Chapter 38: What I Can Do

{Serena}

I found a seat high up where I could see the whole ring, and I watched the mutt dodge. I was rooting for her, funny enough.

I wanted her to win because I intended to be the one to beat her. If Greywild knocked her out here, in some early-round scrap, then the fox would leave this tournament having lost to this wolf, that would be intolerable, because I had a match with her planned. Not on any bracket yet. In my head.

I wanted to stand across a ring from her and take her apart personally, myself, with the whole arena watching. Greywild getting to her first would be theft.

[So win, mutt. Win, so I can be the one to put you down.]

"You sponsored me."

I hadn’t heard Lily come up the steps. She sat down beside me without being invited, and she looked at me with her jaw set like she’d been building up to this for a week.

"I did," I said, and looked back at the ring.

"Why?"

"Rules require a sponsor. You lacked one. I had a pen."

"That’s not an answer."

I let out a breath. Down in the ring, the fox slid under a greatsword swing that would have folded her in half. Good on her.

"Sakana wouldn’t enter without you," I said. "I offered to sponsor her, and she refused unless I sponsored you as well. Package deal, she called it. She would rather have missed the tournament than leave you out of it." I kept my eyes on the ring. "So I signed for you. To get her in. That is the entire reason, Everdawn, and I’d thank you not to make it into something."

The girl was quiet for a moment.

"Oh," she said, in a small voice. "She did that?"

"Yes."

And then, I found other far less pleasant words slipping out of my mouth.

"For what it’s worth," I said, "I don’t think she’s good for you. You’ve changed since you started rooming with her, and not for the better. You take reckless risks. You nearly died in that forest because of her. You lost your own match because you were watching her in the stands instead of your opponent. She’s a bad influence, and if you had any sense you’d put in for a room transfer and—"

"Don’t."

I looked over. Lily had gone from small and uncertain to looking quite angry, sitting up straight, with her blue eyes bright and furious.

"Don’t what?"

"Don’t you dare," she said. "You don’t know anything about her. You call her a mutt, you’ve spoken to her, what, twice? And now you’re going to sit up here and tell me she’s bad for me? She’s spent every morning this week teaching me swordwork she doesn’t have to teach me. She took the Warden’s hit for me! She’s the best thing that’s happened to me since I came to this awful school, and if you think I’m going to sit here and let you, of all people, the girl who couldn’t be bothered to speak with me here because it wouldn’t look good, tell me she’s a bad influence, then you have badly misjudged how this conversation is going to go."

I stared at her.

[...Well.]

Lily’s chest was heaving. She looked as surprised as I was that all of that had come out of her.

"She sponsored me because of you," she added, quieter, mostly to herself, looking down at the ring where the fox was still somehow alive. "She’d rather lose than leave me behind. And you’re telling me she’s not good for me. Unbelievable."

And with that, she walked away.

---

{Kohaku}

Fenna was good.

I’d walked in here thinking "jobber," thinking she was a loser by design and that meant my odds would be better, but I’d forgotten that a character written to lose to the heroine still has to be a real threat first, or the loss means nothing. I’d made Fenna strong specifically so that Lily beating her would matter, and now there was no Lily, and all that strength was pointed at me.

She handled that greatsword like it was a knife, faster than a thing that size had any right to be, swinging it in big clean arcs that ate the whole width of the ring, and every time I thought I’d found space she closed it with two steps of those long legs and I had to throw myself sideways again.

I’d been dodging for a solid two minutes. My tail was doing most of the steering. The weasel was flattened against my neck and hanging on. I hadn’t landed a single thing, because every time I set my feet to throw a strike of my own, she was already there, greatsword coming down, and I had to stop and move.

She caught my sleeve with the edge of one swing and opened it clean, no blood, just a foot of ruined fabric, and grinned at me over the blade.

"You dodge nice," Fenna said, not even winded. "Good instincts. Our pups are gonna be quick."

"Stop saying stuff like that mid-fight!"

"Can’t help it. I’m excited." She came again.

I dove, rolled, came up in the one patch of open ring I’d been trying to reach for two minutes, and got half a second of breathing room, and in that half a second I did some math.

[She’s a C-rank. I’m a C-rank now too. But, she’s got the body, the training, and the reach. What she does NOT have,] I thought, feeling the full ocean of my core sitting there behind my ribs, untouched, [is my fuel tank. I haven’t been training every single day, in a ruin, up to my knees in monster blood, to lose like this.]

Fenna reset, shifted her grip, and came in for the big one, greatsword rising up over her shoulder for a swing that would end it.

I stopped dodging.

I set my feet, right in the path of it, and opened the core all the way, and felt the mana come roaring up my arm like I’d finally let go of a dam.

[Okay, Fenna. You want to see if I’m worth five pups? Let me show you what I can do.]