Chapter 34: The Landlord

Here is what I had going into this fight:

I was level eleven. I had a body that could swing a sword but couldn’t swing it well. Six Forms I knew perfectly and could land maybe one time in three. A LIGHT affinity. And a weasel with four skills, one of which was a taunt on a long cooldown that I had, up to this point, thought of as basically decorative.

Here is what the landlord had:

Actual power.

It came down at me with one of its folding limbs and I did not try to block it, because I’d learned my lesson with the Lurkers. Instead, I threw myself sideways and the limb came through the space I’d been standing in and cracked the floor. I rolled up, routed mana through my body, and threw the Falling Star at the joint where the limb met the body.

It landed! First try.

The eleven levels did that, I think, or just luck, but it landed clean and a chunk of the thing’s arm sheared off.

Then it hit me with the other arm and I went across the room.

"ACK!"

[MEND. WEASEL. MEND!!!]

The weasel mended. The thing that had happened to my ribs promptly un-happened. I got back up.

At this point, I began to understand how the fight was gonna go. This thing was a guardian. I hadn’t written this specific one, but I’d written a hundred like it, and they all worked the same way, because fifteen-year-old me only had, like, two ideas.

A guardian is bound to the thing it guards. It draws its power from the thing it guards. And it cannot, will not, under any circumstances, leave the thing it guards.

Which meant it was on a leash.

[It’s rooted, and it’s slow. Meanwhile, I’m small, and I can heal. I don’t have to beat it. I have to outlast it.]

So I stopped trying to trade blows and started running around the room.

I stayed at the edge of its reach and made it turn, made it stretch, made it come as far from the seed as its leash allowed and then made it step back. Every time it committed to a swing I ate the follow-up on my ribs (ow) and the weasel patched me up. I threw a Form at whatever joint was closest, and it was slow, God it was slow, but chip by chip, I got some damage in. Every few exchanges, it battered me and the weasel worked overtime keeping me whole.

Ten minutes in, the weasel put MEND on a gash in my forearm and the gash stayed open.

[What? Do it again. Come on, do it again.]

It did it again. The gash closed halfway and stopped.

[It’s tired. It’s been down here exactly as long as I have, and when the heals stop, the next hit is the last hit. So I need a faster plan.]

I tried something.

I stopped running and let the guardian corner me against a leaning column on purpose. Maybe the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, but I had an idea. It reared back to bring both arms down on my head.

"Weasel, TAUNT! NOW!"

Bless that little rodent. The taunt went off, the guardian’s attention snapped onto the glowing spirit sitting on my shoulder, and both arms came down on the floor beside me. That bought me three seconds.

I threw every Form I had at the seed.

From the weasel’s point of view, it probably looked like I was having a seizure. Or like I was doing some horrible breakdancing. I used every single martial arts technique I’d learned, one after the other, mana scraped out of the very bottom of me.

I cracked it.

The guardian screamed. The pale blue light in its face flickered, every joint in its body stuttered at once. It spent about a second and a half glitching. And finally, I put the Falling Star through the light where its face was.

Then it came apart.

The arms dropped first, then the shoulders, then everything else fell in pieces that stopped glowing the moment they hit the ground. After that it was rubble.

My legs folded on their own and I sat down in the wreckage.

"Fuck."

[I won. I actually won. I broke the landlord’s kneecaps, then I broke the rest of him, and I’m still alive.]

The seed sat in the middle of the floor, split open where I’d hit it.

[Well, no need to stall. Let’s go grab the prize.]

I crawled over to it, put both hands flat against the crack, and pulled.

And it came into me all at once with nowhere to go slow.

I screamed.

"AAAAAAAAAAAA-"

The mana kept coming anywa. The light climbed up through the crack until it filled the whole dome and I couldn’t see anything at all.

---

{Hollis}

Three floors up and a wing over, I was watching Berrigan ruin a perfectly good bracket.

"The final has to be Frostfall and Stellaris-Vane," he said, tapping both names at the top of the board. "It has to be, Hollis. The crown is attending the closing ceremony. The archbishop is attending the closing ceremony. Do you want to be the man who sits His Majesty down in the good chair and shows him two second-years nobody has heard of? Because I don’t."

"The doves already drew it," I said.

"The doves drew half the bracket into the rafters. I’m not taking notes from a bird." He picked up a quill. "We fix the seeding tonight, we announce it as a ceremonial adjustment, and everybody gets the final they came for. Frostfall in the top half. Stellaris-Vane in the bottom half. And we make very sure nothing dangerous ends up in front of either of them early."

So we went down the board.

"Greywild’s dangerous. Put her in the prince’s path, he can earn his cheer knocking her out. The Kettle girl goes in Frostfall’s quarter, she’ll fold in a minute and a half. Alderltoft is loud, but he’s soft, so he can pad the middle." The quill kept moving. Name by name, he was pushing the whole tournament toward the ending the king had already decided he was going to enjoy.

Then his finger stopped near the bottom, on a name written slightly crooked.

"Uh... Who was this one, again?"

Hollis squinted.

"That’s that new foxgirl, right? Saka... Something."

"Sakana," he recalled. "Commoner scholarship, Rank E."

"She won her first match, didn’t she?"

"Against the other F-rank. One of them had to advance, Hollis, that’s arithmetic." He crossed something out. "She’s up against a third-year from the Knight Course next. She’ll lose and neither of us will ever think about her again. Leave her where she is."