Chapter 44: Hot Girl Business

Saturday arrived a little too fast for my taste. I’d wanted a few more days of mean girl behavior, but what I’d done till now would have to work.

"Ah, what a beautiful day~!" I said.

"Mhm... I-It is..." Lily stammered.

"The sun’s out. The birds are singing."

"Uh huh..." Lily swallowed. "Um... Do you have to hug me for this long?"

"Hold on, I’m recharging."

Yeah. Wonderful start to the day.

We had seats on the competitor’s side, up above the tunnel, and the arena filled in underneath us over the next hour. The nobles took the shaded side. The scholarship students got crammed into a standing section at the far end behind a rope. The Wildfolk delegation had a whole block to themselves, and about nine of them waved at me over the course of the morning.

"Do you know all of them?" Lily asked.

I sighed.

"None of them, no."

"One of them brought a chicken to our dorm. I thought you knew her," Lily said. "It was really good."

"Glad you enjoyed it."

Now, let me recap the week, because the training deserves it.

Lily and I drilled exactly one thing for six days: dodging.

"Okay! So, at this point, the competition is gonna start getting hard, right?" She said. I snickered. "K-Kohaku! Focus! A-Anyway, you’re gonna be facing a lot of people who are way stronger than the people you fought before. So, instead of blocking their hits, it’s gonna be better if you just avoid them entirely. Which brings me to the topic of today’s instructions! Dodging!"

"Dodging?"

"Dodging!!!"

So she hit me hard, every morning, for six days. The rule was that I couldn’t guard. I could move my feet and that was about it. By Thursday I could get out of the way of a girl with the Calamity Queen’s blood in her veins about half the time, and the other half of the time I found out what her follow-through felt like. My ribs were yellow-green from armpit to hip.

The rest of it was theory, and the theory came down to one line I’d been repeating to myself since Marisol told me about the closed yard.

[Don’t overcommit. He wants a big swing, so don’t give him one. Fifty small hits, constant pressure, keep the output low and steady, and let him stand there waiting for a haymaker. Small hits. Lots of talking. That’s the whole match!]

Because I still had a second job out there, and that job was being detestable.

Down at the far end, under the low arch, Perrin came in with his house colors on and his arms instructor beside him. Reindl was already with him, holding his cloak folded over one arm.

I stood up.

I got both hands on the rail and leaned out until I was clear of the shade. Then I waited. When she finally looked up in my direction I lifted one finger, put it against my throat, and drew it slowly across.

Reindl went stiff from the shoulders down. She looked at the floor, then at Perrin’s back, then back up at me. After about three seconds she pressed the cloak tighter against her chest.

I sat back down.

"...What are you doing?" Lily said.

"Nothing. Hot girl business. You wouldn’t get it."

Lily looked at me for a long moment with her mouth slightly open, and then gave up.

---

The arena had almost finished filling in. With all last-minute training out of the way, all I could do now was wait for my match.

"You’re going to lose."

I was halfway mouthing the words "what the fuck?" when I saw who said that.

Serena Frostfall sat down on my other side without being invited.

"Good morning to you too."

"Alderltoft has had the closed yard every evening this week." Her arms were folded, and her eyes stayed on the ring as she spoke. She spoke with a flat voice, like she couldn’t be bothered to say any of this... despite taking the time to come and say it. "His house has a signature technique. It’s a counter. He takes your best strike without guarding and without stepping back, and returns everything you spent on it, doubled, in one motion. He has never used it in a public match. He intends to use it on you, because you are a Rank C who climbed from F in two months and every person in this building with a functioning brain assumes you will open aggressively."

"...Huh."

"So don’t. Whatever you had planned, halve it. And if he plants his feet and drops his guard in front of you, that is the technique, and you are not clever for having spotted it."

I sat there for a second.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you’d have walked into it otherwise."

"That’s not what I asked."

Serena didn’t answer that. She watched the staff rake the sand for a while.

"Alderltoft’s instructor coached my brother," she said eventually. "The man teaches one thing and he teaches it to be used on people who are better than his students. I find that distasteful."

Serena stood up, and off she went, up the steps.

I watched her go the whole way.

[Okay, so, let’s review. She sponsored me. She sponsored Lily on top of that, because I asked her to, and she signed the form without making me beg for it. She’s told the entire academy she wants to beat me personally. And now she’s walked all the way over here to hand me the one piece of information that keeps me in this tournament long enough for her to do it. Why? What does she get out of all this?]

Lily was looking at the empty seat and she wasn’t happy about it.

"What was that about?"

"... I have no clue."

And I don’t like that.

---

Frostfall’s fight took ninety seconds.

The third-year she drew got his sword taken off him about eight seconds in and spent the rest of the match being walked backward around the ring until he stepped out of bounds himself. The crowd made a polite noise.

The prince won his in four minutes and posed afterward, one arm up, chin at an angle. The Wildfolk block booed him. He took it as applause.

Cassian Holloway won his by putting an exchange student unconscious on the sand and walking off before the referee had finished the call.

"That was a foul," Lily said.

"Eh, nobody down there is going to call any of them. His father sits on the funding board." I leaned back. "Write that down, sweetheart. It’ll come up."

I gave that boy an entire philosophy about strength when I wrote the story. An extremely edgy one. Down on the sand it was a nineteen-year-old hitting somebody who had already stopped moving because he thought the guy deserved it.

Marisol came down during the fourth match and put a hand on my shoulder.

"Three to one," she said.

"What?"

"Your odds. This morning you were seven. I bought in at seven." She was talking too fast. "Do you understand what that means? It means the room has decided you’re real. I have been saying this for three weeks and now the bookmakers agree with me, Kohaku, the bookmakers."

"What? Marisol, if I lose today, you’re going to be—"

"You won’t."

"You haven’t seen the bracket!"

"I’ve seen you." She squeezed my shoulder once and went back up the steps.

Then they were raking the ring flat again. A boy in a tabard came up the steps with the list.

"Round of sixteen, match five! Sakana. Alderltoft. To the floor!"

Lily caught my sleeve.

"Kohaku!"

"Yeah?"

"Whatever it is you’re about to do out there," she said, "and whatever this whole week has been about, because I know it’s been about something, since you don’t get cruel at people for no reason and you’ve been cruel at that poor girl for four days straight and I’ve watched you do it and I still can’t work out why." She let go of my sleeve. "Just... get it out of your system!"

I smiled.

"Sure thing."

I ruffled her hair and went down the tunnel.

The tunnel was maybe thirty meters. I spent the walk up to the arenaa going over the plan.

[Small hits. Nothing above half output, ever. He wants one big swing and I’ve got exactly one job, which is to never give it to him. Then I insult him for four minutes and lose the entire arena. Simple.]

The weasel poked its head out of my collar and looked at me.

"I know," I told it. "I know."

The sand was hot through my boots. Perrin was already out there rolling his shoulders, big and blonde, both arms up for the crowd, and they were giving it back to him. Somebody in the standing section was chanting his name.

I looked left, at the front row, at the rail.

Reindl was in her white robes with the healer’s kit in her lap, both hands on the rail, eyes already on me.

[Good girl.]

And, after his usual speech, the referee raised his hand and brought it back down.