The crowd had stopped being spectators somewhere in the last minute and started being a single, furious animal instead, thousands of throats screaming over one another, first years standing on benches to see better, upperclassmen shouting names and numbers and bets down the rows, the whole cavernous auditorium boiling over into something no longer resembling a school exercise at all.
"I take back the ten," Osmandas shouted over the noise, hands cupped around his mouth. "I'm putting it on Typhoen now! Jalim the great, look at him, he's about to do something!"
"You don't have ten to take back or put anywhere," Sashah reminded him, not looking away from the arena.
"Details, Sashah. Details."
Typhoen broke away first.
He put six long strides between himself and Harris, boots skidding against cracked and scorched stone, and a musket simply existed in his hands the way the lance had, heavy and cold and already rising to his shoulder.
'Head,' he thought, sighting down the barrel with brutal, narrow focus. 'End it clean. End it now, before this crowd decides I'm the one losing.'
BANG!
Harris moved before the shot even finished leaving the barrel.
He weaved low, rolled his shoulder, ducked a half-step sideways with the loose, unbothered rhythm of a boxer who'd slipped this exact punch a thousand times before, closing the distance instead of running from it, grinning the entire way like the gunfire was simply part of a conversation he was enjoying.
'He's not retreating,' Typhoen thought, working the musket, firing again. 'He's coming closer. Why is he coming closer—'
Think. Think, Typhoen. A hundred blades hadn't touched him. A killing lance hadn't touched him. Whatever this Benefactor nonsense actually did, it clearly didn't care how fast the thing coming at him was, only what it was for. So maybe it wasn't about speed at all. Maybe it had never been about speed.
'Then hit him with something that isn't trying to kill him,' Typhoen thought, and almost laughed at how stupid that sounded even inside his own head. 'Wonderful plan. Truly inspired. Should've thought of that before I summoned two thousand five hundred men's worth of weaponry.'
BANG!
Harris was nearly on him now, close enough that Typhoen could see the individual scorch marks still faintly smoking along the stone behind him, close enough to see that easy, unbothered grin hadn't slipped even once through two point-blank shots aimed square at his skull.
Missed again, or so it looked — though the truth was something closer to swallowed, each shot vanishing into that same unbothered stillness that had eaten a hundred blades whole not five minutes earlier.
Typhoen didn't have time to be impressed by any of it. Only time to be afraid.
Crack —
The ground beneath Harris's feet tore open, and a spear of dark bronze — vicious and ancient-looking, its edge catching torchlight like something that had killed men long before either boy in that arena was born — punched upward through the stone in a single, silent, terrible motion.
Harris threw himself backward.
It cost him ground, real ground, the boxer's easy rhythm breaking into something far less graceful as he scrambled clear of the bronze point by inches rather than intent, and Typhoen used every second of that retreat to drag air back into his burning lungs.
'Finally,' he thought. 'Finally, something that actually made you move.'
Then the gauntlets vanished.
Both of them, at once, simply weren't there anymore, Harris's bare forearms suddenly exposed to the open air for the first time since the match began, and something about that — something small, unexplainable, deeply wrong — made every hair on Typhoen's arms stand on end.
"What," Typhoen said, low, "was that."
Harris didn't answer.
The bronze spear answered instead.
It tore itself free of the arena floor and streaked sideways, faster than Typhoen's eyes could track it, and landed — not in Harris, not anywhere near him, but directly beside Typhoen's own boot, quivering once against the stone before its edges blurred, thinned, turned faintly translucent, and dissolved into nothing at all.
Typhoen stared at the space where it had been, chest still heaving, the roar of the crowd oddly distant now, muffled, as though the whole auditorium had taken a step back from him and left him alone with whatever this had become.
He was still holding the musket. That was the only weapon left in his hands now, the last solid thing in a match that had just quietly, wordlessly, stopped making sense.
Up in the stands, Osmandas had both hands pressed flat against his own face. "Okay," he said, muffled, "I need someone to explain what I just watched, because I don't think I have the vocabulary for it."
"Nobody does," Sashah said, and for the first time all match, she sounded genuinely unsettled by that fact.
Alderen said nothing at all. His amethyst eyes had gone very still, fixed entirely on Harris's bare, unmarked forearms, and whatever thought was moving behind them, he clearly wasn't ready to say it out loud yet.
'Two matches in one afternoon,' he thought, 'and both of them have ended with the entire auditorium understanding less than they did before either one started.'
He'd assumed, walking into this academy, that he understood roughly where he stood among his year. Watching Harris now, standing there unarmed and unbothered with his bare arms exposed to the air, he found himself considerably less certain of that.
Down on the arena floor, Harris's grin had not faded.
If anything, it had grown, wide and easy and entirely untroubled by the tense, breathless hush that had settled over the entire auditorium, and then something changed in the air around him — subtle, so subtle most of the crowd would never have noticed it at all — a faint shimmer where his own En met the ambient En of the arena itself, two currents brushing against one another like strangers passing too close on a narrow street.
A flower bloomed into existence in front of him.
Small and strange. White petals shading pale into blue at their edges, trembling faintly though no wind moved through that sealed and breathless arena, and it simply hung there in the air before him, delicate and entirely out of place beside a boy who had just weathered a hundred killing blows without blinking.
Harris looked at Typhoen, and laughed.
It came out loud, delighted, entirely too pleased with itself. "This," he said, "is for Gerald. For every word you said about him."
He raised one bare hand toward the flower—
—and dropped.
He hit the arena floor boneless and sudden, all at once, the grin still frozen on his slack, unconscious face, and for one long, disbelieving moment nobody in that entire auditorium made a single sound.
"Harris?" Typhoen took an uncertain step forward, musket lowering on its own. "Harris?"
Nothing. No breath caught wrong, no groan, no flicker of movement at all — just a boy lying very still on scorched, cracked stone, the small white-and-blue flower still hovering, patient, exactly where he'd left it.
Hersneva descended the arena steps slowly this time, none of his earlier urgency in it, his tired face folding into something closer to bewilderment than alarm as he crouched beside the fallen boy, checked his pulse, checked his breathing, and found, by every measure available to him, absolutely nothing wrong at all.
"He's alive," Hersneva announced, straightening, frowning hard at a mystery he clearly had no intention of solving out loud in front of a thousand watching students. "Simply... unconscious." He said the word like it displeased him personally. "Match goes to Typhoen. By default."
The crowd's silence broke into confused, scattered murmuring, nobody quite certain whether to cheer or not, and Typhoen stood alone in the center of the ruined arena floor, musket hanging forgotten at his side, staring down at a boy who had beaten back a hundred weapons and a killing lance without so much as flinching, and had somehow still lost to nothing at all.
"So," Osmandas said eventually, into the stunned quiet of the stands, his voice smaller than it had been all afternoon. "Do I still get my ten?"
Nobody answered him. For once, even he seemed to understand why.