I don’t get any of my questions answered at or after breakfast.

Today’s the day of the Round of Eight. There’s forty people who are going to be engaging in all-out deathmatches, ten of whom have fought through, or at least are representing teams who fought through, the mass melee. We will, or rather, everyone other than me and Vonne will be watching all four of the fights, and even I’m going to have to watch the two that are potentially relevant to us.

That potentially bit is interesting, and highlights yet another way that Lily is effectively stacking the odds in our favor. There’s a day of rest between the Eights and the Semifinals, but that plural holds substantially more depth than it usually does; whoever wins the Eight has to fight twice, first against another survivor of the Eight and then against us. Not much of a break, either; just fifteen or so kiloseconds, four or so hours.

Three days. The tournament feels like it’s been going on for an entire interval, and also like it’s been going on for no time at all, but in three days, as they reckon time here on Cador, it’ll be over, and we’ll be seeing if my plans will survive the cascading catastrophe that will no doubt immediately result.

Zidanya and Sara are both gone by the time I’m up, chasing after Amber’s barely-dressed ass as she threatens to eat all of the fried egg-bread. She beats me to it, which she’d have done even if I weren’t distracted, but I console myself with a heap of egg-and-stuff scramble on a bread that’s soft and chewy and almost sour, toasted just into warmth and firmness.

Amber’s robe isn’t belted, so the view’s a pretty solid consolation in its own right as well.

“The good news is,” Vonne says, “we only have to worry about four teams, and Flight isn’t one of them.”

I chew through a bite and chase it down with some water before chancing speech. “Flight?”

“Flight! They’re my favorite. We call them Wildcard because they make a point of fighting their way through the melee every cycle they compete in, and when they aren’t competing, Penumbra and Naivete both spend some time around ring ten, which is pretty good for top-tier fighters.”

“They’re… Penumbra? Naivete? Are those their actual names?”

“Well, no.” Vonne looks embarrassed for a moment. “They’re just the names they’re known by. A lot of people do that! They make personas for themselves and separate that from who they really are, or who they are outside of the arena. It’s a normal thing!”

“I believe you,” I say with maliciously deliberate disbelief. She gives me a betrayed look, but Amber’s snickering gives away the game, and then we’re all laughing. “Okay, so, we don’t need to fight Flight, because we can assume that Rei is going to win. There’s three other teams we don’t need to worry about; who’s on our side of the bracket?”

“My bet is Eggs. I mean, Roe’s team, Qoo Roe, we call them the Eggs. I don’t like them, but they’re real good; they’ve got a Lightlord, um, I shouldn’t get into their details just yet, four teams, four teams.” I hide my grin as she flails a little and then throws an illusion onto the wall, eight names in a vertical column. The four on the bottom are crossed out, and each of the other four glows in turn as she names them. “Eggs! They’re a scatter kind of team, distract you and get you chasing. Sages! Minions or traps, mostly, but their Stormlord can move, and his technical skills are unbelievable. Aeons Past, um, people think of them as being in-your-face ultra-aggression but it’s more complicated than that. And finally, Ghosts Numbering Five, that’s their actual name, they’re really slippery and then they catch you.”

“Ghosts Numbering…” I shake my head in bemusement. “That’s their actual name. You’re not kidding.” I try to make it a question, but I’ve too much of a sense for Vonne’s jokes.

Amber rests her elbows on the table, leaning towards the wall the words have been cast onto. I miss whatever she says as a result, something that I vaguely register as agreement of some sort, and she glances over at me, smirking. “Perhaps I should… get dressed.”

“Alas.” I kiss her, running my hands into her bathrobe and along her back. I feel the warmth and softness of her body through my shirt, and I lose track of myself in the moment for a moment. “Going to go watch the games?”

“I am.”

“Hey. No need to do the sad smile.” I kiss her again, fighting the urge to make more or less the same face. “Have fun, yeah? I’ve got studying to do. I want to see if the mana recordings of the fights can let me do Skill and spell identification.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“In real time, or retrospective?”

“Real time.”

“Grow in strength,” she says with finality, like it’s a blessing, and strides off towards the shower, and actually it occurs to me that it probably is a blessing.

I put the thought aside; I can always ask her later.

“It seems nice.”

I glance over at Vonne. I hadn’t even noticed the long moment of silence, lost in my thoughts, before she gently broke it. “Huh?”

“You and her. We don’t really do the romance thing, but it seems nice.”

“Yeah.” I blink a few times, and bring myself back into the present from wherever my mind was drifting. “Yeah,” I say more firmly. “It is nice. Fraught for a bunch of reasons, but really nice. Um. Is it, like, incredibly awkward when I get all romantic or affectionate with a partner when you’re around? I’m just now realizing that I literally have been doing that and um.”

“Oh, no, it’s fine! It’s fine.” Vonne shakes her head, fast and exaggerated. “You could die in two days. Obviously you should spend your time the way you want to!”

“Stars, that is the smuggest smirk I’ve seen in a long time.” I throw myself onto a couch dramatically, hands raised in surrender. “What am I missing here? Other than the fact that I should be preparing for that fight in two days, so that I don’t die, and instead I can, y’know, survive it and reach the surface.”

“Nothing.” I look over at her, and she gives an exaggerated shrug. “Sed don’t, well, do romance. It just seems nice! You get distracted in, like, a good way?”

“A lot of that might be less romance and more lust.” I try to keep some of the confusion out of my voice and stay closer to matter-of-fact.

“Well, we don’t do that, either. I mean, some of us have! Like, back in the before times, when they were on the surface? I mean, I had to come from somewhere, right?” She’s on her feet, pacing aimlessly, like there’s just too much energy inside her to sit down. “Which means Mama had to have gone into heat, but what does that even mean?”

“Maybe it just doesn’t work in the Temple?”

“Doesn’t matter anyway. Eggs!”

“Eggs?” I blink a few times, momentarily thrown by what seems like a non-sequitur. “Oh! Eggs, right, you mentioned. Roe’s team.”

“You said you had a breakthrough this morning.” Vonne flicks her fingers at the walls, and they start manifesting images like it’s a plague of color. One, then five, then fourteen, then more and more faster than I can process them, all pictures of fights at some stage or another. “What can you tell me about these?”

It takes me a moment to deal with the disorientation. She’d been so matter of fact about it, but this is… there are hundreds of images, covering pillars and walls alike. What kind of spell even does that?

What kind of spell… my Visor flickers across my face, and then I shake my head. Answering what kind of spell can be used to throw illusory, because yes, these are illusions, footage from past fights in the Tournament isn’t a useful question to answer. There’s probably spells and logic baked into the scenario that are involved with that, the same stuff that makes it so that any surface can tap into the broadcasts of the currently-ongoing fights, and it would be potentially useful and relevant if I were trying to break the scenario, but I’m not, so it’s not.

“There’s one person in all of these,” I say instead. My Visor can identify him in three different forms: an amorphous ball of energy often connected by a beam of some sort to another person, a hulking musclebound man with a wooden log of some sort, and a horseman shining with light. “That is, in each and every one of these, this one person is present. There’s dozens, hundreds of other people, but only one of this guy.”

“Yep! That’s Ben.”

“Ben.”

“Ben! He’s a sweetheart. Totally the nicest.”

In lieu of responding to this—I don’t, for that matter, know why the name Ben sounds so weird to me—I study the pictures, trying to find commonalities or interesting things. “He’s doing something in all of them,” I say eventually. “My Visor can pick up what looks like magical textures in the illusions. Are they supposed to be power flows? Mana flows?”

“Not only that. There’s more than just mana and power to magic! There’s a resonance with the world, and there’s a resonance with the System.”

“Skill use, you mean? For the System resonance.”

“There’s more than just Skills to the System?”

“Oh stars, you do the question-as-answer thing too well,” I say, snickering. “What happens if you have a Trait or Feat or something that grants an… affinity? Or something like that? And you try to cast a spell? Will you get System resonance from that?”

“See if you can figure some of them out.” Vonne is grinning ear to ear. “He’s a sweetie but he doesn’t go around telling people what he can do, so I don’t know the answer!”

It’s a puzzle, then. A puzzle, a time constraint, some computational resources, and someone to bounce ideas back and forth with. Like old times again, I think to myself, and I’m surprised to feel myself smiling. Let’s solve this.