B3CH79-Dinner and Duels (Patreon)

The hill down to the square wasn’t much of one, but it gave him the whole thing laid out below — cookfire smoke and torchlight, trestle tables run end to end where a market had stood that morning, and far more people packed between them than were there this morning.

Adeline had her hand in the crook of his arm. She’d changed for tonight, into something dark green with his emblem sewn into the hem. She looked like a stunning flower.

“Three hundred something lords down there,” he said. “Then you got all the notable adventurers and crafters.” He looked at her. “Ever think you’d be here, doing something like this?”

Adeline snorted. “I thought I’d spend my life mucking stalls and hanging wash out to dry. Marry the cute boy from the next farm.” Her eyes went out over the square. “My life’s changed for the better since Max and I joined the Landing. And worse.” A sidelong look up at him. “Much like your own, I think.”

Harold snorted at that. “Fair.”

They started down, and the square saw them coming. The nearest tables got to their feet, then the ones behind, a spreading rustle of benches and boots until the whole gathering was up. Some of them clapped. A few hooted and hollered down at him — his own faction, the lords Sarah had bribed and cajoled. 

His guard was already strung tightly around him. They were taking no chances tonight. Harold leaned in, down toward her ear, under the noise. “You look beautiful. I’m glad you came north with me.”

“Mm.” Adeline didn’t look at him, but her mouth curved. “Flattery will get you everywhere, mister.”

They reached the head table. He pulled her chair out and seated her first, got her settled, and only then turned to face the square.

He pushed mana through his body until it rang in his bones. Then he clapped his hands once, and let his aura out.

Both halves at the same time — the warm side, the Lord’s side. His aura was a strange thing. He gained access to it with his starting perk, and it inspired. Made people more loyal. Gave them purpose. It was, in all honesty. A true Lord's Aura.  But the system gave that to him when he returned, and underneath it was the part that was all him. Aura’s were extensions of a person's soul and experiences. The cumulative experiences of a person's life that made them who they were. Everyone there felt the weight of that experience.

He didn’t press. He didn’t lean on a single one of them. He only let them feel it. Harold had talked to Balfiel about his troubles with his aura, and Balfiel had taught him how to reconcile the differences in his aura. That it wasn't two sides of a coin. But layers of the same side of the coin, and tonight he unleashed it.

The square fell into a long, rolling hush. Scattered in it, he felt a handful of people push back — their own auras coming up against his, small and stubborn. He could have crushed every one of them without moving. He noted where they stood, and found it interesting that so many had them.

“Lords and Ladies of Humanity!” His voice carried to the walls. “Welcome to Hell’s Edge!”

“Before we eat the, I'm sure, delicious food Baron Dalen has prepared for all of us. I have a few short words for you all.” 

 He looked out over them.

“We have assembled the largest fighting force in the human reach of this continent. Humanity is under siege on every border we have. People are dying and being taken while we stand around in the cold.” He let it sit. “We are the answer to that!”

He picked up his cup and turned it in his hand.

“Now — I’m not so altruistic as to stand up here and tell you it’s all for love of your fellow man. I know better, and so do you. There will be ample opportunity, in the months ahead, for fortunes to be made.”

The roar that went up for that was twice the size of the first, and he let himself smile.

“Colonel Hale has worked out where every one of you fits in this campaign. If you’re unclear on where you landed —” he raised the cup a little “— or you’ve got a complaint about it, now is the time to speak.”

He took a sip. Shrugged.

“Good thing I don’t care.”

A laugh moved through part of the crowd, not sure of itself.

“There is one commander you will all listen to in this.” A second shrug, and this time he let the colder side of his aura pulse out a half-step further. “...or you will leave.”

The core of his own people clapped hard at that. Elsewhere, a murmur ran the tables. Toward the back, a few lords stood very still under the weight of it, and those same scattered auras firmed up again, pushing against him in the dark.

“Tonight, you eat and drink. Then I’ll give you one opportunity to —” he let the pause stretch “— contest my right to command this army.” He set the cup down. “Nothing convinces people like power. So I’ll give you the chance to show off your own against mine.”

The square was openly talking now, heads together up and down the tables.

“After that, I’ll walk you through the days before we march.”

He lifted the cup again. Across the gathering, cups rose to meet it. And when he spoke the last of it, he kept his voice low — but let the aura carry it out into every ear in the square at once.

“To the glorious dead. Long live the empire.”

He drank, and sat.

Hale was at his right, a knot of his staff and Lady Maren beside him. The Colonel watched the lords settle back onto their benches.

“How’d you sort them in the end?” Harold asked.

“By the unit they’ll serve with.” Hale didn’t look over. “Grouped each lord with the legion he’s attached to, so the men he’ll fight beside are the men he’s drinking with tonight. Most of that lot can’t fight worth a damn and know it. They need a reason to stand in the line when it gets bad. A night like this gives them one.” He picked up a cup, looked into it, set it down. “They’re not strangers to violence. Not after a year here. But this war’s going to be different. It’ll be bloody no matter how clever we are about it.”

He sat there thinking for a moment, but ultimately agreed with him. “Unfortunately, you are right.”

Hale was quiet a moment. Then, lower, just for Harold: “Are you sure we can win this, Harold?”

Harold looked at him.

“The quality’s not there,” Hale said. “Not next to ours. Their mana skills are poor. Their discipline’s — all right, and only as good as whoever’s shouting at them. I watched them drill all week. Half of them’d break the first time something big came out of the dark. God forbid what happens when those wargs come at them. They’ll be slaughtered.”

“How many soldiers have you seen, Hale? Outside our own.”

Hale’s jaw worked. “Not many.”

“Right.” Harold turned his cup slowly in his hand. “How many perks do our men have just for discipline? A few each. Your tribunes and centurions, more, and those probably have an area of effect. Every one of those earned in a fight that nearly killed the man who got it.” He tipped his head at the tables. “Now — what has one of these lords ever truly been tested against? Other lords. A few dens or five.  A monster or two of middling strength, on good ground, with the odds stacked their way. Not one of them has pushed this deep into the Blackjaws. Most have never once been in a fight they weren’t fairly sure they’d win going in.”

“And ours have,” Hale grunted.

“Ours have. And ours carry a few World Firsts perks on top of it. A lowered threshold to earn perks at all, and a perk that lets them learn mana skills 20% faster. Stack that on soldiers who already outclass these levies before a single perk’s counted —” he waved his hand towards the Lords. “— it isn’t close. That’s half the reason for the goblins. We need to blood this coalition against the Blackjaw tribes first, where a bad lesson won't immediately kill them all. Before we put them in front of the Velthari.”

Hale chewed it over a long while. The first platters coming out of Dalen’s kitchens.

“I don’t like it,” Hale said at last.

Harold waited.

“They aren’t ready.”

A server came toward the head table with a loaded platter, and Harold lifted two fingers and sent him off down the line — every lord and every retainer served before a thing touched his own plate. Tonight was a statement, and he wasn’t going to waste the chance to make it.

He watched the boy carry the platter away.

“Nope,” he said. “But they’ll learn. They have to. Or they’ll all die.”

The food came around to him last of anyone in the square; it was lukewarm, but he didn’t care. Where Dalen had found someone talented enough to run his kitchens, Harold didn’t know, but the food was good.

Adeline had her shoulder against his. They worked through the meal slowly, neither in much of a hurry, and spent most of it watching the tables around them and trying to guess what people were talking about.

Every now and then Harold would catch Adeline looking at him instead of the crowd. When he turned, she'd already be looking away, a small smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. He caught her at it twice before she gave up pretending.

Three tables down, two lords had clearly been arguing since they sat. One of them stabbed the air with a chicken bone to drive his point home.

“I’m betting it’s about rations on trail,” Adeline said.

“No. Look at him.” Harold tipped his cup toward the man. “That’s a seating-order fight. Nobody goes that red over food.”

Adeline studied him for a moment.

“Look at that belly. He definitely gets that red over food.”

Harold laughed into his cup.

Adeline smiled and leaned a little harder against his shoulder.

“You're enjoying yourself.”

He looked at her, kinda surprised. “You know. I am. It’s been a good day. I’m glad you and Sarah get along.”

Adeline flashed a brilliant smile at him. “I am too.”

He turned his head toward her, and for a moment the noise of the square seemed to fall behind the tables and lanterns and the warmth of her against him.

She nudged his ribs with her elbow.

“Idiot.”

He smiled and went back to his food, his knee resting against hers beneath the table.

A moment later, Adeline pointed with her fork.

“Look. He’s got the chicken bone again.”

Harold glanced over.

“That’s his second one,” He murmured. 

“So?”

“So I’m changing my bet.”

“To what?”

“You’re right. He's talking about the food.”

Adeline laughed, and Harold found himself watching her instead of the argument.

She laughed into her cup, and he smiled at her. He’d look back on this moment in the future as a bright, happy moment. Across the square, he found Sarah wedged at a table full of her team, and for a moment she caught his eye and smiled. Then Caswell headbutted a man flat to the ground.

Amongst his own guard, the dwarf guards had their hands over their mouths and their shoulders shaking, while the Redcaps looked on with interest.

Harold set his cup down and sighed.

“Well,” he said. “It was bound to happen.”

He was still watching Caswell get hauled off the man he’d flattened when a chair scraped back somewhere down the left-hand tables, hard enough to carry over the noise.

A lord stood. Slim, narrow through the shoulders, dressed better than he fought — Harold recognized him before he’d finished rising. He was seated at the 5th Allied Legion’s table. But he knew him from his first timeline. Part of a bloc of Lords loudest for blood when it was cheap and first to run when it got expensive.

“Enough of these games, Count Harold!” The man flung an arm out over the square. “What is this ‘chance to dispute your leadership’? What does that even mean?”

Harold looked at him with a flicker of interest. Watched him a second. Lost the interest about as fast as he’d found it, and turned to Hale.

Hale set down his cup and stood.

And he did something he didnt expect from the man. He pushed out an aura.

It settled over the square like something that had always been there. It was stable, solid, patient. The world could burn down around him and hurt him, and he would stand right where he was and do what he believed was right. It fit Hale exactly, but that was no surprise considering his enterprise on earth.

The aura carried his voice. Weaker than Harold’s — but enough to make his point known.

“Count Harold has named a champion. Any of you may fight him for leadership of this army. If you take that challenge and fail it, you swear fealty to Lord Harold.” He paused for a moment. “If his champion fails — Count Harold swears fealty to you.”

Beside him, Adeline’s head turned in alarm. 

Down the tables, his own bloc came up out of their seats in a wave of protest, benches barking on stone. Everywhere else in the square, a great many more were already on their feet for a different reason — hands up, voices climbing over each other, every one of them wanting the chance.

“What’s the catch?!”

It came from the right, from the horse lords clustered around Vayle. A big man, half-standing, bellowing it like an accusation.

Hale looked over at him, and something that was nearly approval crossed his face.

“No catch,” he said. “You win, you get command, and the Potion Lord swears to you. You lose, you swear to him. Simple as that.”

That lit the square up fresh. The clamor doubled.

A man stood near the middle of it, and the tables around him quieted on their own. 

He was a bear of a man. A troll-hide cloak hung off his shoulders, grey-green and heavy. Under it, he wore what looked like system-made plate armor. A system-forged axe rode across his back. He was, by a wide margin, one of the best-armed men in the square who wasn’t one of Harold’s own.

“I will take that challenge!”

“Lord Urial is the challenger,” Hale called.

Carter was already moving. He had his people up and clearing the open ground in front of the head table — benches dragged back, a long trestle hauled aside, the whole thing shoved out into a rough box of a ring. More tables were dragged up around the edges for men to stand on, sit on, and see over each other. The square rearranged itself around the fight.

A shadow came in at Harold’s shoulder. Jack walked around the end of the head table and planted himself behind Harold’s chair, hands loose, and stood there.

Harold tipped his head back to look up at him.

Jack looked bored. Supremely, professionally bored, like a man waiting out a long line at a bank.

“Lord Urial,” Hale said. “Step into the ring.”

Urial climbed down over a bench into the cleared box, and the troll-hide cloak swung around him, and up close he was even bigger. He looked around at the tables, at the lords packed in to watch, and then back at the head table.

“How do I know you won’t go back on your promise?” he said. “When I win.”

Harold rolled his eyes.

“I swear on Gravesend I will abide by the terms Colonel Hale laid out.” He said it flatly. “Good enough?”

Urial drew himself up and repeated the oath, loud, for the square. “And I swear on Gravesend to abide by the same,” and something lit behind his face, and he grinned and spread his arms. “Well! Where is this Champion?!”

Hale looked at Jack. Jack looked at him bored and shook his head. “No.”

Then he lifted a hand and pointed at the edge of the cleared ground where the guard stood — at Elroy.

“Go get him,” Jack said. “He’s not worth my time.”

Harold’s eyes bugged.

He twisted around in his chair and looked up at Jack. “Wait, wait, wait — hold on.”

Jack rolled his eyes down at him. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes, but you’re sending Elroy out!”

A small grim smile moved across Jack’s face, there and gone. “He’s gonna chop that pansy up.”

Harold stopped.

He reached out instead of arguing — pushed his mana senses across the ring and let them settle over Urial, and took the measure of the man. It calmed him right down. The man was good. Probably in the upper crust of Lords here; there was real weight to him. But it topped out at mid-tier-2, and no higher, and its quality was coarse—well below Elroy’s. Harold had crossed swords with Elroy and Jenkins more mornings than he could count. Singly, the two of them were probably the best pure swordsmen in the county, a pair of virtuosos with the sword. Together, they put real pressure on both him and Jack. The only reason he and Jack came out on top was their mana density and quality. Well, that and the mana bodies the two of them would never catch up to.

Against a mid-tier-2, sending Elroy out was Jack sending a bonfire to fight a candle.

Adeline leaned into his shoulder. “This is going to be fun to watch.”

“You think?”

“Mm.” She propped her chin on her hand, eyes on Urial. “He’s well thought of. A real combatant — Lord Vayle’s tried to recruit him four or five times and been turned down every time. His infantry’s among the best we’ve got that isn’t ours. That armor and that axe — he didn’t get those by accident. He took a detour on the road up, on his own authority, and cracked a big Blackjaw den open for the loot. Came out of it dressed like that.”

Hale grunted, from Harold’s other side. Confirmation enough.

Out in the ring, Elroy stepped down over the bench.

Harold couldn’t help the comparison, and it was almost cruel. Urial, a mountain in troll-hide and steel plate, that axe coming off his back now in two big hands. And Elroy. Just — Elroy. A skinny little fop of a man with a mouth bigger than most.

Except he wasn’t running his mouth. He’d come down into that ring looking more serious than Harold had seen him since the trial, both short swords still sheathed, his weight already settled low and easy across the balls of his feet.

That was what finally let Harold relax.

Carter stepped up to the edge of the ring and put his voice over the square.

“First blood!” he called. “No killing blows. Anything short of that, you can do. We’ve got potions on hand that’ll fix anything that isn’t instant death — so don’t hold back worrying about it, but don’t try for it either.” He pulled a vial from inside his coat and held it up, turning so both men could see it, Urial first, then Elroy. “Both of you see this? Good.”

The square roared, and the betting started before Carter had finished talking, coin and markers coming out up and down the tables. Harold spotted Jenkins at the rail of the nearest one, already running a book, taking bets. Of course he was.

Urial hefted the axe and looked Elroy over, and his lip curled.

“What,” he said. “Am I not good enough to warrant the actual champion?”

Elroy’s whole face changed, and the mouth came back, and he smiled.

Whelp. Never mind that didnt last long. Dude just had to open his mouth. He thought to himself before Elroy started talking. 

“You think you’re insulted?” he said. “I’m the one who got sent out here to take the trash out. Honestly, it’s insulting. After all my loyal service — this is the thanks I get.” He shook his head, mournful, and looked Urial up and down, taking his time. “I mean — look at you. Look at this. You look ridiculous, mate. That troll-hide cloak does nothing for you. Won’t stop a blade, won’t stop an arrow, won’t even stop the cold, I’d wager, under all that sweat. And why are you sweating so much? It’s cold out.” He tutted. “And no vambraces. No greaves. Nothing.” A slow leer spread across his face. “You know we’re up here to fight goblins, yeah? Short little fellas. They’re small. You want to get something over your balls, or you’re going to catch one of the little bastards running right up your ass.” The leer went wider. “Unless you’re into that. No judgment. To each his own. Personally, not my thing, but I hear other cultures like that kind of thing.” He let it hang. “Didn’t see you out there on the Night of Falling Stars, though, did I? You must be one of those that allowed it to happen? Or did you enjoy the services they provided?”

Urial’s face had gone a deep, blotched red, and his hands tightened on the axe. Harold lowered his face into his hands. Dear lord Elroy.

Across the ring, Elroy drew both short swords, finally, and they came clear without a sound.

The square was on its feet, roaring, and somewhere in it Jenkins was shouting odds.

Harold didn’t see him move. One breath Elroy stood square in the path of that axe; the next he was inside it, past the head and past the haft, and the flat of his left sword cracked off the back of Urial’s helm as he went by. The sound carried to the walls. A bright metal tonk, like someone rapping a kettle with a spoon.

Urial staggered through the end of his own swing and had to plant the axe to catch himself.

“Ope.” Elroy was already four feet away, light on his toes. “Was that your head? Hard to tell.”

The big man roared and came again — faster this time, a short vicious chop that would have taken Elroy’s arm off at the shoulder if the arm had stayed where it was. Elroy rolled his wrist, turned his whole body out of the line, and the axe bit empty air where his ribs had been. On the way through, he reached out, almost lazily, and tapped the flat of his right sword across the seat of Urial’s plate. A flat, ringing smack. 

The square lost its mind.

“You’re swinging at where I was, bro,” Elroy said, conversational, circling. “It’s a common mistake. The trick is to hit where I’m going to be. I’ll give you a hint — it’s not there either.”

Urial set his feet and tried to make a fight of it. He was good; Harold would give him that. He kept the axe moving, short controlled strokes now, working to pen Elroy against the trestle at the ring’s edge and take away his room. He clearly had trained for a long time with the axe and knew what he was doing. For about three seconds it even looked like a duel.

Then Elroy stopped letting it.

He flowed in under a horizontal cut, hooked a boot behind Urial’s lead knee, and the knee folded. Urial lurched. Before he’d caught it, the pommel of Elroy’s left sword rang off the side of his helm, snapping his head sideways, and a flat blade spanked him across the backs of both thighs to send him stumbling forward into the empty middle of the ring, arms wheeling for balance under all that steel.

“Dance!” Elroy crowed. “There it is. I knew you had it in you.”

Urial caught his footing and spun, chest heaving. There was sweat running into his eyes now. His mana was coming off him in waves, coarse and hot and wasteful. He was spending it twice as fast as Elroy.

Elroy had already opened that man up six different ways. The man could have ended this in the first exchange and drawn blood, and instead he chose, blow by blow, not to.

It wasn’t for Urial.

Harold’s eyes went off the ring and out over the tables — packed shoulder to shoulder on benches and standing on trestles to see, watching one of the best-armed men get spanked around a square. That was the lesson Elroy was giving. “Jack,” Harold said, not turning. “You magnificent bastard.”

“Told you,” Jack said, from behind his chair, bored and vindicated.

Down the nearest table, Jenkins had stopped shouting odds. He stared at his own book like a man watching his house catch fire. “No — no, put them away,” he was telling the lords crowding him, flapping a hand at their coin. “Book’s closed. Book’s been closed. I’m not taking a copper more, are you people mad—”

In the ring, Urial’s mana flared, and he seemed to flow as he went for the kill.

Harold saw it build as he forced it into his frame—he swung the axe at an oblique angle and tried to feint Elroy as he moved it from an oblique strike into a horizontal one meant to catch Elroy moving the wrong way.

Elroy had been waiting for it the whole fight.

He stepped off the line a half-pace, let the axe scream past his body, and then he flowed behind Urial with a boot planted square in the small of that broad back. He shoved. Urial, bent over his own stuck axe and badly off balance, went down face-first in a crash of plate loud enough to rattle the platters on the head table.

A beat of quiet fell over the square.

Elroy strolled around to the big man’s head as Urial got a palm under himself, and he crouched, easy, forearms on his knees, both short swords loose in his hands.

“Here’s the thing,” he said, almost kindly. “I could’ve done this eleven, maybe twelve times already. I kept count. You want to know why I didn’t?” He tilted his head. “Because you weren’t worth the blood, bro. You’re a dork. And I wanted every one of these fine Lords and Ladies to get a real good look at the difference between you and me before we called it. Lord Harold needs fighters. Not…you.”

He reached down and laid the edge of his right sword against the back of Urial’s hand where it braced on the stone, and drew it an inch. A single thin line of red welled up and ran.

“First blood,” Elroy said, and stood, and spread his arms to the square. 

Carter was already stepping to the ring’s edge. “First blood to the champions, Champion!” he called, and raised the healing vial over his head. “It’s called!”

The square was mostly silent.

Then his own bloc on their feet and roaring.  He was right that power was the only thing that convinced anyone. Harold just needed another demonstration to remind everyone.

Hale was watching the tables, not the ring. “That changed some minds,” he said.

“That was the idea.”

Out in the middle, Urial hadn’t gotten up. He was up on his knees now, one hand pressed flat to the stone, staring down at the thin line of blood tracking across the back of it — the only mark on him anywhere, after all of it. 

Elroy, walking back toward the guard’s edge of the ring, caught Harold’s eye on the way and flipped him a cheerful little salute with one bloodied sword.

“I’m not your trash man!” he shouted at him.

Harold looked him in the eyes and nodded. He was used to seeing the two of them as idiots but maybe it was time he caught up to Adeline and recognized they weren't. He passed something back to Jack, who looked down at him curiously. When he saw the slightly glowing blue token Harold gave him, he nodded his head with a little smile. Elroy had earned it. Across the square, Sarah was standing on a bench with both fists in the air, cheering with her team. Urial reached the head table and went down on one knee in front of it, the troll-hide pooling around him, and swore on Gravesend that his banner and his men were Harold’s. Harold pulled him up by the forearm, and sent him off to join Caswell. They would probably be friends. Hopefully?

A man stood and started walking toward the ring through the packed tables, and the lords made room for him without being asked. He was built lean and long, nothing on him that marked him out — plain leathers, a spear slung across his back, an easy way of moving that didn’t push and didn’t apologize. He came to the edge of the cleared ground and stopped.

“Is this challenge open to adventurers as well?”

Harold looked at him. And his stomach dropped straight through the bench.

He knew that face. He’d spent a long time in the first life trying not to.

Cassian. Cassian the Dragonsbane. The first human being ever to kill a dragon — years and years from now, and across the sea near Lord Sovann. 

To stack the perks for that one kill, the man had spent a decade hunting the dragonkin, Individual to individual, then clan by clan, slaughtering his way up a ladder of perks that would help him slay dragons. And when the dragonkin finally had enough of it, the whole south had burned. And they hadn’t even killed Cassian as they did it. The man had already been gone. 

And here he was. This is going to be interesting, Harold thought. Across the ring, Jack had turned his head. He was looking at the newcomer with something he almost never bothered to spend on anyone. Interest.

Carter glanced to the head table. Harold gave him a single nod.

“It’s open to adventurers as well, challenger,” Carter called. “What’s your name?”

The man’s mouth tipped, easy and unbothered. “Ah — these days I mostly just go by Cassian.”

Down the nearest table, Jenkins had his ruined book back open and a stub of chalk in his hand. “Alright, alright — new fight, fresh book,” he was saying, waving off a lord trying to settle an old marker. “No, not that one, that one’s done, I told you it’s done. I’ll take action on this one. Our guy’s a sure thing.” A pause while he actually looked at Cassian, and something crossed his face. “...Probably. Odds are moving. Get ’em in now.”

Jack came down into the ring.

He unhooked the axe from his hip on the way — the big system blade he carried everywhere- and handed it, hilt-first, to the nearest guard without looking at the man. Then he reached back over his shoulder and drew the longsword instead.

Harold understood that, even if nobody else in the square did. Jack loved the axe. But the longsword had been his first love.

Where Elroy and Jenkins flowed — two blades, all motion, never standing still — Jack did none of that. He settled his weight, brought the longsword up into a plain high guard, and went quiet. No flourish. No wasted motion. 

Harold pushed his mana senses across the ring one more time, the way he had with Urial, and let them settle over Jack.

Jack had finished two full paths. Two. The Blade Master path, and then the Guardian path and had started the Champion path the instant Harold named him champion. His mana sat high in tier-3, both in quantity and quality. There were very, very few people breathing anywhere on this continent right now who could stand in a ring with Jack. But maybe Cassian could.

Cassian stepped down over the bench, rolled the spear off his back, and leveled it.

“First blood,” Carter said, over the noise. “No killing blows. Potions on hand — anything short of instant death, we’ll put back. Both of you clear?”

“Clear,” said Cassian.

Jack just nodded.

They clasped hands across the ring, one short grip, and stepped back to their distance.

Then Cassian opened with a lunge.

The spear came off his hip in a flat straight line for Jack’s throat, and there was a burst of speed behind it that ate the gap before the point had any right to arrive — Harold saw the man blur a half-step mid-thrust, there and gone. Jack turned it. Barely. A short roll of the longsword across the haft put the point past his ear, and he stepped in on the opening and cut for the exposed arm.

The blade rang off skin. Harold watched the edge skate away like it had hit a river stone, and the forearm where it had landed was grey for a breath, then flesh again.

Cassian was already gone — a burst-step back out of range, spear leveled, resetting the whole fight to arm’s length.

“Huh,” Jack said with interest. Fighting adventurers was different. Soldiers, it was normally a fairly normal fight. But adventurers got their perks from the monsters they killed, and they could manifest incredibly unusual powers. 

For a while, it was a real fight.

Cassian wouldn't stand still or be cornered. Every time Jack closed, the man blinked backward on that short, ugly burst of speed and reopened the distance, working the spear in long raking jabs to keep the longsword off him. When Jack tried to cheat the range — a feint low, a step to come around the man’s blind side — Cassian was already turning to meet it before Jack committed. He always knew where the sword was. Behind him, beside him, didn’t matter. Something in him always understood where Jack’s blade was.

A raking thrust caught Jack across the ribs and should have folded him — and Jack just let it ring off his plate, shoulder dropping into it, and didn’t give a single step. A sweep of the spear-butt cracked into the side of his helm hard enough to carry to the walls, and Jack’s head barely moved. That was a benefit of the guardian path. It helped make someone incredibly sturdy. 

Then Cassian started to get serious.

He planted both feet, and the packed stone of the square actually cracked under his boots as something surged up his legs, and he drove a two-handed thrust with his whole body behind it — more than enough to punch through a shield. Jack turned his shoulder and took it on the breastplate, and the point screamed off the steel, and Jack was still coming.

So Cassian threw up a wall of his own. A dome of dark, oily light bloomed off his free hand and caught the longsword mid-swing, and the blade stopped dead against nothing, a hand’s breadth from the man’s face as Jack bared his teeth and tried to cut through it.

Harold sat up. He knew that. He’d seen that exact barrier once before, a long way down in the deep dark. Where in God’s name did he kill a Vivblix, Harold thought. They were incredibly rare and powerful. 

The barrier bought Cassian half a second before the mana on Jack's blade burst through it. He used it to distract Jack as he used a burst of white light and hammered a wall of sound right into Jack’s face.

Jack had vibrated back and hunkered down in vicious pain. His chin was down, and his guard was up across his eyes. He flushed his body with mana, and that was when Harold knew it was over. Slowly, Harold watched Jack start solving the man. 

Jack stopped letting the stone skin matter. The next time he cut, the longsword was lit the length of the blade with mana, and when it hit Cassian’s hardened guard it didn’t skate — it would bite deeply, and Cassian had to burst clear or lose the arm, a thin seam of grey splitting where the edge had gone in. But there was no blood. But Harold knew that if he released the perk and reverted his arm to flesh, it would bleed freely. Jack stopped chasing the burst-steps, too. He quit lunging at where Cassian was and started closing the angles the man kept blinking into. Jack was moving just as fast as the blink step, and he was there, his blade swinging, always keeping the man reacting. And he never let the spear touch bare skin — Harold caught the sheen on the point now, a contact poison beading along the head, and every time it came near Jack it found plate or the flat of the sword. Jack showed the consummate skill every Blademaster was known for. It was why it was such a sought-after Path. As simple as the name was. It was every bit as high-tier as the stormcrafter path. 

Cassian felt the fight turning. Harold saw the moment he felt it — the man’s rhythm cracked, and he started using his tricks faster, barrier and that sonic attack. His spear darted out, searching for angles. Always just looking to catch Jack off guard.

The gap was just real. However good Cassian was — and he was the best thing to walk into that ring all night, by a wide margin — he was one very skilled adventurer with a grab-bag of borrowed monster tricks. While Jack was just a monster. It was a different order of being, and no amount of cleverness would close it.

Cassian blinked back from a cut the way he had a dozen times — and this time Jack was anticipating it, and had already surged to close the angle. The man burst straight into the longsword’s line instead of away from it. Jack caught the spear-haft under his left arm and clamped it to his body. He stepped in. And he sliced the edge of his blade while it was vibrating with controlled mana across the top of Cassian’s troll flesh shoulder.

Blood welled up and ran.

Cassian went still. He looked down at it, then back up at Jack, and he let the spear-haft go slack under Jack’s arm, and he started to laugh — a short, honest, out-of-breath laugh. “First blood to the champion!” Carter called, and raised the vial.

Jack stepped back and let the spear go. Then he held out his free hand.

Cassian looked at it and clasped it.

“You’re good, but you’re focusing on those tricks instead of your skill with that spear,” Jack said. “Most people don’t make me work for it. After you swear fealty, join us in the morning for training.”

“You’re a beast. Most people don’t have whatever you have.” Cassian rolled the cut shoulder and winced and grinned through it. “What are you?”

“Bored,” Jack said, deadpan, and let go of his hand. 

“That shut them up,” Hale said, low.

“Yeah, it did. I imagine they haven't seen combat like that.” Harold agreed.

Out in the ring, Cassian pressed a thumb to his shoulder, took the vial Carter handed him, and knocked it back, and the cut closed over. Then he turned toward the head table and started walking in to kneel. Harold watched him approach, wondering if he would actually go through it. Cassin was famously a loner. But maybe something had happened to make that happen? 

Cassian reached the head table and knelt, the spear laid flat on the stone in front of him, and swore on Gravesend that his blade and his name were Harold’s. Harold took his forearm and brought him up, and that should have been the end of it. He needed to think through what it meant to have gained Cassian the Dragonsbane in his ranks. 

Cassian didn’t step away.

He stood there a moment, rolling the healed shoulder, and then he looked Harold in the eye.

“Now that I’ve sworn to you,” he said, “I can ask a boon of my liege. Right? That’s how this is supposed to go.” A beat. “I look out for your interests, and you look out for mine.”

Harold almost smiled. “Depends what the ask is. But — yes. That’s how it goes.”

His eyes went stormy, and the polite facade he maintained the entire time faded away. “My family was taken in a raid,” he said. “By the Concord. In the west.” His jaw set hard. “I need help getting them back.”

Ah shit. Harold thought.