"Come on, just a hint. One word. I'll take a single word, Typhoen, I'm a reasonable man."
"No."
"Jalim the great, you're a difficult person to like sometimes, has anyone told you that?"
"Constantly," Typhoen said, echoing Osmandas's own earlier word back at him with a satisfied little smirk, "and yet here you are, still talking to me."
Osmandas groaned, dramatic and theatrical, flopping backward against the stone bench as though the weight of Typhoen's refusal had physically wounded him. "Fine. Fine! Keep your secrets. Though I'll have you know, real friendship is built on trust, and trust is built on sharing things, and you, sir, are building nothing."
"We met twenty minutes ago."
"Time is a construct."
Below them, the crowd's roar had begun to settle, the two girls finally separated by a pair of intervening officials, both of them bloodied, both of them upright, both of them, by the sound of the crowd's continued cheering, having earned every ounce of the noise still rolling down from the stands. Sashah watched the officials lead them off, her earlier unease still sitting unresolved somewhere behind her sharp crimson eyes, though she said nothing of it, her gaze drifting, unbidden, back toward Alderen once more before she caught herself and looked away.
"Alright!" Hersneva's voice boomed out across the auditorium, silencing the last scattered pockets of chatter in an instant. "Next match!"
A hush of anticipation rippled through the stands, thousands of eyes turning as one toward the raised dais where the tired, exasperated headmaster stood, a thin scroll unfurled in his weathered hands.
"Typhoen Higritas," Hersneva called, "against Harris Bellhaven!"
For one full second, absolutely nothing happened.
Then Typhoen shot to his feet so fast the bench rattled beneath him, and several rows down, in the section reserved for the remaining first years, Harris did the exact same thing, both boys frozen mid-rise, staring at each other across the gulf of stone seating between them with matching expressions of utter, blindsided disbelief.
"Wait," Typhoen said, "him?"
"Wait," Harris echoed, from a distance, "him?"
Osmandas let out a low whistle, leaning forward with open, delighted interest. "Oh, now this I have to see."
Gerald's absence beside him left Harris standing conspicuously alone amid the murmuring crowd of first years, and something strange had happened to his face the moment his name left Hersneva's mouth — something that had nothing to do with fear, nothing to do with the pale, sweating dread that had gripped Gerald not an hour earlier. Harris's eyes had gone bright. His jaw had tightened, not with terror but with something far closer to hunger, a small, private smile tugging hard at the corner of his mouth that he didn't bother trying to hide.
'This is strange,' Sashah thought, watching him descend the stone steps toward the arena floor with quick, eager strides entirely unlike the calm, quiet boy who usually sat beside Gerald offering soft, steady reassurance whenever the plump boy's confidence wavered. 'He's excited. Genuinely excited. I've never once seen him look like that.'
Harris was, by every account anyone in that auditorium could have given, the calm one. The steady one. The boy who talked Gerald down from his own exaggerated bravado with quiet, dry humor rather than matching it, the boy whose default expression leaned toward mild amusement rather than anything as raw as this — and yet here he stood at the edge of the arena now, practically vibrating, his knuckles cracking one by one as he flexed his gauntleted hands, his gaze locked hungrily on Typhoen across the scarred stone platform.
"Benefactor," someone in the crowd murmured, loud enough to carry. "He's registered Benefactor class. Didn't think we'd see one of those fight this early."
The word rippled outward through the stands in scattered whispers, curious and reverent in equal measure, and Osmandas leaned toward Sashah with open interest.
"Benefactor," he repeated, low. "Jalim the great, that's a rare one. Anything that can harm, cannot harm — that's the old saying, isn't it? Wonder what his actual technique does, though. The class only ever tells you the flavor, never the recipe."
"We're about to find out," Sashah said.
Down near the arena's edge, Harris rolled his neck once, twice, loosening muscles that didn't look like they needed loosening at all, his eyes never once leaving Typhoen across the stone. Somewhere behind him, an empty seat sat where Gerald should have been sitting, and though Harris hadn't said a single word about it since the healers carried his best friend away, something tight and grim had settled into the set of his jaw the moment he'd risen to answer his own name.
'He watched what happened to Gerald,' Sashah thought, studying him with fresh interest now. 'And instead of it frightening him the way it frightened everyone else in this auditorium, it did the opposite.'
"Do you think he's angry?" Osmandas asked, following her gaze. "About his friend?"
"I think," Sashah said slowly, "he's been waiting for a reason to stop being calm."
Down on the arena floor, Typhoen rolled his shoulders, a slow, easy grin spreading across his face, silver light already beginning to gather and hum faintly along his clenched fists.
"Begin!"
Hersneva's voice cracked across the auditorium like a whip, and Typhoen moved.
There was no crossing the distance. There was only Typhoen, and then a lance of gleaming silver, and then nothing at all in between the two, no stride, no windup, no warning the eye could actually catch hold of.
Crack —
The stone beneath his feet shattered outward from the force of the launch alone, spiderwebbing fractures racing across the ancient battle-worn platform, and the lance screamed through the air toward Harris faster than thought, faster than breath, faster than the crowd's held gasp could even fully form.
BOOOM!!!
The impact detonated across the arena like thunder given physical shape, a shockwave rolling outward that sent loose dust and stone fragments scattering in every direction, and for one horrifying, suspended instant, nobody in that entire cavernous auditorium could see through the settling debris to know what remained of the boy who had been standing there.
Silence.
Absolute, total, suffocating silence, thousands of held breaths pressing down on the arena all at once, until the dust finally began to clear and there, standing exactly where he had been standing, unmoved, un-thrown, unbroken, was Harris — one gauntleted forearm raised, the lance's silver tip caught and held fast against it, not a single visible wound marking the skin beneath, his wide grin the only thing in that entire arena that looked remotely surprised by what had just happened.
He was laughing.
Sashah's mouth fell open, just slightly, just enough to betray her.
Osmandas was on his feet without realizing he'd risen, both hands gripping the stone railing, his easy grin replaced entirely by wide, unguarded astonishment. "Jalim the great," he breathed, "he took that head on."
Alderen said nothing at all, though his amethyst eyes had gone sharp, fixed, calculating, tracking every faint tremor still running down Harris's braced arm with an intensity that hadn't been there a moment before.
'Twice in one afternoon,' Alderen thought, unmoving. 'First the boy with no registered technique at all, and now this one, tanking a killing blow like it was nothing more than a light breeze. Whatever this year's crop of first years actually is, it isn't what anyone expected walking in.'
Typhoen stared at his own lance, still lodged uselessly against Harris's forearm, disbelief written plain and unguarded across his face. "That's not possible," he said, low, mostly to himself. "That should have gone straight through you."
"Should have," Harris agreed, cheerful, "didn't."
"What are you?"
"Benefactor," Harris said, rolling the word out slow and satisfied, savoring it. "Class Benefactor. Nice to finally get to say that out loud to someone who actually needed to hear it."
Then the auditorium broke.
It happened all at once, a single held breath finally released into a roar that swallowed the entire cavernous space whole, thousands of voices rising together in disbelief and delight and raw, thunderous excitement, first years and upperclassmen and nobility alike surging to their feet as one, the sound of it crashing down over the arena in wave after wave after wave, and at the center of it all, Harris lowered his unmarked arm, still grinning, still laughing, and looked across the ruined stone at Typhoen with an expression that said, plainly, that he had been waiting his entire life for exactly this moment.
Up in the stands, Osmandas slowly sat back down, running a hand through his already-mussed hair, something like genuine wonder still plastered across his face.
"Jalim the great," he said, quiet now, almost reverent. "I came here today expecting a decent show. I did not expect all this."
"None of us did," Sashah said, and for once, she didn't sound entirely displeased about it.