Chapter 21 - 20 — Make Me Move [I]
POV: Jace
The clan healers had worked on my hand until three in the morning, and by dawn there was nothing left to find.
I opened and closed it in the corridor light. The fingers moved the way fingers are supposed to move, and the skin over the knuckles was new and slightly paler than the rest.
None of that stopped my body from remembering.
Every time I made a fist, some part of me flinched at a break that no longer existed, the way it had felt inside the ruined gauntlet with the metal holding the pieces together.
A servant was waiting at the end of the corridor.
"The master is in the private training ground, young master. He said you are to choose a weapon first."
The armoury smelled of polishing oil and old leather, with the cold flat smell of clean metal running underneath both.
Weapons hung on dark racks under white lights, and the room had that faint pressure you only get around equipment built to carry mana, a sort of low push against the back of the teeth.
I went past the swords without slowing down, and past the spears and the axes after them.
Aten does not want to be held at the end of something. It wants my shoulders and my hips and my heels.
Fire that comes out of a blade is fire I have to aim, and fire that comes out of my body is fire I can steer with.
I stopped at a pair of black combat gauntlets that covered the fists and ran up over the forearms.
They were heavy when I lifted them down, and cold, colder than the room around them.
The outer shells were overlapping dark plates that slid across each other when I turned them, and the insides were lined with reinforced leather worn smooth by somebody else’s hands.
Thin mana channels ran from the wrists up toward the knuckles, empty, like veins with nothing in them.
I put them on.
The leather tightened around my palms when I closed my fists, gripping without pinching, and the finger joints stayed loose enough that I could still spread my hand flat.
Then I fed a thread of mana into them.
The channels lit one after another from the wrist upward, orange running up the lines like something catching along a fuse.
The metal warmed against my skin. The separate plates pulled themselves together with a run of sharp clicks, wrist and forearm and knuckle locking into one piece, and small tongues of flame licked out between the knuckle plates before the channels drew them back inside.
They had not made that fire. The fire was mine, and all they had done was hold it in a shape and keep it from going anywhere it should not.
That was the entire difference between these and the Bureau’s registration set, which had conducted exactly what I asked and then let it cook my hand.
The private training ground was an open stone court inside reinforced barriers.
Nobody had bothered to repair it cosmetically in years. There were old scorch marks burned deep into the flags, long cuts where blades had gone into stone, and craters filled and refilled until the patches showed.
This was not a place anyone did exercises. This was where the clan’s Players found out what they actually had.
My father was standing in the middle of it.
He was in black suit trousers and polished shoes and a white shirt, with his jacket gone and everything else exactly as it had been in whatever meeting he had walked out of.
When he saw me, he started folding his right sleeve back toward his elbow.
He did not hurry. He turned the cuff, smoothed it flat, turned it again, and pressed the fold down with his thumb while I crossed the whole court toward him.
Then he put his left hand behind his back and raised his right.
"Attack with everything you have," he said. "I will use this hand. I will not move from where I am standing."
"I didn’t ask to be put in a squad." I flexed my fingers inside the gauntlets. "I didn’t ask for the clan roster either. I asked you to train me."
"I have not agreed to do it."
He set his feet.
"Make me move. Then I’ll consider it."
I pulled the gauntlets tighter against my wrists.
"Consider?"
"Your performance decides whether you are worth my time."
I lit Aten.
It does not start in my hands.
It starts under my sternum, a hard bloom of heat that opens outward through the ribs, and the first breath after it comes in dry enough to hurt, like breathing over an open forge.
Then it runs. Down the shoulders, along the arms, into the channels.
Fire burst out of both gauntlets and wrapped my forearms in it, real fire, moving and hungry, throwing orange light across a courtyard that had been grey a second earlier.
The air above my hands buckled. Sweat came up along my hairline immediately and started drying just as fast, and the stone under my boots darkened in two patches shaped like my feet.
[ATEN — ACTIVE]
[Output: Combat.]
[Mana Consumption: 2 per second.]
[Mana: 190/190.]
Two a minute is what Aten costs when it is a coat of flame sitting on my skin doing nothing.
This was not that. Burning at the level I needed to fight a top-ten Player meant feeding it constantly, and the System had adjusted the number accordingly.
Ninety-five seconds at this rate. Less every time I pushed harder.
I opened Androphagos on top of it.
[Ability Activated: Androphagos.]
[Duration: 01:00.]
It costs nothing and it lasts a minute, and I had one minute of knowing where my father’s hand was going before I would be doing this blind.
The first warning came almost immediately, a hard directional pull at the back of my skull.
His palm. Coming for the outside of my right fist.
I went.
Fire detonated behind both heels and threw me across the court, and the acceleration pressed the air flat against my face while the smell of scorched leather came with me.
I changed the line of my punch mid-flight, before he had committed to anything.
His hand found me anyway.
Blue-white lightning crawled out along his fingers as his palm came down on the side of my gauntlet.
Fire sprayed off the contact across the stones, and the noise of it was a crack like thunder landing in the same courtyard.
The impact threw me past him.
He had not moved.
I got one hand down on the ground and fired a short blast out of the gauntlet, and the burst spun me before I could fall, so I came up on my feet already facing him.
I went again before the scattered flames had died.
Androphagos fed me his blocks in advance, so I stopped repeating myself. Straight punch, then a low sweep, then a rising elbow, then a fire-shoved strike coming in from the other side entirely.
He caught all of it with one hand.
His palm took the punches head-on, and his forearm knocked the elbow away.
Twice he put two lightning-wrapped fingers against the side of a gauntlet, and both times the mana in the channels stuttered and the flame guttered before it caught again.
The court filled up with the sound of it, snapping lightning and the low roar of burning, and the smell of hot metal cut through with ozone.
His shoes stayed inside the same two faint marks on the stone.
In the half-second gap after he turned my elbow aside, I glanced at the count.
More than twenty seconds gone.
"If you need the System to tell you when you are tiring," he said, "you have already lost."
I stopped throwing everything at once.
Fire is not a hammer, and I had been swinging it like one, so I started spending it in pieces instead.
A short burn off one heel to move half a step out of line, then a pulse from the elbow to make a punch arrive faster than the speed he had already committed to blocking.
Small, ugly corrections, made after he had decided what my body was doing.
Something in his face changed for the first time.
My fist came inside his guard and nearly reached his ribs, and then lightning came off his forearm in a sheet and caught the gauntlet.
The fire broke apart around the current and blew back over me in burning flecks that landed on my shirt and stung across my cheek.
He turned my own weight into the floor.
I hit hard enough to lose the air in my chest, the hot gauntlets shrieking across stone, and I rolled sideways out of the path of the palm that Androphagos had already told me was coming down.
I came up with dust stuck all over the sweat on my face.
One sleeve was singed through, I could taste blood where I had bitten the inside of my cheek, and the gauntlets were hot enough now that I could feel them through the leather lining.
He had still not moved.
So I opened Aten wider.
[Aten output increased.]
[Mana Consumption: 5 per second.]
[Mana: 121/190.]