Chương 51: Chapter 50 - A Ringer

Calvin turned toward the small huddle of his remaining companions and murmured a few words too low for Ant to catch. A moment later, a fifth figure stepped out from behind the wooden stalls lining the edge of the queue — someone who hadn't been standing with the others at all, who Ant hadn't clocked once in the whole time they'd been watching this play out. He was younger than Calvin, leaner, moving with the loose, unhurried gait of someone who'd never once had to prove anything in a hurry.

His Kithren padded out beside him from the same hidden spot, a lean, quick-eyed creature that hadn't been visible anywhere near the group until this exact moment. Maren's hand found Ant's sleeve, gripping briefly.

"I didn't see him at all," she said, low.

"Not once, the whole time we've been standing here."

"Neither did I," Ant said.

"You had someone else with you the whole time," he said aloud, more statement than question.

"Waiting his turn," Calvin said, entirely unbothered.

"Didn't think he'd be needed this early, given how things were going." Ant felt a cold weight settle in his stomach — not surprise exactly, more the confirmation of a suspicion he hadn't let himself fully form until now. This wasn't luck, and it wasn't the honest best of three Calvin had made it sound like either. This was someone Calvin had kept in reserve on purpose, tucked out of sight until the moment he actually mattered.

"He's a ringer," Ant said quietly, mostly to himself. Kalsar had gone very quiet beside him, arms folded, studying the newcomer with the flat, assessing look of a man cataloguing every visible detail before the match even began.

"Doesn't matter what he calls himself," he said eventually.

"What matters is whether he's actually good, or whether Calvin's just banking on us being too rattled by the surprise to notice if he isn't."

"Does it look like a bluff to you?" Kalsar didn't answer right away. That, in itself, told Ant everything he needed to know. Mahkir, he thought. What do you make of him? Hidden on purpose, Mahkir said, his tone flat and certain, from where he sat at Kalsar's feet a few paces back from the panel — close enough to watch, far enough to stay clear of the game itself. No one keeps a person out of sight by accident, not for this long. He was never meant to be seen until now.

The newcomer stepped up to the panel without a word, rolling his neck once. His Kithren settled a short distance behind him, same as Mahkir had, well clear of the frame itself. The referee reset the counter.

"Your opponent's ready when you are," he said to Ant. Ant stepped up to his own panel, feeling the weight of everyone's attention settle onto him all at once — Calvin's group with their flat, patient confidence, the growing crowd who'd drifted over expecting entertainment and gotten a genuine contest instead, and Maren and Kalsar standing a short distance behind him, Mahkir beside them.

"You've got this," Maren said quietly. Ant didn't answer. He wasn't sure he believed it yet. Kalsar leaned in slightly, voice pitched low.

"Don't think your way through it. Let your hands do what they've already learned to do."

"That's easy for you to say. You actually know this game."

"I know it because I stopped overthinking it, decades ago," Kalsar said.

"Same thing applies to you now as applied to me then." The referee tapped both frames. Level one lit gentle and forgiving, and Ant cleared it without much trouble at all — the strength and speed the last few weeks had actually built into him doing most of the work. Fifty lights fell clean, not a single life spent. Beside him, his opponent cleared the same level with the same easy indifference Ant had already seen twice today.

Level two came and went almost as smoothly, the paired points demanding quicker decisions than level one but nothing Ant's improved reflexes couldn't handle. He finished it with his three lives untouched, and for the first time all morning allowed himself the smallest flicker of real confidence. The ease of it hadn't gone unnoticed. The ringer's own rhythm had wavered slightly partway through level two, his eyes cutting toward Ant's panel more than once, his earlier confidence visibly cracking.

Two clean levels from someone with no visible history in this game wasn't nothing, and he clearly knew it. Level three took that uncertainty and answered it for him. The pattern doubled in complexity, and where Kalsar had found some rhythm to hold onto, Ant found nothing — his hand hesitating on decisions that should have been simple. A light died untouched. Then another, barely three strikes later. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

The ringer's shoulders eased visibly at the sound of the second chime, whatever doubt he'd been carrying draining out of him all at once. He settled back into his earlier loose confidence, no longer bothering to check Ant's panel between his own strikes. Two lives spent. One left.

Behind Ant, Mahkir had gone very still, watching Ant hesitate, watching him second-guess himself into mistakes that had nothing to do with skill and everything to do with panic — and unable to do a single thing about any of it from where the rules had put him. No claws to swing, no fire to breathe, nothing that could reach across the distance and simply strike the lights for him.

Mahkir had never once in his short life been forced to sit that still while someone he cared about struggled, and the moment that second light died, his patience ran out entirely. Kalsar noticed first. He glanced down and went rigid, a sharp breath escaping him, and Maren followed his eyes a half-second later, her own hand flying to her mouth.

Mahkir's fur had begun to smoke faintly at the edges, his amber eyes gone dark red, a low, barely audible growl building somewhere in his chest that hadn't been there a moment ago. Rage was pouring off him in a way neither of them had ever seen, visible now even to eyes that had no bond to feel it through. A notification bloomed across Ant's vision, sudden and unbidden, right as the panel prepared to light the next point. Emotional Control triggered — Kithren entering berserk state. All attributes +20%.

The words landed in the middle of Ant's focus and knocked it sideways. His hand jerked, a fraction too slow, as heat rolled toward him through the bond in a solid wave, humming with a rawness that hadn't asked permission to exist. There was no voice behind it. No words at all. Just anger, pure and wordless. The third light bloomed. Ant's stutter cost him a fraction of a second he didn't have to spare. The idea arrived whole in the same instant he needed it.

Mahkir's boost did nothing for hands that weren't his to move — but the bond didn't only carry one direction.

"Attribute Sharing," Ant breathed, and activated it without waiting to think it through. The thought arrived somewhere underneath the panic, distant but clear. No Kithren, the rules said. Mahkir couldn't strike a light, couldn't touch the panel, couldn't act on the game itself in any way that mattered — and he hadn't. Nothing about what he'd just done had touched the game directly at all. The rules hadn't said a word about what happened to Ant. The bond flared white-hot.

Mahkir's Agility alone sat at twenty-eight, and with the berserk state's twenty percent added on top, it landed at thirty-four — poured now across the link and stacked directly onto Ant's own twenty-eight, the combined total settling into his limbs like a current finally allowed somewhere to go. His hand closed the distance to the light and struck it clean. The panel stayed lit. Third life untouched. And then everything changed.

Ant didn't have time to marvel at it, didn't have room in his head for anything except the next light and the one after that, but the difference was immediate and total — his hand no longer chasing the panel, but arriving before it had properly finished deciding where the next point would appear. He tore through the rest of level three without a single wasted motion, level four opening beneath him in the same rapid cluster that had broken everyone else today, and he cleared it without so much as slowing.

The crowd's silence broke apart entirely. Someone near the front gasped out loud. A ripple of disbelief passed through the onlookers, mouths open, several people leaning forward as though proximity might help them understand what they were watching. Behind Ant, Kalsar's jaw had gone slack, his earlier confidence replaced by something closer to disbelief.

He knew what skills Ant had available — Ant had told him plainly enough, weeks ago, sitting in that yard — but knowing a thing and watching it happen in front of you were entirely different animals, and both his and Maren's faces made that plain enough now.

"That's not—" Maren started, and didn't finish the sentence, her eyes fixed on the panel with the same wide, unblinking attention as everyone else around her. Calvin's remaining companions had stopped looking bored. Their earlier flat patience had curdled into open irritation, arms unfolding, one of them muttering a clipped word to another that Ant didn't catch but didn't need to — the tone alone told him enough. The ringer felt it too.

Ant caught the flicker of it in his peripheral vision, the younger man's easy rhythm breaking as he registered just how far behind he'd suddenly fallen. He pushed harder, visibly rushing now, his own hand snapping toward each light with a speed that hadn't been there a level ago, panic driving him to try and match something his body wasn't built to match. He lost a life to it almost immediately, the rushed strike missing a light he should have caught easily.

Level five arrived, and the crowd had gone properly silent again, the gasps and murmurs swallowed by held breath. Ant didn't feel afraid anymore. He felt Mahkir's fury instead, borrowed and burning, carrying his hands through every impossible pattern the panel threw at him.

Somewhere early in that same level, though Ant wouldn't register it until well after the fact, his opponent's panel went dark for good — three lives spent chasing a pace that had never belonged to him, his attempt ending in a scatter of unstruck light nobody but the referee seemed to notice at all. The counter kept climbing. Past two hundred. Past where Kalsar had fallen. Past everything anyone had managed today.

Calvin's expression had lost every trace of its earlier ease, his eyes fixed on the number with the flat, calculating stare of a man watching a plan come apart in real time. Level five bled into level six, and partway through it the current running through Ant's limbs simply stopped. There was no fading to it, no easing off. One strike he was moving faster than thought, the next his own body was all that answered him, the borrowed strength gone as completely as if it had never been there at all.

Behind him, he felt the exact moment Mahkir's fury broke too — the win no longer in doubt, nothing left for the anger to hold onto once the outcome had already tipped, and the rage that had been pouring off him only minutes earlier simply ran out. Three minutes, Ant understood distantly. That was all Attribute Sharing had ever promised, and it had spent itself down to the second.

Level six's lights demanded real effort again, immediately, no cushion left to catch him, and his own hands — however much they'd learned in the last few minutes — had nothing close to what the level actually required. A light bloomed and died before he'd finished reacting to it. His last life went with it. The panel went dark. Ant stood there for a moment, chest heaving, half expecting the loss to matter more than it did. It didn't.

Whatever total he'd banked in the minutes before the boost ran out, it had already put more distance between him and everyone else today than the entire rest of the match combined.