The Trial began at the eighth bell on the first genuinely warm morning of the year. The main arena had been reconfigured entirely for it, the festival's cheerful temporary staging replaced by something considerably more permanent: four separate combat grounds marked out across the expanded field, each ringed by warding stones that hummed faintly with contained essence, and a raised platform at the field's center where the faculty sat in a row that looked considerably less like an audience than a supervisory board. Sixty-four names on the posted bracket.
Arthur found his own about a third of the way down, and traced the lines outward from it the way everyone else was doing, following the branching path through six rounds toward a single space at the far right that most of them would never reach.
FNN: I've been sick twice.
BRR: You have not been sick twice.
FNN: I have been sick ONCE and nearly sick a second time, which is functionally equivalent.
He was pale in a way Arthur had genuinely never seen him, all his usual noise thinned into something considerably more brittle, and Mira, standing beside him, looked scarcely better, her hands wrapped around each other in front of her with the particular tight stillness she brought to anything genuinely frightening.
MRA: I've reviewed my decision.
ELS: And?
MRA: The reasoning holds. The feeling has not adjusted accordingly.
ELS: That's usually how it works.
Instructor Sutton addressed the competitors from the platform's edge, and his tone carried none of the dry weariness the students had grown accustomed to across the year.
SUT: Matches end when a competitor yields, is rendered unable to continue, or is removed from the marked ground. Faculty will intervene where continuing would cause lasting harm. Intervention ends the match immediately and the intervening competitor is disqualified regardless of the match's state.
He looked across the assembled sixty-four.
SUT: I have supervised this Trial for nineteen years. In that time, four students have been seriously injured and none have died. I intend to preserve both of those numbers. Yield when you should. Nobody in this arena will think less of you, and I will personally think considerably less of anyone who doesn't.
The first round moved faster than Arthur had expected. Thirty-two matches across four grounds, running simultaneously, and the whole thing collapsed into a kind of impossible sensory overload, four fights in progress at any moment, essence flaring across the field in a dozen colors, the crowd's noise rising and falling in overlapping waves as different matches reached their conclusions. Mira went out in the fourth match of the morning. She lost to a second-year whose ability turned out to be some manner of localized sound distortion, disorienting enough that Mira's careful strategic approach never properly assembled, and she yielded within ninety seconds of the match beginning, walking off the ground with her composure entirely intact and her expression carrying nothing worse than mild disappointment.
MRA: That was considerably shorter than I anticipated.
ELS: Are you alright?
MRA: I'm fine. I was outmatched, comprehensively, by someone with four more years of practical experience, which was the expected outcome and remains, on reflection, entirely unembarrassing.
She sat down beside Elsie with the particular settled calm of someone who had gotten exactly what she came for, which was not victory.
MRA: I'm glad I entered.
Talon went out in the eleventh match, defeated by an upperclassman whose ability let her multiply her own strikes into overlapping afterimages, and he took it with the same easy equanimity he took most things.
TLN: She was extremely good.
COR: You lasted four minutes.
TLN: I lasted four minutes against someone who reached the quarterfinals last year, and I'm choosing to feel reasonably positive about that.
Finn's first match was the nineteenth of the morning. The whole group gathered at the third ground's edge to watch it, and Arthur, standing among them, found himself considerably more nervous than he had been for any of his own preparations.
FNN: If I die, I want it noted that I did this because Arthur said a thing at dinner.
ART: I did not say anything at dinner.
FNN: You absolutely said a thing at dinner.
ART: What thing?
FNN: I'm not explaining it. It would ruin it.
He walked out onto the marked ground before Arthur could ask anything further. His opponent was a third-year, broader through the shoulders and considerably more composed, and the general expectation among the watching students was clear enough that Arthur heard someone nearby predict the match's duration at under a minute. It lasted eleven.
Finn did not win it through power. He had nothing approaching the raw output his opponent brought, and every direct exchange went badly for him. What he had, it turned out, was an entirely absurd refusal to be where anyone expected him, and a running commentary that appeared to genuinely, measurably degrade his opponent's concentration.
FNN: You're telegraphing the left one!
OPP: Stop TALKING.
FNN: I'm being HELPFUL. That's twice now, the shoulder drops before you commit, I'd fix it if I were you-
OPP: SHUT UP.
FNN: This is constructive criticism and I'd genuinely appreciate a more receptive-
The third-year, visibly rattled, overcommitted on a strike that Finn had been openly announcing for four exchanges, and Finn, ducking under it with more luck than technique, put his shoulder into the man's ribs and drove him three full steps backward across the marked line. The proctor's hand went up.
PROC: Out of bounds. Match to Jota.
The arena's reaction arrived a full second late, the particular delayed roar of a crowd that needed a moment to process an outcome nobody had prepared for, and Finn stood on the marked ground with an expression of total, undisguised astonishment.
FNN: I WON.
BRR: You talked him out of bounds.
FNN: I WON AN ACTUAL MATCH, IN AN ACTUAL TOURNAMENT, AGAINST AN ACTUAL THIRD-YEAR.
BRR: You did, yes.
FNN: I predicted I would win zero. I want that formally acknowledged. I predicted zero, out loud, at that table, in front of witnesses.
MRA: Nobody is disputing it.
FNN: I'm simply establishing the record.
He spent the following forty minutes describing the eleven-minute victory to anyone who would listen, in increasingly elaborate detail, with a level of enthusiasm that suggested he intended to continue describing it for several years. Arthur, listening, found himself grinning. Round three began at midday, and the bracket had thinned to sixteen.