The duel ring was chalk on packed sand, twelve paces across. A water barrel sat at the north edge, leaking, as it had been leaking since Tuesday, spreading a dark patch that every duelist that morning had walked around without thinking. The practice rack stood at the south. Two hundred students lined the low wall.
Bori was on the wall with bread. Yuna was on the wall shouting something already, hoarse from yesterday. Ganghwa was on the wall not shouting, arms folded, watching the sand with the flat attention, busy in his own head.
"You'll lose very fast" he'd said.
She was counting on it.
Yeju stood on her line and did the math. Two beats for Taewoong to close. One to disarm. Three, Ganghwa had said, and Ganghwa counted everything.
Three beats to a credible loss. She could do three beats. All she had to do was raise a guard, hold it long enough to look like effort.
"Han Yeju," called the bracket officer "Jin Taewoong. First blood, yield, or ring-out. Begin."
Taewoong opened with the high feint.
Yeju was already stepping the wrong way, because she'd decided in advance to step the wrong way, a small honest amateur mistake that would put her exactly where his blade wanted her. Her heel came down on the chalk line, on the loose scuff of two hundred previous duels.
Her foot didn't slide.
[ [Sure-Footed (Conditional)] active: 4 minutes remaining. ]
Yeju had four seconds to be furious. This was the title she had received from the system after Baek gad filed a complaint letter against her. The system had told her that each title had a unique ability, how they were rewarded was unclear, but this one was practically useless to Yeju, hence why she did not even mention it. Being Immune to slipping for exactly ten minutes a day, at random.
What a joke.
Her wrong step didn't turn into a stumble. And because of that, she was eight inches left of where Taewoong's feint had priced her, and his real cut went past her shoulder into air.
The crowd made a noise. He recovered instantly and came again, and this time there was no feint, just speed.
Beat two. He'd close and disarm.
Yeju did the only thing she had, which was throw [Spark] at his face.
The dinner-plate of fire was thrown at a swordsman's eyes . It would have done nothing at all. Except Jin Taewoong had been raised since he was six by instructors who taught him that a mage casting at your face is committing, the answer to a committed mage is to drop the back heel and drive through.
He dropped his back heel on the fourth beat.
Into the puddle. He had spent the last two minutes herding Yeju north, methodically toward the edge of the ring, but it had walked him backward into the only wet sand on the field.
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His heel went out from under him.
He did not fall. He was too good to fall. He went down onto one knee with a swordsman's control, guard already reforming. It cost him three-quarters of a second. In three-quarters of a second Yeju did the last stupid thing available to her.
She threw her practice blade at him.
The dumbest possible act, the thing no trained fighter would ever do because it disarms you voluntarily. Taewoong's hands moved to bat it aside on pure reflex, frankly he must be quite bewildered, what lunatic throws their weapon away?!
The lunatic stepped in and shoved him flant on the chest.
All forty-odd kilos of a girl who had never trained a day in either of her lives.
Jin Taewoong went over the chalk.
Ring-out.
The sand was very quiet. Yeju stood in the middle of the ring with no weapon, breathing hard, looking down at a rank fourteen sitting outside the line with his sword still in his hand
Then two hundred students on the wall lost their minds.
It hit her like weather. Somebody was screaming. Somebody was hugging somebody. The bracket officer had to shout the result three times yet nobody heard him. Up on the wall a boy was yelling How! How! over and over at a friend who was already yelling it back.
[ Win by ring-out. ]
Yeju did not move.
[ Would you like the itemization? ]
"No."
The bracket officer got the result out on the fourth attempt. Somebody on the wall was demanding a re-run. Somebody else was explaining the barrel to a person who had watched the same duel from six feet away.
By the time Yeju's ears cleared, the story had already changed.
"She planned it all" a second-year was saying, urgently, to three others. "Before the bell. She was examining the ground. I saw her."
"She threw her sword. Who throws a sword?"
"Someone who knew he'd bat it, obviously. She used his reflex against him."
"That's insane."
"That's tactics," said the second-year, with the fervor of a convert, and Yeju stood in the ring and watched a lie assemble itself out of true parts, live, in about ninety seconds, in front of her.
Taewoong got up with what could only be described as a livid expression, maybe even betrayl. Yeju took a step back.
"You threw your sword...." he said.
"Yes."
"That's not a technique!"
"No."
He stood there. He was, Yeju noticed with something she was too keyed-up to name, shaking slightly. "So you really planned it all?. Even baited me to think you were scared."
"I didn't."
"You did."
"I really, truly didn't," Yeju said one of the most honest sentence of her life, she was really the most honest person here, yet it fell on deaf ears as there was no version of this he could accept where he had simply lost to an accident. That would be worse. That would mean it meant nothing.
He walked away with his back very straight.
Ganghwa was waiting at the edge of the sand. He had not moved off the wall during any of it. He looked at Yeju, and then at the puddle, and then, for a long moment, at nothing.
"Three beats" he said.
"I know."
"I counted the barrel this morning. I counted it as a hazard and I put it at a two percent factor, because nobody's heel goes there unless they're herding. " He looked at her, and for the first time there was something under the tiredness. "Did you know he'd herd."
"No."
Ganghwa absorbed that. Then he did something Yeju had not seen him do, which was almost smile, a small grim private thing that went away immediately.
"My cousin will say you planned it," he said. "The whole school will say you planned it. I want you to know that I've run it four times and I don't think you did." He turned to go. "That's worse, incidentally. A plan can be beaten. I don't know what to do with a person who wins by luck. Such things dont exist you know"
[ And there it is, ] said the panel, quietly. [ Two hundred witnesses just decided you're a tactician. By tonight it'll be four hundred. By tomorrow somebody will have added a detail you'd never think of! ]
[ host, You are not getting the shed group. ]
Yeju stood in the ring with her ears ringing and her hands starting, only now, to shake.
Up on the wall, apart from the noise, a girl in an immaculate uniform watched with her arms folded and her head tilted a single degree.
Baek Seorin did not cheer. She reached into her coat for a folded form and a pen. Without breaking her gaze, she began to write.