CHAPTER 121: FIRST BOUT

Ben moved first, sending one, two, three light jabs to measure range.

They snapped like wet twigs, hurtling through the air with speed.

Damien didn’t even bother to parry them. He simply tilted his head, letting the first glance his cheek, rotated his shoulder to let the second slide off his guard, and ate the third on his forearm as he stepped inside Ben’s reach.

Ben slid back on rails of good footwork, resetting the angle, and fired a cross hook combination into the opening he thought he saw.

Damien’s elbow came up to take the cross. His head slipped off line just enough to let the hook whistle past hair.

In the same motion he stamped forward, heel driving a wedge of sand, and hammered a short, ugly punch into Ben’s ribs.

No flourish, just bone to bone.

The air went out of Ben in a thin hiss.

"No tells." Oliver said, not raising his voice and yet filling the world with it. "Stanley, your shoulders warn your strikes. Krell, keep that chin shelved. Don’t trust your neck to do all the work. Breathe, both of you."

Ben recovered quickly. He feinted low, drew Damien’s guard, and whipped a kick at the back of the knee that would have buckled a lesser opponent.

Damien grimaced, stepped through it, and answered with a clinch, his forehead driving into Ben’s cheek as his arms cinched under Ben’s elbows.

Ben tried to twist free. He had a good pivot, a good turn on the ball of his foot, but Damien had him.

The noble boy’s style showed in the shift of weight, and the cruel efficiency of leverage.

Unlike Ben, who had been taught the clean martial arts of modern earth, Damien had been brought up with something more brutal.

In three beats Ben went from upright to off balance to skidding on sand, back thumping the ground.

The balcony breathed as one. Noah leaned on the rail and felt the stone vibrate faintly under his hands.

’He’s better than he was,’ Noah thought, watching Ben surge up again, cheeks flushed, jaw tight. ’Fear makes a poor diet, but it’s an excellent teacher.’

Ben changed tactics. He stopped trying to out bully Damien and began juking left and right, trying to draw Damien into open space and attack from the sides.

It was pretty. He landed a clean shot on the temple and a shovel hook to the body that dug without mercy.

Damien grunted, bit down on pain, and marched through it.

They traded blows in a pocket of sand, sweat and breath.

Ben’s strikes were a language, syllables learned from a hundred hours under a careful tutor, while Damien’s were orders barked over battlefield thunder.

Ben worked upstairs and down, looking for a switch off he could exploit.

Damien simply punished his body with relentless indifference.

Neither man touched magic, and neither needed to. The ring shrank around them until all that existed was the next step, and the next breath.

"Watch his hips," Oliver called out. "Foot tells the lie, hips tell the truth."

Ben heard it too late. He stepped to Damien’s outside to set up another angle, but Damien’s hips had already turned, loading like a catapult.

The shoulder dip was a feint. The real attack came from the legs. A driving, brutal knee into the midline just as Ben’s weight transferred.

Ben folded around the impact with a strangled sound, hands dropping. Damien’s palm found the back of Ben’s head and guided it into a short, merciless uppercut.

Ben sprawled, and dust puffed into the air.

The healers moved, but Oliver lifted a hand and shook his head once.

Ben groaned, rolled to a knee, and pushed up, eyes glassy. Damien waited, breathing hard, hands loose and ready.

"Good," Oliver said. "Up or yield."

Ben licked blood from his lip and raised his hands. Whether it was pride or hatred, Noah couldn’t tell. Maybe both.

"You should have stayed down," one of his shadows purred, as if Ben could hear it.

"Leace him. Let him break. I want to see what will be created from it when he passes his threshold,’ another shadow hissed, amused.

Noah said nothing, simply watching the fight.

The combatants began circling each other again.

Ben seemed to understand now that Damien was not going to fade.

He played distance, refusing clinch ranges, and peppering with jabs that had less venom and more purpose.

He stole seconds. He made breathing space. He looked for a path only he could see.

Damien cut it off with a step and a shove that wasn’t a shove. It was a small illegal snap at the elbow masked in the motion of a push.

Oliver saw it. He did not call it.

"Spacing," he said instead. "You are responsible for your own balance. He cannot take what you do not offer."

Ben flared. Anger made him rash, and rashness made him obvious.

He came in hard with a flurry that would have put a lesser fighter on the floor, hands blurring through the air.

Damien shelled, absorbed, and then, in a move that would have embarrassed any duelist who prized elegance, simply stepped through Ben’s feet and bull rushed him into the wall of the ring.

The impact rattled the boards. Ben’s head whiplashed. Damien’s shoulder crushed breath from him again.

"Break!" Oliver snapped.

Damien took a clean step back.

Ben swayed. His pride held him upright for another second, then his legs made their decision without him and set him on his knees.

He panted, face gone grey beneath the flush, hands trembling as they pressed into the sand.

The healers came then, and this time Oliver let them pass.

The crowd on the rails exhaled. In that collective breath, the class shifted ever so slightly.

A recalibration. Their mind began reevaluating their own prowess, their respect growing for each fighter.

Damien offered Ben a hand. Ben glared at it, then took it. He got to his feet, wobbling, jaw clenched.

"Winner, Krell," Oliver said. He did not smile. "Clean enough. Stanley, your guard’s fine when you’re fresh and vulnerable when you’re angry. Fix it."

"Krell, you’re efficient, sometimes lazy. Don’t let confidence turn into corners you stop checking."

Damien nodded once, the acknowledgment of a soldier to a sergeant.

Ben stared at the boards, jaw grinding.