Chapter 64: Fifty-Eighth

Chapter 64: Fifty-Eighth

The walls came first.

They were low enough to vault, placed at angles that made a straight line impossible. Silas didn’t try to be fast. He tried to be clean, placing his hands, landing with his weight under him, turning into the next wall without stopping. The narrow beams after them were where the first competitor had lost time. He took them the way Renn had taught him to take a recovery step: eyes forward, feet finding the line without needing to be watched.

He came off the last beam still balanced.

The constructs stood in a staggered row ahead. They were man-shaped frames of wood and metal, each with a painted core plate set in its chest and a padded arm that swung on a timed mechanism. The fourth one carried a small shield bolted to its forearm, held in front of its core.

Silas took the first three with ordinary work: step inside the swing, touch the core, move on. The padded arms were slow enough to read. His blade found each plate with a soft ring.

The fourth construct swung its shield arm into place just as he arrived.

He could have tried to push it aside. He had the output for it now, if he wanted to spend it. But the shield was bolted at the elbow, and the mechanism would fight him the whole way, and he would pay for that in mana and seconds.

Instead, he reached with Remote Grasp for the shield’s lower edge and tipped it upward, just a finger’s width.

The shield’s angle changed. The bottom of the core plate showed beneath it.

Silas’s blade touched the exposed paint, and he was past before the arm finished its cycle.

Somewhere in the stands, someone made a surprised noise. Silas didn’t look.

The accuracy section waited. Silas took out the scoring token every competitor had been issued to carry to the finishing plate.

Here, the rings hung beside a winding path, each center covered by a thin scoring screen. The launch plates fired padded balls across the path on a timer. As the officials had explained at inspection, a competitor could touch the centers with a hand or weapon as they passed, or strike them from farther away and carry their token straight to the finish. Dodging or blocking the balls avoided penalties; hitting someone in another lane earned one.

Silas could send his token through the screens without going within reach of each ring. Remote Grasp would save him several steps—provided he didn’t lose control while avoiding the balls.

He lifted the token.

The first ring was easy. The second was higher, and a padded ball came at his shoulder as he guided the token toward it. He turned the ball aside with his bracer, felt the impact through his forearm, and kept the token moving.

He guided the token through the second ring, then the third, while watching the launch plates. A ball came low this time. He stepped over it without losing the token’s line.

The fourth ring was angled sideways. He brought the token around a fraction too fast, and it clipped the edge with a small clack.

A penalty light flashed on the display.

Fine. That one’s mine.

He adjusted and threaded the fifth ring cleanly, then the sixth, then set the token down on the finishing plate and crossed the line.

The board beside the start updated.

Silas slowed beyond the finishing line, breathing hard. His forearm ached where the ball had hit it, but his mana reserve was still comfortably above half. He looked back at the course and grinned.

The final rankings for the qualifiers went up in the late afternoon.

Two hundred and twelve competitors. The top sixty-four would advance to the individual duels.

Silas found his name at fifty-eight.

He stood in front of the display for a moment longer than he needed to, reading it again. Fifty-eighth of two hundred and twelve. Six places clear of the cutoff, and higher than almost every other Bronze Class name on the list.

The names above him were a different matter.

Leander Solvain sat at the very top, his time almost absurdly clean. Silas had watched part of his run on the Course One display: every thread of lightning striking dead center, every construct dropped in a single touch. Dagna Korr was fourth, having spent the accuracy section turning padded balls neatly back into the ground at her feet instead of into the next lane. Silas had seen her do it and felt oddly pleased on her behalf.

Isolde Arvane was second.

Between them sat names he half-recognized from the game. A fox-eared beastkin girl named Tavi Ashmark had taken third, crossing the sprint section so fast that the display camera had lost her twice. An elven boy, Caelan Veyris, had finished fifth. Silas had watched him carry his token straight down the path while his arrows pierced the rings’ scoring screens ahead of him. Six shots, six center lights, and only one padded ball close enough to make him sidestep. Another S-Rank bearer, like Tavi. The top of the list was full of them.

Further down, Maelin was forty-first. Alden was sixty-third, one place above the cutoff. Silas found both of their names, and then, without quite meaning to, looked for a third.

Gareth Rooke. Twenty-second.

His communicator buzzed.

I saw you!! Mara had written. You looked so serious. The man speaking on the broadcast said "tidy" when you did the thing with the shield. I don’t know what that means but I agree. Fifty-eight!! Your mother is very proud. Eat something.

Silas read it twice. Then he laughed, alone in front of the display, and didn’t care who noticed.

With the final rankings posted, Isolde waited below the guest canopy. Students kept stopping to congratulate her, and she kept looking past them to the fourth chair from the end.

The crowd had applauded her run loudly. People always cheered for blood. They cheered harder when they did not understand what they had seen.

She had spent the whole run controlling a single thread.

It had come from a small cut on her palm, measured under the competition rules, and she had shaped it into a whip that coiled and struck each construct’s core, bent around the shielded ones, and never once touched an official, a spectator, or anyone’s blood but her own. The cut had closed before she reached the accuracy section. She hadn’t needed to use Blood Dominion to heal it. Her body did that on its own.

She had placed second. Leander’s time remained at the top of the display. Isolde looked away before she could start picking through every second she had lost.

Master Ceren sat in the fourth chair from the end of the guest canopy. The vampire master hadn’t applauded, and Isolde hadn’t expected her to. Ceren took very few students; she had come to Crownless as a guest, not a recruiter. Isolde had written to her twice. Neither letter had been answered.

The academy’s senior staff and the visiting recruiters had watched her run too. So had the vampire elders among the guests. Isolde would have to speak to them before they left. For now, she wanted Ceren to look at her again.

When the guests began to rise, Master Ceren came down the steps of the canopy, walked along the rope, and stopped in front of Isolde.

"The third construct," she said. "You broke your thread to turn it around the shield, and formed it again on the other side."

Isolde held very still.

"I did," she said.

She watched that closely?

"You paid for that turn twice," Master Ceren said. "Bend the thread instead. Let the turn carry the shape. You would have finished with more left over, and you would not have needed the extra drop you drew at the fourth."

She nodded once, as if that were the entire conversation, and walked away toward the guest exit.

Isolde stood where she had been left.

She had felt the extra drawing at the fourth construct and dismissed it as a small cost of speed. Now she followed the earlier turn again in her head, furious that she had missed the connection.

Bend it. Don’t break it.

She wanted to try immediately. But Ceren was disappearing toward the guest exit, and Isolde had to make herself stay where she was instead of following her with a dozen questions.

Isolde’s hand closed slowly at her side. She barely noticed the congratulations from the students passing behind her.