that what my heroine deserved was an item, because items are cooler, and because I wanted something shiny for the scene. So the archbishop of Lux doesn’t bless the champion. He opens a reliquary and takes out a divine core, which is about the size of a plum and which I described, God help me, as "humming with holy light," and he presents it to the winner on a cushion.

And the core bonds with whoever absorbs it.

Not the champion. Whoever absorbs it!

I never once wrote a restriction on that, because it never came up, because in the original the champion and the absorber were the same girl and I had no reason to think about it for even one second.

[It’s an object. It’s a physical object that gets handed to a person on a cushion, and then that person can walk it across a room and put it in their roommate’s hands.]

I actually laughed out loud, alone, in a crowded arena.

[I can just give it to her. Take the prize, walk back to the dorm, and just give it to someone else!]

The relief lasted about four seconds, which is roughly how long it took my brain to finish the sentence.

To hand her the prize, I have to win the prize.

To win the prize, I have to win the Duel Festival.

There was just one problem.

[I’m Rank Dogshit right now.]

I got out my copy of the bracket and looked at it properly for the first time, not as a spectator but as a participant, which is a different reading experience entirely. Fourteen slots in the open bracket, filled by everyone in the academy who thought they had a chance, plus a few who didn’t. First and second and third-years. Knight Course seniors who have been swinging swords since they were six.

And in the bottom half, sitting there in gorgeous calligraphy, Frostfall, S. Rank SSS.

The final boss of volume six, who dies to a fully-powered Lily Everdawn and takes eleven pages to do it.

My assets, for the record: three points of MIGHT, one Affinity in LIGHT, five MP, a spirit the size of a housecat whose entire kit is a flashlight, a scanner, and a taunt with a long cooldown.

Plus a memory of a novel I wrote when I was fifteen and mostly can’t remember.

I folded the bracket up and put it back in my coat.

[Okay. Fine. Let’s say it out loud, in my head, so I stop dancing around it. Lily can’t fight. So I fight. I win the Duel Festival, I take the core, I put it in her hands, the Gift gets where it needs to go, and the world doesn’t end, and none of this is negotiable, because the alternative is watching everybody I know get flattened in four years by a woman with a stupid name I also came up with. I’ve got three and a half weeks, no MP, no stats, and no plan. I’ve written worse odds. I’ve written them badly, and my heroine won anyway.]

Up on the platform, Ollivant Prue took a big theatrical breath.

"NEXT ON THE CARD! Ring one, from the Commoner Scholarship, first-year, Rank E, SAKANAAAAA KOHAKUUUU!"

[Oh, right. That’s me.]

I stood up, and my legs informed me they had reservations, and I walked down the ramp anyway with nine hundred people looking at me and not one of them expecting anything.

Then I remembered the pose was scored.

[Ah, shit.]