The third round ran on two grounds instead of four, which meant, for the first time that day, that everyone could actually watch. Arthur had not properly appreciated how much the morning's chaos had been protecting him until it lifted. Through the first two rounds there had been four matches running simultaneously, the crowd's attention scattered across the whole field, and he had fought both of his own matches in a kind of merciful anonymity, one competitor among dozens. Round three had eight matches and everyone in the arena watching each one. His own came third. He won it in under four minutes, against a second-year whose ability produced a sort of clinging adhesive across whatever surface she touched, and he won it the way he had won both previous rounds, which was by absorbing a considerable amount of punishment while methodically closing distance until the match's geometry favored him. It was not elegant. Nobody in the stands made any particular noise about it. He walked off the ground with a bruised forearm and his name still on the bracket.
Elsie's match was the fifth. She had been quiet all morning, which Arthur had assumed was nerves until he watched her take the marked ground, and understood, within about ten seconds, that it had been nothing of the sort. She had been focusing. Her opponent was a third-year with a considerable raw output of something that looked like directed heat, and the match should, by every reasonable measure of power, have been decided quickly against her. It was not.
Elsie compressed the wind around her soles and moved, and Arthur, who had watched her fight before, found himself leaning forward, because she was moving considerably faster than she had at the festival. Not dramatically. But measurably. The compression held longer, released cleaner, and she crossed the marked ground in bursts that her opponent's tracking consistently arrived a half-second behind. She did not try to out-power him. She never once tried. She simply kept being somewhere else, and then, at the fourth minute, put a compressed pellet through the man's shoulder guard at a range that made the whole thing look considerably easier than Arthur knew it to be. He yielded within thirty seconds.
BRR: When did she get that fast?
ART: I don't know.
He was, in fact, considerably more aware than Briar realized, because he had noticed months ago that Elsie was disappearing before the fifth bell most mornings and had made a deliberate decision not to ask about it. He watched her walk off the ground, entirely composed, accepting congratulations with a small nod and no particular ceremony. Fourteen seconds, he thought, without knowing why the number occurred to him. Yseult's match was, by some margin, the most watched of the round.
She had spent the entire year building a reputation, and the arena had clearly arrived expecting a demonstration, and she gave them one: fire and stone in the opening exchanges, wind woven through both, and then, when her opponent adapted, something that started as a wall of hardened air and collapsed inward on itself the instant it made contact, precisely the technique that had rattled Desmond Kael at the festival months before. It took her six minutes.
She did not use Catalysis at all, which Arthur noticed, and which he suspected she had decided about in advance. Corin's match lasted ninety seconds.
Arthur watched it closely, and found himself entirely unable to determine what had actually happened. Corin's opponent had opened with something impressive, some manner of projected force, and had thrown it once, and had then, for reasons the arena could not observe, simply stopped. He had stood there for a moment with an expression Arthur could not read. Then he had yielded.
BRR: What was that?
ART: I don't know.
BRR: He didn't even look injured.
ART: No. He didn't.
Corin walked off the marked ground without any visible exertion whatsoever, and did not explain, and nobody asked him. Finn's match was the seventh, and by then the arena had begun, audibly, to notice him.
FNN: THEY'RE SAYING MY NAME.
BRR: They are.
FNN: BRIAR. STRANGERS ARE SAYING MY NAME.
BRR: I know. Go and fight.
He went and fought, and Arthur, watching, understood something he had not fully grasped during the first round. Finn was not winning by accident.
He was winning because he had correctly identified, apparently through pure instinct, that he could not beat anybody in this tournament through force, and had therefore stopped trying entirely. He did not attack. He evaded, constantly, chaotically, along paths nobody could reasonably predict because Finn himself did not appear to be planning them, and he talked, and talked, and talked, and his opponents made mistakes because a person cannot fight properly while being irritated into distraction. It was, Arthur thought, genuinely one of the least respectable strategies he had ever witnessed. It was also, undeniably, working. Finn won his third match in nine minutes, entirely without landing a single meaningful strike, and the arena's reaction had by that point shifted from surprise into something closer to delight. Dane Whitlock's match was the last of the round.
Arthur watched it with considerable attention, because Sutton's overheard remark from the festival had been sitting in the back of his mind for months, and because he had realized, looking at the bracket that morning, that if both of them kept winning they would meet in the semifinal. The match lasted two minutes. Arthur could not, afterward, describe what had happened in it. Dane's opponent was a fourth-year with a genuinely powerful ability, some kind of accelerated projectile discharge, and he used it immediately, and the projectiles crossed the marked ground toward Dane and then, somewhere in the space between them, stopped mattering. That was the only way Arthur could think to describe it. They did not stop. They did not deflect or shatter or dissipate. They simply arrived slower than they had left, and then slower still, and by the time they reached where Dane was standing they had lost whatever it was that made a projectile a projectile at all. The fourth-year tried three more times.
Dane walked toward him the entire time, unhurried, at a completely ordinary pace, and when he arrived he simply put a hand on the man's shoulder and pushed him over the marked line.
PROC: Out of bounds. Match to Whitlock.
The arena's applause was polite, and considerably quieter than it had been for Finn. Arthur, standing at the edge of the marked ground, found the quiet more unsettling than any amount of noise would have been.
ELS: What was that?
ART: I have no idea.
ELS: Nobody's clapping properly.
ART: I noticed.
The quarterfinal bracket was posted at the fourth bell. Eight names. Arthur found his own, and traced the line across to the name paired against it, and stopped.
FNN: Oh.
Finn had arrived at his shoulder without Arthur noticing.
FNN: Oh, that's genuinely unfortunate.
ART: It's you and me.
FNN: It's you and me.
They stood there looking at the posted bracket, and neither of them said anything for a considerable while.
FNN: I want you to know that I'm going to talk an enormous amount.
ART: I assumed.
FNN: A truly unreasonable amount, Arthur.
ART: I know.
FNN: I'm not going to enjoy this.
ART: Neither am I.