Chapter 172: Leon vs 10 S-ranks[2]

His eyes were steady.

"I felt it. I felt every ounce of what I sent, and it was more than I have ever carried in my life."

"Then you understand."

"I understand that you could have sent it to our hearts." The old man looked at the three bodies on the floor, and at the smoking shape of Seraphine by the wall.

"Fire, frost and lightning, at ten times the strength. Any one of those would have killed an S-rank. It did not. It put them down and left them breathing."

"It was not aimed there."

"Why not?"

"Because I told you. I did not come here to kill anyone."

"Words are cheap, boy."

"Then look at them," said Leon. "They are still breathing."

Garrick said nothing to that. His face was heavy and gray, and for the first time since Leon had walked into the chamber, the old man looked his age.

He then straightened his back. He raised his voice, and the rubble on the floor trembled with it.

"Hear me, all of you," he said. "Nobody strikes that shield again. Not with fire, not with steel, not with a stone. Nothing that lands on it, and nothing that touches it. You have seen what comes back."

"Then how do we hurt him?" Bram Oakhart asked hoarsely. The old man’s voice shook, and he had not yet taken his hand from his chest. "If we cannot strike the shield, what is left?"

"He is not the shield," Garrick said. "He is a boy standing behind it."

"He is a boy who has just put three of us on the floor without moving his feet."

"Yes. And I will not pretend that I am not troubled by it." The old man’s mouth twisted. "Three of the best players in the Association. And you did not even move your feet."

"I did not need to," said Leon.

"I see that."

Leon looked at them, one by one, and the left corner of his mouth lifted in something that was almost a smile.

He did not rush. He did not draw anything, and he did not take his hand from his pocket.

The wreck of the chamber lay around him in the pale light, and seven people were looking at him with the faces of people who had just watched their own best strike come home.

"I will say it once more," he said. "I did not come here to hurt anyone. Sit down, all of you, and let us talk about my rank. Nobody here needs to be hurt any further."

"Sit down," Vesper Nox repeated in a thin voice. "You want us to sit down in our own council chamber, and talk about your rank."

"Yes."

"After you have broken it."

"After you broke it first," said Leon. "I only gave it back."

"No," said Garrick Dole.

He said it quietly, and with such weight that nobody else spoke after it.

The old man stood in the broken crater with his cracked cane in both hands and the blood drying on his face, and he looked at the boy with the cold, clear eyes of someone who has already made his decision.

"We will not stop. I have spent thirty-one years in this Association, and I will not let it be bent by a single man because he is strong."

" If I have to lose every one of the ten of us to prove that there is a limit, I will do it." His voice dropped. "But I do not intend to lose by hitting a wall."

"Garrick..." Bram began.

"I know what it is. Sorin, Vesper, Lysandra. With me."

The three of them stepped forward at once. They did not argue, and they did not look at one another. Sorin raised his hands, and the air in front of them began to tear again, longer and wider than before.

The shadow at Vesper’s feet rose from the floor like a black tide. Behind her veil, Lysandra Thorne drew a long breath, and a pale light began to shine through the cloth.

"Nothing that touches the metal," Garrick said. "Take him by the space around him, and the shadow under him, and the mind behind his eyes. If it lands on the shield, it comes back to you. Is that understood?"

"It is understood," said Sorin.

"Bram, Haldor, Orrin. Wait for the opening."

"What opening?" Bram whispered.

"If there is one," said Garrick Dole, "you will know it."

Leon looked at the four of them. Then he looked at the three who were waiting, and the three who were lying on the floor, and he took his hand out of his pocket at last.

"Seven," he said.

It was not a threat. He said it the way a man reads a number off a page.

Sorin Kade closed his hands, and the air in the chamber folded.

It folded the way a sheet of paper folds, in half and in half again, until the space around Leon was layered a hundred deep.

He watched the broken walls slide toward him and stack up one behind the other.

The ceiling dropped, and the floor rose, and the whole ruined room seemed to close in around him like a fist.

But nothing in it touched him. Every fold stopped a hand’s width from the green shield on his arm, as exactly as if the thin man had measured the distance with a ruler.

’He is being careful,’ Medusa said.

’Yes. They have learned.’

’He is not putting anything on the shield. He is putting a box around you. If he cannot hit you, he means to take you somewhere else.’

’Where?’

’I do not think he has decided. Anywhere would be better than here.’

Sorin drove his hands forward, and a dozen seams tore open in the air around Leon, each one as long as a man.

They were hungry, silent gaps in the world, and they closed on him like the jaws of a ⅇℓ.

trap. Leon could feel their pull on his skin.