Chapter 111: The Problem With Not Losing

James Vellaroux had been trying to hit me for eleven minutes.

I want to be clear that this was not my idea.

***

Combat Fundamentals met in the lower training hall, which was underground, reinforced, and built by people who had clearly been told what fifteen-year-olds with attributes were capable of and had believed every word.

Class Five and Class Two.

Seventy-five students.

One instructor.

The instructor was Professor Darius.

I recognized him immediately, because he had spent a portion of the orientation exam suggesting that several of us would probably die, and had seemed neither pleased nor upset about the possibility.

He walked the length of the hall once without speaking. Then stopped.

"Most of you can fight."

That was, statistically, generous.

"Some of you can fight well. A few of you have been told you can fight well by people paid to tell you that."

Somewhere in the Class Two section, Tristan Rhael laughed.

"Combat Fundamentals is not about your attributes. Your attributes are the easy part. Your attributes will be the first thing that fails you." He stopped in front of the weapon racks. "This class is about what you do the second after your attribute stops working."

He gestured at the marked circles on the floor.

"Pairs. Across classes. No fatal intent, no attributes above level six, and if I have to stop a match personally, both of you will regret it in ways I will enjoy describing."

Then he looked directly at me.

"Vortex."

"Yes."

"Put the pillow down."

"It isn’t participating."

"Put it down."

I put it down.

Dream Haven sat against the wall with the quiet dignity of something that had been through worse.

***

James found me before Darius finished assigning pairs, which suggested he had decided this before entering the room.

"Vortex."

"Vellaroux."

"You and me."

"Is that a question?"

"No."

He was already walking toward a circle, which meant the conversation had concluded without my participation, which was apparently how conversations with James worked.

Behind me, Roland made a sound.

"Do you want me to..."

"No."

"He’s going to..."

"I’m aware."

***

Here is what I knew about James Vellaroux before the match started.

Spatial attribute.

Radiant secondary.

Blade specialist.

Second son of a Duke.

Which meant he had been training since he could hold something with a handle, and had never in his life been permitted to be mediocre at anything.

Here is what I knew about him after fifteen seconds.

He was extremely good.

Spatial is a difficult attribute to fight.

Not because it makes you fast, but because it removes the part of movement you use to predict people.

He did not close the distance between us. The distance simply stopped existing, and then his blade was where my shoulder had been.

Mana Aegis caught it.

He shifted again. Left, then behind.

Aegis caught that too.

"Stop blocking."

"That’s the entire plan."

"It’s not a plan, it’s a wall."

"A wall is a plan."

He came at me eight more times in the next two minutes, and I will say this for him: he never repeated himself.

Each approach was different.

Each one accounted for what had failed the time before.

He was learning faster than most people I had fought.

He was also, unfortunately, fighting someone with two hundred and ten Stamina and a barrier attribute at level ten, which meant the only real question was how long it would take him to become annoyed.

Four minutes.

"Fight back."

"I’d rather not."

"You have offensive attributes."

"At level three."

"You have SSS potential."

"I’ve been informed."

He shifted directly in front of me, close enough that the spar briefly became a conversation, and his black eyes had the specific flat anger of someone who has been insulted by something that wasn’t an insult.

"Then why are you like this."

***

Eleven minutes.

That was how long it took Darius to stop it, and he did not stop it because someone had won.

"Enough."

James stepped back immediately. Breathing hard. Not badly, but harder than he wanted to be in front of seventy-three people.

I was not breathing hard.

That was the part he hated.

"Result," Darius said.

Nobody answered.

"Vellaroux. Did you hit him."

"No."

"Vortex. Did you hit him."

"No."

"Then you both failed." Darius turned to the rest of the hall, raising his voice slightly. "One of them failed to break a defense. The other failed to do anything at all. Decide for yourselves which is worse. You will be wrong either way, but the arguing will teach you more than I can."

He walked off toward the next circle.

James stayed where he was.

"You could have ended that."

"No."

"You had openings. Three of them. I counted."

"You counted four. The second one wasn’t real."

He went very still.

"...You saw the second one."

"I saw all of them."

"And you didn’t take any."

"No."

"Why."

And here was the problem, because the honest answer was long and required explaining five years of a border war to a boy who had spent those same five years in a courtyard being told he was excellent, and I did not have the energy for the version where he understood.

So I gave him the short one.

"Because taking an opening means committing. If I commit and I’m wrong, I’m on the ground. If I’m on the ground, I’m not between anyone and anything."

James frowned.

"You’re not supposed to be between people and things. You’re supposed to end the fight so there’s nothing to be between."

"That works when you can end it."

"I can end it."

"Yes." I looked at him. "You can. That’s why you don’t think about the other version."

He opened his mouth.

Then closed it.

Then, visibly, filed the entire conversation somewhere to be angry about later, which I respected.

***

The accident happened four circles over, eight minutes after that, and it was nobody’s fault in the way the worst things usually aren’t.

Cedric was sparring a Class Two student with an Earth attribute.

Cedric has Fire and Force, S potential, and a personality that has never once encountered a situation it did not try to solve loudly.

The Earth student raised a barrier of packed stone.

Cedric hit it with both attributes at once.

I heard the sound before I understood it. Not an explosion. Something worse, a thin rising note like a kettle deciding to stop being a kettle, which is the sound compressed mana makes in the quarter second before it stops being compressed.

The stone barrier had trapped it.

’System.’

[Move.]

I was already moving.

There were six students between the circle and the wall, none of them looking, all of them watching a different match. Darius was forty feet away at the far end of the hall with his back turned.

Forty feet is nothing.

Forty feet is also everything, when the number you are working with is a quarter of a second.

I got there first because I had been watching Cedric the entire time, because I had given him a job three days ago and had been quietly monitoring whether it had made him better or worse, which it turned out was a useful habit for reasons I had not anticipated.

Mana Aegis went up.

Not the small version. Not the one I had been using on James, which was a plate of hardened mana the size of a door.

The other one. The one that costs.

The barrier bloomed outward in a curve, and I had exactly enough time to think that this was going to be considerably worse than the training drop weights before the stone barrier failed and released everything it had been holding.

***

Being hit by that much force is not painful at first.

It is loud, and then it is quiet, and then you discover you are several feet from where you started and that the floor has arrived.

I did not lose consciousness.

I want that noted, because Penelope has since disputed it.

Sound came back in pieces. Someone shouting. Someone else shouting louder. Darius’s voice cutting through both, giving instructions in the calm flat tone of a man who had done this before and had strong opinions about panic.

『 Sub Quest 2 : Aegis Path 1

➤ Objective: Absorb 2 instances of fatal damage through Mana Aegis (1 / 2) 』

Fatal.

That was a strong word for something I had been standing in front of voluntarily eleven seconds ago.

’Define fatal.’

[You would have died.]

’I’m not dead.’

[That is what the barrier is for.]

I tried to sit up and discovered that this was a negotiation rather than a decision.

Something in my left side had been rearranged. Ribs, probably. The barrier had absorbed the killing part, which is what it is designed to do, and had passed the remainder through to me, which is the part nobody mentions when they describe it.

The six students were fine.

I checked that first. All six on their feet, two of them looking at me with the expression people get when they have just understood something about the last four seconds that they had missed while it was happening.

Cedric was on his knees at the edge of the circle, white-faced.

I would deal with that later.

***

James arrived before Darius did.

He had shifted. Twice, from the look of it, which across that distance was not something a first-year should have been able to do without preparation, and had cost him: there was blood at his nose and his left hand was shaking.

He dropped down next to me.

"Don’t move."

"I wasn’t planning an escape."

"Your side’s wrong."

"Yes."

"How wrong."

"Three ribs. Possibly four. Nothing’s in my lung, which is the only part that matters, so stop looking at me like that."

He did not stop looking at me like that.

And then, because I was running on nothing and because there was a very simple solution available that I had used four times in five days, I did the thing without properly thinking about it.

’Activate.’

Healing Bond does not need contact with a vessel.

I had learned that with Sophie, on a field, in sunlight, with both of us calm and nothing at stake and her three feet away and delighted about it.

This was not that.

The mana left me and did not travel. It arrived, the way a door arrives when you are already falling through it, and the space between us went briefly and completely gold.

Not green.

Gold.

James made a sound I had not heard from him before.

"What," he said. "What is that."

"It’s a healing skill."

"That is not a healing skill."

The light was in the floor. Thin lines of it, spreading outward in a pattern I recognized and did not want to, radiating from the two of us across the training hall stone in a shape I had last seen at the Citadel with five people standing on five Guardian Seals.

It lasted perhaps a second and a half.

Then it was gone, and my ribs hurt considerably less, and James was staring at his own hands as though they had betrayed him.

『 Sub Quest 1 : Healing Bond Path 1

➤ Objective: Successfully bond with 7 individuals through Healing Bond (5 / 7) 』

I ignored it.

’What was that.’

Nothing.

’System.’

[...]

’Answer me.’

[I am looking.]

That was, without question, the worst response it had ever given me.

***

Darius arrived. Then Lena, moving faster than I had ever seen her move, already listing things at Darius in the clipped shorthand of someone who had been waiting her entire life to be needed and was furious about the circumstances.

The hall filled with the specific noise of an emergency being handled competently.

James had not moved.

He was still crouched beside me, still looking at his hands, and when he finally spoke it was quiet enough that nobody else heard it.

"I felt that."

"It’s a recovery skill. You’re supposed to feel it."

"No." He looked up. "Not in my body. I felt it somewhere else."

I did not have an answer.

For the first time in five days, that was not because I was avoiding one.

"Vortex."

"Yes."

"What are you."

Which was a better question than the one he had asked me during the spar, and considerably harder to deflect, and I was saved from having to try by Lena arriving and telling both of us, with total authority and no regard whatsoever for rank, title, or ducal lineage, to shut up and hold still.