Gerald descended the worn stone steps of the arena on legs that felt, for the first time in his short life, entirely unfamiliar to him, the roar of the crowd above pressing down on his shoulders like a physical weight.
The sunken platform stretched wide beneath him, pale stone scarred with centuries of blood and battle, and standing opposite him, small and hunched and trembling ever so slightly, was Otto Feldrik.
'Oh.'
Gerald's fear, so carefully cultivated over the last several minutes of Harris and Hope's nervous chatter, evaporated the instant he laid eyes on his opponent. Otto was thin, reedy, his hands fidgeting at the hem of his robes, his eyes darting everywhere except toward Gerald, his whole body folded inward like a boy trying, and failing, to take up less space in the world than he already did.
'This will be easy,' Gerald thought, straightening his own shoulders, allowing a small, cocky grin to bloom across his round face. 'Harris was worried for nothing. Look at him, he can barely stand still.'
Hersneva's booming voice cut through the murmuring crowd.
"Begin!"
Gerald took one confident step forward, already imagining the guillotine technique he'd boasted about not twenty minutes prior, already picturing Hope's proud smile when he returned to his seat victorious—
The ground beneath him split open.
Crunch —
A maw, vast and impossible, tore upward through the ancient stone as though the stone itself were nothing more than wet parchment, rows upon rows of teeth glistening wet and hungry in the torchlight, and before a single sound of alarm could leave Gerald's throat, it closed around both his legs at once.
Snap —
Pain arrived a half-second behind the sight of it, white and total and screaming, and Gerald's mind, still catching up to what his eyes had already seen, registered the absence of his own legs only after his body had already begun instinctively, desperately, trying to flee an attack that had already finished landing.
He jumped.
It was a foolish, useless motion, born entirely of animal panic rather than any coherent strategy, his ruined lower half throwing his balance wildly off as he launched himself skyward — and the air itself seemed to answer him, a second maw unfurling directly in his path, teeth like a hundred slender swords angled inward, and it closed around his left arm before he'd even finished rising.
Crack —
His scream, when it finally came, tore itself raw and ragged from somewhere deep in his chest, high and childlike and utterly stripped of every ounce of bravado he'd worn into that arena, and still his body fought him, still some desperate animal part of him twisted mid-air toward the right, toward anywhere that wasn't where the teeth already were.
There was nowhere that wasn't where the teeth already were.
A third maw erupted from the empty air to his right, sudden and silent and vast, close enough now that Gerald could see individual teeth catching the torchlight like a hundred small, hungry moons, close enough that whatever remained of him — barely half a body now, blood misting into the air around him in a fine red haze — hung directly, helplessly, inside its reach.
"MATCH CALLED!"
Hersneva's voice cracked across the arena like a whip, and the three maws vanished as suddenly, as impossibly, as they had appeared, leaving nothing behind them but scorched, cratered stone and a boy who had entered that arena whole and was leaving it in considerably fewer pieces than he'd arrived with.
Gerald hit the ground.
Thud —
He did not fall so much as collapse, what remained of him crumpling boneless and broken onto the ancient battle-worn platform, and the sound that came out of him then was not a scream so much as a single, endless, wordless note of agony, high and thin and unbearable, rising up into the vast silent auditorium above.
Nobody moved.
For one long, suspended second, the entire cavernous space held its breath — thousands of upperclassmen, lecturers, nobility, all of them frozen in identical, mirrored horror, the low droning murmur that had filled the hall only moments before swallowed whole by a silence so complete it felt like its own kind of scream.
Then the blood reached the crowd's understanding before their minds could.
It pooled fast, obscenely fast, spreading dark and glistening across the pale stone in a widening crimson lake, steam rising faintly off its surface in the cool arena air, and Gerald — a child of the noble Wynhart line, a boy who had spent the walk into this very auditorium boasting of guillotine techniques and unstoppable dodges — lay at the center of it, still screaming, still somehow, impossibly, alive.
Harris was on his feet before he'd consciously decided to rise, both hands gripping the stone railing hard enough to whiten his knuckles, his face drained entirely of color.
"Gerald—" His voice came out cracked, useless, swallowed instantly by the growing chaos erupting around him. "GERALD!"
Beside him, Hope had gone utterly still, her small hands pressed hard against her mouth, her wide eyes fixed on the ruined shape in the center of the arena, tears already spilling silent and fast down her pale cheeks, her whole body trembling with a horror too large for her young frame to properly hold.
'This isn't real,' she thought, distant, disbelieving, watching healers finally break through the stunned crowd and sprint toward the crimson pool. 'This isn't real, this isn't real, this can't be real—'
Down in the first-year section, Sashah watched with sharp, assessing eyes, her earlier disinterest gone entirely, replaced by something colder, more calculating.
'That wasn't a technique,' she thought. 'That was a summoning. And a controlled one, at that — three maws, precise placement, instant recall the moment the match was called. Whatever that boy is, he isn't what anyone in this auditorium assumed he was.'
Alderen, further along the row, hadn't moved at all, his composed features betraying nothing, though his eyes had not once left Otto Feldrik since the maws first tore open the stone.
Typhoen, mid-laugh with the strangers beside him only seconds earlier, had gone entirely silent, his booming voice swallowed whole by the horror unfolding below, his usual boisterous confidence draining out of his face until he looked, for the first time since any of them had known him, genuinely, thoroughly young.
"That kid," he muttered, to no one in particular, "that kid didn't even move."
Further down the stone benches, an upperclassman leaned toward his neighbor, voice hushed but unable to fully mask the thrill beneath the horror.
"First years never fight like that. Not on the first day. Not ever, really." He shook his head slowly, eyes still fixed on the crimson pool spreading wider across the arena floor. "Someone's going to want a very long conversation with that boy."
The murmur spread outward from him in ripples, first years and upperclassmen alike leaning toward one another, voices low and urgent, until the entire auditorium hummed with the same restless, frightened question passed from mouth to mouth: what is he, what is he, what is he.
Otto himself stood exactly where he had started, small and hunched, his fidgeting hands finally gone still, his eyes — no longer darting anywhere, no longer avoiding anything — fixed with something unreadable on the screaming, ruined boy at his feet.
He did not look triumphant. He did not look afraid, either, not anymore. He looked, if anything, faintly, distantly sad, the way a man might look upon a task completed that he had never particularly wanted to perform in the first place.
Healers swarmed the center of the arena, robes flashing crimson and gold, voices sharp and urgent as they worked to stem the impossible flow of blood pouring from what remained of Gerald Wynhart, and above them all, Hersneva stood rigid at the edge of the sunken platform, his tired, exasperated features carved now into something far grimmer, far more alert.
Beside him, an official flipped anxiously through a thin file, his hands trembling. "Sir," he said, "Feldrik's registration says nothing. No technique listed at all."
Hersneva's jaw tightened, though he said nothing more on the matter. Registered or not, a technique disclosed was a technique defanged, and whatever Otto Feldrik carried inside him, the boy had every right under the academy's oldest laws to keep it buried behind that unreadable, sorrowful expression of his.
Down on the arena floor, Otto was still standing exactly where he'd started, unmoving, unbothered by the healers rushing past him, his gaze still fixed on the ruined boy at his feet with that same faint, distant sadness, as though some part of him had already known, long before he ever stepped onto that stone, precisely how this match would end.