Chapter 253
The Sacrifice currently lies in a bed, feeling his body ache.
The inn is smaller than the last. It's cheaper than the Hungry Wolf. He picked it for the back entrance and the thin walls. Thin walls carry sound well, which means he can track every footstep in the building without opening his eyes. He definitely does not need something like this; yet, it helps him sleep better.
This room smells like dust and old wood and something faintly sweet that he cannot identify.
He is shaking.
The oaths have not stopped burning. Hours later, the channels carved into his blood still pulse with residual fire. It's a slow, sickening heat that moves through his veins in waves. His stomach turns with each pulse. There is bruising across his ribs and down his left forearm where the seizure drove him into the ground. It shouldn't be there: he's not weak. But the oaths... they're supposed to rot the flesh from the inside out when not followed. He has an even deeper ache in his forehead where it struck the earth.
He pulls the blanket tighter and it does nothing.
The robes from yesterday are on the floor beside the bed. He can see them in the dark, they're crumpled, dirt-stained at the knees and chest, and one sleeve was torn by the the lightning that enveloped him.
He catalogues the damage without moving to pick them up.
Replaceable.
His body is very cold.
He closes his eyes. The nausea rolls through him again, even though it's not sharp enough to make him physically sick. It's sort of just present, like weather. His breathing is shallow and controlled.
His hands are flat against his stomach under the blanket, fingers interlaced, the way he was taught to sleep in the program.
The program.
Where Sacrifices are made.
Selected by a pool of... Blood of the Devils, they're a bunch of people bred for specific traits in secretive facilities.
The breeding program is older than most nations. And it produces one thing: weapons shaped like children, trained from birth to fight, to obey, to die on command.
He has no memory of a time before it.
Sleep pulls at him.
He lets it.
Then, as it sometimes happen against his will, a dream takes over.
***
The old man's hands are on his.
The boy is young. Six, maybe seven. His fingers are small inside the old man's grip, and the old man is repositioning them with the care of someone threading a needle.
"Index finger here. Thumb locked against the second knuckle. Wrist angled inward, not outward."
The old man speaks with an iron voice, and yet everyone knows he is broken.
Everyone in the program knows it.
His body was once powerful and has been deliberately diminished. His Mana veins were destroyed.
There are scars running along his forearms and up his neck where the channels were severed. He cannot fight. He cannot access his own power. This is because they broke him so he could teach without being a threat.
Before, he used to be a Sacrifice.
One of the best, or so they say.
Despite being crippled, his hands are warm.
And when he moves the boy's fingers, there is no tremor.
"Like this," the old man says. His voice is low. Quiet. The room they are in is underground, lit by a single oil lamp, and the walls are close enough that the boy can hear the old man's breathing. "Feel where the force wants to go."
The boy feels it. The old man has positioned his hands so that the energy, hypothetical, at this point, because the boy is too young for true Mana circulation, will flow inward. Into the wrists, into the forearms, back toward the core. The opposite of every striking technique the boy has been taught.
"Force flows outward when you hit," the old man says. "That is what they teach you. Outward. Always outward. Projection. Domination. Overwhelming the target."
The boy nods.
"This is the other direction."
The old man adjusts the boy's left hand by one millimeter and the boy feels the alignment change. The energy path tightens. Locks. What was a flow becomes a loop, circling back on itself, feeding into its own origin.
"Inversion," the old man says. "Force turned against its own channel. The body contradicts itself."
The boy studies the old man's face. The scars. The destroyed veins. The steady hands.
Is that what happened to him? C--contradiction?
The boy is so young he's still learning words and logic. Yet, the old man has told him not to speak to anyone of these secret lessons. The boy knows there's something special with him, and the old man told him he needs to be taught before he starts circulating Mana.
"The contradiction is the mechanism," the old man continues. "You do not overcome the force. You let it tear itself apart."
The boy is a genius, but he often has no idea about what the old man means with his words. But he has to learn, in a few weeks, he'll start training his Mana.
He holds the boy's hands in the inverted position for a long time. Neither of them speaks. The lamp flickers. Somewhere above them, stone echoes with the sound of other children training. There are muffled impacts, then a shout, and then only silence.
Then the old man pushes the boy's hands one position further.
It is a small adjustment. A rotation of the wrists, a shift in the angle of the fingers. But something jolts through the boy's wrists. It's very sharp and electric... and wrong. A flash of pain that has no source and no direction. It fires through his forearms and vanishes.
The old man pulls the boy's hands back immediately.
Firm. The correction is instant, precise, the way you'd pull a child's hand off a hot surface.
The boy looks at the old man's face.
There is something there that the boy does not have a word for yet. The old man's jaw is set. His eyes are steady. But there is a movement in his expression. It's a fracture, hairline-thin, that appears and disappears so fast the boy almost misses it. The old man is looking at the boy's wrists as though he has just placed something sharp in a child's hands and cannot take it back.
"Not for them," the old man says.
His voice is low and steady. The voice he uses when no one else is in the room.
The boy files the words. He does not understand them. But he does understand that the old man is telling him something that exists outside the program, outside the trainers, outside the orders.
Not for them.
The old man releases his hands. Pats them once in a gesture that is not part of any technique. The boy does not know what to do with it, so he holds still.
The old man turns back and starts collecting books all around the room and documents. This is where the man teaches much of his knowledge.
Suddenly, the boy feels a presence at the edge of the room, near the doorway.
It's a girl .
She is very small. Blonde hair, pale, almost white, cut short above her ears. She wears a white tunic that is too large for her, the hem brushing her ankles. She stands in the doorway with her hands at her sides and looks at the boy.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
New, the boy thinks. Potential Sacrifice. Very young. Four, perhaps.
She does not speak. She does not move toward him or away from him. Her eyes are wide and still and they carry nothing that the boy can read.
He looks at her the same way.
The program has taught both of them to be still and empty before they were old enough to know what those words even meant.
Yet, the boy feels something weird in his chest looking at the girl.
The old man turns and sees it.
His eyes flicker between them. Between the boy, the girl, the boy again. Something changes in his face. The fracture from before returns, deeper. His hand closes into a loose fist.
He looks worried, but the boy does not understand why.
The old man's face blurs. The light from the lamp stretches and thins. The warmth of the calloused hands is gone. The girl in the doorway dissolves first. White tunic, pale hair, gone. Then the room follows, the close walls pulling apart into dark.
***
The Sacrifice opens his eyes.
He is very cold.
The oath, he tells himself.
The room is pale with early morning light. Sun comes through the window at an angle, a thin bar of gold that crosses the bed and rests on his cheek. He can see it. He can feel the faint pressure of it against his skin.
Yet, he cannot feel its warmth.
His body aches. The bruising across his ribs pulses with each breath. Not sharp, just constant. His stomach is hollow and sour. When he swallows, his throat is dry enough to sting. The nausea has settled into something lower, a weight in his abdomen that does not leave.
He stares at the ceiling.
The old man's face flashes behind his eyes. Just for a moment. Calloused hands. A voice that was low and steady. Not for them. The details are already dissolving. He tries to hold the face and it slips, the way water runs through closed fingers. He can see the shape of it, the scars, the set of the jaw, but the specifics are gone.
Another dream.
He has had severals the past weeks.
He lies still. His hands are where he left them, flat against his stomach, with fingers interlaced. The sun moves across his cheek and he watches it, tracking its angle.
Nothing.
His hand moves to his side. Touches the space below his ribs and recoils.
Somewhere in the building, footsteps. Heavy. A man, probably the innkeeper. Descending stairs. Then lighter ones. A servant, moving left to right along the ground floor. A door opens. Closes. The smell of cooking oil reaches him faintly from below.
None of it is a threat.
Then, a thought slips into his mind.
Maelthra noticed her.
The calculation surfaces on its own. He did not call for it. But the program trained him to run threat assessments the way other people breathe.
She looked at her.
The tournament is today. He turns the problem over in his mind.
The Dark Champions arrive today.
He runs variations. Timing is the only variable that matters. Jacob Cloud will be fighting and between the crowd, the chaos, the attention on the ring... If the Sacrifice enters during a bout, during the moment between one strike and the next, the deathblow can land before anyone reacts. He will step onto the ring while Jacob Cloud engages his opponent and deliver the killing strike from the blind angle.
Twelve seconds. Maybe fewer. Jacob Cloud's combat response time is fast but not fast enough to compensate for a flanking attack during active engagement. He will not see it coming. He has not seen my abilities.
The calculation completes. He examines it from every angle and finds no flaw.
I kill him. Then I die.
He arrives at zero.
Zero outcomes where he survives. Zero paths that lead anywhere other than the ring and the strike and the floor. He has been arriving at zero his entire life. This is not new. This is the shape of every calculation he has ever run.
Minutes pass. The sun moves. The sounds below settle into the rhythm of a morning routine. Plates, voices, the scrape of chairs.
The Sacrifice decides it's time he gets out of bed.
His body requires a little food to prime healing from the oath's power. He has been trained to maintain the body regardless of the body's state. Eat when eating is needed, sleep when sleep is possible, move when movement is required. The program does not permit waste.
The robes on the floor are ruined. He opens his Interspatial Ring and takes a spare set of plain dark blue fabric. He pulls them on and the fabric sits against the bruising along his ribs and he controls the flinch.
He pauses at the door.
His hand goes to his face. The forehead bruise is there, a dull ache above his left eye. His hand goes to his expression. He does not touch his skin. He stands still for a moment and arranges himself. The mouth relaxes. The eyes soften to their usual warmth. The brow smooths. The painted ease that the world sees. Now, he's again the charming, measured, faintly amused Devil.
The mask goes on.
And so, walks downstairs.
The common room is half-empty. Morning light comes through the front windows in wide, dusty bars.
Three other patrons. Two merchants arguing quietly in a corner, a woman eating alone near the door. None of them look at him. None of them are threats.
He takes the corner table. His back is to the wall. He can see the front entrance and the kitchen door and the stairs. He orders something. Bread, he thinks, and water. He does not eat it when it arrives.
The bread sits on the plate. The water sits in the cup. His hands are on the table, one on each side of the plate, and he is not looking at the food. He is looking at nothing.
Three hours. Perhaps four. The tournament begins at midday.
He waits.
The bread starts going stale. The water stays untouched. The merchants leave. The woman near the door finishes her meal and goes. New patrons filter in. None relevant, none watched.
Then he feels her presence.
***
Cecilia stands in the doorway of the inn.
She is breathing hard. Her shoulders rise and fall with each breath, and there is sweat along her hairline despite the cool morning. She walked here. Far enough that her lungs are still catching up.
She hesitates at the door for one beat. Her eye, the good one, scans the room, finds him in the corner, and locks.
Then she comes straight to his table.
The Sacrifice watches her approach but he does not stand.
"How did you find me," he says.
"I asked." She pulls out the chair on his left and sits. "A blonde Devil in azure robes isn't exactly INVISIBLE, Baal."
Practical.
Her one eye is puffy and swollen, while her remaining eye is red-rimmed but dry.
She cried last night. That's over.
What is left is something harder. Anger, certainly.
She figured it out.
She sits on his left.
"I'm coming to the tournament," she says.
The statement sits in the air between them.
He looks at her.
"Don't."
Cecilia's jaw tightens. Her hand, which is resting on the table, curls into a fist and then uncurls.
"I'm coming anyway. It doesn't matter what you say."
He says nothing.
She reaches down. He did not notice the satchel, a worn canvas thing hanging from her shoulder. She places something on the table between them.
The knight book.
He recognizes it immediately. Blood-stained cover, creased spine, the pages warped from moisture and use. The book he found for her when she could not read.
She does not open it.
Instead, she reaches into the satchel again and pulls out a piece of paper.
It is small. It's scrap paper. It has been folded multiple times, creased and re-creased, the edges soft from handling. There are many smudges on it.
She unfolds it on the table with her one hand, pressing it flat with her palm, smoothing the creases. Her fingers are careful. The paper has been worked over. He can see where words were crossed out and rewritten and where the ink pooled because the quill was held too long in one spot
She wrote this with one hand overnight.
Cecilia picks up the paper, holds it close to her good eye, and begins to read.
She reads badly.
"Baal is... s-sev... seventeen."
She pauses.
"He has... golden eyes."
The Sacrifice does not move.
"He does not... l-like... loud rooms."
Her eye flicks up to him for a moment. He is looking at her. His expression has not changed.
"He holds cups too... too hard."
That one comes out steadier. She knows this fact. She has watched him hold cups. Watched his fingers go white at the knuckles, watched him set them down too forcefully, watched the careful way he tries to correct it and doesn't always manage.
"He is... good at..."
She stumbles. Her eye drops to the page. The ink is smudged here. He can see it from across the table, a dark blur where she pressed too hard.
"Teech... teaching."
The word comes out wrong and she knows it and she keeps going.
"He was kind to me and it was not..."
She stops. Looks at the word. Her mouth moves around it silently, rehearsing.
"T-throuble."
He was kind to me and it was not trouble.
The Sacrifice sits very still.
His hands are on the table. His expression is warm, measured, faintly attentive. The mask... the mask... the mask.
He inhales for a little longer than before and does not correct "throuble."
Yet, he always corrects her.
Cecilia reads the last line.
"He m-made a p-p... promise. He will keep it."
She looks at him.
The Sacrifice looks at her.
Promise me that if you ever get that choice, you'll take it. That you won't betray yourself just to win.
He says nothing.
He does not touch the paper. He does not touch the knight book. He looks at the door she walked through. The front entrance, where the morning light is coming in dusty and warm and entirely out of reach.
Cecilia folds the paper.
She does it carefully, one-handed, pressing each crease with her thumb. The folds are not precise. They are slightly off-center. But they hold. She sets the paper on the table beside the knight book.
She pushes the chair back. Stands. Turns.
Walks out.
The door closes behind her.
The paper and the knight book sit on the table.
The Sacrifice still does not move.
He looks at the door she walked through. The mask is still in place. Warm, measured, faintly amused. His eyes are soft. His mouth is relaxed. Nothing on his face has changed.
His knuckles are white on the empty cup.