Chapter 75: Round One And I Won Ugly Because Pretty Wasn’t On The Menu

The ranking screen over the arena gate listed his opponent as a placeholder until thirty seconds before the match, then it filled in.

E-rank. Class T.

A name Soren had never heard, bonded to something the board only described as "avian, mid-tier."

That was all he got.

For two months he had walked into every fight already knowing the ending.

The thing in the corner of his vision that used to hand him the other guy’s moves before they happened was gone now, burned out the same week his writing hand was, and the screen over the gate told him nothing the real screen used to.

E-rank, Class T, avian.

He was going in blind, the way everyone else had always gone in.

◆◆◆◆

The gate opened and the kid on the other side was fast.

Soren learned that in the first three seconds, which was about two seconds too late.

The bird came off the kid’s shoulder low and tight, a gray streak that broke right when Soren read it going left, and Grimm lunged at empty air. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

The talons opened a line across Soren’s forearm before he got it down.

First blood, and it was his.

The crowd noise changed.

He felt it more than heard it, a tightening in the stands behind him, and he did not look up because looking up was how you got the second cut.

"Reset," he said.

Grimm came back to his side, breathing through the bond in a low steady pull that meant she was not panicking and so he would not either.

The bird wheeled for another pass.

He had read it wrong because he had been reading it the old way, watching for the move that the cheat used to label.

There was no label now.

There was just a bird and the way the kid’s shoulder dropped a half-beat before the dive.

The shoulder.

Not the bird.

The kid telegraphed through his own body and didn’t know it.

Dani had spent a week teaching him exactly this, reading the tamer instead of the beast, and he had thought it was a soft skill, a thing you used when the hard skill failed.

The hard skill had failed. So.

The shoulder dropped.

Soren moved before the dive, not after it, and Grimm was where the bird wanted to be instead of where it had been.

Jaws closed on a wing.

◆◆◆◆

It was not clean after that, it was just over.

The bird came apart from the air and the kid came apart from the bird, his composure going with it.

He threw a close-range shadow lash that Soren ate on the shoulder.

Grimm hit the kid’s beast a half-second before it recovered. Half a second was the whole margin.

The avian dissolved back into a summon-mark and the kid went down to one knee and the match buzzer went.

[DING! — Tournament Round 1: VICTORY. Opponent neutralized. Path to D-rank: open.]

Soren stood in the middle of the ring with blood running off his fingers and his shoulder already stiffening and he did not feel like a winner.

He felt like someone who had won.

There was a difference. He was learning it.

◆◆◆◆

The medic tent was a folding table and a girl with a bored expression who wrapped his arm without asking how it happened.

Then someone else was there.

She was a tamer from one of the upper classes, the kind with a sponsor patch, she leaned against the tent pole and looked at his bandaged arm with a smile that had a hook in it.

"Ugly fight," she said.

"It counted."

"It really shouldn’t have." She tilted her head. "You should have lost."

"I didn’t."

She reached out and put two fingers on his wrapped forearm, light, where it would have hurt if it hurt anywhere.

"You’re more interesting than the board makes you look," she said.

Three things happened in the next two seconds.

The temperature near his other side dropped, a thin skin of frost crawling up the table leg from where Selah stood without his having heard her arrive, the cold coming off her skin and not off anything beside her because there was nothing beside her, only her.

Maren made a sound in her chest that was not words.

The temperature dropped another degree.

The tamer with the sponsor patch took her fingers off his arm.

"Friendly campus," she said.

"Very," Soren said, and reached past her for his jacket, which put his shoulder between her and the wolf and ended the conversation as far as he was concerned.

He did not look at her again. That was the part that worked.

She had come over to see if the ugly winner would flush or stammer or lean in, and he had asked for his jacket instead, whatever she did with her face after that he didn’t see, because he was already walking.

Behind him the frost on the table leg stopped climbing and started to melt.

[DING! — Obsession Index. Yara 62/75. Trigger: territorial assertion, contained.]

[DING! — Protective response logged: Selah, Maren.]

He read both and kept walking.

Two months ago a stranger touching his arm would have ended with someone needing a Bureau cleanup crew.

The wolf was holding herself on a leash she had braided out of nothing but the fact that he had asked her to.

That was not the same as her not wanting to.

◆◆◆◆

The bracket screen was up in the staging hall, names sliding into the next round, and he found his own and traced the line forward to see who he would draw.

The line ran toward a name that was already there because that match had already finished.

Troy Minden. Winner. Round 1.

Soren stopped tracing.

He pulled up the match record on the public feed, because Troy crushing some E-rank was not news, except the way he had done it was.

The footage was short.

Troy’s Spectral Knight came in the way it always did, the heavy gray armor, the slow inevitable advance, and then forty seconds in it did something Soren had never seen it do.

The blade split but not physically.

The strike came down as one sword and landed as three, three points of impact across the other tamer’s beast and the match was over before the count.

Soren watched it twice.

He had read every fight Troy had in the novel.

He had the ones only the wiki forums argued about.

He knew the Spectral Knight’s whole kit down to the cooldowns.

That move was not in it.

The Knight didn’t have a three-strike.

It had never had a three-strike.

Troy had not trained a three-strike, because the move broke the Knight’s own form, you could see it in the recovery frame, the armor stuttering as if it had been asked to do a thing its body was not built to do.

Something had been put into it.

Soren stood in the staging hall with his arm wrapped and his shoulder stiff and looked at the frozen recovery frame, the Knight half-locked in a posture that hurt to look at.

He thought about who had access to a beast’s underlying form, and who would want Troy winning fights he was built to lose.

The name that came up was not Troy’s.

He closed the feed.

The bracket still showed the line running from his name toward Troy’s, and now he could not stop seeing it, the way the whole tournament narrowed down to that one match the way water narrowed toward a drain.

To win this thing he had to go through Troy.

And whatever was riding inside Troy’s Knight, he was going to have to go through that too.

[DING! — Threat assessment: anomaly detected in subject MINDEN’s beast. Source: unknown. Confidence: high.]

The DING had not given him the answer. He had gotten the answer himself, the slow way, by watching.