Chương 47: Chapter 46: The Unfair Fight

Kandal's street had gone quiet around the edges of the cubic Field, the ordinary noise of the city fading as people began clearing out. They were near the edge of the Lower City, where enforcement seemed more like a suggestion than a rule, and nobody seemed particularly concerned about what happened in the streets. Nobody panicked. Vendors pulled their carts beneath awnings, pedestrians slipped into nearby doorways, and those farther down the street simply changed direction without a word.

They moved with the practiced rhythm of people who'd done this before. Resonance battles were apparently common enough here that everyone knew exactly what to do. Elma weighed the Field pressing against her own immediately. His TRO was a staggering 500, 000 Will. It was only half her own, but the way he'd expanded his Field, especially after recognizing her strength, made Elma suspect he wasn't the brute-force type. He was hiding something. He hadn't moved from the pane beneath him.

Both hands stayed loose at his sides, spectacles catching the light, nothing in his stance suggesting a person bracing for three opponents at once. Reckless. Or certain.

"Well?" He spread his arms, inviting it.

"We don't have all day." Elma didn't waste the invitation. Six Water Drills launched as one, closing the distance faster than he should have been able to track. They vanished a foot from his face. Elma's eyes widened. They weren't deflected. They were just extinguished, gone the way a candle goes out. They weren't unwoven either—"Elma—" Jorm's voice, sharp, from her left. The drills reappeared a foot in front of Elma, carrying every ounce of the velocity she'd given them.

Jorm's Gund came up in a blur, catching two on the flat of the blade before they could open Elma's throat, sparks and mist scattering into the air. The rest tore into the cobblestones around her, burying themselves deep in the ground. Elma didn't move. Her heart kicked fast, at how close that had actually been.

"Really?" The boy slouched.

"A Tsar, and that's the best you've got?" Silk didn't wait for an opening. She closed the distance in two strides, blade already clearing its sheath— —and the world flipped around her. There was nothing Elma's Field registered as an attack at all. One instant, Silk was mid-lunge, sword angled for his throat. The next, she was facing back the way she'd come, her momentum carrying her away from him as she swung at empty air. A light tap landed between her shoulder blades.

She went down, rolling once before catching herself on one knee.

"Huh." Genuine surprise broke through his smirk.

"Unawakened, and that strong? How the hell did you get that strong?" Silk pushed herself upright, only to slump back down again. She blinked several times, her senses seemingly not working as they should. Elma's eyes caught it before her mind finished processing what she was looking at. The metal mouth guard still covered Silk's entire mouth, but its right side now sat on the left, and its left side had shifted to the right. Her sheath, always slung across her left hip, hung from her right.

Silk hadn't been struck or spun by any force Elma understood. She'd been rewritten, whole, without a hair out of place except which side of her body everything was on. An Innate Ability, Elma thought. Jorm went next, Gund raised, jaw set with the specific determination of someone who'd decided bravery was a choice you kept making even when your stomach disagreed. The boy crooked two fingers, and a dent appeared in the space above Jorm. It pulled her from the ground, dragging her upward before disappearing.

Gravity took over. Jorm fell back toward the cobblestones, her back facing the ground as she dropped. She was almost at the ground when the boy flicked his fingers. In an instant, her whole position was fliped. Her back was now facing the sky, and she was falling upward, her arms flailing in startled confusion. Her ascent slowed until gravity claimed her again. She began falling toward the ground, this time face-down, her arms scrambling uselessly for balance. Just before she hit, the boy flicked his fingers again.

Her face was suddenly turned toward the sky, and she was falling upward once more. He kept doing it, catching her just before every impact, reversing her fall and flipping her position each time. Up toward the sky, down toward the ground, then up again. His grin only grew wider with every turn, clearly enjoying himself as Jorm became little more than a blur of cloak and limbs caught between the two.

"Put her down!" Elma snapped. Jorm's stomach was visibly rebelling somewhere around the third pass, before he finally let her drop the last few feet to the cobblestones, where she lay flat on her back, wheezing.

"Is he still... spinning me?" Jorm mumbled weakly. The boy turned back to Elma, hands sliding into his pockets.

"Is that it?" It wasn't. Elma held still, her jaw tightening as she ran the last thirty seconds back through her mind instead of answering him. His Innate Ability was space inversion. That much Elma was certain of now. What she couldn't understand was why he could only affect parts of his Field at a time. When she used her own Innate Ability, her entire Field became an exclusion zone. His clearly didn't work that way. Let me look, the Other said, already reaching for the wheel.

She let him, her eyes turning red behind the frog mask. Her vision sharpened, the street briefly overexposed before settling into something clearer than she'd ever seen it on her own. Nothing had actually slowed. It only felt that way, next to how much more there suddenly was to see. The boy's Field wasn't smooth. She'd assumed it was the first time she'd felt its edges, one seamless cube stretched around all four of them.

But with the Other sharpening her sight, faint distortions emerged within it, subtle enough that she hadn't noticed them before. They looked like chambers, sections of space that seemed slightly wrong, so subtle she might have mistaken them for flaws in the air. These were the portions of his Field he could manipulate, with thin strips of normal space running between them as boundaries. Five divisions along the width. Five along the depth. Five stacked toward the sky.

One hundred and twenty-five chambers, each barely large enough to hold two grown men shoulder to shoulder. He hadn't teleported her Water Drills. He'd inverted the three chambers between them horizontally, mirroring that entire section of space. Everything inside it had gone with the inversion, carrying the drills to the opposite side of the row. The space around Jorm had been inverted vertically, mirroring it along that axis and turning the direction of her momentum with it.

But his control ended at the walls of his Field. He could invert whatever occupied the chambers inside it, but he couldn't flip something that affected the entire space at once. If she could make an attack large enough to fill the whole cube, there would be nowhere for him to send it.

"Okay." Lucien's voice, tight, already stepping between them with both hands raised.

"Okay, we get it, you're strong, message received. Let's not turn this into an actual incident. Nobody needs an incident."

"Well, that Karnak needs to acknowledge it first," the boy said, looking away with a faint huff.

"Then... maybe I'll consider it."

"He's a child," Lucien hissed at Elma.

"Can we please—" Elma didn't answer him. She raised both hands and began pulling the air toward the space in front of her. The pressure built fast, folding in on itself, a held breath compressing into a sphere of air so dense it cast a shadow. The nearest awning snapped taut. Thirty feet off, a vendor's abandoned cart rattled against its own wheels. Stillstorm. The boy's smirk thinned into something more careful.

"You know what this is?" She said. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. He didn't answer immediately. Then he took his spectacles off, breathed on one lens, and cleaned it against his sleeve.

"I don't need to. I can see how much pressure you're building up."

"Elma." Lucien had stopped bothering to sound calm.

"What are you doing—" The boy slid his spectacles back on.

"Well." He lifted one hand, almost lazily. Something black formed above his open palm. It wasn't shadow or smoke, but an absence so complete it ached faintly to look at directly, a hole cut clean through the visible world.

"Let's see, then." He snapped his fingers. Before the Stillstorm vanished, Elma saw the boundaries between the chambers stretching out in front of the boy disappear. The separate spaces merged into one long box, the lines between them gone. Then the entire section inverted. The Stillstorm was suddenly in front of the boy, occupying the space that had been closest to Elma a moment ago. Dust that had been floating in front of him now drifted in front of her. Her stomach tightened. It was no longer in her control.

It would explode. He moved his hand towards the Stillstorm, and the dark sphere slid into it, settling at its center. The storm began to expand, but the sphere pulled everything inward around itself. The compressed air buckled inward, dragged toward the sphere from every direction until the whole storm folded in on itself and vanished. There was no explosion. Only a few white sparks and a small gust that ruffled Elma's hood. Every ounce of pressure she'd built. A breeze.

The boy rolled his shoulders, cracked every knuckle in one unbroken motion, and spread his arms wide, delighted with himself all over again.

"Anything else?" Elma watched his smile. That sphere of nothing had cost him more than the Stillstorm had cost her. She was fairly certain of it. Unweaving cost more than weaving. If they kept trading blows like this, his LR would run dry before hers did. It didn't change anything. She still didn't want to walk out of this fight empty, not here, not this far from anywhere she could refill it safely. Resonance was supposed to make fights fair. Why wasn't this fight fair?

The boy tilted his head, slow, like a branch bending the wrong way. His smile stretched wider with the motion, an open invitation for her to try something stupid again.

"Nothing?" he said, the word more a chuckle than a question. His mirror rose. The strips of normal space between some of the chambers began to shrink, something forming inside them. Mirror shards. Dozens of them, edges catching the suns as they orbited him in a slow, patient cloud. Jorm sprang to her feet, her head seemed to clear immediately at the site. She'd seen what these shards could do once already—in an alley, over thieves reduced to red paste on the cobblestones.

Silk staggered, still unsteady from whatever the inversion had cost her balance, and Lucien caught her under one arm before she could go down again.

"I wouldn't try parrying these," the boy said, almost gentle about it, the shards drawing still, aimed.

"Stop!" The little girl grabbed a fistful of his sleeve, hauling with her whole weight, which did nothing at all to move him.

"You said only the bad ones!" He didn't look down at her.

"Ready?" Use your Innate Ability, the Other said. Elma went still. My Innate Ability? She'd never tried it on another Innate Ability before. She didn't know if she could negate his ability to invert space. But she knew that using it would leave her defenseless, considering how much space his Field occupied. What would you even do with your Field in this situation, the Other pressed. It's not stopping those. Elma looked at the mirrors, glinting as they waited for their summoner to unleash them. The Other was right.

She couldn't do anything to stop them. She sucked in a breath, threw both arms wide, and shouted it before she could think better of it—"Curtains Down!" —and shut her eyes. She waited two breaths, but nothing came. She cracked one eye open and found the shards still hanging there, their edges glinting in the air. It hadn't worked. Across from her, the boy's mouth was already curling to form a comment. You really didn't have to yell it, the Other said, wincing somewhere behind her eyes.

That was embarrassing for both of us. Shut up. The boy glanced from one side to the other, then back at her.

"What..." His brow furrowed.

"What was that supposed to do?" She yanked her hood further down, refusing to look at either Jorm or Lucien, both of whom were staring at her instead of the small, orbiting apocalypse a dozen feet away.

"Well," the boy said, dragging the word out.

"Dance for me." He threw his arm forward. Elma flinched, one hand up over her face on reflex. But nothing came. She lowered her hand to find him staring at his own shards, frozen and inert, exactly where they'd been a second ago. Elma blinked behind her mask. He shoved his hand out again. Still nothing. It worked, the Other said, delight cutting straight through the earlier embarrassment. It actually worked! The shards blinked out of existence, all at once, with a sound like a struck glass. A delay, Elma thought.

He couldn't create new shards, but the ones already there could persist after falling outside his Field's influence for a short while before collapsing.

"What the—" His mirror vanished from beneath him next. The girl dropped an inch before he caught her collar one-handed, without looking, still hovering himself, several feet off the ground. How is he doing that? The Other asked. It wasn't his external Field, Elma said. I'd neutralized that. It must be something to do with Internal Reinforcement. Interesting… He tried Jorm next, fingers flicking toward her the way they had before—and Jorm didn't so much as wobble.

"What did you do?" he shouted, snapping his fingers at nothing, over and over, like the trick might come back if he was insistent enough about it. Jorm wove another Gund and closed the distance in a single jump, blade angled in a reversed cross-cut." Eighteen o'clock!" Elma felt his Field collapse toward his body in a frantic pull, just before the Gunds could connect.

He caught both blades between two fingers, stopping her cold without so much as a scratch, and pushed her back with no more effort than swatting a fly. Jorm hit the ground on her feet, breathing hard, unharmed and clearly furious about it. He drifted down slowly after her, expression gone thoughtful in a way the smirk hadn't managed.

"Let's call it there," he said, his eyes settling back on Elma.

"That's a real nasty trick you've got there." Elma didn't lower her guard. She watched him for a moment, waiting for the catch.

"Yes. Thank you," Lucien said, exhaling as his shoulders finally loosened.

"Glad you finally realized how pointless this whole thing was." He came down soft, no more impact than if he'd never left the ground, and started toward her at an easy walk. The girl trailed a step behind, hand still fisted in the back of his shirt. He glanced toward Silk, who was still struggling to find her balance.

"Can you drop the trick," he said to Elma, "so I can fix her?" Elma looked at him and said nothing.

"I'm done fighting." He held both hands up, empty, palms out.

"Promise. Not gonna touch any of you again. Better?" She hesitated before deactivating her Innate Ability, but her hand never left the switch. He snapped his fingers. Silk's sheath shifted back to her left hip. The right and left sides of her mouth guard settled back into place. She took in one hard breath like she'd been holding it since it happened— —and closed the distance before Lucien got a hand on her shoulder, blade already free.

"Whoa—" the boy threw both hands up again, stumbling back a step, the girl squeaking and ducking behind his leg. Lucien got an arm around Silk's waist, hauling with everything he had, which did approximately nothing against her. The edge stopped an inch from his throat.

"I—hey. You attacked me first," he said with wounded indignation, like the last four minutes hadn't happened at all.

"We're not doing this again," Lucien said, still hauling and going nowhere.

"Nobody wants a second fight. Silk. Silk." Silk didn't blink.

"Do that to me again," she said, each word placed like a nail, "and I will tear your throat out through the back of your neck."

"Understood. Loud and clear. Won't happen." He didn't move an inch closer to testing her on it. She held the blade a second longer, just to make sure he believed her, then stepped back and let it drop to her side.

"Sheesh." He straightened his collar with two fingers, composure sliding back into place like it had never left. He turned to Elma.

"Name's Vector." He spread his hands, waiting.

"Yours?" Elma didn't offer it.

"Fair. Don't trust me yet." He didn't seem bothered by that either, hands going into his pockets, weight rocking back onto his heels.

"That'll change. So." He tilted his head.

"What'd you think?"

"Of what."

"Of me." He said it like it should've been obvious.

"I could've ended that fight a lot uglier than I did, if I'd wanted to. Figured that's worth something, in terms of what you think of me. So." He rolled one shoulder.

"Join my team?" Elma looked past him at the girl still half-hidden behind his leg, then back at him.

"I don't see a team."

"You'd be the first. Standards are high—you clearly clear them. Others'll turn up eventually. I can feel it."

"You might want to lower those standards," Lucien muttered, "if you'd like a team at some point in this lifetime." Elma glanced back at her own three—Silk still tight-jawed, Jorm pale but upright, Lucien somewhere between exhausted and proud of that last line.

"I already have one," she said.

"You're serious." Half a laugh, disbelieving.

"I am." He exhaled through his nose, long and put-upon, like she'd inconvenienced him.

"Shame." Then, already moving past it: "You're still taking me to Sekar, then."

"That depends."

"On?"

"On what you want with him." He took his spectacles off and cleaned them again, unhurried, the same small ritual he'd used before—stalling, or thinking, or both.

"What I want," he said, sliding them back on, "is simple."

"I want to kill him."