Chapter 54: Semifinals
The other quarterfinals did not last long.
When the dust settled on both fields, four names remained lit above the basin, and the overseer drew the semifinal pairings without ceremony.
Aidan’s name rose over Field One.
Beside it, a second name lit up.
Ryssa Vane.
’The sister,’ Aidan thought, and felt that old ember stir. ’Finally.’
She was already walking to the line before the name finished glowing.
Where Voss had been a bronze wall, Ryssa Vane was a drawn blade. Slender and tall, pale silver scales traced her jaw and the backs of her hands, and she moved the way someone moves when they have never once wasted a motion in their life.
Her eyes held the same slow dragon-calm as Voss’s. Sharper, though. Colder. Already reading him.
"You put Draego down in thirty-nine seconds," she said, voice quiet and level. "I watched all of it. Both your little storms."
’Both,’ Aidan noted. ’She studied the whole fight. She came ready.’
"Then you know how I move," Aidan said easily.
"I know how you moved against him." A faint, cold smile touched her mouth. "That isn’t the same thing, and we both know it."
[Tom: This one thinks, Master. She’s the dangerous kind.]
[Arthur: Boring. Eat her quickly.]
’She thinks. That’s exactly why this will be fun.’
The Spirit Armor wrapped him at a fresh hundred.
"Begin!"
Aidan opened the way he had against Voss, stirring Wind, letting it gather and start to spin, testing whether she would brace like her brother had.
She did not brace.
The instant the air began to turn, Ryssa was already gone from where she stood, silver scales flaring as a sweep of draconic gale carried her low and fast around the outside of his forming vortex. She had seen the storm coming and simply refused to be where it landed.
’Right,’ Aidan thought, letting the half-built spiral scatter. ’No repeats. She’s answered that one before I finished it.’
She closed the distance in a blink of gale-step and raked one scaled hand across his guard, precise as a scalpel.
[Garen: 96/100]
He caught the second strike on a shell of charged air, but she was already sliding away, weightless, circling, giving him nothing to hit.
This was a different animal entirely. Voss had walked into everything. Ryssa touched and vanished, touched and vanished, wearing his armor down four points at a time and never staying long enough to be caught.
[Garen: 92/100]
[Vane: 100/100]
’She’s playing the clock and the count,’ Aidan realized, cold and quick. ’Chip me, stay untouchable, win on points at the minute. And every big thing I’ve shown, she already has an answer ready.’
Then she committed to something bigger.
Silver light gathered at her back, and a phantom unfolded from her shoulders, a translucent dragon of pale scale and long claws, her master’s art given shape. It lunged with her when she lunged, doubling her reach, and its ghostly talons carved a line clean across the ring.
Aidan threw himself sideways on a hum of charge, and it still clipped him.
[Garen: 84/100]
The crowd leaned in as one. This was no easy Dragon-Warlord win being upset. This was a top pupil hunting an unknown, and for the first time the unknown was bleeding points and the pupil was not.
"He’s actually losing this one."
"That’s Ryssa Vane. Second on the SSS boards for a reason."
"He can’t touch her. She’s too fast, and she saw all his moves against Voss."
’They’re right about one thing,’ Aidan thought, breathing steady as she circled for the next pass. ’I can’t catch her by chasing. She’s faster than she has any right to be, and she reads me clean.’
He watched her drift, patient and untouchable, the phantom dragon coiling at her shoulder.
’So I stop chasing. I make her come to me. And I put something under the floor she never watched me use.’
He stopped moving and let her think he was cornered.
Then, low and quiet, he laid the trap.
Epoxy spilled from his palms in threads too thin and too faint to see, spreading out across the black floor of the ring in a wide, patient web, sinking into the surface and setting hard. Not to hold him. To wait.
He anchored the strands to the ground, to the walls, across every line she liked to circle on, and then he made himself look like an easy kill.
He let his shell drop a little. Let his stance open. Let his armor sit exposed at eighty-four.
Ryssa saw the opening and took it, because it was the correct call, and she had never once failed to punish an opening.
The phantom dragon flared to full size, and she dove in behind it with everything she had, gale-step screaming, silver claws and ghost talons converging on his chest for the finishing strike.
She committed.
That was all he had wanted.
The instant her feet touched the web, Aidan closed his fist.
Every Epoxy thread snapped taut at once, anchoring her boots, her ankles, the trailing edge of her own gale, gluing her mid-lunge to the floor and the air. Her momentum died in a heartbeat. The untouchable duelist hung there, caught, for the first time in the whole fight standing exactly where he wanted her.
Then he reached out with Electromagnetism, gripped the silver scales along her arms, and locked her rigid.
Her eyes went wide. "How..."
He was already stepping inside the frozen phantom’s guard.
He gathered Metal into a single dense point at his knuckle, wrapped it in a coil of Lightning, and drove it forward with a hard pulse of Burst, all of it concentrated into one clean strike against her pinned, exposed armor.
It cracked through in a single flat crack of light.
[Vane: 100 to 0.]
The tally hit zero.
The phantom dragon burst into silver motes. The Epoxy released. Ryssa staggered back a step, whole and unhurt, her Spirit Armor scattering, staring at the floor where the invisible web had been.
"Match over," the overseer announced. "Field One goes to Garen. Time elapsed, fifty-one seconds."
The basin roared.
It had been a real fight, and everyone had seen it. The unknown had been behind on points against the second-ranked SSS, cornered and bleeding, and then the whole thing had reversed in a single breath.
"He was losing. He was actually losing, and then..."
"What was that at the end? She just stopped moving."
"How many different powers is this Garen holding? Nothing about him adds up."
Aidan let the aspects settle and stepped back over the line, breathing a little harder than the last three fights, a leisurely smile on his face.
’Fifty-one seconds. She earned every one of them.’ The ember in his chest glowed warm and pleased. ’And I still never showed the rot. Peak-SSS trickster. That’s all they get.’
Ryssa did not rage. She looked down at her own scaled hands, then at the floor, then up at him with a long, level stare that had lost every trace of its earlier cold certainty.
"I prepared for everything you did to Draego," she said quietly. "And you never used a single one of them on me."
"You didn’t leave me the room," Aidan said, honest for once. "You were the hardest fight in this whole draw."
Something in her still eyes eased, just slightly, at that. She inclined her head the same way Voss had, one hunter to another, and turned to leave the ring without another word.
[Jovan: She’ll remember you a long time.]
’Good. So will I. She was the only one who made me think.’
[Tom: One more, Master. The final.]
Aidan turned his gaze to the second field, where the last of the other bracket was still fighting, and a single name burned bright above the survivor waiting for him.
He rolled the ache out of his shoulders and let the ember settle low and steady.
’One more,’ he thought. ’Then I win a world.’
