They stood at opposite ends of the marked ground, and neither of them looked like they wanted to be there. Arthur had fought people he disliked. He had fought Felix, years ago, in a schoolyard, and had fought three strangers already that morning without any particular feeling about it either way. He had not, until this moment, understood that facing someone he genuinely cared about would feel like a completely different activity that happened to share a name with fighting. Finn, sixty feet away, was not talking. That, more than anything, unsettled him.
PROC: Competitors ready.
Arthur drew his sword. It came free of the scabbard with the particular clean sound it always made, and he settled into the guard Calder had taught him a decade ago and Corin had corrected four months back, and found that his hands were steady even though nothing else about him was. Across the ground, Finn cracked his knuckles.
PROC: Begin.
Finn moved first, which he had not done in any previous match, and Arthur understood within about four seconds that this was not an attack. It was a departure. Finn went sideways, then backward, then sideways again along a line that had no discernible logic, and Arthur, committing to an intercept, found himself arriving at a place Finn had already stopped being.
FNN: You're going to hate this!
There it was.
FNN: I want you to know I'm not enjoying it either, but you're going to HATE it, Arthur, you're a very direct person and I'm about to be extremely indirect at you for as long as I can manage!
ART: I'd noticed.
FNN: You've noticed the FIRST part. You haven't noticed the second part yet. The second part takes about four minutes to become genuinely unbearable.
He kept moving. Arthur kept following. It was, precisely as Finn had promised, unbearable. Every closing angle Arthur chose dissolved before he arrived at it. Every commitment he made was punished by Finn simply not being where commitment required him to be, and the talking - the constant, relentless, cheerfully hostile talking - kept arriving in his ears at exactly the moments when he needed silence to think.
BRR: He's doing the thing.
Briar had claimed a position at the ground's edge with Elsie and Mira, and had adopted the particular analytical tone he brought to anything he found genuinely interesting.
BRR: It's the same pattern as the third round. He's not trying to win. He's trying to make Arthur lose patience, and Arthur is a considerably more patient person than his previous opponents, which means Finn's going to have to work for it.
ELS: Is it working?
BRR: Not yet. But Finn's got nine minutes of stamina in that approach and Arthur's got about four minutes of patience, historically, so it's genuinely closer than it looks.
At six minutes, Arthur stopped chasing. He simply stopped, planted himself in the marked ground's center, and waited, and the change was so abrupt that Finn, mid-evasion, actually faltered.
FNN: That's cheating.
ART: You're not being attacked. How is that cheating.
FNN: It's cheating SPIRITUALLY, Arthur.
ART: You can't evade someone who isn't chasing you.
FNN: I'm AWARE of that, thank you.
He circled. Arthur turned with him, unhurried, sword low, and did not move otherwise.
BRR: Oh, that's clever.
MRA: He's making Finn come to him.
BRR: He's making the marked ground do the work. Finn can't just keep running in circles indefinitely, the proctors will call it for passivity eventually, so at some point he has to actually engage, and Arthur's decided he'd rather have that conversation standing still.
Finn circled for another ninety seconds, and the crowd's noise began to shift, and Arthur watched the exact moment the calculation landed behind his friend's eyes. Finn came in. It went badly for him immediately. He had spent three rounds never once trading with anyone, and Arthur, who had spent six years and considerably more mornings than Finn knew about doing nothing but trading, met the first exchange and took it apart in under two seconds. Finn's guard, such as it was, collapsed. Arthur's shoulder caught him in the chest and drove him backward four steps, and the fifth step took him within a hand's width of the marked line, and the crowd made a sound like a single indrawn breath.
He caught himself. Barely. One heel on the boundary, arms windmilling, and Arthur, already committed to the follow-through, pulled the strike at considerable cost to his own balance rather than shoving a friend out of a tournament while his back was turned.
BRR: Why did he stop?
ELS: Because it's Finn.
BRR: That's going to cost him.
ELS: I know.
Finn recovered his footing and got clear, and the two of them separated again, both breathing hard now, and something in the arena's noise had changed entirely, because everyone watching had just seen the same thing. Finn had been one push from elimination, and had survived it only because his opponent didn't want to be the one who did it. Finn stopped talking.
Arthur noticed it immediately, the same way he'd noticed the silence at the beginning, except this was different, this was not nerves or focus, this was something dropping out of his friend's face entirely.
Nothing. No commentary. No cheerful hostility. He stood sixty feet away with his chest heaving and his eyes fixed on Arthur, and the ordinary noise that constituted roughly ninety percent of Finn Jota simply stopped.
ART: Finn?
Finn smiled. It was not a smile Arthur had ever seen on him, and it did not belong on his face at all, wide and bright and entirely hysterical, the particular expression of someone who had run out of every option except one and had just decided, with enormous relief, to stop being careful.
FNN: Sorry, Arthur.
He raised both hands.
FNN: You're the first person all day who's actually looked at me like I could beat them.
And he clapped.