Chapter 58: The Floor: Culmination Arc [19]

The fire was the size of a house.

Elias shaped it in a C and let Auros’s shockwave run straight into the open mouth. The compressed air hit the burning interior and the fire doubled, tripled, the heat rippling outward across the floor in waves that made the front row of spectators lean back.

"Thanks." Elias’s jaw was tight. His eyes weren’t on Auros. "Now eat."

The mass launched.

Auros swung both arms up and crossed them over his head.

Then the fire stopped.

Not smothered. Not dodged. Every particle of the raging mass displaced simultaneously, gone so completely it left a vacuum of cold air that rushed in to fill the space. Xavier stood three meters behind Auros with one arm extended, palm flat, expression giving nothing.

"XAVIER ALMONTH INTERVENES WITH A SINGLE DISPLACEMENT SHOT. THE RAGING FIRE FROM CLASS B ANNIHILATED IN AN INSTANT—"

Elias screamed.

"You bastard, I couldn’t stand your face since day one!" His fists were shaking at his sides. "Till now you really never respected me, huh! You arrogant prick!"

Xavier lowered his arm and looked at Elias the way you look at weather.

Across the floor, Kreasial ducked a water blade from Calver and glanced sideways at Elias. "That guy has serious problems in his head." She exhaled. "I CAN FUCKING SCREAM TOO, YOU KNOW."

"Kreasial." Theodore’s voice was clipped. He fired a burst of compressed wind at Calver, Calver raised a stone wall, the wind scattered. "Focus. Arthur is getting torn up. I can feel it in the aetheric field. Vex is near aetherthin."

Kreasial clicked her tongue, looked at Arthur’s side of the floor, looked back at Calver.

"Tch." She turned and sprinted across the floor.

"Go. I’ll handle this." Theodore exhaled and raised his hands again.

-----

Arthur had stopped firing.

Both arms from the elbows down were numb, the kind of numb that meant aetheric blood had pulled back from the channels entirely. His shadow network was gone too, dissolved when he’d pulled the anchors to spare what little he had left. The floor was just floor now. No perception. No map.

The green-haired woman fired a volley of rock shots in a flat spread.

He moved and didn’t move fast enough. The spikes caught his raised forearm and buried in. Not deep. Deep enough. He hissed through his teeth and the blood came immediately.

The broad-shouldered man extended both arms and wind cut outward in a dozen horizontal lines. Arthur twisted and three of them missed but the rest opened his jacket and the last one grazed just above his left eye. He felt the skin split before he felt the pain. Blood ran down into his lash line and his left eye blurred.

He blinked. Tried to clear it. Couldn’t.

I’ll lose.

Both of them were closing distance, the woman pulling rock from the platform, the man pulling wind into his palms. He had nothing to fire and nowhere clean to run.

I’ll lose. Think. What do I do.

’Just run! Stop trying to fight them and run, you idiot!’ Vexis hissed beside his ear.

Roz’s front paws extended.

"Master." Arthur’s voice came out flat. "Bellus interference. We get disqualified."

Roz looked at him. At the blood running down his face, at his torn sleeve, at the way he was breathing.

He lowered his paws.

The two representatives pulled back and fired together.

A wall of ice slammed up between them.

It appeared so fast the shots punched into it and stopped dead. Then the wall shattered, and every fragment spun outward in a wide arc, dozens of individual shards hanging in the air and catching the coliseum light in every direction at once.

"VIOLET KREASIAL FROM CLASS F MISFITS HAS ENTERED THE ENGAGEMENT! FOLKS, WE’VE GOT CLASS B HELLFIRE AGAINST CLASS F MISFITS MID-FLOOR—"

Kreasial planted herself between Arthur and the two representatives, both palms open, a long ice spike building across her knuckles. She looked at the formation across from her and her mouth pulled sideways.

"Hellfire." She tested the name. "What kind of dumbass name is that."

The green-haired woman’s hands moved and vines erupted from the platform stone in a wall between them, catching the last of the ice shards. "Shut your mouth, Misfits."

Kreasial glanced back at Arthur.

"You look like shit. Boss."

Arthur looked at her with blood in his eye and rock in his forearm. His mouth opened. Then closed.

"Still handsome, though."

"Ew." She flung the spike.

Vexis drifted over Arthur’s shoulder. ’Oh, so you’re calling me handsome.’

Arthur ignored him.

Roz’s voice settled at his ear, low and even. "Deep inhale. Hold it. Then breathe out slow. Your aetheric blood will replenish. Slowly, but it will. Don’t open the network again."

Arthur inhaled.

He felt it immediately. A small warmth moving from the center of his chest outward, creeping into his arms. The numbness didn’t disappear. It lifted, barely, like something waking up from the wrong end of sleep. His left eye was still bleeding and it hurt properly now, which was almost better than not feeling it.

"Alright." He breathed. "I’m getting a hang of this."

-----

Theodore fired for the eighth time.

The wind compressed in his palms and shot across the floor at Calver, who raised the same stone wall he’d raised the last seven times. The wind scattered around the edges.

Calver lowered the wall. He looked at Theodore the way adults look at children doing something they’ve been told twice already not to do.

"Are you seriously this dense? Two years here and you still don’t understand that wind does nothing against solid earth?" His voice wasn’t raised. That was worse. "Haven’t you learned anything at all?"

Theodore’s jaw was tight. He didn’t answer. He gathered more wind into his palms, compressing it further, and fired again.

The wall came up. The wind broke.

"You’re embarrassing yourself," Calver said. "At least go down doing something that made sense."

Theodore’s bellus chirped once from his shoulder, small and worried. He compressed his palms and fired again anyway.

A sharp rock left Calver’s hand while the wind was still mid-travel. It moved faster than the gusts, past them, through the space between.

It hit Theodore’s left shoulder clean.

Theodore screamed. The sound was short and surprised and real. He went down on his back and the wind dissipated and the platform was quiet.

He lay there. His hand came up and pressed against the wound and came away red. His bellus pressed against his neck and made a sound that wasn’t language.

Calver walked toward him slowly. A new rock lifted from the platform beside him, shaping itself to a point, and it floated forward until it hovered six inches from Theodore’s face.

"Forfeit. Now."

Theodore was shaking. His eyes were wet. He was biting his lower lip hard enough that Arthur, watching from the other side of the floor, could see the white of his teeth from here.

Theodore’s mouth opened.

"I’m sorry, guys." His voice came out small.

Pause.

"I forfeit."

"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THEODORE VAUST OF MISFITS HAS FORFEITED HIS MATCH!"

The crowd erupted.

Most cheers were directed to Calver.

The healers moved in immediately. Kreasial looked across the floor, mid-fight, one arm mid-swing, and stopped for half a second.

"That idiot," she said, not unkindly, and kept going.

Arthur was already staring.

Theodore was flat on his back with one arm over his face. His chest was moving fast, the way it moves when someone is trying hard not to make noise. The healer’s hands were on his shoulder and he wasn’t looking at them.

Arthur’s jaw locked.

He breathed in through his nose.

Then he opened his mouth and put everything in his chest into it.

"GOOD FUCKING JOB, THEODORE!"

Theodore’s arm moved off his face.

"THAT WAS GOOD. THAT WAS REALLY WELL DONE!"

Theodore looked across the platform at Arthur. At his bloody eye and his torn uniform and his arms that were still barely working. Arthur was smiling.

Theodore’s face crumpled.

More tears came.

The marble was already forming at Arthur’s fingertip. Small, dense, dark.

"Brat." Roz’s voice was sharp. "You have not recovered enough—"

"We’ll win," Arthur said.

He wasn’t looking at Roz. He was looking at Theodore, who was being lifted by the healers now, who was mouthing something Arthur could just barely read across the distance.

*I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Vex. Kreasial. I’m sorry for being a failure.*

Arthur’s smile went down.

His eyes moved to Calver.

Calver looked back at him from across the platform, unhurried, already pulling a new rock from the stone.

Arthur opened his mouth.

"Don’t cry, Theodore."

He fired.

The shot crossed the floor in a flat line and hit Calver’s shadow at his feet and the bind closed. Calver’s legs locked. The rock in his grip dropped and the stones beneath him lurched upward without direction and stacked against each other uselessly, the magic misfiring in his locked arms.

Arthur built the next marble.

Fired.

"Don’t cry."