Blood Shaper

Book 4: Chapter 26

The duelist was a tall man, and the added height from him standing on top of a fountain had him literally looming above Kay as he walked past the cordon of guards and stopped at the base. The man glanced down at Kay, dismissed him, then started to shout again.

“Can you not?” Kay called up to him, “You’ve already interrupted my day with your nonsense; let’s go ahead and get this over with.”

The man sniffed dramatically, like a French stereotype in an old cartoon, “I’m here to duel the lord of the city. Whoever-“

“I’m the lord of the city. Do you think some random person has the authority to ignore the guards,” Kay swept a hand behind him at the cordon around the fountain, “and walk up to you?”

“They aren’t much; any random person could probably get past them,” He sneered.

“You’re not actually hurting anyone, so they’re not escalating the situation and starting a fight that might hurt people. Now get off my fountain before I smack you off of it.”

The duelist sneered again, but he did hop down from the fountain, landing gracefully on one foot and using the movement of his other leg to step into Kay’s face. “So, you’re the lord of this city? I was expecting someone, well, stronger looking.”

Kay took a quick glance at him just to see what he was dealing with. The man had small orange scales covering his neck and traveling partway up his cheeks, marking him as a reptilian beastkin, which were rare in this region of the world. The thing slit pupils at the center of his yellow eyes made Kay think he was probably a snake beastkin, although he thought there might be some lizards out there with eyes like that, so he wasn’t sure. Interestingly enough, the man’s armor was scale mail, with real scales taken from a monster fashioned together into armor with metal thread. The armor's scales might have naturally been a light blue color, which complemented the duelist’s scales and his perfectly coiffed auburn hair, but Kay found that unlikely.

The perfectly put-together look of the man, plus his nimble movements and Eleniah’s commentary, came together to give Kay a decent picture of the man, a good fighter who liked to put on a show for whoever saw him fight. A showman who thought of himself as the perfect show, or something poetic like that. Of course, it could have been a ruse to lure people off their game, but the arrogance in his eyes as he tried to stare Kay down was too real for it to be an act.

Kay stared back at him, unmoving and with a completely straight face. “I received complaints that your antics were disturbing people and preventing trade in the square. It caught me in the middle of paperwork, and I didn’t have time to change, so you get me in my work clothing. You do know you need a permit to put on public performances like this?”

“I- what?” The man pulled his head back with a sudden puzzled frown. “What are you talking about?”

Kay pointed over the man’s shoulder at the fountain, “Jumping up on the fountain, shouting at people about challenges and duels, you’re trying to drum up business, right? You’re a Professional Duel Seeker, so you go to places and sell tickets for duels you put on, right? You need a permit to do public advertising for events, and you need a permit to use one of the arenas for contests or bouts.”

His eyes flared slightly wider than a human’s could, and his slit pupils expanded as he pushed his forehead against Kay’s, “I’m not selling tickets or putting on a fucking show; I’m here to challenge the lord of the city for his Title!” He snarled, exposing things, slightly curved canine teeth.

He is a snake beastkin; I owe myself five bucks. Is he venomous? Oh, I wonder if she wants to bite me. Wait, is that offensive? Kay continued to keep his official disinterested expression on. “Do you have a permit for that?”

The duelist twitched and then bared his teeth in rage.

Before he could get a word out, Kay kept talking. “Well, you don’t really need a permit for that, but have you filed all the right paperwork and received a response to your application? I believe the queue to fight me is a couple dozen people long at this point.”

“Are you truly a coward, hiding behind paperwork and petty rules? This is a challenge for your title!”

“I wouldn’t say I’m hiding behind paperwork, but it is important. I have a job, you know; I’m not some bum wandering around looking for people to fight so I can take their things; I actually have important responsibilities to handle.”

Literally shaking with rage, the beastkin man seemed to be struggling to get his words out of his mouth. He spat several false starts before resorting to just growling.

That should be enough. “You’re taking up a lot of my time, and like I said, I have real work to do. If you’re here to challenge me, can you go ahead and do it? Or are you all talk, and you don’t actually want to face me.”

His pupils were almost as wide as the rest of his eye when he snapped out, “I am Quenrev of Vaihren, and I challenge you to single combat over your title!”

“Fine, I accept.” Kay mentally dismissed the pop-up about the challenge, “The place will be in the closest arena, the terms are as we both are at this moment with whatever weapons, armor, or gear we have on our person, and the time will be as soon as we get over there and get ready.” He turned and started walking away, pausing to give a disdainful look over his shoulder. “I’d say to the death, but you don’t actually duel for real, right? You’re a professional in it for the money. Till one of us surrenders or is unable to fight, then I wouldn’t want to deny you the chance at your payday.” He turned and kept walking without looking back.

Eleniah was waiting for him at the edge of the crowd, staring back at Quenrev of Vaihren with a malicious smirk, “I told you you have this in the bag. Took you less than thirty seconds to get in his head. He didn’t even verify you really were who you said you were.”

“Hey, I learned how to manipulate people with my words from the best.”

She buffed her knuckles against her shirt and inspected them.

“I meant Amanda and Isla, but you’re okay too, I guess.”

Eleniah clicked her tongue and smacked his shoulder, “Go to the arena already; I want to watch you kick this guy’s pompous ass.”

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Leaning against the railing of the VIP balcony, Eleniah watched as Kay pretended to ignore Quenrev as the beastkin warmed up. The duelist was quite muscular while still lithe and dexterous and was showing off both his physique and his flexibility as he went through a series of impressive stretches. Impressive for someone who wasn’t tier-three or higher, at least. Once you had a certain level of mana running through your body, physical movement of most kinds became pretty easy. A huge bodybuilder type of individual wouldn’t be able to bend themselves in knots like a contortionist, but they’d be able to get pretty close. You also didn’t need to stretch in order to warm up your body once you got to tier-three; your body used tiny amounts of mana to keep itself in fighting form without issue, barring any injuries or problems. That meant that Quenrev was doing it to try and intimidate his opponent and to look impressive to the spectators. Too bad neither of his target audiences cared all that much.

Kay had to fight her on a regular basis, and she could say with no arrogance that this popinjay had nothing on her. Or Meten, for that matter, and Kay had fought both of them at once a few times. He’d lost horribly, but he hadn’t lost immediately. As for the spectators, almost all of them were local citizens, which meant a vast majority, if not all of them, were rooting for Kay. The few independent merchants and travelers who’d managed to grab seats in the stampede for a place to watch the duel were probably neutral parties to the fight.

The arena’s officiant, a position held by wounded Sentinels while they recovered from their injuries and spent part of their time helping others with their training, stepped forward and addressed both fighters. “This is an official duel for the title of Lord of Avalon! The terms are that you two shall fight until one of you is no longer able to continue or either of you surrenders. You will only use weapons, armor, and gear that has been available to you since the moment the challenge was made. Are there any questions?” He waited for a beat, and when neither of them answered, he nodded once. “Very well, you will begin on my mark.” He took a series of quick steps back and pulled himself up into the officiant's box a few feet from the floor and protected by sheets of enchanted glass. “Begin!”

Quenrev crossed his arms and pulled his weapon, a khopesh with what looked like an additional stretch of metal shaped into a sword breaker-like shape at the very end of the curve and a small buckler from his enchanted storage bracelet, the shield already attached to his wrist. The whole maneuver was definitely choreographed, and the beastkin man almost posed for a brief second before he leapt forward, his body low to the ground.

Kay just watched as his opponent rushed toward him. Eleniah had liked the addition of the restriction that they could only use what they had on them when Quenrev had challenged Kay, but arrogance and unnecessary showmanship aside, the man was a professional who’d made it to tier-five; he was unlikely to fall for such a simple trick.

She was proved right when Kay’s skin extruded blood, ripping his simple clothing to shreds and sealing him inside his normal set of blood armor, and the duelist didn’t falter at all. He planted one foot and lunged forward with a sweeping slash aimed at Kay’s neck.

The blood armor shrank inward, going from a shape that looked like plate armor to a much more streamlined form as Kay shaped a punch dagger in his right hand at the same time that he dropped into a crouch, letting Quenrev’s blade sweep over him. He punched upward with his left fist, sending the khopesh upward at a steeper angle, and lashed out with the dagger. It was intercepted, and the dagger was deflected upward, and the khopesh came swinging down in a savage downward slash as his opponent used the momentum from the redirecting punch to add power to his follow-up attack. Kay’s arm came up, and the blood morphed into a smooth plane downward that pushed the blade away, and a blocked kick pushed Quenrev back from him.

Kay dashed in, a new punch dagger formed in his other hand as he let loose with a series of slashes and blade-augmented punches, working to get in under his enemy's guard to best use the shorter range of his more flexible weapons. Quenrev switched between dodging and blocking with his buckler as he weathered the storm of attacks, and his blade swept up from the side, forcing Kay back in order to dodge and reset the engagement again.

Eleniah grinned down at the fight, pleased by Kay following her directions and limiting himself while he fought. Her student turned protege and friend was a very lucky person. Not just from meeting her and being able to learn from her expertise; that went without saying. Jokes for her own amusement aside, what made him one of the luckiest people she’d ever met was him getting the Class Line Progenitor Title, and slightly less from the Class Line he got it for.

Blood Manipulator was very versatile, like most Manipulator Classes, but Kay had gotten a lot more out of it than she was expecting. Part of it was from it being a blood related Class, which came with a lot more concepts and myths behind it since it was an ever-present and vital part of most living beings' existence. That meant that there was a lot more that could be done with it and many more Classes that it could be evolved into compared to other materials. Using blood as a medium to transfer magic? Sure, people’s bodies did it every moment of every day. Using water for the same thing, well, that was a lot harder to conceptualize, and if you couldn’t conceptualize it, you weren’t doing it.

In addition to that, the directions he’d pushed himself, the Classes and Skills he’d gained, and the tier-five Classes he’d unlocked had made him into a terrifyingly competent fighter. Able to shift his equipment on the fly to adapt to whoever he was fighting, capable of devastating medium and short-range attacks, and now able to regenerate from anything short of immediate death as long as he had enough blood and mana, he was a big threat in a one on one fight, or even an outnumbered one. With his blood simulacra added in and the tier-five Classes he’d be able to get within a relatively short period of time, he’d also become able to dominate a battlefield single-handedly as a one-man army.

As lucky as he’d been and as strong as he’d become, he still had flaws, though, and it was her self-appointed duty to help him get past those. His mentality was still an issue to be worked on. He didn’t see himself as powerful, as worth listening to and respecting, either as a leader or a fighter, not deep down in himself. Who cared what his palace looked like? Who cared that he had a palace, or if someone putting up a statue of him right now versus later on was more or less appropriate? None of that was actually important.

The only truly important thing was being strong enough to keep yourself and your people alive and out of harm's way. Tied in with that as a close second was being a good leader who made life good for the people you were responsible for, but you couldn’t do that if you died. That was why Eleniah’s main focus was making sure he could kill anyone he fought or fight them until he could get away. That was why she insisted he go into fights with handicaps, so he could learn what it would be like to fight at a huge disadvantage as if you were fighting someone tiers above you, or his opponent had some way of negating some or all of his Skills.

That and to make sure he didn’t get overconfident. She wasn’t too worried about that, but beating him into the ground in training definitely kept it from cropping up.

She glanced away from the fight when a small commotion happened near the edge of the standard seating section, but it was just some people trying to push past others to get a better view, so she ignored it and went back to watching the fight. It was mostly even since Kay was holding himself back, and Quenrev hadn’t broken out any true tier-five Skills or abilities other than his baseline toughness. She briefly wondered what his trump card was, but that was less important than making notes of what to correct in Kay’s punch dagger fighting. It wasn’t his most practiced fighting style, so she cut him some slack, but there were still things to improve.

Like that overextension right there. Too far forward, your elbows fully extended and not ready to bend, and… Boom, you have to pull your whole body back to dodge that cut instead of just bending your arm. Going to recreate that opening a few times so-

Without any conscious thought, she vaulted over the railing and threw herself at the group of three people who had just jumped into the arena from the other side of the stands. The argument Eleniah had noticed might have been a planned distraction, or it might have been a random occurrence they took advantage of, but the guards were looking over there just long enough for the assassination team to make it past them and onto the arena floor.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Kay start to pull back from Quenrev, repositioning himself to face the actual threat. Before he could make it far enough away, Quenrev’s eyes flared a brighter yellow, and Kay froze in place. It was only for a second, but that was long enough for a fourth assassin to somehow appear out of Kay’s shadow and a sword into his body, stabbing him right in his armpit and driving the blade through him longways.

Eleniah skidded as she turned to move to Kay’s aid directly, which was when the staff-wielding assassin with the original group of three slammed said staff into the ground, sending out a field of energy that knocked Eleniah back. She jumped back to her feet and rammed the barrier, but it didn’t budge. Kay was sealed inside with four killers after him and a professional duelist who had been hired to help kill him.

With a deep breath to center herself, Eleniah took one step back and began to channel mana into her Class Skill. Unless the barrier was also a tier-five Class Skill, it would break to her punch, and even if it could take a hit, it wouldn’t take multiple. Kay just needed to hold on for a few moments, and then she would crush them all.

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