The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 761

Nobody in that arena had a word for what they were watching.

Twenty thousand people had come to see two grandmasters throw five hundred years of art at each other.

What they were looking at instead was an old man on his side in the sand with his arm over his face, and a young man crouched on top of him, working.

“He can’t cast,” somebody in the fourth row kept saying, to nobody. “That’s Yorick. That’s the third-ranked magician alive. Why can’t he cast?”

Up in the commentary box, a man who had called this tournament for nineteen years had stopped speaking entirely.

…

Alex hit him once more and Yorick stopped trying to get his hands up.

The referee came over the rail at a dead run, robes hiked up in both fists, and two stewards came after him, and all three of them arrived at once and none of them touched Alexander.

“Enough. Enough — hold!” The referee got between them, breathing hard, and put one hand out at Alex without quite making contact. “The bout is concluded.”

He turned to the arena and lifted his arm, and his voice cracked halfway through it.

“Winner — Grandmaster Alexander, of the White Tower!”

Then the part that mattered.

“By the terms of the wager, the Red Tower and all its remaining holdings pass to the White Tower.”

Twenty-five buildings, the last twenty-five Red had left in the world, gone in under four minutes in front of the whole country.

Nobody cheered. Nobody had worked out yet what they were supposed to feel.

…

Blue came out second, and Blue came out angry.

Their archmage was a tall grey man named Corwen who had not lost a public bout in thirty-one years, and he walked to his mark and rolled his sleeves and looked across the sand with open contempt.

“That was Red’s problem,” he said. “Fire is loud. Fire is arrogant. It announces itself and it burns out.”

“And water?”

“Water is patient.” Corwen raised both hands, and every drop of moisture in that arena — the sweat on twenty thousand people, the damp in the sand, the water in the vendors’ barrels — came out of where it was and into the air above him. “You cannot burn water. You cannot cut it. And you certainly cannot punch it, boy.”

Alex almost smiled.

“Let’s find out.”

…

What came across that arena was a wall of water forty feet high with a spine of pressure inside it that could take the front off a building.

It reached two metres.

The formula opened over Alex’s palm — that same impossible lattice, turning, unreadable — and the wave stopped being a wave. It hung for half a second as forty feet of undirected water with nothing holding it, and then it came down flat on the sand and soaked in.

“Again,” Corwen said with pure confuse.

Water lances. Undone.

A binding prison, the Blue speciality, the one that ends fights without hurting anybody. It never closed.

Then a thing he had never once used in public, that took eleven seconds to build and made the air taste like metal, and it came apart eight feet from Alexander’s chest and fell as ordinary rain across the middle of the arena.

Corwen stood in it, soaked to the skin, hands still up.

“You cannot punch water,” Alex agreed, walking in.

Then he punched Corwen.

…

The referee’s second run onto the sand was faster than his first.

“Hold. Hold—”

“Winner, Grandmaster Alexander. The Blue Tower and all its holdings pass to the White Tower.”

Three hundred years of never picking a side, and Blue had picked one at last, and it had lasted ninety seconds.

…

Yellow came third because Yellow insisted on coming third.

Their archmage was younger than the others and faster than all of them, and he opened with chain-lightning off both hands before the referee had finished stepping back — six strikes in under two seconds, from six angles, the technique that had made Yellow the tower everyone hired when they wanted something done quickly.

All six arrived.

All six dissolved.

He got four steps closer and tried it at contact range, which was brave, and the lightning died in his fingers with a sound like a wet match.

Alex took his wrist, turned it, and put him face-first into the sand.

“Winner, Grandmaster Alexander. The Yellow Tower and all its holdings—”

Nobody heard the rest. The noise had started by then.

…

Brown lasted longer, because Brown fought the ground instead of the man.

Her name was Halda and she had spent forty years in mines, and she brought the floor of the arena up into a standing giant of packed stone twenty feet tall and walked it forward.

That was clever. That was, genuinely, the best idea anybody had all day — because the stone was not a spell arriving at Alexander. The stone was already there.

It got within two metres.

The working holding it together came apart, and twenty feet of shaped rock forgot it had a shape and fell into a heap that buried Alex to the knees.

He walked out of it.

“Good,” he said, pulling his boot free. “That was actually good.”

She was still speaking when he reached her and smashed a fist into her nose. She dropped cold, like a boxer catching a knockout punch.

They went together.

Fifty workings, from every direction at once, five colours in the air at the same instant — fire from one arc, water from another, stone coming up out of the floor, lightning, thorn, rot, binding-light, things that had names only in private books.

It was, without any argument, the largest coordinated casting anybody in that country had witnessed in two hundred years.

Alexander lifted both hands.

The formula that opened above him was not one lattice. It was fifty, layered into each other, turning at different speeds, so large it threw a shadow across the sand — and every magician in that arena who had stood up earlier now sat down, because they could not follow even one line of it.

Everything arrived.

Nothing landed.

…

The whole ring went out at once — fifty workings unmade in the same half-second, dissolving into clean air that rolled outward across the sand and lifted the dust in a slow ring all the way to the arena wall.

And then Alexander walked into them.

He did not use magic on a single one. He did not have to. Every man who got a working started had it die in his hands, and then a young man in a plain coat arrived and put him down, and moved on.

It took four minutes.

At the end of it there were fifty master-rank magicians lying on the sand of the Grand Convocation in various states of consciousness, and one man standing in the middle with his sleeves rolled and blood on his knuckles that was not his.

…

The bowl came apart.

It did not start as a cheer. It started somewhere in the upper ring as a single sound from a single person and it spread down through twenty thousand people in about four seconds, and then the noise hit the stone walls and came back and doubled itself.

They were on their feet. All of them. The ones who had bet against him, the ones who had spent all week explaining to their families exactly how the marathon strategy worked, the ones who had said in taverns that a bucket empties.

Five towers. Fifty masters. One afternoon.

He had never once looked tired.

In the outer hall, a fat cheerful man sat down on a crate behind his own betting table and put his head in his hands, and Beatrix Hargrove stood in the doorway of that hall and did not say a word, because there was nothing to say that the slip in her hand was not already saying for her.

…

Down on the sand, the master of ceremonies was trying to read the final terms into a noise that would not stop.

“—the Red Tower, the Blue Tower, the Yellow Tower, the Brown Tower and the Green Tower, and all holdings thereof, pass in full to the White Tower—”

Nobody heard him.

They had stopped caring about the paperwork some minutes ago, because every person in that arena had understood the same thing at the same moment, and it was much bigger than five deeds.

For five hundred years, magic had a shape. Seven colours, seven towers, a ladder you climbed from eleven years old, and a ceiling nobody argued with.

That had ended at about two o’clock in the afternoon, in front of them, while they were sitting down.

Whatever came next, it was going to be something else entirely.