Paragon of Skills

chapter 261

The Sacrifice looks at Cecilia, who's on her knees, probably not too far from death.

But everyone's focused on Jacob. In that moment, no one notices her.

The wooden leg buckles further and she drops. One hand on the ground. The other pressed to her chest. Her mouth is open but she is not screaming. She is breathing in small, sharp pulls.

Fifty thousand people are watching Jacob Cloud fight inside the arena. No one is looking at the girl in the trap zone.

She is going to be dead in about one minute.

Maelthra's voice suddenly returns.

He's weak and vulnerable. Kill Jacob Cloud. And retrieve my daughter. NOW.

He looks at Cecilia on the ground.

He looks at the arena where Jacob Cloud is fighting.

He looks at Iskara.

The silence returns.

A different one. Older.

I know this silence.

His left side goes cold.

***

The sleeping hall is long and narrow and lit by nothing.

There are no windows. The ceiling is low stone, close enough that the older children can touch it if they stand on their cots. The cots themselves are arranged in two rows of twelve, bolted to the floor at even intervals, each one identical: thin mattress, single blanket, no pillow. The blankets, the mattresses, and, of course, even the stone are gray.

Everything is.

The boy lies on his cot with his hands flat against his stomach, fingers interlaced, the way they taught him to sleep. He is six. His eyes are open. He counts the drips from the leak in the far corner. One drip every eleven seconds. He has counted twelve hundred and thirty-six drips.

The other children are sleeping. Twenty-three of them, arranged in the cots on either side of him. They breathe in different rhythms. The boy knows each one. The girl in cot four snores lightly through her nose. The boy in cot nine grinds his teeth. The boy in cot seventeen whispers in his sleep, words that the boy cannot make out and does not try to.

They are all potential Sacrifices. The program keeps them here until they are sorted. Some will be moved to specialized training. Some will be moved to other facilities. Some will simply stop being here one morning, and no one will mention it, and their cot will be stripped, hastily cleaned, and be readied for someone else.

The boy has watched this happen six times in four months.

He tracks each disappearance. Name, cot number, last observed behavior, probable cause of removal. He does not know what happens to the removed children.

Cot two. Empty since the fifth day. The boy who was there could not stop crying. Removed.

Cot eleven. Empty since the nineteenth day. The girl who was there bit a handler. Removed.

Cot twenty. Empty since yesterday. The boy who was there could not complete the endurance drill. Removed.

He lies in the dark and counts drips and does not cry and does not bite handlers and completes every drill, and so his cot is still occupied and will remain occupied until his body or his compliance fails, at which point it will be stripped and re-made and someone else will lie here counting drips.

On drip one thousand two hundred and fifty-four, the door opens.

It is a small sound. The hinges are oiled, because the handlers oil them, because the handlers like to enter without warning. But the boy hears it.

A handler enters. The boy does not open his eyes. He tracks the footsteps. Heavy boots, measured pace, moving along the center aisle between the rows of cots. The handler stops at cot fourteen. There is a sound, a blanket being pulled back, a small body being lifted. A child makes a noise, not quite a word, something between a question and a whimper, cut short by a hand or a look or simple exhaustion.

The handler carries the child out. The door closes.

Cot fourteen is empty now.

The boy opens his eyes and looks at the ceiling.

Cot fourteen. The boy with the stammer. Removed.

He turns his head to the left. The cot beside him, cot six, is occupied.

The girl is new.

She arrived eight days ago. She is small, smaller than anyone else in the hall, and her hair is pale blonde and cut short above her ears. Her tunic is white and too large for her, the hem bunched around her ankles where she has tried to fold it and has not managed. She sleeps on her side with her knees pulled up and her hands tucked under her chin.

She is four. Maybe younger.

The boy watches her breathe. Her breathing is the quietest in the hall. Barely there. A shallow rise and fall that he has to concentrate to hear.

Name: unknown. Cot number: six. Status: present. Observable behaviors: quiet, compliant, does not interact with other children, does not speak during meals, follows instructions with a small delay.

She is unlikely to survive the program.

The boy knows this the way he knows the drip count. The program selects for speed, for responsiveness, for the absence of hesitation. The delay is a flag. A handler will notice it. And then cot six will be empty and re-made.

Irrelevant.

He turns his head back to the ceiling.

But something stays. Pressure behind his sternum that his mind has not authorized. He has felt it since she arrived, a pull, faint but constant. It lives in his blood, in his mana pathways, in the deep channels that the old man says will open when he is older.

He cannot categorize it. He has compared it to every sensation the program has taught him to identify: threat-response, hunger, cold, the adrenaline of the training room. It matches nothing, and yet it pulls toward cot six.

The girl in cot six has turned in her sleep. She is facing him now. Her eyes are closed. Her mouth is slightly open and her breathing is the same, shallow and barely present, and one of her hands has slipped out from under her chin and is resting on the edge of her mattress, fingers curled loosely toward him.

The boy looks at the hand.

He does not move.

He counts drips until morning.

***

The training yard is cold and bright.

The handlers have the children in rows. Sixteen of them, standing on stone, barefoot. The exercise is basic: circulate small rivulets of mana, an amount even a newborn could summon, to the palm, hold it there, release it on command. The younger children are expected to fail. The exercise exists to measure baseline, to determine which bodies will open and which will not.

The boy completes the exercise on the first attempt.

His palm glows faintly. The handler nods, failing to hide that he's impressed, and moves on. The boy lowers his hand and watches the others.

Most of them manage some version of it. A glow, a flicker, a brief pulse that dies before the handler reaches them.

The girl from cot six is in the second row.

She stands with her hands at her sides, very still. The handler reaches her and gives the command. The girl lifts her palm. She holds it in front of her face and stares at it.

Nothing happens.

The handler waits. The girl stares. Her face is empty and focused, the way all their faces are empty and focused, but there is something else underneath. The boy can see it from three rows away. The delay.

The handler tells her to try again.

She tries again.

Nothing.

The handler makes a note on a tablet and moves on. The girl lowers her hand. She does not look at anyone. She stands in the second row and her hand drops to her side and she is very still.

She cannot circulate Mana.

The boy makes a mental note.

Cot six. No mana response at baseline test. Probability of program continuation: low.

He looks at the handler making notes. The handler is not looking at the girl. The handler is already moving to the next child. But the note has been made.

The boy knows what that means.

He turns away.

The pull in his chest is stronger now, or he is more aware of it. It does not change when he turns away from her.

***

The boy starts the following week.

One evening, in the hour between the last meal and lights-out, the girl from cot six is sitting cross-legged on the floor near the wall trying to circulate mana, and the boy is passing by, and he stops.

She is holding her palm up. Staring at it. Her face is concentrated and her breathing is too fast and her wrist is angled wrong. She has been watching the other children do it and she has copied what she saw, but what she saw was the result, not the technique. Her fingers are curled inward instead of extended. Her elbow is locked. The mana pathway from her core to her palm is kinked at two points and will not flow.

The boy kneels beside her without even realizing it. Without knowing why.

Silently, he takes her wrist and rotates it fifteen degrees outward. He extends her fingers, one at a time, positioning each one the way he positions his. Index here. Thumb locked. The angle is wrong for her, her hands are very small, so he adjusts further, improvising, finding the position that matches her proportions.

Her hand is cold.

He moves to her elbow. Unlocks it. Shifts the angle until the pathway unkinks.

"Breathe slower," he says quietly.

It is the first word he has spoken to another child here in... he doesn't remember. Still, his voice is flat and carries no inflection.

She breathes slower.

He watches her palm. Nothing happens. But the pathway is open now.

He releases her wrist. Stands. Walks away.

He does not look back.

He comes back the next evening. And the evening after that. And the one after that.

***

The old man finds him in the corridor after training.

His hand closes on the boy's shoulder. The boy stops.

"Come."

The underground voice.

They walk to the training room. The oil lamp is lit. The stone walls are close. The old man sits the boy down on the bench and stands in front of him with his arms crossed.

He does not speak for a long time.

"The girl," the old man says.

The boy says nothing.

"The girl in cot six. You have been helping her."

It is not a question.

"Her Mana pathways were not conducing Mana," the boy says. "Her form is incorrect. I corrected it."

"I know what you did."

The boy watches his face. The fracture is there, deeper than the boy has seen it.

"She is your sister."

The word enters the boy's understanding and sits there.

Sister.

"That is the pull," the old man says. "What you feel in your blood. In your channels. Blood recognizing blood. You're both Devils of the same lineage. Well, from the same mother."

The boy stops to evaluate what that means. But he doesn't know. He has no idea. He has not been trained for this in the least. And so, he looks at the old man, thinking about his name for the first time since he heard it whispered.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Varen.

"You must keep away from her."

"Only problems come from this." Varen unfolds his arms. "They monitor attachment. You know this. They will catch you."

I have memorized their shifts, how they change, when they're most likely to enter. They will not catch me.

But the boy says nothing. Yet, some pride has been born just now in his chest.

"If they see you getting close to her, they will use her to control you. Or they will remove her to test you."

The boy looks at the old man's face. The scars. The broken channels. The warm hands that cannot carry mana anymore.

He knows.

The old man straightens.

"Keep away from her." He places a hand on the boy's head. It rests there for one second, warm and heavy. Then it lifts. "Only problems."

The boy does not argue. He does not ask questions.

Sister.

Only problems.

He closes his eyes.

***

She comes to his cot on the ninth night after the old man's warning.

The boy is awake.

He hears her feet on the stone. Small feet, bare, making almost no sound. She crosses the narrow gap between their cots, a distance of perhaps two feet, and climbs onto his mattress. She does not ask. She does not speak. She presses herself against his left side and curls there, knees drawn up, her head against his ribs, and she goes still.

His arm lifts.

His body completes the motion without consulting him. The arm rises and settles across her shoulders and his hand finds her hair, the short, pale strands of it, and rests there.

His fingers do not move. They simply hold.

She is warm.

The warmth enters his left side and spreads inward.

He lies in the dark with his hand on her hair and his sister against his ribs and he does not count drips.

His body is doing something and his mind is watching from above, detached, and the recording says: my hand is on her head and I did not put it there. I did not... try to put it there. I...

She breathes against his ribs. He can feel each breath as a small expansion of pressure against his left side.

He lies still. She sleeps.

In the morning, he gently brings her to her bed the moment he feels shallow vibrations from down the corridor that leads to the dorm. She is back where she needs to be before the handlers come.

She comes back the next night. And the next.

The boy uses his clawed fingers to make shallow scratches on all the door's hinges, making sure they'll make a small sound when they're turned. Something he's trained himself to look for since he has been conscious.

And every time she comes, his arm lifts each time. His hand finds her hair each time.

He does not count the nights.

He does not file this the way he files everything else.

***

They take her out of the line during afternoon drills.

The boy is in the third row, she is in the second, and two handlers enter the training yard and walk directly to her; one of them places a hand on the back of her neck and steers her forward, out of the line, into the center of the yard where the stone is clean and the light is bright.

The other handler looks at the boy.

"You. Stay."

The boy stays.

Of course they know.

They push her to her knees.

She goes down without resistance. Her hands are at her sides. Her face is empty. She has been trained to be empty the way they have all been trained, but the boy can see the small delay in the way her knees touch stone, the lag between the command and the compliance.

The handler who brought her forward produces a thin rod, a correction tool that strikes nerve clusters without breaking skin. The pain is precise, internal, invisible.

The handler strikes her across the shoulders.

She does not make a sound.

The boy watches. His hands are at his sides. His face is arranged the way the program taught him to arrange it: empty, still, attentive. He is a model of compliance.

The handler strikes again.

Something blooms inside the boy. Not pride, this time. Not a calculation.

Something makes his body shiver ever so slightly and he's caught by a handler.

"Is there a problem?" The handler, happy to have caught him, asks.

The boy shakes his head, "no, sir."

I will take your life, another thought he has no idea where it comes from. Rage that he has never felt before, something that he is maybe experiencing for the first time.

The girl's body jerks forward. Her hands fly up to catch herself and she lands on her palms and her hair falls across her face and she is breathing hard now, ragged and fast, and she is four years old.

If I do anything, we both die.

The thought forms and locks.

The handler turns to the boy.

"Watch."

He watches.

The handler strikes her again. Again. Five times. Six. Each strike lands on a different nerve cluster and each one produces a different reaction, a flinch, a gasp, a full-body seize that drives her flat against the stone. She does not scream. She just presses her face into the ground and her fingers claw at stone and she makes a sound that is not a word, something small and animal, and the boy watches.

His face does not change.

But now, he wants to do something. Yet, if he does...

If I do anything, we both die.

The handlers finish. One of them leans down and speaks into the girl's ear. The boy cannot hear the words.

They leave her on the stone and walk away.

The boy stands in the third row. His face is empty and still.

The girl lies on the ground for a long time. Then she gets up. She does not look at him.

She walks back to the line with a gait that favors her right side and takes her place in the second row and stands still.

The boy does not look at her.

His left side is very cold.

***

The old man comes to him that night and brings him out.

The dorm's corridor is dark. The other children are in their cots. The old man enters without sound, which should not be possible for a man his age with his injuries, and kneels beside the boy's cot before taking him in his steady arms and bringing him to a different room without anyone noticing.

"Give me your hands."

The boy extends his hands.

The old man takes them. The grip is different. Not the usual teaching grip. Firm and deliberate.

"I am going to show you something." The old man's voice is the underground voice but lower, almost inaudible. "It will hurt. You need to understand what it costs."

The boy nods.

The old man rotates his wrists into the inverted position. The one from the training room. Force turned inward, the loop, the contradiction. But he pushes further. Past the position that sent the electric jolt through the boy's arms months ago. Past the boundary that the old man pulled him back from.

The boy's channels light up.

Every mana pathway in his forearms ignites simultaneously. His vision whites out. His body tries to seize, tries to curl, but the old man's grip holds his hands in place and the fire does not stop. It spreads. Up his forearms, into his biceps, across his shoulders, down his spine. The force of obedience fighting the force of disobedience, the... oaths that bind him. The boy is six years old and his body is trying to rip itself apart from the inside.

The old man releases.

The fire cuts out. The boy's arms drop to the mattress and he lies there, gasping, his body shaking in small, controlled tremors.

The old man's face is close to his. The fracture is wide open now, a crack that runs through the old man's entire expression.

"That is what it costs."

Varen's voice is not steady.

"That is the magic of Devils. It can break any oath, any seal, any chain they put on you temporarily. You pay the full cost of disobedience with your body. Every binding they carved into your blood, you can burn it out. But the cost is everything."

He grips the boy's shoulder.

"Don't."

One word. Hard and brittle.

"You feel what it did just now, and that was a fraction. The real thing, the full cost, it would..." He stops. Breathes. "You need to still be alive tomorrow. Whatever they do, whatever they take. You be here tomorrow."

The boy looks at the old man's face. And finally, he asks one question.

"Why?"

The old man is quiet for a long time. His hand is still on the boy's shoulder.

His grip tightens.

The boy doesn't understand.

"Just dont close your eyes," the old man says. "Stay alert. Stay alive. Be here tomorrow."

The boy nods, unsure for the first time in his life.

The old man releases his shoulder. Stands. His hand passes over the boy's head once. Then he turns and walks out of the sleeping hall without sound.

The boy goes back to his cot.

***

The boy rejects her sister the next night.

She crosses the gap between their cots, two feet of cold stone, and reaches for him, and he turns away.

He turns onto his right side, facing the wall, and does not move.

She stands beside his cot. He can hear her breathing. The shallow, barely-there breathing. She does not touch him. She does not speak. She stands there for a long time, a presence on his left side that he can feel without seeing, and then she goes back to her cot.

The boy lies facing the wall.

Be here tomorrow.

He stops watching her during the day. He stops positioning himself near her in the training yard. He stops correcting her form during the evening hour. When she enters a room, he does not turn. When she stands in the second row, he does not track her breathing.

His drills are perfect. His compliance is absolute. His face is empty and still. And the handlers make notes on their tablets and the notes say that the intervention worked and the attachment has been severed and Subject 7 is performing at optimal parameters.

He lies in his cot each night and faces the wall and counts drips.

She comes back the second night. He turns her away.

She comes back the third night. He turns her away.

The fourth night, she stands beside his cot longer than before. Her breathing changes. Uneven, hitching. But she does not cry. She stands there, four years old, barefoot on cold stone, her hand reaching and not reaching, and then she goes back.

The fifth night, she does not come.

The sixth night, she does not come.

The boy lies facing the wall and counts drips. His left side is cold. He does not turn.

Be here tomorrow.

She tries once more on the eighth night. The boy does not turn. She touches his shoulder. One small hand, barely any weight. He does not move. She removes the hand. Goes back.

The boy's arm does not lift. He holds it against his body and does not let it do what it wants to do.

This is Baal performing be here tomorrow.

***

On the fourteenth night, she does not come.

She simply is not there.

The boy lies in his cot facing the wall. He counts drips. He waits for the sound of small feet on stone, the barely-there breathing, the presence on his left that he has spent two weeks refusing.

It does not come.

He counts six hundred drips. Then twelve hundred. Then eighteen hundred. The night is five hours old and she has not come and the boy is lying on his side facing the wall and his left side is cold and his arm is pressed against his body and his hand is curled into a fist and he has not turned.

Morning comes.

The handlers open the door. The gray pre-dawn light filters in. The boy sits up. He looks at cot six.

It is empty.

The blanket is folded. The mattress is flat. There is nothing on it and no indication that anyone was ever there. The cot has been stripped and re-made.

The boy looks at the empty cot for three seconds. Then he looks away and places his feet on the stone and stands and interlaces his fingers behind his back, the morning position, and waits for the handler to give the first command.

His face is empty.

Removed.

***

He runs carelessly. An handler even shouts at him; something unthinkable for a candidate Sacrifice.

The corridors of the facility are stone and torchlight and he runs through them without permission, without clearance, without that measured compliance of his.

No, no. How do I use it?! How do I summon it?!

His bare feet desperately strike stone and the sound echoes and another handler in a side corridor sees him and shouts and the boy does not stop.

I want her back! Please, please, I want her back!

He gets to Varen's training room with tears threatening to spill from his eyes and his breath so ragged he wheezes.

He reaches the door with his small hand.

I need that power, Varen! I need it! Please! Maybe I can do something!

The boy is still a child.

Yet, the door is already open.

He suddenly stops in front of it.

The room is empty.

The lamp is out. The books are gone. The bench is still there, bolted to the floor, but the surface is bare.

The old man is gone.

Removed.

The handler catches up and starts whipping him on the spot.

The boy's eyes stay on the empty room, and his tears are slowly swallowed back into his green eyes.

***

The boy lies in his cot. He is facing left.

He is looking at cot six.

His arm is extended across the gap. His hand rests on the empty mattress. The gray fabric is cold under his palm.

His fingers press into the mattress.

He holds for a long time. Minutes. Hours. He does not count drips.

Then he closes his hand.

Gets up.

Interlaces his fingers behind his back.

Faces the wall.

***

The silence breaks.

The arena is loud. Fifty thousand voices and the crash of combat inside the ring. Cecilia is on the ground. Iskara is warping, the mouth splitting wider across the sealed face. Jacob Cloud is fighting and Maelthra's voice is in his head and the seal is burning him now that he's not obeying.

The Sacrifice stands at the edge of the front row.

He looks at Cecilia on the ground. She is trying to push herself up and failing. Her wooden leg has no purchase on the cracked stone.

His body is already moving.

His legs carry him forward.

He simply stops wearing the mask. The painted warmth, the soft eyes, the relaxed mouth. He lets it go.

His face is whatever his face is. He does not check.

He walks toward Cecilia.

Maelthra's voice hits him but he tunes her out.

The oath attacks him. Fire in his blood, the old fire. His channels light up and his body tries to seize and his vision narrows to a white-hot point. He burns a piece of the reserve he has kept sealed in his core since before the tournament. The seizure breaks and he takes another step.

Maelthra's voice, sharp now, stripped of composure.

What are you doing?! Attack! Don't move slow! If you take another step like that, I WILL KILL YOU!

He takes another step.

He burns the rest. The energy rips through his channels and hits the oath-bindings and the old man's technique fires.

Maelthra's voice gets kicked out of his head.

The silence returns.

Pain floods in. His arms shake. His vision blurs. Something in his chest tears.

He steps onto the traps.

The afflictions pulse toward him.

They do not touch him.

His aura, unsealed for the first time since he entered the academy, radiates outward.

He reaches Cecilia.

She looks up at him. Her eye is wide.

He kneels.

He picks her up.

His arms are shaking and his body is failing and he lifts her. She ends up against his left side. Her head against his ribs.

His hand moves toward her hair.

He stops it.

He carries her to the seats.

The crowd is noticing. Heads turning.

He sets her down in the front row. Her wooden leg finds the stone. She grabs his sleeve.

"B--Baal, what are you doing?"

Her voice is rough. Her eye is red-rimmed, watering, but she is looking at him with the same hard expression she had when she sat at his table and read her piece of paper.

He looks at her.

"That wasn't your place."

She stares at him. Her grip tightens on his sleeve.

"You asked me once what real strength looks like."

Cecilia looks at him.

He smiles.

It is a small and uneven smile.

"You're about to find out."

He releases her hand from his sleeve, finger by finger. She lets go.

He turns toward the arena.

Maelthra tries to reach him but can't for now.

His aura climbs.

It detonates. The stone vibrates. The air pressure shifts. Students in the first ten rows grab their seats.

Everyone turns.

Jacob Cloud turns. Nimirea turns. The Dark Champions on their platform turn. Iskara pauses in the middle of her charge and turns.

On his raised platform above the arena, the Prophet frowns.

Maelthra, in the VIP box, goes still.

The Sacrifice walks toward the arena. His body is failing.

He does not slow down.

The sun is warm on his face.

He feels it now.