Chapter 140: The Combat Event 9
"GERMANY... VERSUS... AUSTRALIA!"
Julie’s announcement rolled through the colosseum, and two very different sounds answered it.
From the German stands came a roar with teeth in it, the desperate, defiant thunder of a nation with its back against the wall. From the Australian stands came a cheer streaked with worry, because their alcove had just lost a hundred and fifty points, and everyone knew Mercury wasn’t moving until the endgame.
"What a pairing, everyone! Germany, gutted in the opening match, four hundred points gone, their ace in the medical wing! They have two fighters left and a hundred points each, and if they lose here, their tournament is functionally OVER! And Australia, fresh off a loss, needing to stop the bleeding! One nation fighting for survival, the other for pride! There is NOTHING more dangerous than either!"
In the American alcove, Selena leaned on the rail. "Germany has to send their best remaining card. No choice."
"They will," Nectron said. "And I know who it is."
The German alcove’s gate opened, and the man who walked out silenced half the arena by his silhouette alone.
He was enormous. Not tall the way athletes were tall, but built the way bridges were built, shoulders like load-bearing architecture under a heavy leather smith’s apron worn over combat plate. His forearms were bare, and they were wrong somehow, wrapped in pale scars from wrist to elbow, hundreds of them, thin and deliberate as tally marks.
He carried no weapon at all.
"Representing GERMANY!" Julie called. "The man they whisper about in Munich! The forge that walks! BLUTSCHMIED... THE BLOOD SMITH!"
[Demiurge666: no weapon and a blacksmith apron. I have a bad feeling about the scars]
[Marypaz13: why are his arms like that. why are his arms like THAT]
[Zorgus: Germany really said "we’re done being subtle"]
"And representing AUSTRALIA..."
The Australian gate opened.
And out walked the smallest competitor the Combat Event had ever seen.
She looked lost. That was the honest first impression of sixty thousand people: a slight, soft-faced girl in an oversized team jacket with sleeves past her fingers, picking her way across the connecting bridge like she was worried about disturbing it. She reached the center of the ruined stage, looked up at the mountain of scars and leather waiting for her, and bowed.
"Um. Good luck," she said, barely catching the microphones. "And I’m sorry in advance."
"...FURRY!" Julie finished, with slightly less certainty than usual.
The colosseum did not know what to do.
[Boddlly: she APOLOGIZED IN ADVANCE]
[Will_1631: mates I need you all to stay very calm and very far away. we’ve seen her training footage]
[Kamzy_1234: the jacket sleeves 😭 someone protect her]
[Will_1631: no. no you misunderstand. protect HIM]
In the American alcove, Nicholas’ eyes narrowed slightly.
He remembered her. The shy handshake at the pool. The timid glances. The girl Jackson had introduced as "a lot nicer" than Mercury, and the association file that said almost nothing at all.
’Australia keeps two aces,’ he thought. ’One drinks tea. One apologizes.’
"FIGHT!!"
Blutschmied moved first, and what he did emptied the noise out of the arena.
He raised his right hand, pressed his thumbnail against the pad of his palm, and cut.
Blood welled. And then blood obeyed. It poured out far faster than any wound should feed, streaming upward around his fist in a crimson helix, and where it flowed it darkened, hardened, took an edge. In under two seconds the Blood Smith stood holding a longsword of deep red metal, its surface faintly steaming, its balance flawless.
"MEIN GOTT!" Julie found her voice. "HE FORGES WEAPONS FROM HIS OWN BLOOD! Every scar on those arms, everyone... that’s his ARMORY!"
He swung the sword once, lazily, to test it.
The pressure wave cleared the dust off half the stage.
Across from him, Furry sniffed the air. Her nose wrinkled.
"Oh," she said quietly. "Blood."
Something happened to her eyes. The soft brown drowned under a ring of burning amber, the pupils snapping into vertical slits, and the lost little girl went out of her posture like a candle being blown out. She dropped low, fingertips to the stone, spine curling with liquid ease.
"Sorry," she said again, and this time it sounded different. "The smell makes it hard to be polite."
She moved.
The stage cracked where she’d crouched. She crossed thirty meters in a blink, and mid-stride her legs changed, jacket sleeves snapping around forearms that thickened with grey fur and dense muscle. Kangaroo. The next bound covered the rest of the distance in a flat arc, and the kick she uncoiled into Blutschmied’s raised sword rang the blood-steel like a cathedral bell and sent the giant skidding backward through the rubble, apron flapping, boots carving trenches.
The colosseum detonated.
"HALF-TRANSFORMATION!" Julie was screaming over the crowd. "FURRY’S ABILITY, EVERYONE! ANY BEAST SHE CHOOSES! ANY PART SHE NEEDS! SHE’S NOT A SHAPESHIFTER, SHE’S A WHOLE ECOSYSTEM!"
Blutschmied stopped his slide, looked down at the hairline crack running up his forged blade, and did something no one expected.
He smiled, warm and wide, like a craftsman who had finally been handed an interesting commission.
"Good," he rumbled. "Then I will need better steel."
His left hand opened. Three fresh cuts. The sword unmade itself and the blood rejoined the flow, swirling out into a great circle around him, and from the circle rose shapes. A war hammer with a head like an anvil. A hooked chain that moved restlessly, tasting the air. A tower shield with a wolf’s face embossed in dark red.
An armory, forged in four seconds, orbiting its maker.
’Efficient,’ Nicholas noted from the rail, arms folded, eyes recording everything. ’The blood loss should be crippling him. It isn’t. Either the ability replenishes what he spends, or that man has trained his body to run on fumes.’ His gaze flicked to the scarred forearms. ’Hundreds of marks. Hundreds of forgings. He knows his exact budget to the drop.’
Below, the commission got interesting.
Furry came in low and the chain met her, whipping in a horizontal scythe. Her arms blurred: kangaroo fur giving way to sleek dark scale, and she caught the chain in a crocodile’s grip, jaws of muscle running wrist to elbow, and rolled. The death roll tore the chain from its orbit and shattered it to red mist. The hammer fell where she’d been rolling and found only stage; she was already gone, falcon-gold flickering around her eyes, reading the shield’s angle before Blutschmied himself had chosen it.
She hit the shield anyway. Deliberately. Her right arm swelled grotesquely for one instant, banded in impossible colors, a club of coiled shell and spring-loaded muscle.
Mantis shrimp.
The punch didn’t sound like a punch. It sounded like a rifle. The wolf-faced shield detonated into crimson spray, and the shockwave alone knocked Blutschmied’s boots from the stone and threw him ten meters into a broken pillar.
[GodOfDegenerates: SHE ONE SHOT THE SHIELD WITH A SHRIMP. A SHRIMP!!]
[Marypaz13: I googled mantis shrimp mid fight and I am no longer calm]
[Demiurge666: the polite one is like this??? what does MERCURY do???]
But the Blood Smith rose from the pillar’s ruins, and he rose laughing, blood already leaving him in ribbons, wrapping his frame in interlocking crimson plates, a helm, gauntlets, a breastplate with a furnace glow between its seams.
He rolled his armored neck, reached to the deepest scar on his left arm, the old white one that ran the full length of the forearm, and rested his thumbnail against it.
"You break everything I make, little beast," he said, and his voice came out of the helm like heat out of an oven. "So I will make the one thing that does not break."
In the Australian alcove, Mercury’s teacup stopped halfway to her lips.
"...He’s opening the Masterwork vein," she said quietly. "Jackson."
Beside her, the director’s easy smile had thinned. His eyes were locked on the small figure below, on the amber ring in her eyes that was, degree by degree, swallowing the last of the brown.
"Furry!" he called down, hands cupped. "Stay in the shallows, sweetheart! You hear me? Whatever he builds, you stay in the SHALLOWS!"
Down on the stage, Furry watched the giant slice his oldest scar open, watched the blood come out darker, heavier, almost black, gathering into something long and vast that made the air itself flinch.
She flexed her small hands.
"I’ll try, Sir Jackson," she said softly.
Her slitted eyes tracked the forming Masterwork, and somewhere beneath the amber, something very old and very deep turned over in its sleep.
"But he smells like a whole ocean of blood..."
Her jacket slipped from her shoulders.
"...and there’s a beast I’m not supposed to use."