The Stargazer's War - Chapter 19

[Ladies and gentlemen, we have a title!  Big thanks to Akgreenday for bringing the word 'stargazer' to my attention.  It's a good one.  In other news, I'm sorry this chapter took so long.  At 9.5k, it's the longest single chapter of anything I've ever written.  Thankfully, I seem to have escaped self-doubt and uncertainty about this story that's been plaguing me these past few weeks, so chapter 20 hopefully shouldn't take this long.  Thank you all for being patient with me.  It means a lot.  Anyway, I hope you enjoy.  Happy Dueling Day!]

Chapter 19: Not the Face

“So what do you say we make a bit of a show of it?” I asked Nick as we followed the flow of people to the housing D gym. “Stage an epic battle at the bottom of the rankings, really give the gawkers something to talk about.”

Nick audibly gulped.

“Alright, alright, no theatrics,” I conceded. “But you should at least show off a bit. Do you have anything flashy that won’t kill or injure me?”

Nick didn’t answer.

“C’mon, work with me here! You’ve gotta have some cool way to kick my ass, right?”

Nick’s voice wavered with a nervousness that struck me like a punch to the gut. “People are gonna watch?”

I stopped and pulled him aside, stepping to the edge of the hallway to let others pass as I spoke to him. I looked him in the eye. “You’re gonna do great.”

“Why can’t we just spar like we normally do?”

I sighed. “We can if that’s what you want, but I’d recommend against it. It’s a ranked match on the one day qi attacks are allowed. If you fought me without even cycling, it’d look like you either didn’t want to win, or couldn’t.”

Oh, that reminds me, I should explain the whole qi attacks thing. The short version is, the Dragon’s Right Eye are stingy bastards.

The long version entails the expense involved in running the qi fields that surround the arenas during duels to protected onlookers and infrastructure from wayward techniques. Since the sect doesn’t want to pay for it, they just keep a blanket ban on external qi use outside of scheduled dueling days. As a system it meant that cultivators more skilled with internal qi manipulation and physical combat prowess dominated the leaderboards.

It also meant today was my first chance to see some real magic. I was psyched.

Nick wasn’t. His face seemed to pale even under the warm LED glow in the hallway.

“Look,” I told him plainly, “it’s gonna be a circus out there, and in no uncertain terms, I’m the clown. In case you haven’t seen a circus holo, do you know what happens when a clown steps into the ring?”

Nick shook his head.

“Unless everyone involved makes a concerted effort otherwise, the moment a clown walks in, it becomes a clown show. Them’s the rules. In about fifteen minutes, you’re going to step into the ring with the clown. If you want people to take you seriously, we need to make that concerted effort.”

Nick blinked at me. “I… um… what?”

I let out a breath. “Okay, forget the circus metaphor. What’s your most badass technique? I don’t care how powerful or effective it is, just how cool it looks.”

“I guess I can—”

“No, no, no,” I interrupted. “Don’t tell me. It’ll help me sell it. Whatever it is, just don’t bang me up too bad, avoid the face, and win quickly. Make it look easy.”

“Um… okay?”

I clapped him on the back, gentler but without the enthusiasm Xavier managed. “That’s the spirit. Now come on. Let’s go put me in my place.”

Nick flashed me a curious look but otherwise seemed to center himself. “Alright,” he said. “Let’s do this.”

Startlingly quickly after that ghost town of a morning workout, the gym had exploded with activity. Familiar faces of housing D residents mixed with visitors from housing C swam through an ocean of people in civilian clothes. Friends and family, I deduced, cultivators too young or too old to compete for resources in the cadet program and thus free for the day to enjoy the show and support their loved ones.

I had no such support. Lucy, for obvious reasons, would have to watch my duels via holo, and I hadn’t thought to invite the non-cadet connections I’d made thus far. I was sure Arthur or Vihaan and his family would’ve come if I’d asked, but it would’ve been a favor to me. Three quick, one-sided losses didn’t exactly make for good entertainment.

If Nick’s family had come, he didn’t point them out to me.

Ring twelve awaited us as far away from the main entrance as possible, the least convenient of the arenas. Somehow its inaccessibility hadn’t deterred the growing mass of onlookers, a mix of cadets with some free time before their first match and visitors from the city at large. They crowded the limited space between rings, some standing on the back-to-back benches in search of a better view.

The cadets all maintained bored expressions as they chatted amongst themselves, less than interested in Nick or me. They’d seen us sparring a dozen times before.

The visitors, in contrast, practically gawked as I passed, some likely sensing my lack of qi for the first time. Charlotte kept telling me it made people uneasy. They didn’t look uneasy. They looked curious, excited to see what tricks the strange outworlder had under his sleeve, what tools he’d used to slay a void beast and save a child before even forming his seed core. The mysterious disappearance of that day’s security footage hadn’t helped.

I couldn’t wait to disappoint them.

The audience parted for us as we approached, clearing our way to the steps up into the ring. A mortal official met us there. He didn’t bother with niceties.

“Scheduled duel between Nicolas Vesper and Caliban Rex.” He turned to me. “As the lower ranked participant, you have weapon selection.”

I stashed my stuff at the base of the ring. “No weapons, please.”

The man gave a curt nod. “Very well. Please step into the arena. A tone will sound as the qi field falls into place. Keep arms and legs away from the edge of the ring while the tone sounds. When it falls silent will be your cue to begin.”

“Thanks.” I flashed the man a smile as I mounted the steps up onto the padded floor of the arena. Nick followed, looking paler than ever.

The tone signaled the crowed to go quiet, a dull and droning thing that buzzed in my ear at a most unpleasant frequency. I took a moment, as the air seemed to shimmer around the ring, ever-so-slightly distorting the gymnasium at large, to wonder where the gong they used for unscheduled duels had gone. The tone was just so… anticlimactic.

I watched as the faint distortion in the air traveled up and overhead to come together in a dome at the ring’s center. My eyes were still up there when the ring went silent.

I darted in, hoping to maintain the appearance of an actual challenger even as I cycled no meridians and crafted no battle plan. I made it shockingly far, almost thirty feet across the forty-foot ring before Nick made his move. He swung his hand out, pointing at me with his palm as he directed the technique. No blast of qi flew at me.

Instead, from a small leather pouch on his belt, a vine erupted.

Little more than half an inch thick and sporadically sprouting flat, pointed leaves, more and more of the plant emerged from the pouch. Rather than falling limply to the floor or climbing up the nearest surface, its length shot through the air right at me. I made a halfhearted attempt to dodge before it wrapped itself around my left ankle.

I tripped, catching myself on my palms as my momentum sent me skidding forward.

I wasn’t on the mat long.

Nick swung his hand up, and the vine obeyed, yanking my left leg up. My three free limbs flailed about, scraping against the floor and fruitlessly reaching for the vine, but before long they found only air.

I hung suspended there for a moment, dangling from the vine’s grip around my ankle, blood rushing to me head as I futilely swung about, before ceasing my struggles, craning my neck to look Nick in the eye, offering my best embarrassed look—an easy one with gravity pulling blood to my face—and uttered the words, “You win.”

The gong sounded.

“Oh, there it—” I cut off as Nick’s vine released me and I fell the three feet to the padded floor. By the time I looked up, the vine had fallen to the floor, desiccated and dead.

“Victor, Nicolas Vesper,” the official droned.

Lukewarm applause washed over the ring as I pushed myself to my feet and followed Nick down the steps back to floor level. I placed a hand on his shoulder.

“That was awesome! I was expecting like an energy pulse or something simple, and you conjured an entire vine! You should’ve told me you were a badass.”

Nick blushed. “Um… thanks?”

“Seriously, that was super cool,” I continued. “Where did you learn that?”

He patted the pouch on his hip, some amount of confidence finally returning to his voice. “It’s a special seed my grandfather engineered. It grows explosively when you feed it qi, and will follow wherever that qi tells it to go.”

“Nick, you can control plants. Do you have any idea how cool that is?”

“It’s really not,” he deflected. “Most cultivators can move fast enough to dodge it, and anyone with a bladed weapon can just cut the vine.”

“Then reinforce it. Make it faster. Practice. That thing’s a few poisoned thorns away from dealing some real damage.”

“My parents keep the lethal varietals locked up,” Nick said, “and to reinforce it I’d have to run enough qi through it to harden some on the edges. Maybe if I made bronze I could do that, but that’s a big if.”

“Nonsense. You’ll get there.”

“Yeah,” Nick said through an exhale, sounding more deflated than inspired, “sure.”

In the moments since our match, the crowd around ring twelve had dispersed by over half, leaving plenty of space both for the next two competitors to climb into the ring and for me to slip past them to grab my sword and other belongings from where I’d left them. “So,” I said as I strapped the sheathed blade to my back, “where to next?”

Nick shrugged.

“Ring one?” I offered. “I want to watch a few actual cultivators fight.”

Nick nodded and passively followed me back across the busy gym towards ring one. We got there amidst the flurry of activity between matches, the crowd chaotic enough that we managed to snag a few seats on one of the benches facing the ring. A few minutes later, two cadets climbed into the ring, one local, the other unfamiliar enough I reckoned she could only have been from housing C.

As the buzzing drone rang out and the qi field activated, I reached for the super special tool I’d procured to keep people from noticing what my sense meridian did to my eyes.

A pair of sunglasses.

The aviators weren’t perfectly dark, but their lenses tinted just enough that the blackness of my eyes didn’t stand out. Better yet, anyone who saw me wearing them simply assumed they were holopad integrated and displaying some HUD rather than the simple pieces of darkened glass they were.

The glasses had been Charlotte’s idea. Xavier’s had been to just keep my eyes closed. I preferred being able to see.

The world flattened into a deluge of information, the hairs of the mortal official’s eyebrows striking me with the same importance as the grip each cultivator held on their weapon. Without my brain meridian, I knew I’d never successfully sift through the sheer amount of data my eyes and ears provided, but with dedicated focus I could at least track what was going on in front of me.

Without my sense meridian, it would’ve all been a blur.

The match ended in under a minute, the girl from housing C distracting her opponent’s guard with a flash of light then sweeping his legs with her quarterstaff to down him. The audience around me all blinked and rubbed at their eyes as the blinding light flashed, an experience from which my flattened senses protected me.

Well, that and the sunglasses. It turns out, those help protect your eyes from bright lights. Who would’ve thought?

We stayed put as the match ended and the ring cleared, waiting patiently for the next fighters to arrive. I had a bit of time before my next duel—again at ring twelve—and I was more than happy to spend it watching as many fights as possible.

After the speed with which the first match had ended, a good ten minutes passed before the next two cultivators stepped into the ring. They left their weapons behind, opting to fight hand to hand for their duel. Or qi to qi, I guess. The moment the droning buzz silenced, a pale white light blossomed around each fighter as they took similarly defensive stances. They traded blows, neither’s fist making it past the dim aura around the other. A shield, then.

Approximately eight minutes of punching, grappling, and eventually wrestling followed as the pair each struggled to overpower the shield or break their opponent’s focus while maintaining their own. It seemed clear from about minute four that neither of them knew any offensive techniques, at least none I managed to spot.

I’d just begun to consider braving the blinding light and deafening noise to look with my spiritual sense when a particularly frustrated-looking Charlotte stepped in front of me.

I should mention, one of the problems I’d come across with cycling my sense meridian was that once I’d managed to focus in on whatever I wanted to look at, sensory input I wasn’t expecting tended to… fade into the background. Because my qi turned the world into a flood of more information than my brain could handle, little side details like, I don’t know, your friend calling your name, struck with the same intensity as the man who farted thirty yards away. Only by blocking my view of the fight could Charlotte nab my attention.

“Sorry, sorry,” I said, cutting the flow of qi though the meridian. “How’d it go?”

“I won, of course.” Charlotte’s voice came across as slightly snippy. “But Xavier took a beating.”

I looked over to find the big guy sitting a bit to my left, holding an icepack to the back of his head. Whatever was wrong with it had to have been bad from the sheer fact he wasn’t holding the pack to the front of his head.

Xavier’s left eye had swollen shut, the entirety of it taking on a purple hue so dark it made my eye ache. Bits of blood streaked in various places where he’d incompletely wiped it away, all seeming to stem from a pair of cuts on his forehead. His nose sat crooked on his face, visibly broken and swelling to match.

“Holy shit, Xav, what happened?”

“I lost,” he grunted.

“Darla felt she had to send a message with the upstart low ranker they paired her against,” Charlotte explained. “He’s lucky he got away with all his bones intact.”

A knot formed in my throat. “You call that lucky?”

“I can still fight,” Xavier said.

“Like hell you can. You’re down an eye!”

Xavier just shrugged. “Only need one.”

I shook my head. “Cultivators,” I spat. “You’re all insane.”

Nick looked up at me. “You’re a cultivator.”

“And I’m insane. Point proven.”

Charlotte sighed. Nick stared. Xavier grinned, revealing a gap where one of his front teeth had been. I grimaced. He’d lose an afternoon getting that replaced.

Charlotte glanced down at her holopad. “I’m up again soon.” She nodded towards Xavier. “Make sure he gets to ring six. If he passes out, take him to the medics.” She pointed across the gym to an area outside the running track, where a team of mortals had pushed away the exercise equipment to throw up a temporary infirmary.

“Will do,” I said. “Good luck up there.”

She raised an eyebrow at me. “Luck has nothing to do with it. A word of advice—most battles are decided long before the opening salvo. It pays to be the one doing the deciding.”

I watched her saunter over to ring two, just to the left of the seats we’d found. Charlotte’s opponent, Barbara Duff—the lower ranker she’d chosen to avoid suspicion—had a cut on her right cheekbone from her previous duel, little more than a thin red line to contrast with her short-cut platinum blonde hair.

She looked at Charlotte with hunger in her eyes.

Charlotte drew her rapier and looked back with disdain.

I gave up on trying to watch the duel as the crowd shifted to block my view. I didn’t expect much from Charlotte’s opponent, and a certain someone needed my support more.

“Alright.” I looked to Xavier. “Ready to go?”

He mumbled something under his breath, leaning over with his elbows on his knees and his head facing the floor.

“Sorry, what was that?”

He kept going, continuing on in tones too hushed to pierce the hubbub around us.

“Xavier?”

He tapped his foot in a slow and steady rhythm, seeming to punctuate his sentences with the gesture. I noticed even his uninjured eye sat closed, his hands balled into fists.

He kept mumbling.

The foot-taps built, growing louder and more solid until they evolved into first gentle, then powerful stomps of his right foot against the ground. His entire body swayed with the motion. His lips moved with a fury. The stomps crescendoed but didn’t speed, keeping pace until, at the peak of their volume, Xavier clapped his hands a single time with sharp intensity, leapt to his feet, and said with a much more Xavier-like volume, “Let’s do this.”

I’d never before seen such determination, such solemnity, such intensity, on his face.

I smiled at him. “Give ‘em hell.”

Nick kept our seats as I scurried off after Xavier, struggling to keep up as he strode confidently through the crowd. Hot damn whatever psych-up ritual he’d just done had certainly worked. Were it not for the slight limp to his step, I might’ve thought him entirely uninjured.

I didn’t get in his way. I didn’t offer any rousing speeches or battle plans. I simply stood ringside as Xavier opted for weapons against his higher-ranked opponent, grabbed a padded wooden battle axe from the rack, and climbed the steps into the arena.

I’d seen Xavier fight before. Threads, I’d fought him myself more times than I could count. He epitomized the Dragon’s Fang style the sect taught, full of explosive aggression and decisive strikes. It suited his bulk and preference for the great axe perfectly, an overwhelming force that challenged its foes to meet it. Even within the style, Xavier eschewed the more controlled maneuvers in favor of unceasing assault, forcing the onus of strategizing and defending onto the opponent. His fights trended quick and decisive. Either you could stop his axe from cleaving you in two, or you couldn’t.

I’d seen Xavier fight more times than I could count. I’d never seen him fight like this.

I watched him settle into the assault stance instructor Long still insisted I couldn’t do properly, listened as the buzzer droned, and slipped on my sunglasses so I could catch the finer details.

There weren’t many.

The qi field arose. The tone ceased.

A well-timed pulse of qi through his muscle meridian sent Xavier launching forward, his axe raised and ready to strike. His opponent raised her buckler, crossing her short sword behind it to reinforce her defense and prepare a counterstrike at once. The shield glowed as qi ran through it, some kind of defensive technique I failed to recognize, one Xavier was set to run headlong into.

Except he didn’t.

In what would’ve been a blur of motion to unenhanced eyes, Xavier adapted to his foe’s defense. He shifted his left hand from the haft of his axe, redirected his footwork to carry him rightward, shot his free arm out to grab the top of his opponent’s shield, yanked it aside, and delivered the padded edge of his axe directly to the side of her neck. He even stopped his strike midair half an inch from its target, demonstrating absurd control over the vast momentum of his heavy weapon.

A moment passed in perfect stillness before the poor girl even realized she’d been beaten. The brief seconds of shock lasted longer than the fight itself. The gong rang.

Xavier Honchel, former lowest rank in the entire sect, with one eye swollen shut, a limp in his left leg, and a broken nose, annihilated his higher-ranked opponent in under three seconds without even hurting her.

And the crowd had the audacity to look bored.

“Victor, Xavier Honchel.”

“Let’s go Xavier!” I cheered, seemingly the only one impressed by his feat. The onlookers returned to their own conversations, uninterested in quick one-sided bouts, upsets or otherwise.

Other than a single, feminine voice that shouted from somewhere further back. “Xavier!”

I blinked, failing to place the unfamiliar voice of Xavier’s other fan, as the man himself bypassed the stairs to hop down from the ring directly. “Well fought.” I patted him on the back as he stepped past me, weaving through the crowd towards the second voice. I followed.

“Xavy!” a four-foot-and-change blonde woman who looked to be mid-forties—which I guess translated to mid-fifties on the cultivator adjusted scale?—ran up and cradled his face in her hands. “What happened to you?”

“Darla Young,” he answered, letting the woman tilt his head this way and that as she inspected his swollen eye. “I faced defeat in housing C.”

The woman’s brow shot up. “You fought at housing C? Xavy, that’s great!”

He smiled back at her. “May it be the first of many.”

They both seemed to notice me standing there at once, turning in eerily perfect sync to look my way. I grinned awkwardly. “Hi there. I’m Cal.”

“I’ve told you about Caliban,” Xavier said. “Cal, this is my mother.”

“Linda.” She offered her hand. “Linda Honchel.”

“Caliban Rex. Call me Cal.” We shook.

The moment our hands parted she reverted her attention back to Xavier, a gesture I appreciated as I was too distracted wrapping my head around how someone Xavier’s size could’ve come from a woman that tiny to make decent conversation.

“Has anyone looked at that eye? What about this cut? I’m sure nobody’s looked at this nose.” She ran a hand through his hair. “Is this a bump on your head? What hit you?”

“No, no, yes, a quarterstaff,” Xavier rattled off his answers. “Mom, I’m fine.”

“That’s for the doctors to decide. Come on, you’re seeing one right now.” She grabbed him by the hand and took off towards the temporary infirmary.

Xavier craned his head over his shoulder to flash me an apologetic smile that flawlessly communicated the words ‘ugh, I have to go.’

I held back a laugh. “Go on then, Xavy. I’m going to check in on Charlotte.” I raised my voice to cover the growing distance to add, “Lovely to meet you!”

Linda called, “You too!” without looking back.

“Heh,” I chuckled to myself, “Xavy.” Shaking the humor of the diminutive from my head, I turned on my heel and headed for ring two, only to find the arena sitting empty as it awaited its next match. That option eliminated, I headed for the next most likely location.

Sure enough, there she sat at Nick’s side, gazing intently at the ongoing duel in ring one. “How’d it go?”

“As expected,” Charlotte answered, scooting over to make room between her and Nick. “I see Xavier’s match didn’t last long.”

I sat. “He won in about three seconds. His mom’s taking him to get his injuries looked at. Did you know she calls him Xavy?”

“Cute,” Charlotte said, completely disinterested.

“You met his mom?” Nick perked up. “What was she like?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, motherly? Weirdly small. She must weigh, what, a third what Xavier does?”

Charlotte glared at me. “You met Xavier’s mother and your first thought was about her weight?”

“No, my first thought was that she calls him Xavy. It took like three more thoughts to get to her weight.”

Charlotte sighed.

“Look, all I’m saying is that Xavier is… well… Xavier, and his mom is tiny. It jumped out at me.”

The end of the match in front of us rescued me as the gong rang out and the official declared a victor. Charlotte didn’t comment, pulling up her holopad and typing with a fury.

I peeked over, catching a glimpse of her own copy of the sect rankings with detailed notes on every active entry. Even a few of the names aged out of the cadet program and thus ineligible for scheduled duels had little details neatly laid out beneath them, tidbits about everything from fighting style to relationship status to important family members.

I raised an eyebrow at her. “You take notes?”

Charlotte yanked her holopad back. “Of course I take notes. You never know what bits of information might prove useful.”

“So that’s how she does it,” Nick breathed. “Meticulous notes.”

“Ooh, what does it say about me?” I leaned in in an attempt to read more.

Charlotte closed her holopad, its holographic screen disappearing back into the implant in her forearm. She looked me dead in the eye. “It says you’re either going to accomplish great things and elevate everyone around you, or get yourself killed. It says you have a long way to go. It also says you desperately want everyone to like you, even though you know that’s impossible, so instead you turn every social conflict into a joke at the first opportunity.”

She pulled up her holopad again, tapping out something with her right hand before spinning the screen around to reveal a picture of me with the phrase, ‘gifted at making an ass of himself’ written below it.

I sniffled and pantomimed wiping a tear from my face. “You know me so well.”

She flashed me a pointed look. I smiled back.

The next match kicked off.

Our conversation ended as we watched the duel, then the next one, then the next one. A seemingly endless parade of cultivators climbed up to compete in housing D’s top ring, their fights seeming to blend together as they implemented a mishmash of the sect’s hallmark fighting style and their own family’s techniques.

I didn’t bother taking notes. I had no hope of contending with any of these people any time soon. I did make some effort to track any fighting style other than the Dragon’s Fang in the hopes of finding something that suited me better than the sect’s tradition, but without explicit instruction, I had little hope of picking up any new tricks.

It was out of boredom more than anything else that I looked with my spiritual senses. Truth be told I hadn’t put much thought into what kinds of qi manipulation techniques I wanted to develop, both because I was still months away from developing a core, and because I couldn’t trust that my qi would work in the same way as anyone else’s.

Still, I opened my mind’s eye to the cacophony of light and sound. The qi in the air was thicker than I’d ever seen it, a result of both the busy gym and duelists expelling qi for their various techniques. My head ached dully with the intensity of it all, far from the piercing migraine Fyrion had induced when I’d first arrived, but still an annoyance. I’d take an annoying headache over so-bright-I-can’t-see any day.

The qi field obfuscated the view, but I could still readily track the cores of the competing cultivators, as well as those of various audience members surrounding me, and even the dim, natural qi in the mortal official. I’d long learned what living beings—cultivator or otherwise—were supposed to feel like.

For all I’d improved my tolerance for normal qi, I hadn’t yet mastered the skill of looking through my spiritual senses and my mundanes ones at the same time. As such, I failed to perceive the fight itself beyond the general positions of the competitors and the movement of the qi within their bodies. It was, to me, a novel way of watching a duel, but little more.

Until I noticed something odd.

One of the fighters pulled qi from their core and launched it in a simple—some might say brutish—burst to destabilize her opponent. I watched as the energy left her body, struck her foe, and dissipated into the environment, all as expected, but for a tiny mote of something else that drifted away, something cool, something dark, something familiar.

I tracked it as it rose, this little spot of calm amid a sea of light and noise. It wafted up, directly through the qi field, into the air, then out through the glass rooftop into the vacuum beyond. I blinked. That couldn’t have been my qi, could it?

I shut my spiritual senses and glanced left to look at Nick, finding his head leaning against the top of the bench’s backrest as he gazed, openmouthed and unblinking, through the skylight and into space.

“Nick, did you see that?”

He didn’t answer.

“Nick? Hello?” I poked him.

He jerked back to reality. “Oh—sorry, I was-uh… meditating.”

I looked askance. “Sure. Did you see that?”

“See what?”

I paused as I thought through the best way to explain it. I settled on a question. “What happens to qi after it’s used for a technique?”

“It disperses into the local environment,” Nick said like he was stating the obvious.

“All of it?”

“Yeah… or, well, not all of it. About a half a percent returns to the threads.”

“Returns to the threads? What does that mean?”

Nick shrugged. “It disappears. It becomes one with the threads that bind the universe together. I don’t know. I’m not a philosopher.”

“Why would a philosopher know?”

“Because it’s not the kind of thing a scientist or engineer would look into?” Nick offered.

I scowled. “But philosophers don’t know anything. I think that’s kind of the point.”

“Are you going somewhere with this?”

The gong rang out as the duel in front of us ended. I exhaled. “Not sure. Maybe.” In a desperate bid to escape the unseemly act of philosophizing, I excused myself from the conversation. “I’m going to go back over to ring twelve, get there a bit ahead of my next match. Want to come?”

Nick shook his head. “I’m fighting in ring eight soon.”

I glanced over to Charlotte, who’d remained absorbed in her notes thus far.

She didn’t even look up from her holopad. “I’m going to watch Nick. He at least isn’t beyond help.”

“Thought as much. I’ll catch you after. This shouldn’t take long.” I looked back to Nick. “Give ‘em hell.”

“Yeah,” he muttered, “sure.”

I sighed as I slipped through the crowd. Clearly neither my pep talks nor his dominant win over me had done much for Nick's confidence. Goddamn Xavier and his goddamn need for medical attention. He was the only one any good at this kind of thing. I couldn’t imagine a single thing Nick needed more than that hype-up ritual Xav had used before his last match.

After a few minutes of weaving though the busy gym, I reached the comparatively vacant seats around arena twelve. A girl with the same inch-long heavily curled black hair as the image of my next opponent was doing stretches ringside. I approached.

“You Cass?”

She didn’t look up from her lunge. “I am. And you’re Caliban.”

I grinned and extended a hand. “Call me Cal.”

She didn’t shake it. “What do you want, Cal?”

“To talk. To apologize. I know I’m not an opponent anyone wants. I sorry you have to fight me. I thought we could figure out a way to make this work out as well as possible.”

That got her attention. She stepped up out of the lunge, and turned too cowl at me. “You want to fix our duel?”

“It’s hardly fixing if the conclusion’s foregone. You have a core. I don’t even have twelve open meridians. You’re going to crush me one way or the other. I just figured…”

She sighed. “You don’t want me to hurt you.”

“I’d prefer if you didn’t. At least not the face.”

“Okay.”

I blinked. “Okay? That’s it?”

“Yeah, sure. Honestly, weak as you are, it’s weird they have you fighting at all. If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone in local management has it out for you.”

“Yeah,” I said, my mind immediately leaping to Elder Lopez. She had taken every opportunity to point out how weak I was. “That sounds about right.”

“Anyway, you’re being nice about it, and it’s not like you challenged me. As long as you don’t do or say anything that’ll require I teach you a lesson, I can take you down painlessly.”

“What is it with everyone and teaching people lessons?” I asked. “It feels like a weird choice of euphemism for beating the shit out of someone.”

That earned me a smile. “It is, isn’t it? Then again, that mouth of yours makes it sound like you still have something to learn.”

“Oh, I have loads to learn. I just don’t think debilitating injury makes for great education.”

“And yet it works.”

“Obviously not. I’m still talking, aren’t I?”

She cocked an eyebrow at me. “Maybe you should stop.”

I opened my mouth to counter before realizing that just about anything I said would’ve proved her right. “Good point.”

I let her return to her stretching as I stepped aside to do a few of my own, letting my mind wander over my earlier discovery. I’d need more data, but I was pretty sure that’d been my qi I’d seen emerge from that cultivator’s attack. Did all techniques work like that? Would mine, once I’d progressed far enough to actually externalize my qi? What did it mean? Did anyone else know what it was, or did they all believe that half a percent just… disappeared?

The cultivation world’s penchant for hoarding information made that last question remarkably difficult to answer. That Nick had directed me to philosophy rather than science implied at least most people didn’t know. The obvious next step would be to try and take in that discharged qi, if only to confirm it was like mine and not something else entirely, but there’d been so little of it I questioned the possibility of such a thing.

It felt like I’d taken an important step towards understanding my strange qi, yet I still found myself with more questions than answers.

The sound of the gong rescued my from my musings as the match before us came an end and the cleared out. You all already know the whole pre-duel procedure, so I’ll cut to the chase.

The fight was over before it began. The tone ended, Cass rushed forward, I made a halfhearted attempt at sidestepping to it’d look like I was taking the duel seriously, and a second later I found myself face-first on the mat with both my arms bent behind my back.

“Victor, Cass Denika,” the official droned.

I stood up and respectfully offered my hand. “Well fought.”

She shook it in a single, not-quite-friendly motion, turned on her heel, and left the arena. I followed suit.

Deciding my second loss of the day could not possibly have gone better, I set off towards ring eight in a sparklingly good mood. The schedule really hadn’t left me much of a break, but with any luck, I could catch the back end of Nick’s match before I had to return for my final duel.

The nasty thing about luck is it tends to fuck with you.

I heard the yelling before anything else, a single voice, masculine and hoarse with the act. Moments later I emerged from the crowd the see for myself.

“—barrassment. An embarrassment! After all the resources we dumped into you, all the pills, the extra hours, the private tutors, this is what you have to show for it? How dare you?”

The man himself stood with his back to me, but I didn’t need to see his face to know who he was. All I needed was Nick, standing cowed and staring at the floor in front of him, clutching a horrifically swollen arm and visibly fighting back tears.

Two women flanked the shouter, one that matched him in age that silently scowled down at Nick, and a teenager, a girl who looked maybe a year or two younger than Nick. Her right arm ended in a bandaged stump instead of a hand.

Worst of all, as this all unfolded, Charlotte stood uselessly aside, typing furiously into her holopad. She was taking fucking notes.

“You’re pathetic,” Nick’s father continued his tirade. “A useless threads-damned leech given every resource he could’ve wanted and wasting it all in his own laziness.”

Nick pleaded, “I just want to come home.”

“Until you get your act together and start behaving like an actual cultivator, you don’t have a home to come back to,” the man spat. “A layabout son and a crippled daughter. What did I do to deserve this?”

I decided enough was enough and moved in to diffuse the situation the only way I knew how: by making it about me.

“Hi.” I flashed a friendly smile, physically placing myself between them and Nick. “I’m Cal. You must be Nick’s family.”

Nick’s mother blinked several times in surprise. His father stared dumbfounded by my interruption. His sister collected herself first.

“Oh! You’re the one who saved that boy during the void beast incursion,” she said, a painfully familiar look of relief on her face. She took my right hand in her left in a surprisingly well-practiced opposite-hand handshake. “I’m Martha.”

“Ah, yes,” Nick’s father growled, failing to introduce himself, “the mortal.”

“People do seem intent on calling me that, yes,” I answered. “And you are…?”

“Stay away from Nick,” his mother snapped, her voice stern and disdainful. “The last thing he needs is weak friends.”

“Mom!” Martha interrupted. “He saved a kid’s life!”

“A mortal could’ve could’ve saved that boy’s life,” the mother said.

“Again with the mortal thing,” I said. “You people do realize I can cultivate, right?”

“That’s enough. Come, Martha,” the father snarled. “We’re leaving. It reeks of failure here.”

He turned and stormed off, leaving his wife and daughter to scurry after him. I watched them go, waiting for them to disappear into the crowd before I turned to Nick. “Are you okay?”

Nick sniffled and shook his head. “My arm is broken. I’m going to have to forfeit my last duel.”

That wasn’t quite what I’d meant, but I wasn’t about to push the issue. “That’s okay, that’s okay.” I wrapped an arm around his shoulder. “C’mon, let’s get you the infirmary.”

Charlotte fell into step with us as I ushered Nick away. I waited until after I’d handed him off to one of the medical staff before rounding on her.

“What the hell was that? You just fucking stood there.”

She set her jaw. “It’s not my place to interfere with other people’s families. It’s not yours either.”

“It’s my place to look out for my friends.”

“You think you’re doing him any favors defending him like that? Nick has to fight his own battles, otherwise he just looks even weaker. If Nick isn’t meeting his father’s expectations, his only recourse is start.”

My voice dropped, cold anger lowering it to a tight and even tone. “Did you see me defending him? I’m not clueless, Charlotte. You might be better at reading people, at getting them to do what you want, but some of us have a fucking soul. Whatever you have written in that notepad of yours, I know exactly how men like that operate. He’s angry, and he’s always going to be angry. It’s better he’s angry at me.”

“Cal, whatever you think, you don’t know them. You don’t know what Nick’s family is like, and you have no right to mess around with it.”

“Oh, I know him,” I muttered, scarce louder than a whisper. My holopad beeped at me. “Shit. I’ve got to get to my third match.” I looked across the infirmary to Nick. “Stay with him, will you? He shouldn’t be alone.”

“Yeah, of course,” Charlotte said. “Good luck up there.”

“Thanks.” I turned and strode away, weaving through the crowd one towards ring twelve one final time. My mood had soured. I hated that Nick had to deal with that, hated the ways cultivation brought out the worst in people, hated myself for not stepping in sooner. I should’ve known Nick’s lack of confidence came from somewhere.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to hit something. I wanted to punch that asshole square in the nose. Had I been a capable fighter, that might’ve been a good state of mind to have going into a duel. Instead, I found myself fighting off the foreboding notion I was about to get myself into trouble. I was good at that.

I spotted Xavier up in ring three as I passed, his nose and eye covered in white bandages. His mother cheered him on as he relentlessly battered his opponent’s defenses, his bare knuckles dripping blood as he wore down the man’s qi barrier.

I offered a shout of support for him, but didn’t linger, daring not show up for my duel late. The last thing I needed was to give Elder Lopez more ammunition against me.

Ring twelve had its regular crowd of gawkers looking to watch the battle for the bottom, but most had seen my last fight, so none seemed particularly enthused. I hoped this next one would prove just as boring.

The look on my opponent’s face was my first sign otherwise. The man sneered at my approach, managing to look down his hooked nose at me despite our equivalent heights.

“Edgar?” I greeted him, flashing the friendliest smile I could manage given my current mood. “I’m Cal. Nice to meet you.”

He spat on the floor in front of me. That couldn’t be a good sign.

“What do you want, mortal?”

I bit back my retort, resolving to at least try to play nice. “To apologize,” I said, taking the same tact that’d worked with Cass. “I know you have nothing to gain by fighting me, and I’m sorry you have to waste one of your scheduled duels doing it. If you can end things quick and painlessly, I promise not to turn this all into some big joke.”

“Your presence is a joke,” Edgar growled. “You have no right to sect resources, but you take them anyway. Those focus room hours could be going to cultivators who deserve them, who fought for their place here, rather than an upstart mortal with a powerful friend.”

It took some doing not to laugh at that one, given where my focus room hours were going, but I couldn’t tell him that. Instead, I let out a sigh. “Look, all these people are at ring twelve hoping for a clown show. We can give them that, if that’s what you want, but I think it’s in both our best interests to keep it civil and get this over with. How’s that sound?”

“Like a coward, begging for mercy.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to sound like it was. “Clown show it is.”

I left my sword and sunglasses at the same spot by the stairs I’d used twice before and climbed into the ring, prompting Edgar to follow me up. We faced off on opposite ends of the forty-foot arena as the official announced our match.

I had the privilege of first strike as the tone buzzed and the qi field arose. In those moments before the duel technically began, fighting might’ve been barred, but nobody—and I mean nobody—had the power to stop me running my mouth.

“Out of curiosity,” I said with my voice raised so the audience could hear, “do you actually believe I’m the reason you’re so low ranked, or am I just the only one weak enough for you to take your anger out on?”

Edgar cracked his knuckles. “It’s high time someone taught you a lesson.”

“Ooh, what kind of lesson? Is it algebra? I hope it’s algebra. I’ve always been bad at algebra.”

The tone silenced.

I cycled my bone meridian in the hopes of avoiding the worst of it, wishing, for a moment, I’d managed to open my spine meridian so I could’ve done something about the pain. C’est la vie.

Edgar darted in faster than I could’ve hoped to counter and threw a jab at my midsection.

I doubled over, cycling my lungs to recover the wind knocked out of me. “Oh, when you said ‘lesson’ you actually meant ‘violence.’ My mistake.” I righted myself. “You know, the only lesson violence teaches is how to be violent.”

A right hook caught me in the ribs, thankfully soft enough not to break anything, through probably unintentionally. The asshole didn’t know I had my bone meridian open.

I hit the mat either way, spinning from the force of the blow to catch myself on my hands. From the floor, I kept talking. “Is that why you’re like this? Daddy spanked you one too many times and now you think violence is the answer?”

He kicked me, the toe of his boot digging into my side. I felt skin tearing beneath my uniform.

“Get up,” he snarled at me. “I’m not finished with you yet.”

I pushed myself upright. “Oh, you’re trying to finish? So it’s a sex thing then. You get a little chub whenever you make someone bleed? You know there are clubs for that. I’ve heard down in sector three there’re people who’ll even pay you for it.”

He went for another body shot, sending me stumbling back clutching my midsection. As I ran up against the qi barrier, I spared a glance into the crowd. They stared up at us with wide eyes colored by a mix of revulsion and glee.

I always strive to entertain.

“Shut your mouth before I shut it for you.”

I shook my head. “Edgar. Ed. Eddie-boy. You should know, I’m a goddamn savant at not shutting my mouth. Loads of people have tried to shut me up—including myself. It never seems to stick.”

He stalked across the arena, his ire apparent yet still leashed tight enough to keep his composure. I figured I’d snap that leash soon enough.

“Your words are just that,” he said. “Words. Crazed ramblings of a jumped up mortal.”

“Your punches are just that,” I aped him. “Punches. Like an angry child that didn’t get his way.”

He swung for my face. A horrible crunch echoed through my skull as his fist collided with my nose, rocking my head back and knocking it into the qi barrier. A bright flash filled my vision for a moment as the blow rattled me.

Blood poured from my broken nose. It hurt like a bitch, but I’d had worse. “Oh, Eddie-boy, not the face. What will your mother say? You know she cherishes my boyish looks.”

“Shut up.” He hit me again, this time across the jaw. The bone held, but I felt my cheek shred against my teeth and my gum rupture. Blood pooled at the back of my throat.

I coughed. “Has telling someone to shut up ever really worked? You realize trying to silence someone tells the world you’re afraid of what they have to say.”

“I said shut up!” he shouted and struck my nose again, pain flaring through me as he pounded the already smashed flesh. My knees buckled, but he grabbed me by my shirt collar to hold me upright.

“You know, now that you’ve said it a second time, I think I actually will. We’ve been at this a while now. Are you getting close? Is this doing it for you? I can take my shirt off if you want.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” The blows rained down as he yelled, my jaw, nose, my temple. His grip on my shirt kept me from hitting the floor, kept me in range.

My words slurred as I spoke this next bit. “Ah, shit, Ed. I forgot the safe word. What was it again?” I turned my head to the side and spat out blood. I looked him in the eye—or at least where I thought his eyes were; I had too much blood in my own to actually see—and flashed a shit-eating crimson grin. “Oh, that’s right. Clown show.”

I never heard the gong. I never heard the official declare Edgar the victor. I felt only a burst of pain from my temple, saw the world go black, and awoke on the padded floor.

Not quite ready to lift my own head, I wiped my eyes on my sleeve. Only the left one opened.

The qi field was down. The audience stared, agape. I caught Edgar storming off in my periphery. Charlotte, Nick, and Xavier stood ringside, the former scribbling down notes as the latter two blinked. Nick looked sick.

Xavier leapt up onto the ring to help me to my feet, pulling my arm up over his shoulder and supporting me down the steps and back to ground level. The four of us walked together to the infirmary.

“So,” I broke the uncomfortable silence, “you guys saw that, huh?”

“We saw enough,” Charlotte said, her voice cool.

Nick gulped. “What was that?”

“That was the clown show I told you about.”

“Much as I applaud your courage in the face of pain, why disrespect him? You’ve made an enemy today, and taken more injuries than you needed,” Xavier asked.

“He disrespected me first,” I answered. “And believe me, this’ll save a lot of suffering down the line.”

Nick raised an eyebrow at me. “What? That man hates you now.”

“Cal’s right,” Charlotte said. “Everyone here can crush him in a fight. The only leverage he has is the threat of making them look bad while they do it.”

“I needed to send the message that ‘teaching me a lesson’ doesn’t work. My round two opponent came away clean because she was nice about it. Edgar stormed off looking like a petulant child because even as he beat the shit out of me he couldn’t make me stop taunting him.”

“I still don’t get what that accomplishes,” Nick said. “Just because Edgar lost his cool doesn’t mean others will.”

I shrugged. “Edgar was going to beat me up anyway. All I did was make it clear he wasn’t teaching me a lesson or proving his superior ability. Sure, maybe by running my mouth I’ve made a few more people want to punch me, but if that didn’t prove how little punching me achieves, I don’t know what will.”

Charlotte nodded along. “Being paired against the lowest rank in the sect isn’t a flattering experience. Cass’s and Nick’s fights with Cal were so boring, nobody will remember them. Edgar made such a spectacle, people will be talking about him and Cal for days. Whatever deeply understandable joy someone might get from hitting him, they’ll have to weigh against the social repercussions of being seen emotionally invested in Cal. Even if they look calm, if Cal’s taunting them, any real damage they inflict will look like he got under their skin. The only winning move is to play nice.”

“Besides,” I said, looking up at Xavier’s bandaged face, “that nose splint looked so good on you, I just had to get one of my own.”

I could feel the tension drain from Xavier’s shoulders as he barked out a laugh. “You have a warrior’s spirit, my friend.”

“And a warrior’s nose too.” I smiled up at him. “I take it you won your third match?”

“A glorious victory that propels me ever closer to greatness.”

“That’s great!” I said, well past commenting on Xavier’s… Xavierness. “So that’s me oh-three, Nick one-two, and you two-one. Charlotte?”

We stopped at the back of the line for medical attention.

“Undefeated so far, with one match to go. When I win, I’ll be promoted to housing C.”

Xavier beamed. “I like that confidence!”

“Well,” I said, “fair warning, but if that happens, injuries or otherwise, we’re going to celebrate. I know just the spot.”

“Do you have a table reserved?” Charlotte asked. “The bars get busy after dueling day.”

“Don’t worry.” I winked. “Arrangements have been made.”

She eyed me suspiciously, but didn’t press the issue. “If you say so. Are you going to be alright here? I need to go prepare for my match.”

“Go, go.” I waved her away. “Give ‘em hell.”

A smirk crossed her face. “Always.” With that she left, disappearing into the crowd to step into the ring with a cultivator she’d tricked into challenging her.

I looked back and forth between Nick and Xavier. “Should someone go with her? She’s about to fight a guy who thinks she tried to ruin his relationship.”

“I’ll go,” Nick said, casting weary eyes across the temporary infirmary. “I’ve had enough of this place.”

Xavier kept by my side as the medic patched me up. It was a long process. Between setting and splinting my broken nose, sealing the various gashes across my midsection, forehead, lower lip, and inner cheek, hemoneural stimulation to cure my concussion, and a patch over my eye soaked with some chemical or other to bring down the swelling, my holopad had beeped with the confirmation of Charlotte’s victory long before I ever got up off the exam table.

Before I could leave, the shoved a bottle of capsules into my hand. “For the pain,” she said. “If it’s not enough, you can get something more powerful at your local clinic. We don’t distribute the strong stuff here.”

I glanced down at the pill bottle. “Why not?”

“The cadets like to go out drinking after their duels,” the doctor explained. “Had enough incidents of people ignoring our warnings and mixing meds with alcohol, so now we don’t hand out anything that reacts poorly.”

“Huh,” I said, pocketing the painkillers. “Good to know.”

Xavier and I both thanked the woman profusely as we left in search of Nick and Charlotte. We found them waiting by the exit, Nick with his broken arm and Charlotte with the audacity to not even look tired. Damn her.

“So,” I greeted them, “how’s it feel to graduate from being a D-bag to a filthy C?”

Charlotte faltered. “Excuse me?”

I grinned. “Soon enough you’ll get through being a son-of-a-B and become a true A-hole.”

The consternation showed on her face. “Ignoring… whatever that was… it feels great. A long time coming.”

“Does this mean we get to eat at the housing C mess?” Xavier asked. “I hear they have a chocolate fountain.”

“Dreams of chocolate for later, big guy.” I patted Xavier on the back. “Tonight, we have grander plans.” I led them down the hall to the transport platform and boarded a pod, typing in our destination via my holopad to avoid spoiling the surprise. I was pretty sure Charlotte had already guessed it, but at least she had the wherewithal to pretend like she didn’t know.

“So this place of yours,” she said as pod lurched away from the platform and into the dark tunnels below the city, “how’d you find it?”

“Oh, right place at the right time,” I kept my answer vague. “Or wrong place. Depends on whom you ask.”

I caught Nick’s eyes lighting up as we whizzed past the transport station at Cadet’s Row, where most of our peers would spend their evening.

Xavier didn’t figure it out until our pod stopped not in the depths of the city, but at its fringe. “Threads,” he swore, excitement dawning on his face, “is she—”

I cut him off as the door slid open. “In light of the day’s events,” I began my speech as I stepped out onto the platform, “in celebration of two of us surviving our first dueling day, of Xavier’s tenacity in his ongoing climb up the rankings, and, of course, Charlotte’s promotion to housing C, I’ve arranged something that’s been far, far too long coming.

The others followed me out of the pod, stopping short with knowing grins on their faces as they took in the massive hangar in which we found ourselves, as well as its lone occupant, a small, matte white skiff with an off-center orange stripe along its length, and the designation LC-81535 painted upon its side.

“Everyone,” I told them, “I’d like you to meet Lucy.”

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