Chapter 61: The Ones to Beat

Chapter 61: The Ones to Beat

By the following morning, workers had started building the arena around the practice fields.

Silas stopped at the edge of the east lawn to look. Where there had been open grass the evening before, there were now tiered stands rising on metal frames, their seats still wrapped in protective sheeting. A crew of dwarves was bolting railings along the front row, arguing about the spacing. Farther along, two human technicians stood on ladders, fixing a display panel to a pole while a third shouted up measurements from below.

Beyond the stands, the qualifying course was taking shape. Marked lanes ran between low walls and raised platforms. Target posts stood in rows, some fixed, some on tracks that would presumably move. A long barrier of pale mana screening hummed faintly along the outer edge, separating the course from where the spectators would sit.

Near the front, a separate section had been roped off with blue cord. Cushioned chairs. A canopy. Small placards set on each seat.

Guests, Silas thought. Recruiters. People with money to hand out.

He wondered how many names on those placards would still be there when he graduated.

He had come to walk the course. Registered competitors were allowed to inspect the layout before it was sealed for the qualifiers, as long as they stayed out of the active lanes. A few dozen students were already doing the same, drifting between the walls in small groups, pointing at the targets and muttering.

Silas started along the nearest lane.

A crack split the air before he had gone twenty paces.

He flinched. So did half the students nearby. Then he saw the source: a practice lane at the far end, still open for use, where a young man in a Star Class jacket stood with one hand raised toward a row of targets.

Light jumped from his fingers.

It wasn’t wild. Silas had expected lightning to look like the effects from the game, all forks and flashes spraying across the screen. This was a single thread, thin and white, that leapt from the young man’s hand and struck the exact center of the first target. Then the second. Then the third, each strike landing in the same place on each plate.

The fourth thread went a finger’s width wide and scorched the rim.

The young man lowered his hand. He looked at the scorch mark for a long moment, then walked forward and examined it up close, his expression one of quiet annoyance.

Silas knew that face.

Leander Solvain. A human prince, though Silas couldn’t recall which kingdom. Stormcall. S-Rank. He had been one of the students Alden’s party could recruit or fight depending on the route, and he had been maddeningly hard to beat because he almost never missed.

Now Silas watched him miss by a finger’s width and go back to correct it. Leander returned to his mark, flexed his fingers, and threw four more threads. All four landed dead center.

"Impressive," someone near Silas murmured.

Leander apparently heard. He glanced over, found Silas at the edge of the lane, and raised an eyebrow.

"You’re standing on the inspection line," Leander said. "Not the observation line. That’s two paces back."

Silas looked down. There was, in fact, a faint painted line two paces behind him.

"Sorry," he said, and stepped back.

"It’s not for my benefit." Leander nodded at the targets. "If one goes wide, it goes wide in that direction."

"The last one didn’t go very wide," Silas said.

"It went wide enough." Leander rolled his shoulder. His voice was even, not unfriendly, but there was a sharpness in it that Silas recognized. It was the same sharpness Alden had when talking about his loose grip. "Anyone can make lightning loud. I want mine to land where I put it."

Silas’s eyes went to the canopy in the distance, then back.

"For the recruiters?" Silas asked.

Leander followed his glance and made a dry sound.

"They’ll be polite to me regardless." He turned back to his targets. "I’d like to be ranked first by people who aren’t paid to be polite."

Another thread struck the center of the plate. Silas moved on before he could be told to mind the line again.

The accuracy section was farther along. Hanging rings marked a path between steel plates mounted on posts at different heights. Each plate had a circular opening in its face. Silas stopped to look at the small launch mechanism behind the nearest one.

A dwarven girl was standing in front of the third plate with a measuring rule held up to its edge.

She was short and broad-shouldered, with dark braids pinned tightly against her head and a Star Class badge half-hidden under a heavy work vest. She was scowling at the plate the way Vessa had scowled at Silas’s first dart drawing.

As he passed, she turned and pointed the measuring rule at him.

"You. Remote Grasp?"

Silas stopped. "Yes."

"Hold that for me." She pointed at a second, loose plate lying on the ground. "Angle it like this one. Exactly like this one. Don’t touch it with your hands, I’ve already got fingerprints on half the course."

It was an oddly specific request. Silas lifted the loose plate with his Talent and turned it until it matched the angle of the mounted one. The dwarven girl squinted, made a small adjustment gesture with two fingers, and he tilted it a hair further.

"There." She raised one hand.

A shield appeared in front of her palm.

Silas had seen barrier Talents in the game. They looked like glowing domes or walls. This was different: a flat pane of faintly shimmering mana, angled rather than facing straight out. She pushed it forward, and it met the edge of the plate he was holding, and he felt the plate slide sideways along it, deflected away instead of stopped.

"That," the girl said, "is my problem."

"Which part?" Silas asked.

"The part where it slides." She dropped the shield and pointed at the mounted plates. "These launch projectiles while we touch the targets. But my shields don’t just stop things. They turn them. If I turn one at this angle, it goes straight into the next lane."

Silas looked. She was right. The neighboring lane was barely four paces away.

"So you’d hit whoever’s running beside you," Silas said.

"And lose points for interference. They’d lose time getting up, and we’d both have to explain it to an official." She jabbed the measuring rule at the plate. "I’d rather finish the course."

Silas lowered the loose plate carefully to the ground. In the game, Dagna Korr’s S-Rank Bulwark had kept whole parties alive. He had never needed to think about where the things it deflected would land.

"Can you change the angle mid-run?" he asked.

She looked at him properly for the first time.

"Yes. That’s what I’m going to do. But I wanted to know which angle was safe before I started guessing under a timer." She tucked the rule into her vest. "Thanks for holding it. Dagna Korr."

"Silas Rooke," he said.

"I know," Dagna said, with no particular inflection. "You’re the one who got Lydia Rooke expelled." She was already walking toward the next plate. "Good luck with the qualifiers."

Silas stood there for a second, unsure whether he had just been insulted, complimented, or simply informed.

He decided it was probably the third.