Chương 20: Chapter 19: Mathematically Inferior

Damian extended his hand, weaving a perfectly cylindrical metal pipe. The shape was flawless; it was a weave born of rigorous, repetitive practice. He shifted his weight into a textbook fencing stance, the tip of the metal pipe angled directly at Elma's chest.

"How do you like to start?" he asked, his tone dripping with mock courtesy. Elma's gaze slid sideways, cutting through the torchlight to lock onto Fenric. The Strategoi was calmly taking a sip from his goblet, his gray eyes fixed on the spectacle. She tightened her small fists until the knuckles turned white. She pulled her focus back to Damian. Her field brushed against his, reading the ambient pressure within it. His TRO was 100, 000 Will. Not a negligible number, but mathematically inferior to her own capacity.

Damian offered a sharp, tight-jawed smile.

"I am going to attack now." He shifted his wrist, attempting to channel a secondary weave into the space between them, but nothing happened. His eyes widened in sudden confusion. Elma had already deployed her Mutual Negation, zeroing out his field.

"Any time, now!" Valerius crowed from the high table, drawing a chorus of ignorant laughter from his entourage.

"Is this your innate ability?" Damian whispered, his eyes narrowing as he felt the oppressive, dead weight of her field.

"It's terrifying." The mocking edge in his voice couldn't quite mask the bitter, underlying spike of jealousy. Elma stood completely still, her threat-assessment models stalling. They had stated they were not supposed to kill each other. But if lethal force was prohibited, what was the tactical win condition? How did a spar prove anything if the variable of death was removed from the equation— Damian moved, a smear of motion her tracking couldn't resolve, and brought the metal pipe down viciously across her back.

The impact drove the breath from her lungs. It felt as though a live electrical current had violently snapped through her spine. Elma stumbled forward, her small shoulders trembling.

"What is the meaning of this?!" Nina Kresnik's voice cut through the air. Valerius remained entirely silent, his jaw locked tight. Lord Teyrn leaned back in his heavy wooden chair, casually swirling his wine.

"It is a spar, Nina. Pain is an excellent teacher. It teaches one not to let their guard down."

"She is four," Nina stated, her voice dropping to an icy whisper.

"The strongest Resonants began their combat training at that exact age, like her father for example." Teyrn countered smoothly. Down on the grass, Elma forcibly regulated her breathing, swallowing the metallic taste of blood in her mouth. Internal Reinforcement. With a TRO of 100, 000 Will reinforcing his body, his speed and kinetic output were vastly superior to Nagin's. If only Sable had finished teaching her how to turn her resonance inward before the displacement, this body wouldn't be such a massive liability.

Elma spun around, her hands snapping up. Water Drills. Damian laughed. His reinforced muscles twitched, and he was already clear of their path before her eyes could even register the motion. The water drills hissed harmlessly past him, tearing deep, steamy trenches into the lawns. Before Elma's eyes could track him, the metal pipe slammed into her side, sending her sprawling violently into the grass.

"What is the matter, little jewel?" Damian taunted, casually spinning the metal pipe in his hand as he looked down at her.

"Was the assassin not this fast? Should I slow down for you?" There was no way she could win like this. Not while restricted to his terms. Damian stepped closer, the tip of the metal pipe pressing directly against her scalp. He twisted it slowly, the hard edge grinding painfully against her skull.

"Do you surrender?" Damian asked, his chest heaving slightly from the exertion. He offered a condescending, tight-lipped smile.

"I must admit, I admire the fact that you haven't cried after all those strikes. Most adults would have broken by now." Down in the dirt, Elma felt rage ignite somewhere behind her sternum, white and total, the kind that didn't ask permission before it burned through every threat-assessment protocol she had. To be reduced to this, pinned in the mud, in front of her executioner. Elma detonated her perimeter, extending her reach to a massive sphere with 100-meter radius.

Damian looked up, his mocking smile instantly faltering. High above them, the silver moonlight suddenly warped and distorted, refracting through an impossibly massive sphere of water. His eyes widened in absolute horror. Five-hundred tons of water slammed into the grass with the concussive force of an avalanche. The impact shattered the manicured lawns, sending a massive, roaring tidal wave surging outward toward the high tables. Servants scattered, screaming, abandoning trays and goblets in the grass.

Jorm's eyes went wide, and instead of running, she threw her own serving tray above her head, as if it might mean something against five hundred tons of water. On the stands, elite guards instantly lurched to their feet, their hands flashing as they hastily wove heavy barriers to protect the nobility from the incoming flood. Varik didn't rise from his seat.

He snapped his fingers, almost absently, and the leading wall of water—easily enough to bury the high tables whole—simply ceased to exist, unwoven before it ever reached the barriers the guards had scrambled to raise. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings. The guards held their shields a moment longer than necessary, the gesture suddenly, visibly redundant. Behind it, the rest of the wave halted on its own. It reversed.

The water was rapidly drawn backward, pulled into the gravitational center of Elma's command. Elma rose from the ocean, ascending into the night air upon four massive, writhing auxiliary limbs forged entirely from the churning waters. The liquid appendages shifted and coiled with a fluidity that no biological limb could replicate, lifting her high above the battlefield like a water strider. Elma twisted, and the auxiliary to her right followed. Damian was ejected from the roiling water like a stone from a sling.

One moment he was trapped inside the torrent, tossed about and struggling for breath; the next he was flying across the terrace. A profound, suffocating silence swallowed the stands. Lords were frozen, the barriers still raised. Then, a concussive roar shattered the quiet. Valerius threw his arms wide, his face split into a manic grin as his booming laughter rattled the estate's foundations.

"Yes! Beat the daylights out of him!" Stupid. She looked back down at Damian just as a massive, hyper-dense spike of woven metal was a mere two inches from her face. Elma unconsciously jerked her head to the side at the absolute last microsecond. The heavy steel grazed her cheek, the wind of its passing tearing a few strands of hair from her scalp. Her heart stalled in her chest. Her mind hadn't even processed the threat in time; the dodge had been pure, autonomic reflex.

If her nervous system hadn't forcibly overridden her conscious thought, that metal would have cored straight through her skull. He was trying to kill her now.

"Anti-phase alignment!" Damian shouted. The stone beneath him shattered as he launched upward, the earth itself seeming to push him skyward rather than resist him, as if gravity had reversed its allegiance for that single, violent instant. He closed the vertical distance with the speed of a projectile. Elma shifted her weight against the limb beneath her, leaning hard to the side as his trajectory carved past her ribs by inches, his momentum carrying him past her and into the empty air above. Barometric Coffin.

Damian halted immediately, his upward momentum completely negated—he hung frozen two feet above, close enough that she could see the shock in his eyes. Without hesitating, Elma drew back the limb she wasn't braced on and brought it down and across, a colossal hammer falling from above his exposed back. The liquid appendage struck him center-mass, driving him out of the sky and down past her, slamming into the grass below with enough force to carve a second crater into the earth.

Before he could even attempt to stagger to his feet, the moonlight vanished. The sky above the courtyard suddenly shifted into a blinding emerald. Fission: Slag Round. Elma ripped apart the sky above him. A barrage of unstable, glowing green plasma spheres manifested and rained downward. They detonated against the ruined grass in a synchronized sequence. Craters melted into the earth, and the entire courtyard was instantly swallowed by a thick, choking curtain of pulverized dirt, smoke, and steam.

Panicked screams tore from the observation stands, but the Lords remained frozen in shock, their faces washed in the sickly green glow of the falling inferno. Guards lining the stands tightened their grips on spear and blade, knuckles whitening, eyes darting toward their charges for an order that never came. No one intervened. Fenric tilted his head slightly to the left, the motion almost lazy, his gray eyes narrowing in mild surprise.

Varik mirrored the gesture a beat later, the two Strategoi watching the carnage before them with the detached curiosity of men reading a report. Elma generated a sweeping surge of wind that cleared the smoke from the battlefield. She slowly lowered herself back to the ground, the water limbs compressing and coiling tightly behind her. Damian was still conscious, but barely. He was swaying on his feet, his tailored burgundy silk scorched and shredded.

His Lattice Reserve was completely, unequivocally spent; every single drop of his energy was burned just to keep his reinforced skeletal structure from collapsing under the trauma. Elma couldn't utilize internal reinforcement yet, but the same physics could be applied externally. She shifted her command, collapsing exactly half of her Total Resonance Output directly into the four aqueous limbs. The dense water instantly solidified, radiating with a harsh, humming emerald hue. She launched the constructs forward.

The four limbs struck Damian simultaneously, wrapping around his wrists and ankles. With a single, sharp gesture, Elma hoisted him into the air, pinning his four limbs wide apart in a suspended crucifixion. Each limb now carried its own Resonance Unit of 112, 000 Will—more than his entire Total Resonance Output. Even at full LR, he wouldn't be able to break from this. She stopped. She looked toward the high tables, waiting for the match to be called.

She waited for a referee, a Lord, or an adult to step forward and end the spar. Nobody spoke a word. Pride, Elma calculated, her eyes sweeping over the rigid, horrified faces of House Teyrn. They remained silent because asking for a cessation meant officially admitting that their teenage heir was being effortlessly dismantled and held hostage by a four-year-old girl. Fine. She was not going to back down either. Elma raised her small, open palm toward the suspended boy. She compressed the remainder of her field.

The atmosphere around the high tables audibly gasped. The ambient air in the courtyard began to aggressively suck inward, spiraling into the center of Elma's palm. The seasoned warlords in the stands instantly recognized what she was doing.

"Stop!" Lord Teyrn suddenly bellowed, his composure completely shattering as he surged to his feet.

"Stop this at once!" The pressure at the center of Elma's palm reached its critical maximum. A knight draped in Teyrn colors launched from the sidelines, moving with immense, reinforced speed directly toward Elma to forcefully break her concentration. He didn't make it halfway. A blinding streak of gold intersected his path. Commander Thiyya slammed into the knight with the force of a falling meteor, her golden armor gleaming as she drove him into the dirt.

She rose smoothly, planting herself in the exact center of the space between the Teyrn forces and Elma, her hand resting casually on the hilt of her blade.

"What is the meaning of this?!" Lord Teyrn shouted, his face purple with rage. Elma held the crushing storm in her palm for one final, agonizing second, making sure every Strategoi in the yard felt the exact weight of the execution she was holding back. Then, she flicked her wrist upward. She launched the Stillstorm directly into the night sky. The detonation was a thunderous, concussive boom that rolled across the entirety of the city, shattering the cloud cover and violently parting the heavens.

A profound, unnatural chill immediately washed over the silent, terrified courtyard, settling into the bones of every lord who had come to watch a child break. As the echoes faded, the clouds remained parted, letting a single, cold shaft of moonlight fall directly onto the arena. Damian hung limp and unconscious in the grip of the water auxiliaries. Elma stood in the center of the crater, her wide dress fluttering in the dying wind of her own storm. The emerald light flickered.

One by one, the water auxiliaries unraveled, collapsing into harmless rain that pattered against the shattered stone. Damian's suspended body dropped heavily into the mud below, caught a heartbeat later by his own guards as they rushed forward in stunned silence. Elma remained standing. For a single, fragile breath. Then a thin line of red slipped from her nose, tracing her upper lip. The world tilted. The moonlight fractured. This… body. Her knees buckled. She never felt the ground.

Thiyya was already there catching her small, trembling frame against her chest as the last ripples of the Stillstorm faded into the night.

"My lady!" Thiyya's voice broke through the ringing silence. Elma was catching her breath in shallow, uneven pulls, each inhale scraping against lungs that felt too small for the strain she had forced through them.

"I'm… fine," she managed, though the words were little more than air. Her heart hammered wildly against her ribs, but it was steady. She was still here.