Chương 38: Battle

[Greater Focus Active] It felt like the world went crisp at the edges as the skill took hold: every mote of dust in the lamplight suddenly accounted for, with the forms of my new comrades resolving out of the dim, already fighting each other. The Rothvar came for me first. He crossed the room smiling, and he was fast. Economical, too, every stride placed exactly where it needed to be, no wasted motion anywhere in him.

In fact, he was fast enough that I knew taking him lightly would have cost me, and that frankly made the whole thing sing in my chest, even as the other three tore into one another off, the big one, the boy with the sword and the quiet one folding into a knot of noise I let fall away. He came in low, and was already reaching when I stepped off the line.

I watched his eyes arrive where I'd been a full beat after I'd already left it, then saw him register the empty air, immediately correct, his weight rolling onto the back foot as he hunted for the angle to turn my sidestep into a throw. He was good. He found it fast. He was already turning to make me pay for the opening when my fist went into his chest. Much to my surprise, he got an arm across himself in time.

I felt it fold under the strike, the guard and the ribs behind it taking the force together, and then he simply left. He went off his feet and across the room, making a loud WHAM! sound as he hit the far wall, plaster jumping loose in a pale burst around the shape of him. He slid down it and sat in the wreckage, one boot skewed under him, dust settling on his shoulders like the first of a snow. Oh no! The room had gone silent, and somewhere in the quiet my own breath was loud, coming quicker than I wanted it to.

"Are you alright?!" He'd come at me with mana in his fist, so I'd put it in mine. That was the only reason. I-I thought... he looked like he could take it, he really did. The other three had frozen where they stood, all of them looking at me now. And the Rothvar, slumped against the ruined wall, was now looking at me too with eyes were wide open.

"Hey, I'm so sorry, I thought yo—""HAHAHAAH!" The laugh came up out of him before I could finish, and I flinched at the sheer size of it. The Rothvar was already levering himself off the floor, beating the plaster dust off his shoulders in big careless slaps that filled the air around him with pale clouds.

"Oooowee." He rolled one shoulder, then the other, testing the arm that had taken the hit.

"You pack a mean punch, pretty boy."... Pretty boy? I stood a little straighter. I wasn't sure what my face had to do with any of it, though I supposed there were worse things to be called when you'd just put someone through a wall.

"Interesting." The boy with the sword had lowered it, watching me over the flat of the blade with his head cocked to one side. The quiet one stood with both hands closed around the wiry boy's neck, and the latter had a dagger pressed up under his jaw, the two of them locked there at a dead stalemate. Neither was looking at the other. The quiet one's eyes were on me, as though the blade at his throat were a detail beneath his notice.

"God hides his sharpest edges in soft things. A still pond over deep water. A gentle face over a hard hand." He inclined his head, as far as the dagger allowed.

"How unexpected." The wiry boy's eyes cut to me without his head moving. He made a small, sharp sound in his throat.

"Hmph." Then, from somewhere low and behind me, muffled, half swallowed by cloth and floorboard: " Howl!" I turned. There was a face under the nearest bed, jammed into the gap between the frame and the floor, one arm reaching out through the dust toward me.

"Beat them, Howl," Tomás hissed.

"Don't let them be the king of the room!" The Rothvar clapped his hands together, knocking loose one last cloud of plaster.

"Ah — I forgot to name the rules." He said.

"There's only two. Don't kill anybody. And keep it inside these four walls; nobody goes out a window or through the door, because the moment something lands in the corridor we've got proctors in here, and then it stops being fun." He grinned, rolling the sore shoulder one final time.

"That's it. Everything else is on the table."

"Wait, how do you decide who—" Then they all came at me. [Greater Focus Active] Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work! The room sharpened again, and I saw them all arrive at once, converging from every corner. Had I done something?

I combed back through the last minute for it — the wall, the are you alright, the pretty-boy business — and found nothing that seemed to warrant this, but stepped back anyway to buy a breath, only to find that there was a shadow under me that hadn't been there. A hand came up out of it and closed around my ankle.

It was the wiry boy's — I placed it a half-beat late, because his actual arm was across the room, sunk to the wrist in the pool of dark the lamp threw behind him, and this hand had surfaced out of the shadow beneath my own feet like the two ends of the same dark were one place. Is that an Authority? It had the taste of one, nothing about it obeyed a natural law I could name. A second hand then broke the surface and caught my other leg.

And not a second later, the swordsman was on me, the steel of his blade suddenly folded into itself as he swung, resolving into the blunt head of a mace at the top of the arc. I cast a shield up between us. He struck it, and it shattered on contact, the force behind the blow so far past what I'd braced for that it didn't seem real. It would have thrown me clear across the room, had the hands at my ankles not held me exactly where I stood.

So the blow had nowhere to go but into me, and I was still adjusting when the Rothvar's fist met my face. I had never been hit like that. Not even by Bellos during our sparring sessions. The whole room tilted a quarter-turn and rang like a struck bowl, and some far-off analytical part of me observed, from a great distance, what — what the hell — before the rest of me could catch up to the fact of it. A fist went into my stomach half a second later.

This time from the quiet one, still with that serene half-smile, folding me around his knuckles. And then they were simply beating me.

"Fight back, pretty boy!" The Rothvar's voice came down through the noise, delighted, close to my ear and then gone." Fight back!" And they were hitting each other, I realized; harder than they were hitting me, far harder, the big one's elbow catching the swordsman across the jaw, the monk's heel raking down the wiry boy's shin, a whole separate war being fought over the top of me. But every swing found its way to me too.

However viciously they went at one another, some part of each blow always came home to my ribs, my back, the side of my head, as if I were the one fixed point they'd all agreed on.

Again, this was utterly foreign to me. Never in my life had I felt this much disrespected and somewhere under the confusion and the ringing in my skull I found a small, clear fact waiting for me: I did not like it. Not one bit.

"ENOUGH!" I burned my own legs to do it. Fire down both shins, no time to be clean about it: my shoes went, so did the cuffs of my trousers, curling black and gone in the same breath, but the heat found the hand around my ankle, and the wiry boy shrieked somewhere behind me and let go. I then pulled the air in, compressed it to a hard knot in the space I stood in, and let it go. BOOM! The room came apart.

Beds lifted and flipped, the lamp swung wild on its chain, someone's trunk went end over end into a corner, and the four of them were flung back off me in every direction, which was the entire point. For one whole second I had space to stand in.

"Ah, now that's more li—" The Rothvar didn't finish it. I had him by the throat before the sentence was out, mana pouring down through my arms as I took him off his feet and drove him into the floorboards hard enough to feel them give. I hauled him back up, noticing the monk was already coming. So I threw the Rothvar at him. He caught a fist across the ear on the way past, still trying to help even as he flew, and the two of them tangled.

Then in the half-instant the monk spent dealing with a body full of Rothvar, I closed the distance and dropped right up under his guard where he'd never thought to look. My fist came up into the point of his chin, and WHAM! His head snapped back. At the same moment, the swordsman was winding up behind me. I felt the mana gathering under his legs for a lunge, so I put a levitation spell on him before he could spend it, and all that stored power lifted off the ground with him.

He hung there, boots a hand's width above the floor, robbed of everything he'd been about to throw at me, dangling for one furious second before he tore my spell apart with one of his own. But one second was enough. I took the monk by the collar and hurled him up into the swordsman before his feet had found the floor again, and they met in the air with a crack. Then I felt punches coming from everywhere. From under me, behind me, angles that no arm should have reached me from.

It did not take me long to realize it were the wiry boy's hands, surfacing out of every shadow in the room, striking me, then gone before I could turn. One caught my temple. The next my kidney. He was everywhere and nowhere, the dark itself throwing fists. But [Greater Focus] was still burning, and the world was still crisp at the edges, so when the next hand came up out of the shadow beneath me I saw it arrive and caught it.

I hauled the whole arm up and out, and the rest of him came with it, dragged bodily out of his own shadow and into the light, sprawling, suddenly and completely present. He had just enough time to look surprised before I hit him square in the face. His glasses burst across his face and he went down. Ding! [Skill Level Up!] [Greater Focus: Level 1 (84%) > Level 2 (3%)] I stood in the middle of the room, breathing through my mouth, only now noticing my left eye swollen shut, blood on my uniform, on my hands, on the floor… Every part of me hurt. My ribs, my jaw, my shoulder, the back of my head, the front of it, every part. But they were all down, for the moment. Just for the moment. The Rothvar shoved a part of the wall boy off him and got to his feet, spitting blood.

He cracked his neck to the left, then the right, and a bloodied grin spread across his face." Whoo! I gotta say, pretty boy, after hearing all that awesome shit about you, I was expecting to be very disappointed," He rolled his shoulders as I looked at him, unsure what to even answer.

"Alright, let's finish this up. You lot ready?" Then they all stood back up, looking, for all the world, perfectly fine after all this. They… still had more in them. I could see it. They were hurt, but they were not done. So I raised my fists. My arms were heavy, my breathing ragged, but [Greater Focus] was already at Level 2, and the warmth of excitement in my chest had only amplified now that I saw them standing. Just like that, we all came forward when the door opened.

Everyone stopped, all heads turned at once toward the doorway, where a woman with copper hair and dark robes stood with one hand on the iron ring and a frown on her face that could have cut glass. Professor Ashara looked at the mess, then at the six of us, standing in the wreckage of a room that had been furnished and intact about a few minutes ago.

"What is happening here?"