The Dragon Emperor of Another World: Awakening of a Legend

CHAPTER 3: Champion

The coliseum had been a ruin for longer than Feya had been a town—somebody's war, somebody's empire, both long forgotten—but on tournament morning it was loud enough to wake the dead it had been built for. Banners hung off every arch: crossed swords, a coiled serpent-dragon, runes Ethan couldn't read. The crowd shoved in through the gates and up the stone bleachers, and vendors worked the press with trays hung around their necks, shouting over one another—skewers of meat still spitting from the grill, cups of something blue and fizzing that the sellers swore was mana.

Ethan tightened a strap on the Godslayer armor that didn't need tightening. On his left hand the ring's amethyst stone pulsed, slow, then quicker, keeping time with him. He put the hand behind his back.

Celestia had braided her hair that morning, one long silver rope down her spine, and stood beside him with her arms folded. Even here, even in this, people stepped around her without deciding to.

"You know," she said, eyeing the stands, "this isn't what I'd call keeping a low profile."

"Who said anything about low? I'm here to make a statement."

"You. Making statements." She snorted. "Next you'll tell me you only entered for the money."

"Money and attention. We could use both."

She said something in Draconic. He didn't know the words, but he'd have known the tone in any language. She was already scanning the exits.

The contestants' line snaked past a marble goddess of war with four arms, each hand holding a different weapon and one of them chipped. Around them waited every kind of fighter a bracket could hold: big men comparing scars, lean monks with prayer beads looped around their wrists, robed mages muttering warm-ups under their breath, a beastmaster crooning to a cage of fox-squirrels that chittered and spat. Heads turned as Ethan passed. Eyes followed the runes on his plate.

"Who's the pageant knight?" said an armored man, loudly, to his friend.

Cosplayer, Ethan translated, and nearly laughed out loud, and managed not to.

"Too shiny," said the friend. "Won't last two rounds."

"Some lord's pup playing at heroes." That was a scarred lancer resting a spear across his shoulders. "Dead meat walking."

Heat went up Ethan's neck. Celestia's hand landed on his forearm—not hard, just there. "Let the fighting answer," she said.

At the table a bored guard in the town's colors squinted up at him. "Name and origin?"

"Ethan Lockwood. From—" There was nothing to put after it. "The unknown reaches."

The guard's eyebrow went up and came back down. He pushed a carved wooden token across the table. "Fancy armor," he said. "Let's see if you can swing the blade that goes with it, Mister Lockwood."

Celestia squeezed his shoulder. "I'll find somewhere to watch your back from." She was already turning away. "Don't make me come down there."

---

Walking out onto the floor was like walking into weather.

The noise hit him first, a solid wall of it—cheers, jeers, stamping, somebody blowing a horn for no reason at all. Heat came up off the black tiles, which were etched with runes that hummed through the soles of his boots. Across the ring a gate groaned open, and his first opponent came out of it.

"From distant lands unknown—Ethan Lockwood!" the announcer bellowed, magically enormous. "And facing him—the pride of the Riverside Pits—SAMSON THE STRONG!"

Samson was six and a half feet of muscle packed into dented plate and cured wyvern hide, with a battle-axe in each hand. He banged the axe heads together over his head and roared, and the crowd roared back, and he grinned across the sand at Ethan with every one of his teeth.

No respawn, Ethan thought. No pause button. His mouth had gone completely dry.

A gong sounded, low enough to feel in his ribs.

Samson came at him like a landslide. Both axes went up and came down together to split him from crown to crotch—and Ethan's body took him sideways without asking, the way it had in the clearing. The axes bit the tile where he'd been standing, cracked it clean across, and threw sparks. The crowd gasped as one.

He pivoted, and something gathered along the blade of the sword, cold and heavy and violet, and he heard himself shout "Void Arc!"—the name the game had given it, the name on the hotbar—and was mortified before the word had finished leaving him. The blade swept a wide crescent. A wave of purple-dark light peeled off the edge and caught Samson across the shoulder, not deep, deep enough; leather parted and blood ran.

Samson bellowed and came again. Feint left, cut low right. Ethan got the sword across in time and the shock of the parry went up both his arms into his teeth, and his boots squealed backward across the runes. The man was much stronger than he was. The man was not faster.

When Samson rushed him the third time, arms high for the finishing blow, Ethan didn't back away. He dropped and slid—straight across the slick tile and between the man's planted legs, axes whooshing through the air above him—and came up behind him and swung upward with everything he had. The flat of the greatsword met the back of Samson's helmet with a clang like a dropped bell.

Samson went over like a felled tree and lay face-down in the sand.

For one heartbeat the whole coliseum was silent.

"VICTORY TO ETHAN LOCKWOOD!"

The sound came back all at once, cheering and booing and a lot of people who'd lost money shouting about it. Ethan stood in the middle of it with the sword in both hands. He could not make his hands let go of it, so he held it harder, until the shaking was only in his forearms and nobody watching would see.

Up in a balcony that was very clearly not meant for the public, Celestia sat with her arms folded among a scatter of nervous nobles who had given her a great deal of room. She met his eyes and nodded once.

---

After that the day came apart into pieces.

A healer between rounds, her hands cool on his split knuckles, humming while the skin closed. Water. Sand in his teeth.

In the second round, a wiry woman with close-cropped hair and a dagger in each hand—fast, faster than anything he'd seen, and smiling the whole time. She smiled when he cut her sleeve. She smiled when he nearly took her ear. Before every attack she tapped the flat of one dagger twice against her own thigh, tap-tap, a small tic she didn't seem to know she had, and once he'd seen it he couldn't stop seeing it, and the third time she tapped he stepped into the gap it made and put his pommel against her temple. She went down laughing. She lay on her back in the sand and looked up at him with her eyes still swimming.

"Next time," she said, and meant it.

In the third round, a grizzled beastmaster and his thunderwolf, which was a wolf made mostly of teeth with lightning crawling through its fur. That one kept him moving, rolling, never still, until he found an opening and put a burst of void-cold into the wolf's face that dropped it whimpering, and laid the beastmaster out with the flat of the blade before the man could whistle it back up.

By the semifinal a section of the crowd had started chanting his name. He rolled his right shoulder, which was starting to grind, and tasted blood from somewhere, and was enjoying himself so much it frightened him.

The gate across the ring opened again, and a knight walked out of it.

Silver armor chased with holy symbols, bright enough in the noon sun to hurt. A longsword whose blade was engraved with running glyphs of light. A shield across his arm whose face moved like a church window with the sun going through it, colors sliding over one another.

The knight raised his sword in salute. "You fight well," he called across the sand. "Word travels in the stands. I've been hoping to find out where your limit is."

"I hope I live up to the hype." It was out before Ethan could stop it. He returned the salute. "Let's see who finds the other one's first."

A horn, and they closed.

The knight was good. It came off him in everything—his feet, his breathing, the way the shield was already where Ethan's sword was going. Ethan's overhead cut rang off it in a flash of runes. The knight answered with three quick thrusts, each trailing a thin arc of holy light, and the third skinned sparks off Ethan's pauldron. They traded. Steel rang on steel and on shield and on armor like a smithy at full work; the arena's wards crackled along the barrier, eating stray magic before it reached the crowd.

Ethan threw everything at him—switching grips, switching stances, feints he'd learned in a thousand hours of duels on a screen—and the knight took it all on the shield and gave it back with interest. Once the shield came around flat and smashed into his face, and he went back three steps with his ears ringing and a hot line of blood running down from above his eyebrow into his eye. He wiped it away with the back of a gauntlet and grinned, because he didn't know what else to do with his face.

Up in the balcony, Celestia was no longer sitting. She was at the rail with both hands on the stone.

They circled. Both of them were breathing hard now. And Ethan, circling, watched.

He had spent years—he could not have said how many—watching things wind up. Every boss in every game had a tell: a shoulder that dropped, a pause, a quarter-second of stillness before the big attack came. The knight had one. Before every heavy cut from the right, a half-beat where his weight settled onto his back foot. Barely there. Absolutely there.

Ethan let his guard sag, and let his left side open, and panted a little more than he needed to.

The knight's weight settled.

The big cut came, right to left, meant to take the sword out of Ethan's hands—and Ethan was already under it, the glowing blade whistling over his head, and inside the knight's reach with nothing between them. He drove an elbow into the man's ribs. He hooked a leg behind the knight's knees and swept. The knight hit the ground with a crash of plate, and the point of the greatsword came down to rest against his breastplate.

The knight's chest heaved under it. After a moment he lifted a gauntleted hand. "I yield."

A beat of stunned quiet, then an avalanche.

Ethan held out a hand and hauled the knight up. "Well fought," he said, and meant it. The knight looked at him for a moment as if trying to work out where he'd learned that, gave him a short salute, and walked off the sand to scattered, respectful applause.

---

There was no break before the final. The crowd wouldn't have allowed one.

When the far gate opened this time, the figure that came through it was hooded, in long robes, and walked without any sound at all. A staff of living oak floated at her side with nobody holding it, its knots studded with crystals. Where her feet touched the sand, small flowers flickered up and glowed and faded. She pushed back her hood: an elf, with hair like spun silver and eyes that crackled.

"You have strength," she said, and her voice came from everywhere in the ring at once. "Strength is not enough."

Every part of him hurt. He raised the sword anyway. "Good. I was hoping for a real challenge."

The announcer barely got the word out before she moved. Two fingers flicked; the staff swung to point at him; a bolt of fire came off it and he threw himself aside and felt the heat of it go past his cheek and burst behind him. Ice next—shards hanging in the air, then flying—one glanced off his greave and his calf went dead with cold. Then lightning, crawling up the staff and leaping from it in a forked strike, and he went into a roll and came up on one knee with the smell of his own cloak burning.

At range she would take him apart.

He faked a stumble. She took it and sent a spray of small fireballs after it, and he got up and ran straight into them. One burst on his shoulder plate and scorched it black; the heat went through the metal and he shouted. Then he was close, and she was pulling away, levitating backward, the staff swinging up to gather something bigger—

He didn't swing at her. He brought the greatsword down on the staff with every ounce he had left.

The crack was half wood and half thunder—the staff breaking, and whatever she'd been gathering in it breaking loose with it. The shockwave threw them apart. Ethan skidded a long way on his back and lay there with the sky swinging over him.

When he got up, sword somehow still in his hand, she was on her knees against the barrier among the splinters. Sparks were fading out of the broken wood. She wasn't hurt. She was looking at the two halves of the staff in her lap.

"It was my grandmother's," she said. Not to him. To the staff.

Then she raised one slender hand—palm out, empty. "I yield."

Nothing happened for a moment. The whole coliseum seemed to be holding its breath. Then it let it out in one roar that shook dust off the arches—stamping, whistling, screaming. The announcer was shouting CHAMPION over and over. Ethan stood in the middle of the ring with soot and sweat and blood running down his face, and the elf's voice still in his ears.

Up in the balcony, Celestia was on her feet, clapping at last, with her fangs showing.

---

A town official in a feathered hat presented the prize on a velvet cushion: an inlaid box, and inside it, on more velvet, a leather satchel no bigger than a coin purse, stitched all over in tiny runes. The dimensional satchel from the Count's own vault. Ethan knew it the moment he touched it—the weight was wrong, too light for how full it looked, like a bag in a game that could swallow a house. He took it and bowed to the official, and then, awkwardly, to the crowd.

First real win, he thought. It should have felt like more. What it felt like, mostly, was his calf thawing.

Coming down off the podium, he felt it—a pressure at the back of his neck. Not the crowd. The crowd's eyes felt warm.

Celestia had reached him. Her smile was already gone. She was looking past him, into the emptying stands.

"What is it?" he said, not moving his lips much.

"We're being watched," she said. "Not by admirers."

It took him a moment to find it: a cloaked figure in the shadow of an archway, hood up, face hidden, standing perfectly motionless while the crowd poured past on both sides like water around a rock. No clapping. Just looking at him.

The moment their eyes met, the figure turned—without any hurry at all—and went out into the flow of people, and was gone before Ethan had taken a step.

"Well," he said, trying for light, "looks like I made an impression."

"Yes." Celestia's hand was resting on the hilt of her curved dagger. "I doubt all your new admirers mean you well."

---

By dark the whole town seemed to have heard, and most of it seemed to be in the tavern. A cheer went up when they came in. Somebody shoved a foaming mug into Ethan's hand; three wide-eyed apprentices wanted to know how he'd done the slide. A dwarf with a beard like a hedge clinked mugs with him and admitted cheerfully that he'd bet against him in the first round. "Worth every coin," he said, "to watch Samson go down on his face!" A liveried servant pressed a card into his hand: an invitation to a minor lord's banquet the following night, in honor of the new champion. Ethan put it in his belt without reading it.

For a while he let himself enjoy it. Then he noticed Celestia standing by the wall with her arms crossed and her eyes on the door and the windows, not drinking, and the enjoyment went a bit thin.

When he could get away, he joined her at a small table in the corner. She pushed a cup of hot spiced wine across to him. "Look like you're relaxing," she said, eyes on the room.

He sipped. It helped a little. "I thought I'd feel safer after winning," he said quietly. "I feel like I painted a target on my back."

"You did." She didn't soften it. "You're carrying something valuable now, and you've shown people what you can do with a sword, and some of them are jealous and some of them are frightened." She stopped. Her eyes had gone to the door again. "And—"

"And what?"

She leaned over the table, and her voice dropped to a thread under the noise. "Power like yours doesn't come through a door without something on the other side of the door noticing it open."

A knot pulled tight in his stomach. He looked around the room: farmers, apprentices, the dwarf, a harried barmaid. Everyone smiling.

Not everyone.

At a small table against the far wall a man sat alone in a midnight-blue cloak, with a glass of amber wine he wasn't drinking. He hadn't toasted anyone. He hadn't talked to anyone. When Ethan's eyes landed on him, Ethan understood with a jolt that the man had been watching him since he walked in—and saw, stitched on the cloak's shoulder, a small black scorpion curled around a silver dagger.

He kept his face still. "Blue cloak," he murmured. "Far wall. He's been staring."

Celestia didn't turn. She picked up her own cup, bored. "Embroidered scorpion?"

He nodded into his wine.

"Syndicate." Her lips barely moved. "Smugglers. Assassins for hire. They move relics—buy them, steal them, sell them to people who can't be seen buying." Her eyes flicked down to the satchel on his belt and up again. "If he's here, it's for that. And if I'm right, there was a scorpion drawn in chalk on the frame of our inn door this morning. Low down. Where you'd only see it if you were looking for it."

Ethan's hand went over the satchel.

He was remembering a figure in a plain coat, crouched by the door, dusting off one hand. A drunk, he'd decided.

"Right," he said, and drained the wine, and stood. "Time we called it a night."

Celestia was up before he'd finished saying it.

---

They went back to the inn the long way and in through the kitchen yard instead of the front. "In case," she said. The room under the eaves was the same as they'd left it: one narrow window, two cots, a door with a lock a child could pick. Celestia went straight to the window and put her eye to the crack in the shutter, her tail twitching. Ethan wedged a chair under the door handle, felt stupid, and left it there.

He paced. The ceiling made him stoop. "They think they can just rob me?"

"They'll do much worse than rob you, given the chance." She didn't look around. "These aren't street toughs. If they want that satchel, they'll send professionals."

He drew the sword and laid it across the little table beside his cot, where he could reach it lying down. "It's like a dungeon boss setting up an ambush," he said. It helped to put it that way. It made it a thing with rules.

She glanced at him over her shoulder, and he couldn't read what was in it. "Then you know what to do," she said. "Prepare. And don't sleep deeply."

He lay down in his clothes with the satchel under the thin pillow. The invitation card crackled in his belt. He didn't take it out.

Just before sleep, the satchel under his cheek gave one faint pulse—warm, then cold—and he took it for his own heartbeat in his ear, and his eyes stayed on the shutter, and on the thin line of dark between its slats.