Chapter 237: The Bet
Mantis stayed where he was after Neil turned away.
He wasn’t moving with the easy acceptance of someone who had received a clean refusal and was ready to leave, he was standing there with the particular stillness of a man who had exhausted most of his options and was staring at the last one.
"If you help us," he said, "I will owe you a personal favor, not as a formality but as a genuine debt I will honor without condition whenever you choose to call it in."
Neil looked at him over his shoulder.
"What exactly would I do with your favor?" he said. "What is it worth to me practically?"
"I have resources, connections, and influence across half the settlements in this region," Mantis said. "I am not someone who forgets what he owes."
"I don’t need any of that," Neil said.
Mantis was quiet for a moment.
"Then tell me what you do need," he said. "Whatever it is, I will find a way to get it."
Neil turned around fully and looked at him.
"There is one thing," he said. "A spatial treasure capable of carrying my entire domain with me, all of it, subjects and buildings and everything inside, for at least a few months."
The answer was already in Mantis’s expression before he opened his mouth.
He looked at Neil with the grim and honest face of someone who understood exactly what they were being asked for and was going to say the thing that ended the conversation.
"I don’t have anything like that," he said.
Neil shrugged.
"Then we have nothing to talk about and you can leave," he said, turning away again.
Mantis looked at Randy.
Randy had been watching the entire exchange from the side with his arms folded and his expression arranged into the careful blankness he used when he didn’t want to be conscripted into anything, and the look Mantis gave him was a direct appeal.
Randy exhaled through his nose.
He looked at Neil’s back.
"Neil—" he started.
Neil turned around before he could finish.
"Don’t," he said. "Unless you want me to sit down and calculate exactly what I owe you for the past months and pay it all back in one conversation right now, don’t finish that sentence."
Randy closed his mouth.
The courtyard was quiet for a moment.
Then Mantis said: "A duel."
Neil looked at him.
"If you win," Mantis said, "I will become a subject in your domain without condition, my settlement included in whatever that arrangement requires."
He paused.
"If I win, you help us fight."
Randy turned to look at Mantis with the expression of someone who had just heard something that required immediate attention.
"How is that remotely reasonable?" he said. "You are at the diamond class of the 5th Origin, Mantis, you have been a lord for longer than this man has been alive, and you are proposing a duel where the loss falls entirely on his side?"
"The upside is his," Mantis said, not looking away from Neil. "A 5th Origin diamond class lord and his entire settlement as a subject is not nothing."
"It is completely irrelevant because he cannot possibly—"
"I accept," Neil said.
Randy stopped.
He looked at Neil with the particular expression of someone whose argument had just been cancelled by the person it was supposed to protect, and then he looked at Neil’s face for a moment trying to find something that would explain it, and he found nothing except a man who had made a decision and was done making it.
"Fine," Mantis said.
Something shifted in his expression, a quiet and genuine relief moving underneath the composure.
He looked at Neil.
"When?"
Neil looked at Randy.
Randy stood there for a moment with the expression of someone processing several things in sequence, and then the particular quality arrived in his eyes that appeared whenever his mind shifted tracks, the thing that happened when objection became arrangement.
"Give me two hours," he said.
The fighting area Randy had arranged was a broad circular platform in the open district near the settlement’s eastern edge, enclosed inside a containment shield that had clearly been sourced through a favor Randy was still internally calculating the cost of.
The shield was built properly, layered and dense, the kind of construction that communicated whoever had designed it understood exactly what forces they were planning to contain.
Around it the crowd had filled in during the preparation time with a speed that demonstrated Randy’s particular ability to produce an audience from nothing given the right announcement and the right betting lines.
People had come from across the settlement, drawn by the information that a warden of Mantis’s standing was fighting a resident lord, and the odds boards Randy had established were already loud and active when Neil arrived.
The odds were not favorable in his direction.
He didn’t look at them.
He sent a brief message through Nemo back to the domain, a short account of where he was and what was happening, and he didn’t expect anything to come of it.
Then Ileana stepped through the crowd.
She had Jane with her and Neil found her immediately, the way he always found her in any space, and for a moment everything around him simplified considerably.
She had dressed simply and it didn’t matter because simplicity had never been the thing with Ileana, and Jane beside her was striking in the cool and composed way she was always striking, pale eyes already moving across the arena with quick assessment.
The two of them drew attention the way light drew everything toward it, and the crowd shifted around them as they moved toward the elevated seating Randy had arranged for notable attendees, heads turning and conversations redirecting and the betting boards temporarily forgotten.
Neil watched most of the audience forget about the fight for a full thirty seconds.
He exhaled slowly.
’If anyone here decides to make that their problem tonight I am going to make this evening considerably more eventful than they planned for.’
Ileana found his eyes across the space and the small warmth arrived in her expression, brief and genuine.
Jane caught his gaze a moment later and the corner of her mouth moved, and he thought briefly that if she was already here then she had finished with her dragon empress teacher and had the field comprehension, which meant she had made remarkable use of the time he had been in the arena.
He turned back toward the platform.
Mantis was already at his position on the far side, standing with the quiet composure of someone who had fully settled into what they were doing and was no longer second-guessing it.
Neil walked to his side and the shield hummed closed behind him.
Randy’s voice carried over the crowd from his elevated position, covering the terms of the engagement with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done this enough times that he had developed a personal economy of words for it.
No fields.
No giant form.
Everything else available.
A clear winner when one party could no longer continue.
The crowd settled.
Neil felt the energy sitting in his body, the full depth and weight of the 5th Origin pressing quietly against his control, and he drew a line through it and decided that everything beyond thirty percent was not available to him for this fight.
It felt like choosing to walk a road he could have flown.
He looked across the arena at Mantis.
Mantis looked back.
Then Mantis moved.
The transformation came fast.
The human shape dissolved into something taller and wider, the frame restructuring with a sound like compressed stone cracking apart and reforming, chitin plates spreading across the body in overlapping sheets as the mantis form asserted itself, the limbs reconfiguring into the bladed architecture the ability was built around.
He reached close to twenty feet at the peak of it, the scythe-arms replacing the human ones entirely, each edge running with a line of concentrated essence that was bright enough to see clearly from the crowd’s distance.
He didn’t give any opening announcements.
He moved.
WHOOSH
The first strike came horizontal and at a speed that explained in a single motion exactly why diamond class at the 5th Origin meant what it meant, the right scythe sweeping in an arc that would have divided the arena at chest height if it had connected with anything.
Neil stepped back.
One step, small and entirely without hurry, and the scythe went through the space where his chest had been with a sound like something tearing the air open.
He felt the essence edge pass close enough to leave a faint warmth against the front of his shirt.
The left scythe came immediately behind it, a downward diagonal aimed precisely at someone who had just stepped back from the first strike, the timing built for exactly that response.
Neil moved sideways instead, a clean lateral step that took him outside the angle of the blade, and the scythe hit the arena floor and left a deep score in the surface, the essence discharge sending a fracture line running outward from the impact point.
Mantis pressed forward.
The combinations were compact and efficient, built without unnecessary movement, designed for opponents who could read single attacks and therefore needed to be occupied by two or three arriving in the same window.
The primary scythes mixed with the secondary arms that had emerged from the transformation, shorter and faster and positioned to cover the gaps the larger strikes left open, the whole system interlocking in a way that was clearly the product of a very long time spent developing and refining it.
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