Chapter 68: A Different Feel: Culmination Arc [29]
The arena came apart.
"How did he take that hit?"
"I don’t know, but he’s bleeding everywhere. He’s not supposed to be standing right now."
"This is interesting." Someone laughed, somewhere in the upper tiers. "I’m starting to like the Lestilaut."
Auros launched.
Vexis was grinning. Wide, stupid, eyes too bright. The dust in the air tasted like grit on his tongue and he let it. The sun sat hot on the back of his neck. Pain radiated from his temple in slow, hard pulses and it felt incredible, sharp and real and his, every nerve lit up at once after weeks of watching all of it happen to someone else from somewhere behind his own eyes. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed the weight of his own body until this exact second. The way his knuckles felt when he closed them. The specific pull in his shoulders when he straightened up.
He closed his fist. Leaned his head forward.
"Honorable," he said, and grinned wider.
Auros’s leg swung for his neck. A finishing kick, fast and clean, aimed at ending it.
Vexis dropped.
Not a normal duck. He folded all the way down, knees bending past anything a mage’s frame should allow, until his nose nearly scraped the stone. Auros’s shin hissed through the space where his head had been a heartbeat ago.
Both palms hit the floor.
Vexis yanked his lower body upward off his hands, weight flipping, one leg already swinging before his feet left the ground, and his heel connected with the side of Auros’s skull at an angle that shouldn’t have been possible from that position.
"WOAH! VEXIS LESTILAUT JUST WENT CLOSE RANGE? WHAT WAS THAT MOVEMENT?"
Auros’s field absorbed most of it. But the impact came back, traveling through Vexis’s own leg, up through his hip, a jolt of feedback that made his teeth click together. He threw himself forward with the momentum anyway, landing in a crouch, already moving.
Roz, on the bench, hadn’t taken his eyes off him since the moment he stood back up. The bond through his paws was feeding him everything and none of it was making sense. The weight was wrong. The aetheric current was wrong. Even the emotional signature coming through was wrong, brighter and more chaotic and angrier than anything he’d felt from this caller in weeks.
In 599 years, the bond had lied to him exactly once. He was starting to wonder.
What is this. The feeling through the bond. The weight is different. The way the blood is moving through the channels is completely different from anything he’s done before. As if the person wearing this body right now isn’t the same one who put it on this morning.
He went still.
On the opposite end of the platform, Xavier had uncrossed his arms. Both hands were at his sides now. He was watching Vexis the same way he’d been watching Arthur all culmination, with the specific stillness of a person encountering something that isn’t in their notes anywhere.
Auros straightened, visibly thrown. "I’ll admit," he said, "I was genuinely surprised"
Vexis wiped blood off his forehead with the back of his hand, smearing it sideways. "Surprised about what?"
"Surprised you were using ranged magic at all." Auros’s mouth curled. "Thought you’d lost it completely. You told the entire first year you were going to be a battlemagus. Then nothing for two years. Now this?"
Vexis’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"Battlemagus." He looked at Auros’s whole frame, the field still humming around him. "Like you?"
Auros leapt. Straight punch, full weight behind it.
Aetheric blood didn’t gather in Vexis’s forearm. It didn’t pull toward his fingertips the way Arthur’s did, narrowing down to a single point. That wasn’t this. That had never been this.
I only know how to explode my own insides.
Aetheric blood scattered outward from his core all at once, every limb, every joint, flooding through him in a single continuous wave.
Roz’s eyes went wide.
"This brat." His voice came out low. "He’s perfusing. Scaling his entire aetheric reserve through his whole body at once. Don’t tell me." A beat. "He’s attempting to enter."
"TO HELL WITH BEING A BATTLEMAGUS." Vexis’s head snapped left, dodging the punch by less than an inch, close enough that the wind off Auros’s fist moved his hair.
His left elbow came up.
"THIS IS STIMA!"
It drove into Auros’s jaw with a crack the whole coliseum heard.
"Stima," Roz said. Just the word, landing flat, and underneath it something that sounded almost like disbelief.
Auros went down hard, rolled, and came back up spitting blood and a fragment of tooth onto the stone.
He didn’t stay down. He came in low this time, both arms wide, going for a grab, trying to take the range advantage back by force.
Vexis dropped under his arms, planted one hand on the ground, and swept his leg in a full rotation. It caught Auros across both ankles and the bigger boy’s footing went out from under him completely.
"WHAT ARE WE WATCHING? VEXIS LESTILAUT IS GOING FULL CLOSE RANGE!"
Auros caught himself on one hand, breathing hard, voice rough. "Stima?" He spat again. "You absolute bastard. You gave up on being a mage. So what was all of that, this whole culmination? Every category? Was this all a joke to you!?"
Vexis pushed his hair back from his face. The blood from his forehead had slowed, almost stopped, the skin underneath knitting closed at the edges. His muscles felt tight everywhere at once, the blood inside his veins pressing harder with every passing second, the perfusion building.
"Oh." He grinned. "That?"
"That was Arthur."
Auros’s mouth opened. "Arthur? Who, what the hell are you talk—"
Vexis launched.
He closed the distance in one step, no telegraph, no wind-up, and drove his shoulder into Auros’s ribs before Auros could reset his guard. The impact rocked him back. The field took most of it and Vexis felt the feedback surge up through his own shoulder like catching a wall with his body. He was already moving before the pain registered, pivoting around Auros’s right side, hand grabbing his collar, pulling him forward into a knee that came up fast and hit him square in the sternum.
Auros’s breath left him in one burst.
He grabbed Vexis’s arm with both hands, trying to control the distance, trying to get his feet set.
Vexis let him pull.
He went with the direction of the grab completely, weight transferring so fast Auros had no resistance to work against, and used the momentum to slam his own forehead into Auros’s nose. Not clean. Messy and fast and it didn’t matter.
Auros reeled backward, blood running from both nostrils.
The crowd made a sound it had never made before.
"VEXIS LESTILAUT IS HEADBUTTING A BATTLEMAGUS. I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN DESCRIBE THIS PROPERLY! IT’S WORKING!"
Auros shook the blood off his face and came back in, angrier now, the field brightening around him, more aetheric blood feeding into the reinforcement. He led with an overhead slam, both fists together, meant to finish it in one hit.
Vexis sidestepped and the stone where he’d been standing cratered.
He drove his elbow into Auros’s kidney from the right side while Auros was still off-balance from the swing. Then stepped back.
Auros turned.
His face had changed. The expression underneath the blood and the bruises had lost its shape entirely, replaced by something rawer. He was breathing through his mouth now. His eyes tracked Vexis the way they hadn’t been tracking him before, with a new quality to the attention.
He charged again, low this time, going for a tackle, putting his whole body into it.
Vexis didn’t go sideways. He stepped inside the charge instead, bent at the knee, took Auros’s momentum on his shoulder from below, and used it. He straightened. Auros’s own weight carried him up and over and he hit the stone back-first with a sound that was loud enough to stop several conversations in the spectator tiers simultaneously.
Vexis stepped back and rolled his neck.
He could feel the perfusion everywhere now. Every muscle. Every joint. The blood inside his veins pressing harder and faster with each passing second, the heat of it sitting just under his skin. It wasn’t unlimited. He knew that from the training, from the years before any of this, from every time his body had told him what it cost. But right now it felt like it was.
Auros got up.
Slower this time. He got one knee under himself first and pushed. His mouth was set and his eyes were steady and he came forward again, because that was apparently what Auros Vaell did.
Vexis met him.
Three exchanges. Short and fast and completely without distance between them, both of them inside each other’s guard, trading hits that the field absorbed and the perfusion ate and neither of them gave ground for. Vexis caught an elbow to the cheekbone that split the skin and didn’t stop. Auros caught a knee to his thigh that buckled the leg for a second and didn’t stop.
Then Vexis’s right hand found Auros’s jaw clean.
Auros’s head snapped sideways. His feet crossed. He went down.
"ANOTHER HIT! ANOTHER CLEAN HIT FROM VEXIS LESTILAUT! AUROS IS DOWN!"
The crowd erupted into confused noise, thousands of voices overlapping into something with no shape.
"MY AETHERIC READOUT IS SHOWING SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! VEXIS LESTILAUT IS USING STIMA! THAT IS A SWORDBEARER TECHNIQUE! THAT HAS NO BUSINESS BEING ON A MAGE!"
Mareth shot up from his seat so fast his chair scraped back. "Velion." His voice had gone high and thin. "Velion. Tell me what I’m looking at. Is it possible for a second-year mage to learn Stima and standard magic simultaneously? Is that something that can happen?"
Velion didn’t answer.
Velion, who had an opinion on everything and delivered it at the same flat temperature regardless of the stakes, said nothing. His drink sat untouched. His eyes were on the platform and they hadn’t moved in two minutes.
"Velion!"
"No," Velion said finally. The word came out like it cost him something. "It’s not—."
"No. It’s not possible."
The second voice came from behind them.
Vivienne was standing at the end of the row, arms crossed, eyes locked on the platform. The people around her had cleared a small gap without meaning to. She had that effect in rooms.
"The foundation for Stima runs completely opposite to standard magic flow," she said. "One requires inward concentration of aetheric blood. The other requires outward release. Training both at once doesn’t just overwork the mageia core. It tears it open. In three places at once. Most senior mages never attempt it. The ones who do come out the other side crippled."
Mareth turned on her. "Then how is he doing it? You saw the previous category?. You saw the magic. The water magic. The ranged precision. That was real. That wasn’t a swordbearer doing tricks." He gestured at the platform, where Vexis was currently putting his knee into Auros’s ribs for the second time. "So which is it?"
Vivienne was quiet for a second.
"There’s only one explanation that fits," she said. Her voice was exactly as flat as Velion’s had been. Both of them using the same tone people use when the thing they’re saying sounds wrong even as they say it.
"That kid only just started learning magic."
Mareth stared at her.
"And he was a swordbearer from the start."
