Chương 99: Chapter 98 – Hazel Takes The Plaudits

The room had no windows. Whoever had built it hadn't wanted the light, or hadn't wanted anyone outside knowing there was a room here at all — stone on three sides, a door on the fourth, and in the middle of it a communicator stone set into a plinth that hummed low and constant even when nobody was speaking through it.

"So he won then," the voice said through the communicator.

"He didn't just win." The voice in the room didn't sit. Hadn't sat since the call connected.

"He tore apart a Kithren a full grade higher than his own. Granted, it had only just evolved — but have you ever heard of a lower-rank Kithren dominating a higher one to that degree? Because I haven't. Not once, not in thirty years of watching this arena." A pause on the other end, longer than surprise alone would have needed.

"No," the other voice said.

"And it begs the question — where did he get this Kithren from. From the reports I've read, Claire met him at most three months ago, and he had no Kithren at all. The silly girl actually put in a request for us to send him money. Said he was living rough. Struggling."

"Well, something must have happened between then and now." The voice in the room stayed level, deliberately so, each word set down like he wanted the calm itself noticed.

"How does he go from that to leading a medium clan and putting a Rare on its back in three months? It doesn't add up. Not by any curve I've ever seen."

"There is one way it adds up." The words came slower now, weighed before they were spent.

"Watch them. From a distance, for now — I want that Kithren, but I need to know who he has standing beside him first. How strong the boy really is, how strong the ones around him are, before anyone moves." Quiet held on the line long enough that the man in the room checked the stone was still lit.

"You want Anthony?" he said finally.

"He won't give the Kithren up. I've seen what's between them. That's not a boy who parts with what's his."

"He may not have a choice." The other voice didn't rise. It didn't need to.

"If my hunch is right, that Kithren was never his to begin with. It was taken from us. A very long time ago." The waiting room behind the champions' hall smelled like every other back room in the arena — old wood, lamp oil, a draft coming from somewhere nobody had ever bothered tracing — but somebody had at least found Mahkir a cushion to lie on, and he'd taken it without complaint, leg still wrapped, head resting flat on his paws while the rest of the clan crowded in around him and Ant both.

"Right, from the top." Duncan dropped onto the bench across from Ant like he'd been saving the energy for it.

"How does a cat that size put a hole in a wall."

"He doesn't, normally," Ant said.

"That was new."

"New how new. New like you'd been saving it, or new like you didn't know you had it?"

"Second one."

"How's it feel, though," Rebekah cut in before Duncan could keep going, leaning forward with both elbows on her knees.

"Sharing that with him. Feeling him hit like that through the bond."

"Terrifying," Ant said, and meant it more than the word probably let on.

"Like handing someone the reins and still feeling every hoofbeat." Ray had been quiet for exactly as long as it took him to find an opening.

"Because from where I was standing, the both of you looked like something out of scripture. Divine retribution, walking on four legs." He paused, visibly pleased with himself.

"Or two, in your case."

"It wasn't divine," Ant said.

"It was gear." That got the room to actually settle, heads turning his way properly for the first time since they'd all piled in.

"Overload, Speed Enhance, the Roulette greaves — all three, back to back, then Attribute Sharing on top of it." Ant counted them off on his fingers, more for his own benefit than theirs.

"Attribute what?" Rebekah's brow went up, and beside her Duncan looked just as blank, which told Ant everything he needed to know about how far this had actually traveled through the clan. Kalsar caught the look too, and his voice gentled toward the room generally.

"Long story, short version," he said, before Ant could get into it.

"When they're both willing, some of what's his becomes some of Mahkir's — stats, mostly, for a few minutes at a stretch. Ant's had it a long while now. Just never had cause to explain it to anyone who joined after the fact."

"Nobody explains anything to anyone who joins after the fact," Ray said, not quite complaining, more cataloguing a fact for later use.

"I've been finding half this clan's secrets out sideways for months."

"You'd lose interest halfway through the explanation and start telling a story instead," Kalsar said.

"This way's faster."

"Every piece of it's Hazel's work," Ant went on.

"She's the one who forged gear that could take that kind of strain without falling apart on us mid-fight. I just pointed it at something."

"He's being modest," Kalsar said, from where he was leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded.

"Modest's the wrong instinct here, boy. You made the call to use it all at once, under pressure, without flinching. That's not nothing." This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"I'm not being modest. I'm saying it wouldn't have worked on anyone else's gear." Ant looked around the room, made sure it landed.

"She's the real story today. Not me."

"Well." Ray clapped his hands together once, decisive.

"Then we thank her properly when we get back. Something with actual ceremony to it — not just Duncan grunting 'nice work' at her over breakfast."

"I do more than grunt," Duncan said, wounded.

"You grunt with feeling. It's not the same as ceremony." Andy hadn't said anything yet, which by itself was worth noticing, and when he finally spoke it was to the room generally, not quite to Ant.

"I've seen Hexa go all out. Full aura, everything she's got." He was watching Mahkir on the cushion while he said it, the way he always watched Mahkir.

"She still puts him down, most likely. Two grades is two grades. But he'd have made her work for every inch of it, and she wouldn't have walked away clean either. That's not nothing, against what he was for those three minutes." Nobody argued with him. Nobody ever did, when Andy talked about strength — it was the one subject he never exaggerated, because he never needed to. He's not wrong, Mahkir said, without lifting his head. Tell him I said thank you. And that Hexa still isn't allowed to know I said that.

Ant relayed the first half and kept the second to himself.

"What'd the cat back go through, at the end there," Sam asked, quiet, the way his questions always arrived — small, and exactly the one nobody else had thought to ask.

"The wall. Did it feel it?"

"I don't know," Ant admitted.

"I hope not. It didn't ask to evolve mid-fight any more than we asked to be standing across from it when it did." Rowan, who'd said almost nothing since they'd sat down, finally looked up from whatever he'd been turning over in his hands — a scrap of leather cord, worrying it between his fingers out of habit.

"For what it's worth," he said, "nobody in that crowd is going to forget this tournament. Whatever else comes of it." The door opened before anyone could ask him what he meant by that, and an arena staffer leaned in — young, harried, a clipboard held like a shield.

"Champions to the floor, please. Ceremony's starting in five." His eyes caught on Mahkir stretched out on the cushion and went momentarily uncertain.

"Ah — can he walk?"

"He can walk," Ant said, already on his feet.

"Slowly. He'll manage." Mahkir was up before Ant finished the sentence, favoring the bad leg but moving under his own power, and shot Ant a look through the bond that needed no translation at all. I am not being carried out there in front of forty thousand people. I have some dignity left.

"You never used to complain about being carried in my coat." The coat was different. The coat was strategic.

"Nobody suggested carrying you." Good. Keep it that way. The arena floor had been swept clean of sand-churn and scorch marks since the last fight, raked smooth again, and under the afternoon light it looked almost like nothing had happened there at all — no wall with a fresh hole in it, no blood, no evidence that a Rare-grade Kithren had gone through solid stone a few hours earlier. Ant walked out onto it flanked by Mahkir, and the sound that met them wasn't the disbelieving roar from before.

It was steadier, thousands of voices settling into applause that had had time to decide what it thought. Three groups stood spaced across the sand, one for each bracket, and Ant found his place at the Common marker without needing to be shown it. The Epic winner stood closest — Marigolds' colors, a tall man with a coiled serpent Kithren at his heel that Ant didn't recognize and didn't want to get any closer to than this. The man was looking at him.

Properly looking, the kind of look that measured rather than admired, moving from Ant to Mahkir and back again like he was trying to reconcile something that refused to add up on the page in front of him. The Rare bracket's winner, standing a few paces further down, was doing the same thing, and made no effort at all to hide it. Ant didn't look away from either of them. He'd had enough practice with that today already.

An official in Bramholt's own arena colors moved down the line, flanked by two attendants each carrying a case, and stopped in front of Ant and Mahkir first.

"Common bracket champion," she announced, loud enough to carry to the back rows, "Oath of Defiance." The case opened to show a trophy — simple, heavier than it looked, a bronze Kithren mid-leap set into a stone base — and beneath it, sealed in a smaller pouch, a chit stamped with a number Ant had to read twice.

"Fifty thousand clan credits," the official said.

"Awarded to the champion's clan, redeemable at any registered ledger house." Fifty thousand. Ant kept his face steady, mostly, and took the trophy with both hands because it genuinely needed both. It was a fortune, by any measure that mattered to a clan two holdings deep and still counting its coin in careful stacks. And it still wasn't close to what two crates of brightvein had already put in the ledger — a fact that steadied Ant more than the trophy did.

Whatever came of today, whatever the man in the judges' box wanted from him, the clan didn't need this money to survive. It just made survival easier. Mahkir accepted his own share of the ceremony with rather more composure than Ant expected — sitting upright despite the leg, head level, looking every part a champion even with a bandage showing under his fur — and the crowd's noise climbed another notch for him specifically, chanting a word Ant couldn't quite make out over the general din.

They're saying my name, Mahkir said, deeply satisfied. Say it back to me. I want to hear it from someone who actually matters.

"Later," Ant murmured.

"You're being watched by half the arena right now." And?

"And I'm not encouraging you in public." When the ceremony finally released them, the clan swarmed back around Ant at the tunnel mouth in one loud, overlapping wave — Duncan already asking what fifty thousand credits actually bought, Ray already calculating some cut of it for himself out loud, Rebekah's hand landing briefly on Ant's shoulder in place of anything she might have said instead. Kalsar was the one who pulled him aside from the noise, voice low enough not to carry.

"I haven't heard from Maren in longer than I like," he said.

"Not since before the final started. That's not like her, tournament or no tournament." Ant felt the good mood of the last hour thin out at the edges. The old, familiar cold crept back in under it.

"How long's longer than you like?"

"Since this morning." That wasn't nothing, and Kalsar's face said he knew it too — the calm too flat, too deliberate, worn on purpose.

"Might be nothing. She gets buried in ledgers and forgets the world exists sometimes, you know that better than I do."

"But you're telling me anyway."

"I'm telling you because I think it's time we headed back regardless. Tournament's done, trophy's won, credits are banked. No reason left to stay." Ant looked down at the trophy still weighing in his own hands, at Mahkir favoring his bad leg beside him, at the clan still loud and celebrating around them like nothing in the world could touch it — and felt the first thread of real worry pull tight under all of it.

"Yeah," he said.

"Let's go home."