Chapter 128: Chapter 128: Superiority

Raoul is in a stoop, titanic wings sized to his megagram bulk almost furled around him, spear pointed down. He passes through the last hundred or so meters between him and Grapple in just over a second’s time, and the activation of his Skill is a thunder of drums across the stadium.

A second’s time for him, ten seconds for those of us watching; and that lets me take in the sick, savage beauty of it all.

Raoul is out far enough ahead that none of the other members of his team are in range to support him. This doesn’t appear to trouble him, and he dodges—barely, with the tiniest motion of his wings—the one projectile he seems to have been concerned about, a torso-sized white-glowing shard of ice from Glacial Soul. Grapple doesn’t seem troubled by the incoming behemoth, though, and Skills and magic alike start piling up from the side of Sages. Minelayer, after the last grenade’s total failure to do anything, is tossing a couple of blinking, spiky looking contraptions onto seemingly random spots on the cliff, but the others are all focused on Raoul. Stormlord’s electricity reaches over and starts to course through Grapple’s armor, linking the two of them in a crackling, actinic glare, Old Gunner is a vortex of fire as his alchemical rockets go off, and Glacial Soul is doing something probably clever with [Manipulate Ice] that I can’t actually see or follow.

In the end, it’s Grapple who makes the key move. One step to the side—no time for a second, that much is obvious—and he crouches, flinging a set of what look like cogwheels or gears into the air. They spring up around him, starting to rotate, but they’re obviously not intended to be a wall to keep Raoul out; they’re intended to be a wall to keep him in.

The wall doesn’t hold.

There’s the sound of shattering ice as Raoul lands, spear driving through Grapple’s armor and out the other side. Grapple doesn’t seem fazed, shedding armor pieces and dropping to the ground, but not fast enough to avoid being caught by a shoulder and brought along as Raoul half-charges, half-slides forward with every newton-second he’s got left in the tank. He slams into the wall of cogwheels horns-first despite his best efforts to make the impact with his occupied shoulder, and the arcing lightning between Grapple and Stormlord grounds itself along his body, eliciting howls of pain and leaving scorched and blackened flesh. Grapple’s armor blows apart, peppering the two of them with metal—he turns out to be a short, scrawny humanoid with a flattened-looking face, twisting like a contortionist to keep what seems like one millimeter ahead of Raoul’s hooves and spear—and a hail of tiny shards of ice, a blob of alchemical fire, and a spray of bullets come in from Grapple’s teammates.

Raoul, shuddering and blasted, lives through it, even if he’s not looking like he’s fit to fight, and then there’s Grapple’s hand is up in front of his face, an arrow all the way through a cogwheel and his hand, as the rest of Ghosts shows up.

There’s a moment of, not exactly quiet, but repositioning. Despite the fact that he’s hurling balls of shadow and flame at Stormlord, who dodges with a smirking, swaying grace, Varad is showing no interest in keeping the range open. His path aims to take him around and well past Grappler to where he’ll be within a few meters from Glacial Soul, by the time he lands, and I figure that lays out his targeting priorities. Easy, on the other hand, is backwinging for elevation like there’s an updraft to ride, pulling three arrows out of her quiver in one motion and nocking them and whispering an incantation as [Shared Ranged Mastery] activates. Peacebringer is below and to one side of Easy, supporting her, and Sun’s Glory is—

—Sun’s Glory is too far to the side, too far forward, too low, eyes fixed on Old Gunner for just a split second too long, as she lets loose with [Frostflame Barrage], which turns out to be a condensed breath attack of some sort..

Stormlord wasn’t repositioning backwards. He was drifting to the side as he dodged Varad’s attacks, making it look like he was being herded instead of moving on purpose, but there’s a crackling, snapping feeling as he activates [Charge] and [Surge] simultaneously.

He moves like, well, lightning. For that matter, it looks like he’s for a split second turned into lightning, and he slams into Sun’s Glory in midair with an electrical discharge that dims our viewing screens, all at a speed that’s too fast to track even slowed down by a factor of ten. [Spark] had to have been involved, and the tazi’s scream is mercifully brief before it’s cut off by, merciless Void, the sound of her spine or neck breaking, and she starts dropping out of the sky from dozens of meters up.

She drops slow. A tenfold time dilation means she’s going to take ten seconds to fall five meters, twenty to fall twenty meters; and she’s maybe a hundred meters up over the river. I can’t take my eyes from her, though; there’s something hauntingly compelling about the way she gracelessly arcs through the air with the momentum imparted from when Stormlord kicked off of her with a cheerful and cheeky wave.

Through my peripheral vision and through the analytics I’m running on my Visor, I still see the way the rest of the fight ends. And end it does, before Stormlord’s feet hit the ground, despite his haste. Easy has three passive Skills with what are probably multiplicative effect, judging by what happens to Old Gunner when her three volleyed arrows punch through his armored suit and out the other side. He still gets a substantial amount of damage onto Varad, tearing apart the demon-form Ghost’s wings and punching several holes in his chest and even putting a bullet through his neck that has his body starting to flop forwards limply, but Varad has already reached out with his magic and triggered [Consume]. By the time he hits the dirt, he’s whole and all that’s left of Glacial Soul is a fractured, fist-sized core of ice that slips into the darkness of Peacebringer’s [Shrouding Shadows], which I absolutely thought was going to turn out to be a defensive Skill.

By the time Stormlord lands, the only one of his allies left alive is Minelayer, fast asleep on the side of the fight in Peacebringer’s [Slumber]. That same nightmare spirit raises one hand, and I can feel what’s about to be a Skill activation, when a double snap-pop of lightning cuts across the echoes of battle.

Stormlord’s fists meet each other again, twice in quick succession, and the time dilation drops, Sun’s Glory going from a slow, drifting arc to a blur that ends in a splash and a heavy whud, mercifully out of my line of sight.

With the fight over—though the combatants are still on the field, gathering in a more leisurely fashion, and there’s a tremendous subtle working of magic targeted at Raoul which feels like an odd kind of healing—there’s nothing keeping my attention off of the sick feeling in my stomach. I’m shaking with adrenaline, hands wrapped around a pair of orbs and another pair of orbs rolling slowly up and down my arms where they’re wrapped around my torso, and I’m shivering with a cold that I know isn’t driven by temperature.

Amber notices. I wanted her to notice, wanted her to see me and see my distress, of course I did, but I also didn’t want her to, because I wanted her to enjoy whatever the aftermath of the fight was going to be, which is why I didn’t reach out to her. It doesn’t matter; as soon as the first full-body shudder has my elbow hitting the armrest of my chair, she’s there, saying something I can’t make out. I can hear it, I know I can hear it, but whatever it is just isn’t registering, and all I can think about is the fact that I’m being pathetic, that she must think I’m—

She pulls me out of the chair and picks me up like I’m feather-light, sitting back down with me in her chair with my head on her chest. It takes me a moment to realize what she’s done, but I burrow into her chest in an effort to borrow as much of her warmth as I possibly can, and the moment passes and I can laugh, a snickering, raw sound that surprises me as it comes out.

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“My lord?” Amber’s voice is distant, distracted. Her hands are, I think unconsciously, pressing at the precise points in my lower back where I tend to collect tension, and I make a quiet and incoherent sound at her in response.

This doesn’t seem to suffice, since she shifts me from being faceplanted into her chest to having my back against her stomach. I spare a glance for the battlefield—Minelayer is dead, Raoul is alive and staggering off the field, and Stormlord is laughing at a joke from Easy—and sag back into her. “I guess I don’t do as well with violence as I thought I was going to. Or at least, not the aftermath.”

“Ye weren’t wrong.” I look over at Khalal, raising an eyebrow, and ze shrugs in that taut way of zirs. “Bout the match. Made a good haul off’a the pool, but still don’t right ken how ye know.”

“It’s about… teamwork and synergy, I guess.” I frown to myself, starting to settle down as the challenge of remembering or resynthesizing that flash of understanding and then communicating it distracts me from the mood I was in. “Actually, is it embarrassing if I admit that I don’t entirely remember why I was so sure about it?”

“Yes!” The word is a wry chorus from four voices, as Zidanya, Vonne, Amber, and Khalal all sort of goggle at me. Sara’s slower to give her answer, but her firm nod makes it unanimous, and I have to struggle not to let my laughter turn hysterical.

That’s a good sign that I’m not on an entirely even keel, after all the, well, violence I just watched with extreme intensity.

“Okay, fine. It’s… look, there’s a category of games where you’ve got three strategies. You can ramp up your tempo steadily, you can fortify and launch narrow attacks, or you can overwhelm out of the gate. These three form a cycle, like sustain-isolate-conquer. Which you don’t know, right.” I close my eyes, leaning my head back into an extremely nice headrest, and talk at the ceiling. “Um. Classically, tempo beats fortify, fortify beats overwhelm, and overwhelm beats tempo.

“Obviously, this isn’t exactly the same, but Sages was set up to fortify up and look for opportunities and then capitalize on them, right? And Ghosts was all set up to just hit you like a freight shuttle on full thrust, but it’s not just that, everything they have is set up to boost each other and work together. Honestly, I think that if Sun’s Glory had been closer to Peacebringer, they wouldn’t have lost anyone. We never did see Baneful Grasp, whatever that is.”

“Mmm. So, my lord, are you wishful to see the next round?”

Amber’s hands have closed around mine, massaging the bases of my palms, and it’s something of a struggle to get any words out. “Not really,” I manage to say. “But is it necessary?”

“No, it is not.” Sara’s voice is unexpectedly firm. “I am confident in my understanding of our plan for the final round of this tournament, and I endorse it. Given that, there is no need to consider or analyze the other side of the bracket.”

I crack an eye open, half-rolling first one way, then the other. “Is it really that obvious?”

“It is to me!” Vonne grins at me.

“Ain’t any of my business, but…”

“Magelord, Adinah’s grace is lost upon you.”

I blink at that, and turn to look behind me meaningfully. “My lord, she says you are not meant for subtlety.” As she answers my unspoken question, Amber’s grin turns impish without changing in the slightest, which is a pretty good trick. “Nor do I have it in myself to disagree. So! My lord shall rest, and those who wish to watch Flight and Order shall do so without him.”

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