CHAPTER 26

Nox ate ramen as other people conducted a ritual.

He’d found a place two streets over on the third day and gone back every morning since. This was the first time he’d brought it home instead.

Three bowls. One for himself, and one he put in front of Lisa and me without being asked.

Then he pulled the collar down.

I had lived two doors down from him since the day he handed me a key card, and I had never once seen below it properly.

Neither had Lisa, going by the way she stopped with her chopsticks halfway to the bowl and stayed stopped.

It was an unfair face. That was my whole first thought, arriving fully formed and useless.

Sharp all the way through, with the kind of jawline that photographs well from angles that ruin everyone else. His mouth sat somewhere between bored and amused without appearing to do anything to get there.

The eye bags didn’t help. They should have made him look tired, and instead they made him look like he’d been up doing something more interesting than sleeping.

Lisa put her chopsticks down.

“What,” Nox said.

“Nothing.”

“You’re both staring.”

“We’re not,” Lisa said, staring.

Oh, that is genuinely unreasonable.

Azazel had gone somewhere between offended and impressed.

I grew up in a court that bred for its own reflection, and perhaps nine faces in it could have got away with that. He hides it under a collar. Deliberately. Every day.

“.....”

I am being complimentary. It costs me something, so let me finish. A pause. The quiet one is extremely attractive, for a human. I want that on the record, and I want you to know it took real effort to say.

And since we are apparently doing this, you are not a disappointment either. I contributed the frame. Some of the credit is mine, and I intend to take it.

“You can’t take credit for my own face.”

You merely walk around in it looking pleased with yourself.

Nox looked between the two of us, decided the situation was beneath him, and went back to his bowl.

The collar came up again the second it was empty. Lisa watched it go and said nothing at all.

Lisa had the tickets out on the kitchen table before either of us had finished breakfast.

“Got these from my uncle,” she said, sliding one across to each of us like she was dealing cards. “Front row seats.”

Nox picked his up and turned it over, frowning at it like it might explain itself if he looked hard enough. “What is this?”

“The World Hunter League. Opening exhibition of the season.” She said it as she’d say something obvious, then caught the blank look on his face and stopped. “You don’t know what the League is?”

“Should I?”

“It’s the biggest thing in the sport.” She looked at me next, checking. “Please tell me you at least know what it’s.”

“I know what it’s.” I turned the ticket over once, mostly out of habit. “I never had a reason to go. Solo gates paid better and I didn’t much like crowds.”

Which was true, as far as it went.

It left out the part where someone had asked me twice, years ago, if I wanted box seats for a final I’d turned down both times.

“Well, you’re going now,” Lisa said, already on her feet and halfway to her coat. “Walkyrie versus Qilin. Germany’s top guild against China’s. Eat faster. We aren’t being late for this.”

I do not know what any of those words mean. I am already certain I am going to enjoy finding out more than either of you expect me to.

✦ ✦ ✦

The arena sat in the middle of London like something that had always been there and only recently been noticed, a bowl of white stone with a roof that peeled back to the grey sky.

Ninety thousand seats, Lisa told us, and every single one of them full.

“Every hunting nation with a good enough guild fields one,” she said, once we’d found ours. “They fight each other all year, until it comes down to whoever’s left standing.”

“This match doesn’t even matter for the table. It’s an exhibition. People still sold their kidneys for these seats.”

“Because it’s Walkyrie and Qilin,” I added, before Nox could ask why. “Top two on the continent. Last time they played each other outside a tournament setting, tickets went for more than some people’s rent.”

Lisa looked at me sideways. “You really did know about this.”

“I knew about it. Never watched it.” I didn’t say the rest of it. “Last Games cycle, before any of this, Apex took the whole thing. America’s first-ranked guild. Aegis wasn’t even fielding a team back then.”

“And now?”

“I don’t actually know what Aegis does now.” That part, at least, was completely true.

Down on the pitch, banners the size of buildings were dropping from the rigging. A German eagle in dark blue. A Chinese qilin in gold, coiled mid-leap.

This is a great many people. Taking in the bowl of noise around us. Are they all here to watch five people fight five other people?

“That’s the whole sport.”

Elysia had nothing like this. We simply fought the war until one side ran out of people.

“That’s grim, even for you.”

I am only saying I understand the appeal better now that I have seen the alternative. Nobody in that war ever sold their armour to watch it happen.

The two teams walked out to noise loud enough to feel in my chest.

Ten of them, five a side, and even from this far up I could see it in how they carried themselves.

They weren’t nervous, and they weren’t performing nerves for the cameras either. Just people who had done this enough times that ninety thousand strangers screaming their names had stopped being anything worth reacting to.

“No fixed order,” Lisa said, scanning the board overhead. “Each side names one fighter right before the match.

“Sometimes both sides reveal together, sometimes one waits to see who the other sends first. Nobody in this stadium knows who’s up next until that board says so, and half the time not even the teams.”

“So it’s not mage against mage, that sort of thing?”

“Never has been. That’s the whole appeal.

“A captain might lead with their strongest to set the tone, or hold them back and gamble on someone weaker buying them a round. You’re not watching five matched pairs. You’re watching two people guess each other in real time.”

The board overhead flickered, and two names steadied side by side.

Walkyrie’s knight stepped up first, broad enough to have been built for holding a door shut against a siege.

Across from him, Qilin had sent their mage. She was already conducting with both hands raised, leading an orchestra nobody else could hear.

“Otto Reinhardt,” Lisa said. “And Mei Lian. Nobody called that one.”

Lightning came down from a clear sky in a single called shot. No windup, no warning.

Reinhardt’s shield caught it, and he apologised into the noise anyway, genuine concern crossing his face like he’d committed some real breach of manners just by still being standing.

“Don’t waste time being polite about it,” Lisa said of Lian, leaning forward.

That one is better than the wall thinks she is. Watch her feet. She is not losing ground. She is choosing where to lose it.

I hadn’t noticed that. I watched more carefully after he said it, and he was right.

Reinhardt held until the eleventh strike, then didn’t. He took the loss as he’d taken every hit before it, apologising once more on his way off, and the crowd loved him for it.

The board flickered again.

Walkyrie’s mage this time, frost already blooming off her fingers in slow, deliberate shapes, building toward something instead of simply appearing.

Across from her, Qilin had sent the stone-still man who hadn’t moved his feet since before his own name was called.

“Greta Voss,” Lisa said. “Ranked third caster in Europe. Watch, she builds it like a piece of music. And that’s Chen Wu. Whoever drew him just lost the easy fight.”

Is this one asleep? Watching Chen Wu with something close to suspicion. He has not moved his feet since the horn.

“That’s the technique. It’s called Unmoving Peak.”

It sounds like an excuse to avoid exercise.

Voss’s ice built for nine full minutes.

The commentary spent all nine of them explaining what we were watching to people who could see it perfectly well. Sports coverage does that everywhere, and I had never noticed it until I was watching from a sofa instead of a green room.

It cracked and reformed and cracked again against a wall that had decided not to be one anymore.

When it finally gave out she took the loss with a small, precise bow. It looked less like defeat than a conductor acknowledging the end of a piece.

Lisa told us later that was normal. Losing well apparently earned its own respect, at this level.

The board changed a third time, and this one drew a noise from the crowd before either fighter had thrown a hit.

Elke Wagner stood already at rest, blade loose in one hand. Across from her, a broad-shouldered man was already grinning like the fight was a joke only he’d been told the punchline to.

“Bao Zhi,” Lisa said. “This is going to be the strangest pairing all day.”

It was. Wagner’s blade work was precise enough that it barely looked like effort.

Zhi laughed taking every near-miss on the shoulder and swung back twice as hard while still laughing. By the third exchange it looked less like anyone was losing and more like he’d found the one person in the arena who understood a joke nobody else was in on.

She didn’t smile once. Lisa said some of them saved it entirely for their own team.

Wagner won it clean. Zhi hugged her afterward anyway, hard enough to lift her half off the ground, and she let him, which Lisa said was the most surprising thing that had happened all day.

The fourth board reveal brought out Bruno Falk, throwing his first punch like a greeting rather than an attack, against a Qilin swordsman who hadn’t fought yet.

“Lin Feng,” Lisa said, checking the programme. “Didn’t expect them to spend her on a brawler.”

Feng didn’t so much fight Falk as refuse to be where his fists already were. Precise, and in no hurry, and making him work for every exchange he thought he’d already won.

He got there eventually, as he got everywhere eventually, still grinning through it.

I have several genuine questions about that entire sport. None of which I expect this world to have satisfying answers for.

Nox hadn’t said a word through any of it.

The final board reveal brought out Kaspar Lindt. He moved like he already knew where the fight was going to end and was enjoying the walk there.

Across from him, a woman in dark red who hadn’t smiled once since walking out.

“Well,” Lisa said, checking the board twice like she didn’t quite believe it. “Guess they both decided to save their fastest for last.”

“Rogue,” Nox said. Just one word.

Lindt vanished mid-sentence, and the noise he’d been making followed him like the joke was still landing somewhere the eye couldn’t track.

He reappeared behind his opponent’s exact blind spot, close enough that the crowd’s noise dropped half a beat waiting for the hit to land.

It didn’t land. She was somewhere else.

I glanced at Nox. He was leaning forward now, elbows on his knees.

The two of them were trading a fight that was almost entirely invisible to me, gone and reappeared and gone again faster than the eye had any business following.

“You could do that,” I said, landing it somewhere short of a question.

“Not like that.” Flat, but something under it I hadn’t heard from him before. “Not yet.”

“Kaspar Lindt,” Lisa offered, checking the programme. “Nineteen. Youngest on the whole roster.”

Nox didn’t answer that at all.

Interesting. Watching him rather than the fight. That is the first time all day I have heard him admit to a ceiling.

I didn’t say anything to that. It didn’t feel like mine to comment on.

The woman in dark red never got a name from the programme, or if she did, none of us caught it over the noise.

He’d have to find that out for himself. I had the distinct sense he already intended to.

The match ended in a draw, three duels to two with the rogue bout going to nobody, both of them still standing when the horn sounded and the arena decided that was answer enough for one day.

Lisa was on her feet clapping like she’d forgotten either of us was sitting next to her.

“Every single year,” she said, dropping back down, breathless. “I tell myself I’ll stay calm about it, and every year I lie.”

“You genuinely love this,” I said.

“I genuinely do.” She wiped her eyes, laughing at herself for it. “It’s the one thing in my whole life nobody in my family ever bothered ruining for me.”

I thought about that for longer than the sentence probably deserved.

I still didn’t know most of their names by the end of it.

Somewhere in my head they were staying anyway, filed next to the numbers on my own card. A picture of what the top of this looked like that I hadn’t had before today.

You watch this as a man watches a market he used to own. Quiet enough it barely reached me over the noise around us. I have not decided yet whether that is nostalgia or something else.

I didn’t answer that. Below us, the two teams were shaking hands, exchanging words I couldn’t hear, Bruno Falk pulling the Qilin fighter into a hug he clearly hadn’t asked for and didn’t seem to mind receiving anyway.

Whatever we were, on our own recent numbers and our handful of clumsy months together, it wasn’t that yet. Maybe not for a long time.

“Aegis plays tomorrow,” Lisa said, flipping to the back page of the programme. “Against Sentinel. Second-ranked American guild.”

I went very still, and I felt her notice it before I’d decided what to do about it.

“They never used to field a team,” I said. “Not enough roster depth to bother, certainly not when I was there.”

“And now they do. Under him,” she said.

She didn’t make me say Jack’s name. I was grateful for that.

Nox was still watching the rogue’s empty spot on the pitch, long after she’d walked off it.

He hadn’t caught any of it. Lisa had, and she kept it between the two of us without making me carry it alone.