Chapter 81: The Final Against Troy Was The Ugliest Thing I’ve Ever Won

Mona was still asleep in the medic cot when the call came for the final, which meant Soren went down to the floor with his ribs taped and a mole on his ankle who refused to be left.

He supposed he should start researching how to tame a mole, or if the permanent attachment was just part of the quill.

The arena was full in a way the semifinal had not been.

Vasquez Sr. was in the high box with the glass, and this time he was leaning forward.

Up another tier, three figures sat where the public seats ended and the private ones began, and they did not move or cheer, and Soren did not need to know what a Council delegation looked like when it had come to watch a class get dissolved.

The official read the stakes out loud so the cameras had them.

Immunity for one year to the winning class.

Dissolution for Class Z if its champion lost.

Troy came out from the far gate with his knight already manifested, and Soren took inventory the way he took everything, fast, cold, evidence first.

The knight was wrong.

Troy’s spectral knight had always been a clean fighter with a heavy guard and patient, the kind of beast that beat you by never making a mistake.

This one moved like it had a second set of instructions running under the first.

Soren watched it settle into Troy’s guard and the guard was Troy’s, he knew his guard, but the way the knight’s edge tracked, reading angles a knight that size had no business reading.

That was not Troy and it was not the beast either.

That was the thing the Council had put in it.

He had seen the shape of it in the novel he no longer fully remembered and he had seen it on the audit forms Joan used to carry.

A capability bolted onto a bond from outside, riding the beast like a second rider the first one couldn’t see.

Troy did not know it was there. That was the part that mattered.

◆◆◆◆

The bell went and the knight came in fast.

Soren had an ice queen, a heat that ran hot, a moth-girl reading the floor, and a shadow goddess he was not going to spend in a public ring with a Council watching her breathe.

He had a mole underfoot who answered to nobody and a pack that did.

He had his own two eyes that worked now because they had to.

He gave ground on the first exchange and ate a guard-strike on the bad ribs to learn the knight’s timing, and it came a half-beat early every time, reading him, the imposed thing doing the work Troy’s beast couldn’t.

"You’re faster than last time," Soren said, ducking under a swing that should have landed.

"I trained." Troy’s voice was measured. The voice of a man holding a line.

"No." Soren came up inside the guard and put a strike into the knight’s flank that it should have blocked and almost didn’t.

"Something’s driving for you. I saw the stutter on the recovery frame. It hates the extra speed."

Troy’s jaw did a thing Soren recognized, the small downward set of a man who has been told not to think about a thing and is thinking about it. "It’s not your fight, Kane. Keep your beasts off the floor."

"They’re not on the floor," Soren said.

"Then fight me, not the noise in your head."

"I am." Soren took the next hit on purpose, let the knight’s edge open his forearm so he could feel exactly how far ahead the imposed thing was reading. "I’m just fighting two of you."

It got ugly after that.

The knight pressed and Soren bled.

The pack worked the edges without ever stepping into the center where the cameras and the Council could call it interference.

Mona kept tunneling toward him, and a trench opened under the knight’s footing that Soren had not asked for and would not have asked for.

The knight read the trench before it opened, which a knight could not do, which the thing riding it could.

Selah iced the recovery and the knight adjusted before the ice landed, reading, always reading.

Soren stopped trying to beat the knight’s speed.

He started counting the half-beats instead.

The gap between when Troy’s beast wanted to move and when the imposed thing made it move early.

Somewhere in the third minute he stopped seeing one opponent and started seeing two, the beast and the leash.

He took a knee-strike to the thigh that dropped him and Mona surfaced right then, the wrong moment for Troy and the right one for him by pure accident.

He came up off her back and got close enough to the knight to touch the bond-line.

Not Troy’s bond-line. The other one.

The seam where the imposed thing was stitched into the beast.

The knight felt him touch it and went berserk, faster than it had any right to be, and the imposed thing drove it like it had stopped pretending to be subtle.

Soren held on.

[DING! — Combat: active. Tamer injury logged: ribs, forearm, thigh.]

[DING! — Foreign capability detected on opponent bond. Origin: external. Classification: imposed.]

"Troy." Soren said it under the noise, close, just for him, with his hand on a seam that was burning his palm. "It"s not your beast doing that. You know it"s not."

Troy flinched, the denial a sharp, immediate shock in his eyes. "Get your hand off me, Kane."

"I am not on you Minden, I’m just on the leash they put on you. They cheated for you, Troy. It’s not your win!"

Troy looked at him for the first time like a person and not a fixture, and the knight"s next strike came a full beat late.

Then something in the seam under Soren’s hand pulled taut and snapped halfway, and the whole ring lurched, and the knight froze between two sets of orders with neither one finished.