Chapter XXXIII (33)- Harvey vs a Troll, the Arena Begins
Dropping off Ione at the medical wing, Kizu managed to dodge any questions about her injuries. As it turned out, Professor Kateshi wasn’t in at the moment so he slipped away without any issues. Afterwards, Kizu made his way to Roba’s office to report the events to her. Needless to say, the administrator was not very pleased about his misadventure down in the dungeon. Even less so when he reluctantly explained Ione’s involvement. Thankfully, she didn’t expel him on the spot like she had threatened. She even took pity on him and gave him two options for the combat test. If he competed today, his private lessons next week would continue as normal. If he decided to skip today and rest, he’d instead need to attend the competition next week in lieu of her tutelage. It took a massive weight off his shoulders. The dawn had already broken over the horizon by the time he left her office and started back to the dorms where he flopped face down on his bed.
A familiar lump pounced on his back from the rafters.
“Hello Mort,” Kizu said, voice muffled by the pillow.
Through Kizu’s bond, he could feel the monkey’s initial intention to pull on his hair. But then, something in his familiar shifted, perhaps sensing his complete and utter exhaustion. Mort hopped down and curled up in the crook between Kizu’s shoulder and head. They napped like that for a couple hours.
Kizu didn’t slip too deeply into sleep. He instead drifted in that in-between state, tantalizing himself with the promise of true rest before pulling himself away. A thought continued to haunt him, keeping him from sleep.
Harvey would be competing alone. Kizu had promised him he’d be there.
Ione had gone with him down into the World Dungeon. She didn’t need to, in fact he’d told her repeatedly to go back to safety. And he doubted he would have survived without her there. How could he turn his back on Harvey less than a day later?
Kizu rolled out of bed and onto a heap of Basil’s discarded clothing. Harvey needed support.
Besides, he had a few tricks he wanted to try out. Before confronting the bloodspawn last night, he’d never been in a fight or a true spar before. If nothing else, the experience would be educational.
The worst part about his preparation was that he couldn’t even practice his spells. Any spells cast sucked away his blood’s reserves, and he might need every drop in the hours to come. So, after tinkering a bit with a few brews and downing a healing potion for the bumps and scrapes he’d accumulated, he gathered up his things and left the safety of the dorm and his warm bed behind.
He left Mort to sleep as he prepared for the fight. He still completely lacked coordination with Mort and they didn’t know how to channel spells properly. As it was, it was more dangerous for him to bring his familiar with him. Like Arclight had said, familiars could prove to be an easily exploitable weakness. And the first blood rules didn’t count for Mort. Safer all around for him to stay behind.
Despite everything that had happened, he still felt his nerves gnawing on his stomach. He had fought, outmaneuvered, and escaped vampiric spawn from the pits of the World Dungeon only a few hours ago, and here he was stressing himself out about a play fight with another junior mage. So silly. And yet the unease continued to nag at him.
He reached the courtyard about an hour early and followed old signs carved into the stone walls that directed him to the preparation room for the competitors.
He found the little room completely empty. Harvey had said nobody else was fighting, but the empty room was an unnerving confirmation of that fact. Still, as the minutes passed he wondered where Harvey might be. He triple checked the signs, but this seemed to be the place. Kizu peeked out the door into the courtyard and spotted half a hundred faces filling up the stadium. It was definitely the right place.
Finally, just before Kizu gave up and went to find an adult, Harvey arrived. His friend froze in the doorway, paling at the sight of him.
“What are you doing here?” Harvey hissed. He clutched his flute with both hands like a drowning man clung to driftwood.
“I told you before that I was competing.”
“And I told you to withdraw, like everyone else did this week.”
“They actually pulled it off?” Despite all the signs contrary, Kizu had been hoping Harvey might have gone a bit hyperbolic while drinking. Surely no one in the academy had enough pull to do something like that. “How? Arclight should see through this.”
“I don’t know. Maybe they asked someone high up for a favor. Arclight is only the facilitator, after all. But it doesn’t really matter how.”
“At least they're at a low skill level,” Kizu tried. “They’re stuck in the lower level classes.”
“Their friend helps them. The Rank 2 fighter we saw last week. He teaches them basically everything he learns from the S class.”
“Well-”
“Stop,” Harvey cut him off. “There is no positive spin to this. I don’t want to be here, Kizu. They might kill me here. But if I leave, I’ll just wind up in a ditch somewhere. You need to get out of here before it’s too late. Stick your fingers in your throat until you puke. Tell Arclight that you ate something bad.”
“Arclight won’t believe that.”
“But she won’t force you to stay, either.”
“I’m staying,” Kizu said, knowing he was very likely damning himself to a horrific beating. But how bad could it really be? This wasn’t a gladiator pit. The only thing on the line was a rank placement.
Before Harvey could press the argument further, the door behind them swung open.
Three extremely robust students walked in. They stalked across the room and stood uncomfortably close, staring down at Kizu and Harvey.
“My brother,” the largest one said, looming over Harvey, “Is a coward and a moron. He runs away from every fight presented to him and hides behind the legs of better men. Unfortunately, I’m one of those men. In the future, mock him behind closed doors.”
There was no malice in the half-troll’s voice. He sounded cool and collected. Not at all what Kizu had expected from him.
“Why are you here?” one of the other two asked Kizu. His eyes were a violet shade, which might have been pretty if not juxtaposed with his thick unibrow and ugly scowl.
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“Why wouldn’t I be?” Kizu kept his voice level. “I signed up to compete.”
“He won’t be your opponent.”
“I’m glad,” Kizu lied. Then he added a little truth. “I wouldn't want to fight him. He’s my friend.”
The half-troll brother actually nodded at him, pleased by his answer. The other two just looked irritated.
“When we threatened him before, I expected him to pull his name out,” the third one said to his unibrowed friend.
“Must’ve took it as a challenge.”
“So, one of us doesn’t get to compete now?” the third one complained melodramatically. “Damn. Years of training, wasted. Now I’ll have to wait a whole week more.”
“I wanted to punch Tip’s face in.”
“As if you could,” his friend, Tip, said. “We both know you’re still reeling from getting dumped last week. Liable to keel over in tears at any moment.”
They chortled and kept on trading barbs, but Kizu couldn’t help but notice the glares never stopped from the unibrowed one. He really had been itching for a fight, and he clearly didn’t think Kizu would be much of one. And to be fair, Kizu was ranked 784th.
But still, Kizu just survived a night of being attacked and stalked by bloodspawn. That had to count for something. He kept repeating that reassurance in his mind, hoping that if he thought it hard enough, it would end up being true.
Of course, the most mild mannered one of them, Tip, decided to step down. That left Harvey with the older brother and Kizu with the irritable unibrowed one.
The two older students stopped speaking entirely after Tip’s departure. They took seats on benches across the room from Kizu and Harvey. The brother closed his eyes and appeared to sleep for a minute, but the other one glowered at Kizu the entire time. Kizu couldn’t shake the feeling that his opponent’s hostility went beyond needing to fight him. But for what, he had no idea. He had never even spoken to the older student before today.
Kizu and Harvey remained silent as well, not wanting to attract any more ire. Though at this point, it was too little, too late.
Finally, a scrawny older student in robes and a pointed hat poked his head in.
“Gob Lucas and Harvey Hugo, to your positions please.”
Lucas stood, towering over them both.
“Don’t think I want this fight any more than you do,” he told Harvey. “After four years, I’m finally permitted to enter the competition again, and my first bout is with you. A first year. For my sneak brother’s supposed honor.”
Kizu doubted that Lucas wanted the fight less than Harvey, but his friend just nodded, gulped, and stood to follow the student who had called their names. The scales on his face looked dull and pale, washed out of their natural color.
Left in the room with the glowering unibrow, Kizu did his best to look anywhere but at him. It was hard since they were sitting directly across from one another, and his opponent wasn’t even trying to be subtle with his frustration. Tension continued to rise in a stifling miasma between them. It seemed like more than a bit of an overreaction, but Kizu wasn’t about to say that out loud. Instead, he just fidgeted and avoided eye contact.
One of the large stones on the wall suddenly went translucent, giving them a window into the stadium. The illusionary enchantment on the stone was so thorough that it was like it had vanished altogether. Through it, Kizu could see Harvey clutching his flute with white knuckles while his opponent loomed on the other side of the pit. The half-troll cracked his neck left, then right, eyeing Harvey. Then, at Arclight’s whistle, they both jerked into motion.
Unfortunately, Harvey’s motion was a backwards step that immediately turned into a trip over a stone. He fell in a clumsy heap. Lucas, on the other hand, looked like a serpent as he weaved toward his prey. He moved as if anticipating a trap, like Harvey had faked his bumbling opener. But there was no trap. It was all Harvey could do to find his feet again and dig the dirt out of his flute.
When he struck, Lucas didn’t use any spell Kizu was familiar with. For a second, Kizu thought the older student had foregone magic entirely, choosing to pummel Harvey with his raw strength. But then Kizu focused on his spellsense. To his surprise, it actually worked. While the stone itself was obviously enchanted, Kizu could still sense individual condensed points where magic was being used. Kizu quickly realized that Lucas had reinforced his body’s natural strength with some sort of muscle enhancement spell. Kizu knew of some potions that had similar effects on the body, although he didn’t have any firsthand experience with them. And while he didn’t know of any spells that could produce such an effect, he understood the results just fine. The half-troll now had the strength of a full-blooded troll. Maybe even more.
Somehow Harvey managed to throw himself to the side, taking only a glancing blow from Lucas’ inhumanly swift swing. But even that grazing blow to his arm was enough to send the Tainted boy spinning across the dirt. He cried out, clutching the wound and trembling in the dirt.
Lucas slowly crossed the distance, savoring the palpable fear of his opponent. But Harvey hadn’t dropped his flute, and the older student’s showboating gave him the seconds he needed to raise the instrument flute to his mouth and begin to play.
The song was altogether different from the one Kizu had heard back at the placement tests. The notes rang a bit out of tune, the pressure of the situation obviously taking its toll. The Tainted boy clenched his eyes shut and focused.
The melody cleared, and with its clarity, Lucas began to slow. Even in the competitor box, walled off and untargeted by Harvey, Kizu still felt the pull. The deep longing for friendship that emanated from the music. Kizu desperately wanted to rush to his friend’s side. He wanted to help him. Harvey didn’t deserve this sort of treatment.
“Sit down,” his own opponent snarled.
Kizu hadn’t realized he was on his feet. He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts, and sat back on his bench.
Lucas, while clearly affected, seemed to resist the music. He advanced on Harvey. Harvey kept his eyes shut as Lucas raised a fist.
His fist hammered down, and the sickening crunch of broken bones silenced the cheering crowd.
But it didn’t silence Harvey’s flute.
Kizu hadn’t been the only one pulled into Harvey’s music. One of the students from the audience had thrown himself in front of Lucas’s fist right before impact, taking the blow in Harvey’s place. A moment later, four more students threw themselves on Lucas’ back, hollering in outrage.
Behind them, Kizu saw Arclight stand in the referee’s box. She looked furious. She raised her prosthetic arm and darkness gathered in a tenuous glob around her fist. But, before she initiated whatever spell she intended, a Hon man in an extravagant black yukata set a hand on her shoulder. He stood in the spot Kateshi had been the previous week. He leaned forward, as if intrigued. Arclight whirled on him, but the shouts exchanged were lost in the noise.
Lucas swatted the spectators off his back and made to grab Harvey again, but the first person he had punched sprang up again, broken and bleeding, to block another blow.
Harvey’s notes were a wild frenzy, but with an underlying structure that kept the overarching melody coherent.
Harvey sat cross-legged in the dirt, and continued to play his flute with his eyes closed, seemingly oblivious to everything happening around him. But now a dozen different spectators stood in front of him, their arms outstretched as if to block him from Lucas’ view.
Lucas took a step back and crossed his beefy arms. He examined the arena,evaluating his situation. He glanced up to Arclight in the referee box. She remained engaged in an intense argument with the Hon man. Another spectator jumped down into the courtyard to join her peers standing before Harvey.
Then Lucas smiled. Madness touched the half-troll’s eyes. He lunged forward, but not at Harvey - he reached for the closest student and chopped his hand into the back of her knees, collapsing her and sending her tumbling to the side. He kicked the next student’s shins, snapping them like kindling. Then he grabbed the uniform of another student and swung him at the one beside him, sending both tumbling across the courtyard.
He laughed. A deep, booming laugh. What it lacked in actual humor, it made up for with sheer gusto. He levied all his strength against the obstacles in front of him, dismantling them one by one.
When, finally, Lucas stepped through the carnage of writhing bodies to where Harvey sat, still playing his flute, his humanity appeared to have completely melted away. He plucked Harvey’s flute from his lips and snapped it in two with a single hand. Then, almost gently, he dragged one of its broken edges across Harvey’s cheek. The skin split, drawing first blood.
As soon as the music ended, the screams began.