Volume 1, Chapter 41: A Friendly Demonstration, Probably (Patreon)

“Yeah, aight, man. Magic duel sound good to me,” Peter said. “So how y’all run that shit ’round here?”

“The rules are the same as in a contest meant to determine who stands in the right before the eyes of the gods and our graciously ruling Mercy of the Morning Light Vizier Saladin Pasha the Seventeenth. The difference is that we do not fight until one of us gives all his blood back to the earth, but only until one fighter shows the other proper respect and yields.” Plasario pressed against each of his knuckles in turn, making the joints pop.

“So we go back-to-back, take three steps,” Peter began, trying to recall the procedure while acting it out at the same time, “then spin around and start throwin’ magic till one of us like, ‘Aight, fuck this, I’m done’?”

“Correct.”

“And what if one of us fuck around and kills the other by accident? Y’all gonna have a problem with that?”

“Accidents happen, so no, it would not be treated as a crime. In keeping with the spirit of the wind, I will do my best to pull my blade—or my body—so that you feel only the brush of a breeze rather than the strike of a hurricane. Provided, of course, that your fighting style allows me to do so.”

“All right, man, I think I’m ready. We doing this here?”

“Mr. Rodrick, please assume the role of arbiter for this duel,” Plasario said to his subordinate.

Rodrick backed away another few steps—I followed him—and gave his master a nod. Plasario then turned his back to Peter and waited for him to do the same.

The taller man watched him for a moment, then turned around and took a few small steps backward until his back touched the old swordmaster’s. Feeling the pressure, Plasario turned his head toward Rodrick.

“Contestants, please remain calm. I will count to two, after which you will take the customary three steps and begin the fight,” Rodrick announced. “One!” he shouted a moment later, raising one hand into the air. “Two!” By the second shout, both of his hands were pointed toward the cave ceiling.

Plasario took his first step, pressing the grass flat beneath his foot as it swayed across the rise where we stood.

Peter reacted very differently. Instead of stepping forward, he spun quickly on one heel and reached toward the shorter man.

I expected a trick. So did Rodrick, judging by the way he thrust both hands toward the duelists and opened his mouth to intervene.

Instead, before Plasario could take his second step, Peter tapped him on the shoulder.

“Sorry, man,” he said, scratching his beard with his left hand.

Caught completely off guard, Plasario stood there for a moment, seemingly unsure whether he should take the third step or not. Eventually, he turned first toward Rodrick, who only shrugged, then back toward Peter.

“What happened? Are you withdrawing from the duel?”

“Nah. I just forgot to ask—say I got you fucked up so bad you can’t even move. I’m supposed to stop then? Or I keep goin’ till you tell me you done? Or your boy calls it? ’Cause what if you can’t even talk?”

“Mr. Rodrick will end the duel then,” Plasario replied, irritated. He turned his head away from Peter, spat on the ground, then tilted it slightly before once again presenting his back to him. “If that is all, I respectfully ask that you do not interrupt once the countdown begins. It is dishonorable. An insult to all our ancestors.”

“Yeah, yeah. Aight. I got it now.”

Peter took his place and, just like Plasario, waited through Rodrick’s countdown. Once it ended, he took his three steps away from his opponent.

Contrary to what I had expected, neither man lunged at the other the moment they turned around.

Instead, both of them calmly began shifting from foot to foot, moving sideways to their right and circling together around some invisible point of gravity—the rules of the duel—that should have been pulling them toward each other.

Plasario did it by crossing one leg over the other and staying on the balls of his feet, never allowing either foot to fully settle into the ground between the blades of grass. Without taking his eyes off Peter, he reached toward a small pouch hanging from his belt and dipped two fingers inside.

He drew them out covered in fine, pale sand and slowly rubbed it between his palms, coating his fingers and the backs of his hands in a thin glittering layer. When he was done, he reached into the pouch again and closed his left hand around a small handful.

He kept it there as they circled. Then he pushed his body into an actual stance—he moved his left forearm horizontally in front of himself, with his right forearm vertical where the left hand ended.

Peter, meanwhile, bounced from foot to foot like a boxer, keeping his hands loosely clenched into fists in front of his face. His shoulders were angled forward, his head hanging low.

It was hard to tell whether he was actually tracking his opponent’s movements because the dark glasses hid his eyes, but he definitely reacted when Plasario finally moved.

Like a striking mantis, instead of continuing sideways, Plasario flicked two fingers of his left hand toward Peter’s far side. A few grains of sand flashed through the sunlight, while he pushed off his left leg and landed closer to the other man, ducking beneath the fist launched toward him. He stepped quickly under Peter’s extended arm and struck it from below with both fists, knocking it upward.

Immediately afterward, he sprang again, snapping his right leg toward Peter’s chin.

Peter managed to duck and bent his left arm, trying to catch the leg and pull his opponent toward him. His hands passed straight through the shorter man’s body as though Plasario wasn’t there at all.

A moment later, that body blurred like a distant mirage and broke apart into tiny grains of glittering sand carried away by the wind.

Then Plasario’s struck Peter in the ribs. The man had somehow appeared behind his larger opponent. The next attack hit Peter’s leg at the knee, buckling it and forcing him down onto it. Plasario followed with an elbow to Peter’s temple, sending the dazed man sprawling onto the ground.

He didn’t lose consciousness, though. Peter rolled away, curled almost into a fetal position, planted both open hands against the ground, and with one sharp movement launched himself into the air. He twisted as he rose and landed back on his feet several feet from where he had fallen.

A thin stream of blood ran down his face. His sunglasses were lying somewhere in the grass now.

Plasario, on the other hand, looked exactly as he had when the duel began. His breathing hadn’t quickened, his clothes were still sitting neatly against his body, and I couldn’t see so much as a smear of blood on him. And he was on Peter again almost instantly. His left hand never seemed to stop moving—opening, closing, occasionally snapping a few glittering grains of sand somewhere past Peter—while every attack he threw left behind streaks of particles breaking apart and scattering in the light breeze. Peter blocked and tried to counter wherever he could, but most of his punches struck only air—or Plasario’s body, which kept turning out to be nothing more than a sandy illusion.

Peter's feet tore divots from the grass whenever he changed direction. Plasario barely seemed to disturb it.

More and more wounds began appearing across the bigger man’s body, and bombarded from one side and then the other, he bent under the hail of blows. The attacks to his legs in particular kept forcing him to retreat farther and farther from the quicker man pressing him.

At one point Peter managed to catch the attacking man by the wrist. Plasario’s trapped hand stayed still. His other one didn't. His thumb snapped against his middle finger, throwing a tiny spray of sand past Peter’s hip. A heartbeat later Plasario blurred apart, and the man Peter was holding became nothing more than drifting grains.

Plasario reappeared exactly where that little spray had landed and struck from below.

After landing, though, the larger man twisted sharply, and suddenly all the blood running down his body moved as though it had a mind of its own. In a quick stream it began flowing across his skin from the wounds it had been drawn from, until it gathered entirely around his fist, where it took shape into something like semi-liquid Crimson claws.

At the same time, it became obvious that every strike Plasario had landed, every bruise, every crack and scrape, had completely vanished from Peter’s body. His body looked repaired, but his movement didn't.

The little bounce he'd started the duel with had turned uneven. Twice he planted one foot, seemed to change his mind about where he wanted to go, and corrected half a heartbeat later.

Unmoved by what was happening, Plasario sprang at his opponent, pushing off the ground and landing on the man’s back just as Peter, rising, slashed with his newly formed magical claws, leaving a trail of blood following through the air behind them. That trail lagged behind the main strike, and the arc it formed somehow hung in the air, preventing Plasario from launching a counterattack.

Rebounding off the blood, the smaller man leaped backward, landed on the ground, and shifted into a defensive stance. For the first time since the fight began, he let Peter come to him. The blood, however, no longer clung to the bigger man as cleanly as it had at the start. Every sharp turn shook loose a few thick drops. They struck the grass behind him one after another, leaving a broken red trail across the ground.

“He can force his body to trade places with the sand he throws into the air,” I said to Rodrick.

He looked at me but neither confirmed nor denied it, simply turning his attention back to the fight.

It would have been hard to notice while fighting the man by myself, but standing here on the sidelines, it was painfully obvious.

I also remembered how, earlier, during his fight with Milo, I had thought the man’s baseball bat had struck Plasario in the head and something had flashed in the air. At the time, I’d assumed my eyes had simply played a trick on me. I just hadn’t understood how the man’s magic worked yet.

“Shit, look like I gotta bring out the big guns,” Peter said, lunging into the attack.

He pulled his arm back through the air, loading up a right hook, his face twisting with effort. A heartbeat later, blood burst from the veins along his arm, spraying in every direction. But just before the strike landed, the blood was dragged back toward the same limb as though caught by intensified gravity. It clung to his arm like armor. Not all of it made it back, though. Several drops slapped against the grass, while another trickled from beneath the armor at his elbow before falling from his fingertips.

The punch hit Plasario, who blocked it with both hands, catching Peter’s fist with one and his wrist with the other, then twisting sharply in an attempt to bleed away the strike’s momentum.

The blood-covered arm punched through the block anyway and nearly slammed into Plasario’s deformed chest.

Forced back by the protruding claws, the smaller man had to jump away.

Peter followed with a left-handed southpaw uppercut aimed at his chin, but Plasario managed to jerk his head aside and avoid it. His left hand’s fingers snapped outward at the same time in what seemed a bit exaggerated manner.

Peter twisted around, searching the ground behind him for the sand, but nothing was there. I hadn’t seen Plasario throw anything. Instead, he had used the movement to distract Peter, who awkwardly looked away and twisted his body, expecting the smaller combatant to change position again.

Instead, Plasario remained where he was. Taking advantage of his opponent’s turn, he drove a fist into the area just beneath his shoulder blade, forcing Peter to drop his guard, then struck him around the kidneys. Peter’s entire body shuddered, and the man instinctively stumbled backward, trying to retreat.

Plasario paused for a moment, returned to the stance he had started the fight in, and allowed his opponent to turn and face him again. His breathing remained steady and nasal. He hadn’t even opened his mouth to try to catch his breath.

Peter grew frustrated and charged at his opponent, both hands extended. On the arm where the blood armor was now dripping more heavily onto the grass, the blood began forming something resembling a reinforced knuckle-duster, replacing the deteriorating claws.

Plasario made a quick flick of his wrist, throwing some sand toward the man. But once again, instead of moving away, he took advantage of his opponent’s distraction and simply sidestepped his attack, knocking Peter’s arms aside with a quick motion of his own while simultaneously kicking him in the chin.

Preventing Peter’s previous attack must have cost Plasario the last of the sand he had already thrown, because when the bigger man followed with another punch, quickly leaning back toward his opponent, Plasario reached for the pouch at his belt.

The blood gathered around Peter’s arm pulsed once, and the entire limb bristled with spikes. His eyes rolled upward for a moment, revealing nothing but whites, but Peter shook his head and, despite his unsteady movements, charged forward, winding up for another hook.

His fist came around with enough force to tear droplets of blood from the armor and send them spinning through the air, but there was nothing left of the compact boxer I'd watched at the beginning. His shoulder opened too early, his other hand dropped, and his entire weight followed the punch.

Plasario darted forward instead of reaching for the sand, slipping inside the attack so that Peter’s wide swing passed harmlessly behind him. Then he drove his forehead straight into Peter’s nose.

Another stream of blood spilled free. Before Peter could recover from the unexpected turn, Plasario dropped into a crouch, grabbed one of his legs with both hands, swept the other out from under him with his own leg, and brought the larger man crashing to the ground.

The moment Peter hit the grass, Plasario jumped onto his chest. The impact blasted every bit of air from Peter’s lungs. Then, with two quick strikes from the flattened edge of his foot, Plasario hit him once in the neck and once in the temple and Peter went limp.

The fight might have seemed fairly even to anyone who didn’t pay attention to the details. First, Plasario wasn’t using a sword at all; he was fighting hand-to-hand. Second, despite that, he hadn’t been wounded by his opponent even once. Third, he hadn’t even broken a sweat, while Peter had been bleeding practically from the first second. The truth was that this swordmaster really was the beast everyone said he was. Still, I decided to take the lesson he had taught me here to heart. No matter how strong or fast someone was, there was always something you could use against them.

Plasario relied on his sand—not completely, but he did. On top of that, he was a man of honor, and that was always something that could weigh a person down.

Peter’s abilities, on the other hand, revolved around regenerating his body and controlling blood. Maybe, just as a single blow had been enough to knock him unconscious, an attack capable of finishing him off before he had a chance to regenerate would do the trick—an explosion, for example. Wearing him down worked just as well—his psyche was still a limiting factor.

In the world I had found myself in, knowledge about others was becoming the greatest weapon of all. I would have to be especially careful. It was high time I got myself some more locally appropriate clothes—and a more local persona.