Chapter 147: Germany Vs China
The wheel spun, slowed, and delivered its verdict.
"GERMANY... VERSUS... CHINA!"
For a moment, the colosseum did not know what to feel.
Germany had one fighter left. One fighter, one hundred points, and a tournament that every analyst on the planet had already written off before lunch. Across from them stood China, second in the standings, their machine rolling, their ace still seated with his beads. On paper, this match was a formality. An execution with paperwork.
Then the German gate opened, and the paper burned.
She came out alone. A tall woman with a silver-blonde braid down her back, armored in plain grey plate that carried no shine and no ornament, a long spear resting across her shoulders like a farm tool. She walked the bridge without hurry, and behind her, high in the stands, the German section rose to its feet.
They did not chant. They sang.
A low, old hymn, thousands of voices deep, rolling down over the arena like slow thunder, and the woman walked through it with her chin level and her eyes dry, the last soldier of a fallen campaign coming to collect what was owed.
"Representing Germany," Julie said, and for once she matched her volume to the moment, "their final fighter. WALKÜRE."
In the Chinese alcove, Tianzun did not move. His beads turned, and his gaze slid sideways to the young man beside him.
Danqing rose from the bench.
He had bathed and changed robes since the morning, but the day was written on him anyway. His steps were a shade heavier crossing the bridge. His hands, wrapped now in thin white bandage, held the great brush a fraction lower than they had against Reverb. The Stillness had taken its price, and everyone with eyes could see that the price was still being paid.
That was Germany’s entire plan, and the whole world understood it at once. China would never spend the monk on a hundred-point corpse of a nation. So the corpse had waited all day, saved its last and freshest blade, and called out the tired artist.
The two met at the center of the stage and regarded one another.
"You should not have come back out," Walküre said quietly. "You are half empty. I can hear it in your footsteps."
"And you are all that remains of your country’s honor," Danqing answered. His voice was worn, but the steel under it had not gone anywhere. "Half of me will be enough."
"No," she said, and took the spear off her shoulders. "It will not."
"FIGHT!!"
The sky caught fire.
Wings tore out of Walküre’s back, vast pinions of white-gold light that threw the shadows of sixty thousand people backward up the stands, and she left the earth like a thing that had only ever pretended to need it. One beat of those burning wings and she was fifty meters up. A second beat and the sound of her passing arrived late, cracking across the stage after she had already gone.
Below her, Danqing’s brush was moving before her boots cleared the stone.
Ink flooded upward. Dragons again, but not one now; three, four, five serpents of black pouring off the brush and climbing into the sky on coils thick as train cars, jaws open, hunting the golden star that wheeled above them.
She went through the first dragon like a spear thrown by a god.
There was no other way to describe it. She folded her wings, dropped into a dive, and the light around her sharpened into a single point that struck the serpent’s skull and did not slow, tearing down the whole forty meters of its body from teeth to tail, bursting out the other end in a spray of dead ink with her spear arm still extended and her wings snapping open to carve her out of the fall.
The second dragon’s jaws closed on the space she had been. The third met her spear.
The detonation of gold against black lit the underside of the clouds.
And the colosseum, which had screamed itself hoarse five matches in a row, made almost no sound at all.
This was the strange thing, the thing the broadcast archives would preserve forever: sixty thousand people on their feet in near silence, hands gripping rails and strangers’ shoulders, faces upturned and washed in flickering gold and shadow. Around the world, in the packed streets and the shuttered shops, crowds stood before public screens without speaking. Even the stream chat, that ceaseless river, had thinned to a trickle, because two hundred million pairs of hands had forgotten they were holding phones.
There was only the sky, and the war inside it.
Walküre fought the way a storm front advances. She did not slow. She did not circle. She rose and fell through the dragon-thick air in blazing arcs, and every dive erased something: a serpent’s skull, a painted watchtower, a rising wall of shielding ink cleaved before it finished being imagined. The spear in her hands sang when it moved, a high ringing note under the thunder, and each time its light dimmed with spent force, her wings flared brighter to feed it.
Because that was her gift, and slowly the world came to understand it. The German hymn in the stands swelled, and she burned brighter. The blood ran from a gash the fourth dragon’s fang had opened along her jaw, and she burned brighter. The scoreboard hung above her showing her nation’s ruin, one fighter, one hundred points, no tomorrow, and she burned brighter still, as though despair were a fuel and Germany had spent all day stockpiling it.
The last soldier of a lost war does not tire. She has nowhere left to spend her strength but now.
Below, Danqing bled ink and pride in equal measure.
His serpents died faster than he could paint them. His pavilions fell half-built. The bandages on his hands had soaked through, white gone grey, and each stroke of the great brush dragged more visibly against the air, a swordsman fighting on with a blade grown heavy. He had one advantage and he clung to it with a master’s patience: she had to come down to him. Sooner or later, the spear had to descend to where the ink lived.
So he stopped painting dragons.
He painted the sky itself.
The brush swept in vast horizontal arcs, and blackness spread above the stage in a ceiling, a false night unrolling from horizon to horizon of the arena, sealing the air below it into a shrinking box of shadow. Walküre’s dives began meeting walls. Her light, so blinding in open sky, now bled its glare into the dark and showed her position like a signal fire, and from every direction the remaining ink converged on that fire with jaws and chains and spears of frozen black.
Her wings blazed. The night pressed in.
Gold and black tangled at the heart of the shrinking dark, streak against streak, flare against flood, and the arena below them shook as pieces of both, dead ink and dying light, rained down onto the ruined stage like the ash of a burning cathedral.
Then, through the thunder, Danqing began to cough.
Wet, ragged, doubled over his brush, and every soul in the silent colosseum saw the moment his ink faltered mid-stroke. The great false night above him shivered. Thinned. The reserves were gone. The Stillness had taken them this morning and the sky had taken the rest, and what remained in the well of his ability would not fill a teacup.
Fifty meters up, wreathed in closing darkness, Walküre saw it too.
She rose instead of falling. She climbed through the tattered ceiling of night into open sky, higher than she had flown all match, until she was a single golden star above the colosseum, and there she turned, leveled her spear along her body, and folded her burning wings around herself like a shroud.
Every drop of light she had left ran down into the spear’s point.
Below, on the broken stage, Danqing looked at the star preparing to fall on him. Then he looked at his brush, at the dry, split tip that had nothing more to give.
He unwound the soaked bandage from his right hand.
He set the brush tip against his open palm, pressed until his own blood welled dark around it, and drank the bristles deep. When he raised the brush again, its point gleamed red-black in the falling light, and the tired young man stood straighter than he had all day, both hands on the shaft, poised before the empty air like a headsman before the block.
One dive left. One stroke left.
The German hymn rose to its final verse. The golden star screamed downward, trailing fire. The red-black brush began to move.
And two hundred million people forgot how to breathe.