Chapter 57: Unexpected, But Expected

Rodrik Vell lasted forty seconds.

He came up out of that first roll and charged again. Cassian let him get within four steps of the beam, and the second one took Rodrik’s shoulder guard off him. The pieces landed in the sand.

Rodrik stopped and looked at his own arm.

"You should yield before I aim lower," Cassian said.

"I’ve still got a hand on this hammer, so you’ve still got to put me down!"

Cassian raised his palm again.

"Okay, okay! I yield!"

"THAT IS THE MATCH! CASSIAN HOLLOWAY IS YOUR FIRST FINALIST!"

The crowd gave him a respectable amount of noise, and Cassian walked out through it without turning his head once, which I had described in the original novel as carrying his silence with him.

[Well, that went about how I thought it would.]

I hoped I’d be wrong about what the next match looked like, though.

"That was frightening," Lily said. "Did you notice he never moved his feet? He stood in the one spot the whole time and made a boy twice his size give up."

"He’ll be worse in the final. Every match this tournament, somebody has run at him in a straight line, and he has never once had to deal with a person who didn’t."

The staff came out with the rakes. Then the horns went off across the arena.

"AND NOW, YOUR FEATURE BOUT! SERENA FROSTFALL! VERSUS KOHAKU SAKANA!"

I stood up on the bench and stretched both arms over my head, and I held it long enough for the western stands to get a proper look at me. Then I went down the steps and onto the sand.

[Take your time. She has spent the whole morning refusing to look in this direction and she is going to have to keep refusing for another two minutes.]

It was the only way I stood any chance of winning this. I had to commit to the bit.

I walked to the center the long way around. The Wildfolk block stamped their feet in time with my steps, and a girl in the third row screamed something about my thighs.

Serena was already standing at the mark with her arms folded.

"I hope you slept well," I said.

"I’d rather you didn’t speak to me at all, to be honest. Everything you say to me in the next minute is going to sound much worse to you by this afternoon, and I’d prefer not to be responsible for that."

"Aww! Look at you, worrying about my feelings."

I shifted my grip on my practice sword, and I let it slide out of my hand into the sand between us.

"Whoops."

I turned and bent at the waist with my knees straight and my tail up, and I took my time getting my fingers around the handle. The western stands started screaming. The referee looked at the sky.

I came back up and gave Serena a smile.

Serena had her eyes fixed on a support beam at the very back of the arena. Her ears had gone red to the tips, her hands were closed at her sides, and the sand within three feet of her boots had turned white.

[There it is! She’s furious, she’s flustered, and in about nine seconds she is going to try and take my head off in front of four thousand people. Come at me, sloppy wolfgirl. That’s all I need.]

I got my guard up and put my weight on my back foot, the way Lily had beaten into me over six mornings.

"Fighters ready!" the referee called.

Serena unfolded her arms.

"Begin!"

The sand under my boots turned to ice.

I didn’t see her cast anything. There was no gesture, no word, and no time between the referee’s voice and the cold coming up past my ankles. Then I was moving backward with both feet locked into the sheet, and the white line went by underneath me. I went off the edge of the ring and landed on my back outside it.

I slid another few feet and stopped.

Nobody in the stands said anything.

"...RING OUT," Prue said. "BOTH FEET. WINNER, BY ELIMINATION, SERENA FROSTFALL! NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL A DUEL!!!"

The ice was coming off my legs in flat white pieces. My sword was still inside the ring where I had dropped it, because I had never actually picked it up.

Serena walked. She didn’t look at the stands and she didn’t look at me. She reached the mouth of the far tunnel and went into it.

[... What just happened?]

---

I was lying in bed later, staring at the ceiling.

I was alone. Marisol had come by, crying about how she lost all the generational wealth she’d gained betting on me. Lily soothed me for a bit and then left to give me some space. And that was it, actually.

No one else came, because, to them, it wasn’t a big deal. Of course I just lost to the SSS-rank Serena Frostfall. That was what was supposed to happen. 10 out of 10 times, if she and I fought, that was supposed to be the outcome.

But, they didn’t know about the Calamity Queen.

[They don’t know that in about eight months an extremely powerful mom is gonna rise up with an army behind her, and the only person who can stand in front of her is a girl who got shoved out of the ring in the first round of a tournament, and who now has nothing on her that a Divine Gift would have covered.]

I could guess what would happen now. Lily would probably die in the second exchange. Everyone in the harem would also die, if the harem ever even got back on track.

Then, the Church surrenders the capital, the Wildfolk go last because they’re furthest east, and then it just keeps going until there’s nothing left worth burning.

That’s the world I’m in now. That’s my hammock, my foxgirls, my mint ice cream stand behind the arena.

[I can’t let it end here. I refuse!]

So I sat up in bed, and I ran the problem again from the top.

The Benediction is a physical object. It’s a divine core the size of a fist, handed to the winner of the final in a wooden box, and the rules say nothing about who absorbs it. The winner of that final is going to be either Cassian Holloway or Serena Frostfall. Cassian wouldn’t hand anyone else free power.

So, that left one option, and it was an appalling one.

[I go to Serena Frostfall, the woman who put me on my back in under two seconds this morning, and I beg her to just... hand that thing over to me.]

I got out of bed and pulled a coat on over my sleep shirt.

It was the only plan I had. So, I got to work!

---

Finding her wasn’t too hard. After all, I’d written the woman. I knew her habits.

The north annex is a walled practice court behind the ranked dormitories, and I gave it to Serena in Chapter twenty-two of the original novel so she’d have somewhere to be alone after her matches. She goes there every single time she wins and uh... does villain stuff. She monologues, talks about how much she hates Lily. That sort of thing.

The campus was dark and the lamps along the path had burned down to almost nothing. My feet were still buzzing from the ice earlier.

[Okay. Approach. I open with an apology for this morning, because she’s going to expect me to be bitter, and then I explain that there’s something coming that she doesn’t know about, and then I ask. She’ll say no. Then I ask again. Every day, for the rest of my life, I ask her to just give that thing to me.]

I reached the side door and put my hand on it.

Then I heard something inside.

[Oh, she’s training. She won and she’s still in there swinging at ten at night, because she’s insane. Admirable work ethic, to be honest.]

I pushed the door open and stepped through into the short corridor, and the sound came again, and...

I realized it was not a training sound.

The washroom door was open. Serena was sitting on the bench inside it with her back against the tiles, and her uniform jacket was open down the front, and her shirt was pushed up over her chest. Her skirt was up around her hips. One hand was between her thighs and moving, and her head was tipped back against the wall, and her eyes were shut.

[Oh... my... fucking god.]

She was stroking her dick. Masturbating, my villainess, jerking off, right there!

I did not move. I did not breathe. My whole body agreed to become furniture.

[... Alright, I’ll try again tomorrow. I’ll get out, right now, quietly, and never think about this again as long as...]

Serena’s eyes opened.

And she looked straight at me.