Chapter 22 - 21 — Make Me Move [II]
So I opened Aten wider.
[Aten output increased.]
[Mana Consumption: 5 per second.]
[Mana: 121/190.]
The flame went from orange to a yellow-white that hurt to look at directly, and the sound of it drowned out my own breathing.
The channels across the gauntlets lit so hard that the metal edges started glowing dull red, and I could feel the plates trying to spread apart against their locks.
My first step cracked the flagstone under it.
I went around him in bursts, firing off alternating heels, changing direction in ways a body cannot change direction on its own.
Each turn left a short tail of flame in the air and a black print on the ground, and he had to keep turning to follow me with both feet nailed where they were.
He blocked a strike near his face and the fire washed straight over his hand and rolled up his bare forearm.
Lightning ripped through it and scattered it before it reached his sleeve.
But I caught it as I went past.
Scorched cotton.
That was all it took to make me stupid.
Androphagos told me he was going for my shoulder, and instead of clearing it I let it land, took the lightning-wrapped strike full on the joint, and used the spin it put into me to throw the hardest punch I had.
He caught my fist.
Fire exploded out between our hands and turned the whole space around us white-orange.
The lightning came off his palm and crawled up over the gauntlet into my arm, and every muscle from wrist to shoulder locked solid.
He threw me away with a single movement of one arm.
I fired both palms at the ground before my back reached it. The blast took most of the fall and turned the rest into a long skid through smoke and broken stone.
I came up breathing in pieces.
The air going into me was hot and thin, the skin under the gauntlets felt scraped raw, and the flames along my arms had started to flicker at the edges the way a fire does when it is running out of something to eat.
[Mana: 44/190.]
He was still standing on the same two marks.
And that was when I finally heard what he had actually said.
Not hit me. Not land one. He had told me to make him move, and I had spent the entire fight trying to get through a hand instead of trying to shift a man.
You do not move somebody like that by being faster than him. He is already faster.
You move him by giving him something he cannot afford to let past.
I stopped attacking.
I pulled every loose thread of fire back in, off the stones and out of the air, until it was all wrapped tight around my arms and legs.
For a moment the court went almost quiet, with nothing left in it but the hiss of hot rock cooling.
My father’s eyes narrowed.
Then I opened Aten past anything I had ever asked it for.
[Aten output increased.]
[Warning: Output exceeds current physical tolerance.]
[Mana Consumption: 12 per second.]
[Mana: 44/190.]
Fire erupted around both legs and climbed my back and came off my shoulders in streams.
The heat dried the sweat off my face in a single second, and the air went so distorted that my father’s outline bent and swam behind it.
The gauntlets creaked. Their channels burned from red through to white, and I could smell the lining starting to go inside them, leather cooking against my own skin.
They were holding. They were not going to hold much longer.
I put everything under my feet and let go.
The blast threw me up off the court, and my stomach dropped as the ground went away, and for a moment my body began to turn over on its own with nothing to push against.
A short burn off one heel straightened me out.
I got my shoulders around toward him and spent the last of the minute.
[Androphagos Duration: 00:04.]
His block came through clear. Right hand, rising, angled to take whatever came down at his head and turn it off to the side.
I did not try to go around it.
I aimed at it.
Below me, my father lowered his stance without lifting either foot, and the casual thing that had been sitting on his face all morning finally came off.
Lightning spread up over his raised arm in blue-white branches from the fingertips to the shoulder, and the air went sharp and metallic, and I felt my own hair lift.
I cut the fire holding me up.
Gravity took me, and I let it, and then I put every scrap of mana I had left out through my heels and my back at once.
I came down as one falling mass of fire.
My gauntlet went into his open palm.
The detonation came as a single sound with no separate parts to it. The barriers around the court flared white where the pressure hit them, and the stone under his shoes broke outward in a ring.
I kept pushing after he caught it.
Fire tore out of every gap in the gauntlet and rolled around his forearm, and his lightning cut thin bright paths through the middle of it, and neither of us gave anything back.
[Mana: 0/190.]
Aten went out like a switch had been thrown.
The heat vanished out of me all at once and left me freezing and unsteady, with the gauntlets smoking around my fists and the empty channels aching all the way to my elbows.
My knees started to go.
He was still holding my fist, and that was the only reason I did not end up on the floor.
The barrier gate opened.
The head butler came two steps into the court and stopped, because the air rolling off the stones hit him hard enough to move his coat, and it took him a moment to work out where to put his feet.
"Forgive the interruption," he said, entirely composed. "The Bureau has requested the young master’s presence."
My father let go of my hand.
"Clean yourself up," he said. "Go."
I looked down at the ground around his shoes, at the cracks running out through the flags in a rough circle.
He was standing exactly where he had been standing when I walked in.
"About the training—"
"I said go."
I kept my face still, picked my burnt sleeve off my forearm, and went.
++++
POV: Christopher
The butler waited until the gate had closed behind my son.
Then he looked at the state of my training ground, at the black arcs burned across it and the melted lips of stone around the deeper strike marks.
Finally he looked at my right palm, which was red from the fingers to the heel of the hand.
I looked down.
My right shoe was several inches behind the mark it had started in.
The sole had cut a short black line through the broken flags where the last impact had pushed it, and the line was still there, perfectly readable, going backwards.
The butler saw it at the same moment I did.
"Young Master Jace moved you."
I unfolded my sleeve and drew it back down over an arm that had not entirely stopped shaking.
"He did."
I fastened the cuff and looked at the gate he had gone out through, still holding his disappointment together with both hands because he had not thought to check the ground.
"At Level Five."
"Then will you accept his request, sir?"
I turned away from the ruined middle of the court.
"Have the grounds repaired," I said. "He’ll need them tomorrow."
++++
POV: Jace
I got to the Bureau with smoke still in my hair.
Two showers had not taken it out, and emptying my entire mana pool had left my arms hollow in a way food and water were not fixing.
Every time I turned my shoulder, the muscle remembered the lightning that had gone through it.
An official met me past the public registration hall and took me down a corridor I had not been in before.
"They’re waiting for you."
The door opened onto a private waiting room with a long table and too many chairs.
Bria was already sitting at the far end with her arms folded. Idris had a chair turned slightly away from the table, Nia was beside him with her hands in her lap, and Tomas was mid-sentence about something.
He stopped talking the moment he saw me. All four of them did.
"You look terrible," Tomas said.
"Why are we all here?"
Before anyone answered, the door on the other side of the room opened.
A senior PSB official came in with five sealed Player Licence cases stacked in his hands, and set them down on the table one at a time, in a row, facing us.
"The investigation into the Orange Gate has concluded," he said. "Now we need to decide what happens to the five rookies who cleared it."