The clap was not loud. That was the strange part. It was an ordinary sound, two hands meeting once, the sort of noise a person might make to get a room's attention, and it should have been swallowed entirely by an arena holding several hundred people. Everyone heard it. Arthur felt his sword leave his hand. It did not fly, or shatter, or dissolve. It simply became something he was no longer holding, gone from his grip and from the marked ground and from anywhere he could see, and across the field Finn's own stance had changed in the same instant, both hands empty and open.
PROC: Combatants are restricted to unarmed engagement.
The proctor's voice arrived flat and immediate, announcing a condition rather than imposing one, and Arthur understood, with a cold clarity, that whatever had just happened had not been negotiated with anybody.
ART: Finn. What did you do.
FNN: I honestly don't know yet.
He said it with the same hysterical brightness he'd worn before the clap, and Arthur, looking at his friend across sixty feet of packed earth, realized Finn was telling the truth.
BRR: What just happened?
ELS: Arthur's sword is gone.
BRR: I can SEE that, Elsie, I'm asking WHY.
Finn came in. He was, Arthur discovered within about three seconds, considerably better at unarmed fighting than he had any right to be, and this was not something that had been true four seconds earlier. The first strike came in low and fast along a line Arthur barely caught, and the second arrived before he had finished catching the first, and the third put him on his back foot for the first time all morning.
FNN: OH.
He sounded genuinely delighted.
FNN: Oh, that's what it did! Arthur, I know how to do this! I've never known how to do this in my LIFE-
The combination that followed was, Arthur registered somewhere in the middle of failing to defend against it, technically flawless. Not competent. Not promising. It was the work of someone who had spent thirty years in a discipline and had arrived, at the end of them, somewhere very few people ever reached. Finn's fist caught him under the ribs and Arthur felt something in his chest go briefly, entirely wrong.
BRR: He's a master.
MRA: He was not a master ninety seconds ago.
BRR: I'm AWARE, Mira, I'm reporting what I'm watching.
Arthur went down onto one knee. He got back up, which took considerably more out of him than it should have, and Finn, circling now with a footwork pattern that would have taken a decade to learn properly, watched him rise with an expression caught somewhere between exhilaration and horror.
FNN: I don't know how long this lasts.
ART: Neither do I.
FNN: That's the problem, isn't it.
He was still smiling. It had not improved. The martial skill lasted twenty-two more seconds. Arthur watched it leave him. It was visible, the moment it went, Finn's guard collapsing mid-motion from something precise into something entirely ordinary, and the boy's face did something complicated as thirty years of borrowed practice evaporated out of his hands. He clapped again immediately. The world went dark. Not dim. Dark, completely and instantly, and Arthur heard the arena's reaction arrive as a wall of sound because he could no longer see anything producing it.
FNN: OH NO.
His voice came from somewhere ahead and to the left.
FNN: OH, THAT'S BAD. THAT'S GENUINELY BAD, ARTHUR, THAT'S BAD FOR ME SPECIFICALLY-
Arthur stopped moving. He stood still on the marked ground, blind, unarmed, and listened. He had trained through six years of Calder's instruction and considerably more mornings since, and a not-insignificant portion of that had been conducted in the hour before dawn when the western yard was dark enough that seeing properly was optional. He had never thought of it as an advantage. It had simply been when the yard was empty. He heard Finn's footwork immediately. It was panicked, and it was loud, and it moved along exactly the kind of erratic evasive line that had defined the entire match, except that evasion required knowing where the other person was, and Finn had just removed his own ability to know that.
ART: You've made a mistake.
FNN: I'M AWARE.
Arthur moved toward the sound. He closed twenty feet in near silence while Finn scrambled audibly in the opposite direction, corrected for the change, closed again, and caught a fistful of Finn's collar entirely by feel.
FNN: HOW.
ART: You're very loud.
FNN: I'M ALWAYS VERY LOUD, THAT'S NEVER BEEN A PROBLEM BEFORE-
Arthur had him. He had a grip and he had position and the marked line was, by his best estimate, about eight feet behind Finn's heels, and all of it would have concluded within another three seconds. Finn clapped. He did it with Arthur's hand still knotted in his collar, both palms coming together somewhere between their chests, and the sound of it was the loudest thing in the arena because it happened four inches from Arthur's ear. Nothing happened. Arthur waited, braced for the ground to change or his strength to leave him or some further impossible thing to arrive, and it did not, and after a moment he understood what he was feeling in the fabric bunched inside his fist. Finn had gone completely rigid.
FNN: ...ah.
ART: What is it.
FNN: I can't move.
ART: What?
FNN: I can't move, Arthur. At all. That's the roll. That's what it gave me.
His voice had lost the hysteria entirely. It arrived small and flat and almost conversational, the particular calm of someone who had gambled four times and had finally, comprehensively, been answered.
FNN: I'm blind, I can't hold a weapon, I don't know how to fight anymore, and now I can't move.
Arthur stood there holding him in the dark.
ART: Finn.
FNN: It's fine.
ART: It isn't.
FNN: It genuinely is, though. That's what it does. I knew that when I used it. Everybody knows that's what it does, it's the whole point of the thing, you don't get to keep rolling and only ever like the answers.
Arthur adjusted his grip.
ART: I'm sorry.
FNN: Don't be sorry, just do it, this is extremely undignified and I'd like it to stop.
Arthur pushed him. It was not hard. It did not need to be. He moved his friend eight feet backward across the packed ground while his friend stood entirely rigid and entirely unable to prevent it, and set him down past the marked line with as much care as the situation permitted.
PROC: Out of bounds. Match to Lyerm.
The blindness lifted about four seconds later. Arthur's sword reappeared where he had dropped it. Finn's rigidity broke somewhere in the same span, and he sat down abruptly on the packed earth just outside the boundary, breathing hard, blinking against light he had not seen in over a minute. The arena was making a considerable amount of noise.
FNN: Four rolls. I have never used it more than once. I've never in my life used it more than once, and I used it four times in about ninety seconds, and the fourth one told me to stop.
He laughed, wetly and without much humor in it.
FNN: That's genuinely the funniest possible ending. I should have quit after the second one.
Arthur offered him a hand up. Finn took it, and got to his feet, and stood there a moment longer looking at the marked ground he had just been pushed out of.
FNN: You know why I entered?
ART: You wouldn't tell me.
FNN: I'm telling you now. It was the thing you said at dinner, about how you stopped hesitating when you were eight.
Arthur stared at him.
ART: I don't remember saying that.
FNN: I KNOW. That's exactly the problem, Arthur, that's the entire problem with you, you say something like that and then you don't remember it, and meanwhile it's been sitting in my chest for two days making me sign a roster I had absolutely no business signing.
He shrugged, and something in his face settled into something genuine.
FNN: I won three matches. I've never won anything. I gambled four times in front of the entire academy and the last one ruined me completely, and I'd do all of it again.
He walked off toward the stands, already gathering volume, already assembling the version of the story he intended to tell for the next several years. Arthur watched him go, and picked up his sword, and found the semifinal bracket had already been posted.