Chương 52: Chapter 51 - A Good Day

The shouting started before Ant had even fully caught his breath.

"That's cheating." One of Calvin's remaining companions had pushed forward, jabbing a finger toward Ant, his face red with something that had stopped being simple disappointment several sentences ago.

"Nobody plays like that. Nobody moves like that. You set this whole thing up." Another of the group had already crouched by the panel itself, running a hand along its edge as though searching for some hidden mechanism, some proof that would make sense of what they'd just watched. He found nothing, of course, and straightened looking genuinely frustrated, the sort of man who badly needed an explanation the world wasn't about to give him.

"Enough," Calvin said, though even he sounded less certain now than he had all morning. Kalsar stepped between them before Ant had to decide whether to answer at all.

"That's rich," he said, something dry and cutting in his voice.

"Considering you were the ones who insisted this stop being one against one. You wanted more people involved. You got more people involved. Don't come crying about the result now that it didn't go your way." The referee moved without hurrying, coming to stand just behind Kalsar's shoulder, arms loose at his sides.

"There was no cheating," he said, flat and final, loud enough to carry to the small crowd still gathered around them.

"I watched the entire match. Nothing about what happened breaks any rule I enforce." He stepped forward then, past Kalsar, until he was standing close enough to Calvin that the younger man had to tilt his head back slightly to hold his gaze. Something in the referee's posture had shifted, gone harder, though his voice stayed perfectly level.

"I hope," he said, "you intend to honour the agreement." Calvin held his eyes for a long moment, jaw tight, and then reached into his coat and pulled out a folded piece of parchment. He threw it — not handed, threw it — so it landed at Ant's feet rather than in his hands.

"Take it," Calvin said. Ant bent down and picked it up, and as he straightened he caught Calvin's eyes properly for the first time since the match had ended. There wasn't much left in them beyond the anger. No respect, no grudging acknowledgment, nothing that suggested this was over now that the wager had been settled. Whatever else had come out of this morning, Ant understood clearly enough that they'd made an enemy today, one who wasn't going to let this loss go quietly.

Calvin's group turned and walked without another word, cutting back through the thinning crowd and disappearing toward the far side of the queue. The referee watched them go, then turned back, giving Kalsar and Maren each a short nod before his attention settled fully on Ant.

"You know," he said, "you had three separate bursts of speed in that match. I'll admit, for a moment I considered you might be cheating after all — right up until I caught your boots lighting up on the last one. Explained the other two well enough once I'd seen it." Ant blinked.

"My boots?" The referee didn't elaborate. He simply turned to leave, then paused after a few steps and looked back over his shoulder.

"You're interesting," he said.

"I'll be keeping an eye on you going forward. Try not to do something stupid and die on your first mission." Then he walked on, back toward his post at the front of the hall alongside the other guards, and didn't look back again. Ant stood there for a moment, entirely baffled, turning the referee's words over without immediately understanding them. Then it caught up with him properly. My boots?

He opened his system without quite meaning to, checking the readout on reflex, and found his mana sitting noticeably lower than it should have been. Had I activated them? The realisation arrived slow and a little embarrassing. He'd genuinely forgotten — the boots he'd taken off that vortex fight weeks ago carried an active skill, a short burst of speed, and somewhere in that match, apparently, his body had used it. Once, as far as he could actually work out, not the three times the referee had claimed.

He thought back through it properly now: the first burst had just been his own improved stats doing what weeks of training had actually built into them, nothing more mysterious than that. The second had been Attribute Sharing, Mahkir's boosted strength and speed pouring across the bond exactly the way it was supposed to. Only the third — that strange extra surge right at the very end, on top of everything else already running — had actually been the boots.

The referee had simply miscounted, three separate sources of speed folded together into one explanation that didn't quite match what had really happened. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Which was, Ant realised with a small jolt, probably lucky. Diligent enough to notice the boots lighting up at all, apparently, but not diligent enough to ask what exactly had been powering the other two bursts he'd misattributed to the same source.

If the referee had pushed even slightly harder, had asked the wrong question at the wrong moment, Ant suspected the answer would have led straight back to Mahkir — and he had a distinct, uncomfortable feeling that a Kithren's skill touching the outcome, even indirectly, even through nothing more than borrowed strength rather than a strike on the panel itself, might have been exactly the kind of thing that voided the whole match in Calvin's favour. How had he even activated the boots, though?

Not once, consciously — he was certain of that much. Had it been instinct, some part of him reaching for anything that might close the gap without bothering to inform the rest of him it had done so? Or had the system itself made the call, reading the desperation of the moment and acting on his behalf, the same way Emotional Control had chosen its own moment without waiting for permission?

He glanced down at the boots themselves, unremarkable now, laced tight and giving away nothing about what they'd apparently done without his conscious say in the matter. It unsettled him a little, the idea that his own body might act faster than his mind could track. It had also, he had to admit, just won them a headquarters. He wasn't sure yet how to feel about both of those things being true at once. A question for another day, he decided. But not one he intended to forget.

Maren had gone quiet beside them both, watching the space where Calvin's group had disappeared with an expression Ant couldn't quite read.

"They'll remember this," she said eventually.

"People like that always do."

"Let them," Kalsar said, already unfolding the deed and studying it closely, the same intense focus he brought to anything worth taking seriously.

"Reasonable sized plot," he added a moment later.

"Not far from town at all. Has a small castle on it, a handful of outbuildings." He glanced up.

"If I had to guess, I'd say Calvin's lot tricked some wealthy fool out of this the exact same way they tried to trick us. Doesn't seem the sort of thing five people scrape together honestly."

"So we have a headquarters," Ant said, still turning the boots question over somewhere in the back of his mind.

"We have a headquarters," Kalsar agreed.

"And somewhere for the three of you to actually live, which saves me the trouble of hosting an entire clan out of my own house indefinitely." He stroked his beard slowly, the way he always did when part of his attention had already wandered somewhere else.

"A productive morning, all told. Wasn't expecting quite this much productivity when we set out." The queue behind them had reformed properly now, though it looked different than it had an hour ago — plenty of people had clearly stepped out of line entirely to watch the match, and now those same people were watching Ant instead, murmuring to each other, a few of them pointing outright.

He caught fragments of it as they walked back toward their place in line: "that's the one," and "beat all five of them, I heard," and, once, a fragment that sounded uncomfortably close to his own name, though he couldn't have said where anyone here would have learned it. Ant had never cared much for that kind of attention, not even before any of this, back when the only thing that ever drew eyes toward him had been the absence stamped across his forehead rather than anything he'd actually done.

This felt different in a way he didn't have the words for yet, and not entirely comfortable either.

"Get used to it," Kalsar said, not unkindly, catching the direction of his gaze.

"Word travels fast in a place like this. By tonight half the clan hall will have heard some version of what happened out here, and it won't be the accurate one."

"Wonderful," Ant muttered.

"Could be worse," Maren offered.

"At least this version has you winning." He kept his eyes down anyway, focusing instead on Mahkir at his feet.

"Ready?" he asked quietly.

"It's now or never." Mahkir considered the question with his usual unhurried calm, tail curling once. I was born ready, he said. Let's go. The queue moved slowly, the ordinary business of registration continuing around them as though nothing unusual had happened at all, though Ant caught more than one curious glance thrown their way as they shuffled forward.

Maren spent most of the wait re-reading the deed over Kalsar's shoulder, occasionally pointing something out in a low voice — a boundary marker here, a mention of water rights there — while Kalsar nodded along, clearly already turning the practicalities of an actual headquarters over in his head. Ant used the time differently, running through the morning properly for the first time since it had started. The queue. The wager.

Kalsar's win, then the twist, then Maren's loss, then his own turn standing in front of that panel with everything riding on it. He thought about the boots, and the notification, and the particular way Mahkir's fury had felt pouring through the bond, raw and wordless and entirely outside anything either of them had planned for. None of it had gone the way he'd expected when they'd left Kalsar's yard that morning. Somehow it had still worked out.

It took another ten minutes or so for the group to actually reach the front of the queue, and when they did, a guard — a woman this time, her expression entirely professional despite the whispers still trailing behind them — waved them through without ceremony. Ant stepped through the doorway, and for no particular reason he could name, a quiet ease settled into his chest. Today, he thought, was going to be a good day.