Chapter 62: A Battle Undecided (Part 2).

Ash moved first, right arm swinging. I raised my left hand, put my weight on the same leg. Ash’s blow never came. She twisted mid blow, and I defended against nothing. Ash moved towards my right. I tried to correct, but I was a beat too late. She was already inside my guard. Her palm took me in the shoulder and turned me a quarter-circle, and I staggered two steps sideways with all the majesty of a startled hen.

She could have pressed the advantage before I recovered. Instead, she waited. “Your footwork is terrible,” she said.

“My footwork has never been relevant.”

“It’s relevant now.”

That was true. It had never needed to be. Nothing that had ever come within my reach had lived long enough for footwork to matter, until now.

She came again. I had commanded battles across three horizons at once. I had held the positions of forty legions in my head and moved them like fingers. None of that lived here. The Cerberus and the Great Elk had been dangerous, but they were simple beasts in the end. The Phoenix had been worse still, and it had been holding itself back. Ash was formidable, and she held back nothing. She had sworn that to me not long ago, in a chamber of crystal, and she was keeping her word now.

By the time I understood what her shoulder was doing, her shoulder had already done it. Her fist stopped a hair from my ribs and withdrew.

She was testing me. If I had any of the [Skills] and [Stats] I had once commanded, this testing would have been short.

I swung. She slipped it. I swung again, lower, a feint folded inside the blow. Ash took it apart without appearing to notice it had been one, caught my wrist, and let it go rather than capitalize on it, which she could have. The crowd had gone quiet. It had been quiet for some time.

They had jeered at tangled chains and a girl falling on her face. They were not laughing now. Some of them, at least, understood that they were watching something else entirely. The boy who had muttered for my blood was only staring wide-eyed now.

I had once known how every battle ended before it began. The opponent did not matter. Most would be swatted long before they could reach me. The few who reached me would end the moment they drew blood. I always knew the outcome. A victory, and usually a dull one.

I looked at Ash and I did not know. I did not know, and my heart was hammering, and there was sweat in the small of my back, and a strand of hair had come loose across my face, and I was-

I was enjoying myself.

“Is that the best you can do?” Ash asked. The Hero was grinning. It was not a Hero’s grin at all.

“Do not regret this, Ash.”

I settled into a different stance. My weight dropped low, my hands hung at my side. In the old world this had been called the [Silent Blade]. It was the stance my assassins had favored. Those who had passed through chambers no one should have reached and were gone before the body cooled. It was one of the rare few stances that leaned on nothing but itself. It did not care for [Stats]. It was all about patience and cunning, to deliver a single strike at the one moment a target believed itself safe. It could let a lesser thing kill what it had no right to touch.

It was different here, where Ash knew I was coming. It was still my best option. It annoyed me to use it. It was a weakling’s stance, and twice beneath a Queen. Against Ash, I would be a fool not to use it.

We moved again. My footwork had not improved. The earth still dragged at my feet and Ash was still faster. But I no longer needed to strike her. I needed only to not be where her hands were, and that much I could manage. Her palm passed a finger’s width from my jaw and met air. Her elbow grazed the place my shoulder had just left. I gave ground to her, always keeping myself a hair’s breadth from a blow that would have ended our bout.

The [Silent Blade] was not made for trading blows. It was made for one. Everything before that one was a lie told with the body. So I retreated, and let her think she had me running. Each blow came closer than the one before it, but none of them landed.

“Are you just going to run?” Ash asked. She was grinning.

She rushed forward and dropped low. Her leg swept the earth and took both of mine with it. The ground tilted and the world went sideways and I was falling. That was the moment.

I twisted into the fall. I gathered Essence into my heel, no more than the strike required. Enough to drop the Hero, but not enough to hurt her. I made sure of that. My body finished its turn and I drove my heel into the back of her neck.

It connected, but something about it was odd, and then we both struck the earth. I lay there half a breath. Then I pushed myself up. My ribs and my legs ached, but I rose, because the blow had landed clean, and a clean blow from the [Silent Blade] ended things. I turned to the Hero, to where she ought to have been lying senseless.

Ash was sitting up. One hand was pressed to the back of her neck, rubbing it. “Ow,” she said.

I stared at her. The strike should have dropped her. I had given nothing away, I was certain of it. On anyone else in this building save perhaps the Inker, that strike would have been the end of the fight before they knew they had been struck.

Ah. That was why the impact had felt off. In the last fraction before my heel found her, she had turned her neck into it, had she?

“That almost got me,” Ash said. She rolled her neck and winced. “Almost.” She looked up, and there was something rueful in her face. “I knew there was something strange about the way you were fighting. Good thing my hunch was right.”

“You know this style then.”

Ash got to her feet. “I’ve protected other people from it. Was always wondering when I’d have to defend myself from it.” She brushed the dirt from her arm. She rolled her shoulders. “It was still just a hunch though. You hid it pretty well.”

I’d failed because of a hero’s hunch. I waited for the frustration. I had been beaten, and worse, I had been read. The frustration should have come. It did not. A smile found me instead. Perhaps a single strike might have ended things, but it would have left something inside of me hollow. No wonder this was the Hero who finally killed me.

“I hope you’re not done yet,” Ash said. She settled back into her stance. The grin had come back.

I rolled my shoulders. The [Silent Blade] had failed me. Very well. I set my feet wide, squared my shoulders, and let my weight settle forward. This was the [Haunting Giant]. It was a brute’s posture. It was beneath me thrice over. I took it anyway. The gaps in our bodies were clear, but enough Essence would bridge that gap. I was sure.

The Ember Core hummed and I poured Essence through my limbs until the air bent with it. I might not have her skill, but raw force could open doors skill never could. If there was enough of it. I felt the bracers shiver, and pulled back some of the Essence. Ash answered. Her presence rose to meet mine, until the ground beneath her feet shattered. My own feet had sunk into the earth. I was aware, distantly, that every other fight in every other ring had stopped.

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It is a strange thing, to be honored by the strikes that are beating you.

We collided. The ground left us first.

“Stop!”

The Inker was between us. I had not seen the Elf enter the ring at all. One moment we were charging, and the next she stood in the gap between us with one hand raised toward each of us. She had caught our fists -one in each hand- and her arms trembled with the holding. Her Crest blazed.

“How,” she breathed, and it was not meant for either of us, “how in the world do you both have this much-” She caught herself. Her jaw set. When she spoke again her voice was cold. “You are allowed to spar,” she said, “you are not allowed to destroy the ring.”

Ash and I looked at each other, and then we looked beneath it.The entire ring had sunk in on itself, and the sinking had spread past its edges. A few moments more, and it might have been a small crater instead.