Chapter 76: Troy’s Knight Did Something New And I Realized Someone Was Pulling His Strings

Soren watched the recovery frame so many times that night that he could close his eyes and still see the Knight stuttering, the armor caught in a shape it hated.

By morning he had stopped trying to figure out the move and started trying to figure out the man.

The two were not the same problem. He had been treating them like one.

◆◆◆◆

He found Troy in the practice annex before the day’s matches, alone, which by itself was strange because Troy used to travel with a half-circle of people who wanted to be seen near him.

The Spectral Knight stood behind him, dismissed to its resting posture.

"You came to scout me?" Troy asked without turning.

"I came to watch you stand there hating your own win."

That got Troy to turn.

Soren had read him a hundred ways in the novel, the rival, the early-arc wall, the threat that the OG protagonist never quite got past.

None of those versions had this face on them. This one looked tired in a way that went past sleep.

"You don’t know anything about my win," Troy said.

"I know your Knight can’t do what it did yesterday." Soren kept his voice. "Three strikes off one blade, that’s not its form. You feel it in the recovery, it’s fighting itself."

"You’ve been reading me?"

"For months I had a way to read everyone, but I lost it. So now I read the old way, by watching, and what I watched is a man using a weapon that doesn’t fit his hand."

The Knight shifted behind Troy.

"Who improved it," Soren said.

"You should go."

"Council access," Soren said. "Somebody with reach into beast architecture went into your Knight and added a function but you didn’t ask for it. You can’t even use it without it hurting the thing, so they didn’t do it for you."

Troy looked at the floor.

"They did it so you’d win," Soren said. "Far enough to land in front of me or in front of whoever they actually want me to fight through."

Troy did not deny it.

That was the part Soren had not expected, because the Troy in the book denied everything right up until the moment it stopped being deniable.

"You think I want to be in this bracket," Troy said. "Class Z gets dissolved if you lose, you know that, the whole campus knows that. You think they put me in your path because they like the drama?"

"I think you’re a piece,"

"Same as me. We just got put on different squares."

Something happened to Troy’s face when he said that.

Back a couple of weeks ago, on a cold landing outside the dorm, Troy had said a thing to him that neither of them had finished, a thing with a fuse on it that had been burning slow ever since.

Soren had been waiting for it to go off.

It did not go off now. Troy reached for it, opened his mouth, and put it back down.

"When we fight," Troy said instead, "it won’t be me you’re fighting."

"I know."

"You don’t." Troy looked at the Knight, at the gray patient thing standing where his own choices used to stand.

"It listens to them now. I tell it to do one thing and it does that thing plus a thing I didn’t ask for, if you want to beat me, fine. But the part of me that’s still mine isn’t the part that’s going to be in the ring."

The fuse was still there. He had just walked around it again.

"Then I beat the rest," Soren said.

◆◆◆◆

He left Troy in the annex and the wolf fell in beside him in the corridor.

You spent a long time in there, she said. With him.

"He’s not the enemy."

You worried about him. The bond carried it plain, jealousy of his attention, of where his head went when it left her. I felt where you went.

"He’s a problem I have to solve. That’s all my head was doing."

Grimm did not answer, which from her was its own answer, and she walked a half-step closer than she needed to for the rest of the corridor.

◆◆◆◆

The other side of the bracket was a different sport.

Lior Vasquez moved through his rounds the way water moves downhill, every match a highlight reel before it ended.

The campus feed ran his fights twice.

The Council sponsorship banner sat in the corner of every one of his frames like it had been bolted there.

Lior won the way the board wanted winners to look.

Soren watched one of them in the staging hall, his own arm still wrapped, the contrast doing the work without him having to think about it.

Lior’s path was paved. His own was a thing he was clawing up with his fingernails.

Then Lior was there.

Not on the screen. In the hall, a few feet off, watching Soren watch him, that pressed jacket and that line of blond hair, the face the illustrators loved.

"You won ugly," Lior said.

"I won."

"I watched it." Lior tilted his head. "You read him wrong twice and beat him anyway. Whatever you were using, it’s not there anymore."

Soren said nothing.

"Two months ago I told you I wanted to see if you’d hold." Lior’s voice stayed pleasant, which was a dangerous register for him. "You held without the thing that was holding you up. That’s the first time you’ve worried me."

He walked off before Soren could answer.

[DING! — Threat reassessment logged. Subject VASQUEZ now classifies you as a primary obstacle.]

The whole bracket had turned into one shape while he wasn’t looking.

Win the tournament, save Class Z, and to do it he had to put down Troy, and to put down Troy he had to put down the thing the Council had stitched inside him.

Lior was waiting clean and unbloodied at the far end of it all having just decided Soren was real.

The personal fight and the political one had stopped being two fights.

They were the same drain, and the water was already moving.