Book 3, Chapter 63

There was a lot of jeering and laughing at the mage’s expense when he stepped off the stage, but it was good-natured, and Sorin could tell none of them were taking his loss poorly. The only ones who weren’t joining in were the next two opponents, both of whom were studying Sorin intently.

“Mage hunter, you think?” the man muttered.

“No,” the woman said. “Just happened to have the perfect solution for the occasion. Could be luck. Could be good info.”

“I owe him a drink either way. Always nice to see someone embarrass Darvin.”

Galdred hopped up onto the stage and walked over. “We generally like to do a five-minute break between matches if you’re going to do two in a row, but I don’t think anyone would argue if you want to take a bit longer since you’re doing three.”

“No need,” Sorin said. He’d barely used any anima, and a few minutes wouldn’t ease the ache in his soulspace anyway. “Send the next one up.”

“Birran? You ready?” Galdred asked.

The man with the quarterstaff practically teleported from where he’d been standing to appear in front of them. “What kind of question is that? Of course I’m ready.”

Birran didn’t look ready. He stood there, relaxed with his quarterstaff held casually in one hand like he was a hiker navigating a docile forest trail. Sorin wasn’t fooled, though. His next opponent had given him a hint with his entrance. Birran was fast enough that he’d bring his weapon up to intercept any attack easily.

Speed, offense, and maybe some situation-specific soulprints to protect him against the most common types of magic. He’s a tough nut.

Normally, Sorin would employ a strategy of attrition against an opponent with that kind of build. He was always willing to bet on himself in a contest of who could go the longest without making a mistake, especially since he had a whole library of spells he knew how to free cast. But with his soulspace still in shambles, that was perhaps the worst possible thing he could do.

“Sorin?” Galdred prompted after a second.

“Ready,” he said, not taking his eyes off Birran. The first second of the fight was going to be crucial.

Galdred apparently knew it, too, because he backed all the way off the stage before he gave the signal to kick things off. Sorin drew anima into Lesser Aspect of Grace and Lion’s Blood, enough to bring them to full strength, while he waited. There wouldn’t be time once they started moving, so he’d decided it was worth a few extra seconds of feeling like a hot iron was pressed against his soul.

Birran vanished practically before the words were out of Galdred’s mouth, perhaps having anticipated Sorin’s own opener. He stepped neatly into the force trap Sorin had left behind, but was gone again before it could close on him. Sorin met him on the far side of the arena, his sword coming down to bite into Birran’s quarterstaff.

Shock spread across the man’s face, then redoubled when Sorin leveraged his hold to wrench the weapon free of Birran’s grip. It vanished into dimensional storage, where it would stay until the match ended unless Birran managed to steal Sorin’s ring right off his finger. As unlikely as that was, it had happened once before, and Sorin knew to be wary of the trick.

Unbothered by the loss of his quarterstaff, Birran stepped forward into a punch that cracked against Sorin’s jaw. The pain of Iron Bulwark flaring up to absorb the damage hurt far worse than the hit would have on its own, and Sorin mentally chastised himself for not thinking to deactivate his triggered soulprints before the fight began.

As he’d suspected, Birran was strongly invested in speed and offense, which was a fantastic combination. What he lacked in defensive soulprints, he made up for with reaction time and skill. The two danced around for another half a minute, clashing dozens of times and breaking apart while their audience raised enough of a ruckus that the climbers back at the hub no doubt heard all of it.

Finally, Birran made a mistake. Sorin baited him with a slight stumble, there and gone so quick that there was no time to consider if it was true or a trap. Eager to take advantage of even the most minute of errors, Birran reacted before he could think through it. He lunged in, manifesting a bar of force and thrusting it at Sorin’s face.

It was only after he’d committed that he realized what had happened, and by then, it was too late. Sorin’s supposed stumble turned into a pirouette that shifted him out of danger and ended with him slamming the back of his sword into Birran’s head. Defensive magic burst out, blunting the blow and dulling the edge, but it couldn’t absorb the full kinetic force of the swing.

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Birran lay face-down on the stone for a few seconds before rolling over. “I give,” he groaned. “Fuck me. I give.”

It wasn’t that he couldn’t keep going. Sorin knew he had plenty of energy left in him. It was that they both knew that strike could have been fatal, that Sorin had deliberately pulled back enough to make contact. They knew it, and so did everyone else watching.

Predictably, the volume from the audience only increased. Demands for more matches came from multiple sources, though they were thankfully aimed at Galdred and his cousin, Zindra. Those were shut down decisively, for which Sorin was grateful.

“I’ll be the last match,” Zindra declared. “That’s what we agreed on, and that’s what we’re doing. You guys can have your own little tournament when we’re done if you want.”

“Oh, come on!” the axe-wielder protested. “I’ve already fought all you idiots hundreds of times. How often do we get a chance to fight someone new? And this guy is so good! You can’t just—”

“Wrong. I can do exactly that.”

“That was a neat trick, swiping my staff,” Birran said softly. “I don’t usually fall for that, but I wasn’t expecting you to be able to cut into the wood. It’s pretty heavily enchanted for durability.”

Sorin manifested the weapon and handed it back over. “Ah, sorry about that. I can pay to fix it.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s also heavily enchanted for self-repair. Give it a few hours, and it’ll be good as new.”

They reset everything—Sorin declined a break, but he noticed Zindra still took her time dealing with her rambunctious friends—and started the final fight. Though her spear and Birran’s quarterstaff were superficially similar weapons, their wielders were unlikely to share much in the way of fighting styles.

Sorin’s prediction proved accurate the instant Galdred gave the signal. Rather than rushing forward with anima-boosted speed, Zindra drove the spear point-first into the arena and sent out a shockwave of raw kinetic energy. The entire floor fractured into pieces, much to the protest of the mage who’d built it in the first place.

Zindra took to the air and cast one hand out, scattering hundreds of tiny sparks that swirled around on sudden currents of wind and formed a dazzling wall between her and Sorin. Without Observer, it would have been difficult to keep track of her position, which was the whole point.

He recognized the tactic. It was all designed to keep him off-balance and misdirect his attention, to create an opening where none existed. She only needed a single moment where she could strike like lightning and take him out of the fight.

A stall tactic was exactly the wrong maneuver to use against Sorin. Observer cut through the noise, both literal and figurative, and he easily pinpointed her location. The spear was coated in crackling blue electricity now, with more and more of it running down her arm and into the weapon to pool at the tip.

Zindra expected him to be off balance from the shockwave and disoriented from the sudden light show. When she fired off a jagged beam of blue-white lightning, it should have found a target too overwhelmed to even realize what hit him. Instead, it arced to the side and grounded itself out on a Lightning Rod he free cast off to the side.

At the same time, Veins of World grabbed hold of the shattered arena and heaved. Strands of scorching liquid rock erupted upward, easily overshadowing Zindra and descending on her. She had just enough time to utter, “Shit,” before thousands of pounds slammed into her.

Sorin commanded the rock to roll back far enough to free her face before he let it cool. Then he picked his way across the cracked arena and squatted down in front of her. “Want to keep going?”

Her answer was a telekinetic call to her spear, which had fallen free when a literal ton of earth and stone slammed into her. It zipped through the air, silent but for the cutting swoosh of the wind, to plunge at Sorin’s back.

Force Weaver leapt out like tentacles emerging from his back to catch hold of it and slam it down point-first into the ground. He drove its length halfway down and reshaped the dirt into solid stone before releasing it from his magic, then cocked an eyebrow at Zindra, who scowled back and let out a huff.

“Fine, I concede. You win.”

Sorin gave her a tight smile and tried not to let it show how much he was hurting. He’d had to put on a good show in order to recruit the rank 24s, but he knew he’d regret his flashy tactics for the next day or two.

The stone let go of Zindra and her spear, and she took Sorin’s offered hand to pull herself to her feet. “Can’t believe you used earth to attack a flying opponent,” she told him. “Who does that?”

“Fly higher next time then,” he said.

Chuckling, Zindra shook her head and walked away. Her companions met her with a mixture of good-natured heckling and sympathy, which seemed to annoy her more than anything. The twinkling in her eyes gave her away though; they were a tight-knit group that gave as good as they got. Sorin suspected any outsider trying to treat them the way they treated each other would be in for a surprise.

“You alright?” Odric asked as Sorin walked across the broken stage and hopped down next to him.

“Going to be sore. Hopefully it’ll all be worth it.”

“If I didn’t know the voidlings had been chewing on you just a few days ago, I wouldn’t believe it was true,” Azlo told him. “You dominated those guys.”

“They were pretty good,” Sorin said. “I wouldn’t be worried about them pulling their own weight in a normal climb.”

“But we’re going up against the void,” Odric said.

“Exactly. That’s a whole different kind of fight.”

“You think they’re ready for it?” Odric asked.

Sorin watched them, smiling and laughing. He thought of the unflinching line of pseudo-humans, so thoroughly mutated by the soulprints they’d taken in order to specialize in void combat, and of how little emotion they seemed to have left. Theirs was a world of unending pain fulfilling a duty that earned them no gratitude.

By contrast, these climbers were the privileged elite. They chafed at the void restricting their ability to keep climbing. Sorin didn’t see any desire to save anyone in them, but that was fine. They could still be useful. Self-interest was no better or worse than altruism, not for his purposes. All that mattered was that they were capable and willing. In that respect, Galdred’s friends were more than good enough.

“I think that, if they’re not, they will be soon. We just need to make sure they survive long enough to adapt to what they’re fighting. If we can manage that, we might just have a shot at pulling this off after all.”