Chapter 88: The List (8)
“Oi, shut it!”
The shush came sharp and low from somewhere behind him, but Corin didn’t even twitch.
He was still leaning forward, knuckles white on the railing, voice echoing off the gymnasium walls.
Balt groaned, rubbing the side of his head like the volume alone was giving him a migraine.
“For the love of… Corin, you can’t just scream like that in the middle of a duel.”
Corin glanced sideways at him, utterly unrepentant.
“Why not?”
“Why not…?”
Balt threw his arms up.
“Also…how the hell did you even say all that without a translator brace?”
A grin tugged at the corner of Corin’s mouth.
“Because the occasion demanded it. I couldn’t half-ass what I had to say.”
Balt’s eyes narrowed.
“…So you can do it. You just don’t think it’s worth the effort most of the time?”
Corin shrugged.
“I get my point across. What more do I need to do?”
Balt just shook his head slowly, the expression of a man trying very hard not to have an aneurysm.
“Unbelievable.”
He turned back toward the duel, muttering something under his breath about “selective effort” and “future problems.”
And then.
“LUCIEN!”
The shout wasn’t Corin’s this time.
Both duelists jerked in surprise as another voice, sharp and commanding, cut through the air from further down the railing.
Vaelira.
Standing there like she was issuing orders on a battlefield, hands braced on the iron bar, eyes locked on Lucien.
“Don’t listen to that lunatic!”
She yelled, stabbing a finger toward Corin without even glancing at him.
“That broadsword takes more energy to swing! Keep your defense tight! Tire him out, then counterattack!”
Corin’s head snapped toward her, incredulous.
“Are you insane? He can’t keep playing defense against someone like Philip, he has to take the tempo away from him!”
Vaelira shot him a glare sharp enough to peel paint.
“And rushing in blindly will hand Philip the duel on a silver platter! He needs to be patient and wait for the right opening!”
“That’s not patience, that’s letting the other guy dictate the fight!”
Corin fired back, stepping right up next to her on the railing.
“You don’t win duels by letting the opponent set the pace, you smash through it!”
Vaelira’s voice rose to match his.
“And you don’t win duels by pretending brute force is a strategy!”
“It works, doesn’t it?”
“It works until you’re on the ground wondering why your teeth are scattered across the dirt!”
From there, it devolved into a rapid-fire back-and-forth:
“He needs to break the rhythm-”
“He needs to control the board-”
“It’s not a board, it’s a fight-”
“Every fight is a board if you can think five moves ahead-”
“You can’t think five moves ahead when someone’s trying to take your head off-”
Their bickering was so animated, so relentless, that the rest of the first-years couldn’t help but get pulled into it.
At first it was just a few chuckles, but then someone in the back called out, “Yeah, Lucien! Keep your guard up!”
Another voice, “No, hit him back! Hard!”
And just like that, the floodgates opened.
Half the stands were suddenly shouting advice at Lucien, the other half at Philip.
It turned from tense silence into a wall of noise, a roaring mess of conflicting strategies.
“Sidestep him!”
“Go for his legs!”
“Feint high!”
“Guard up, don’t get baited!”
Even the upper-year spectators who had been watching in stoic quiet earlier were smirking at the chaos.
Then, as if to complete the transformation, Philip’s ‘maiden’, who up until now had been sitting with eyes closed, hands clasped in prayer, suddenly snapped her head up.
“Philip! You’ve got this! I believe in you!”
She shouted, voice cracking with earnest intensity.
That was it.
The whole gymnasium was alive now, noise bouncing off the walls, stomps and claps joining in, every spectator choosing a side whether they meant to or not.
In the middle of it all, Corin and Vaelira kept arguing over Lucien’s fate like a pair of rival coaches, neither entirely right, nor entirely wrong, one urging him to act on instinct and seize the moment, the other demanding he think like a chessmaster and lay traps five moves ahead.
And down in the arena, two fighters still clashed, now with an entire crowd behind them.
***
The rising roar of the first-years was suddenly cleaved in half by a voice of authority.
“Silence!”
The Judge at the arena, the tall, broad-shouldered man with a voice like a drum, had turned fully toward the stands.
His sharp eyes swept over the shouting students like a blade through grass.
“This,” he said, enunciating every syllable as if they were commands, “is a gentleman’s duel… not a tavern brawl.”
The words rang across the gymnasium, slicing through the hype like cold water on a flame.
The stomping stopped.
The clapping halted mid-beat.
One by one, voices faded until all that was left was the echo of his rebuke.
Even Corin and Vaelira, still squared off at the railing, froze mid-argument.
They exchanged one last glare, his wild-eyed and full of unrepentant stubbornness, hers razor-sharp and simmering with controlled disdain, before both reluctantly turning their eyes back to the arena.
Down on the polished wooden floor, the duel carried on.
And yet… the silence didn’t erase what had just happened.
Philip felt it.
The echo of those cheers was still in his chest, pounding alongside his heartbeat.
His footwork grew sharper, his grip steadier.
Every swing now carried a new weight, not reckless, but confident.
He wasn’t being goaded into overconfidence; if anything, the crowd’s brief roar had affirmed one thing: he could win this.
His eyes were fixed on Lucien, his stance clean, measured, but now brimming with that subtle energy born of being believed in.
Lucien felt it too.
But for him, the effect was different, Corin and Vaelira’s clashing voices had slammed into him like two battering rams from opposite sides, shattering the rhythm of his earlier, self-defeating spiral.
The toxic loop in his mind, the one that whispered you’re not good enough, ‘you’re just here to die,’ had been interrupted, broken apart.
And what took its place was not calm.
It was fury.
***
‘Why the hell… am I thinking like I’m going to die?’
The thought came with the heat of a forge.
‘This isn’t even a real duel. Even if it was…what then? Steel instead of bamboo? Fine. A cut on my left shoulder? So what? I can still grip the sword. Worst case– it takes the arm entirely?’
A grim grin tried to pull at the corners of his mouth, but his jaw was clenched too tight.
‘One limb less? I can live with that. I can fight with that. Hell, if I have to… I can win with that.’
‘My arm’s just a piece of meat. Victory is worth more. And if I have to trade every limb for it, then so be it.’
His grip tightened on the saber.
Just as the thought solidified like cooling steel, Philip surged forward.
His eyes locked on Lucien’s centerline, his stance crisp, textbook-perfect, the bamboo broadsword cutting a clean diagonal arc toward Lucien’s left.
Philip expected a dodge.
A parry.
What he got instead was Lucien stepping straight into the swing.
The bamboo slammed into his already-bruised shoulder with a deep, meaty thwack.
Pain shot through Lucien’s nerves like lightning, but his eyes… his eyes didn’t flicker.
No shock.
No flinch.
For a heartbeat, Philip felt the bloom of triumph that is until he saw those eyes.
Until the cold, deliberate steadiness in Lucien’s expression sank into his gut.
He tried to retreat, to create space and reset, but it was already too late.
Lucien’s left hand, injured shoulder be damned.
Snapped forward like a viper, clamping down on Philip’s sword arm just above the elbow.
Philip’s weapon was still resting against Lucien’s shoulder at an awkward angle, the weight of the sword and his own position making it difficult to both yank it free and shake off the iron grip locking onto him.
And Lucien didn’t give him the time to solve that problem.
With his right hand, he twisted the saber not for a slash, but for a brutal, short-range strike.
The hilt solid, concentrated, and with great speed, drove forward in a vicious arc.
The target wasn’t random.
Lucien aimed for the narrow gap just under Philip’s right ribs, where the padding of the training armor thinned.
Not enough to risk breaking bone, but enough to let blunt force hurt.
The hilt hit like a hammerhead driving into a nail.
Thud.
The sound was dull but heavy, the kind of noise you feel more than hear.
The impact compressed through the gap in the armor, concentrating all the kinetic force into one screaming nerve cluster.
Philip’s mouth opened, but no sound came out, only a sharp, wheezing gasp as air fled his lungs.
His knees buckled half an inch before instinct locked them again, but the pain was blooming fast, radiating through his side in pulsing waves.
Lucien didn’t wait to see him fold.
He didn’t need to.
The way Philip’s grip faltered told him enough.
The control of the duel had just shifted again.
