The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 760

By the morning of the tournament, every person in the United State of Magic understood the terms, and they understood them in the simplest possible way.

One man against five.

Alexander of the White Tower would fight the best magician each remaining tower could put in the ring — Blue, Green, Yellow, Brown, Red — and if he lost a single bout to a single one of them, he lost everything.

Regent Group, the fastest-growing company in the country. Ferrowgate, as big as Regent Group, on transfer. Five hundred and fifty-five towers.

All of it handed to whoever put him down.

And in exchange, every tower that lost to him handed over its own.

…

The five of them had met the night before to settle the order, in a room with no windows and seven chairs.

“Blue first,” Brown’s master said. “If Blue wins, it ends there and the rest of us never have to walk into that ring at all.”

“And if Blue loses?”

Nobody enjoyed the silence that followed.

“Then he takes Blue,” Green said quietly. “Every branch of it. And we go again with Yellow, and if Yellow falls he takes Yellow, and so on down the line until somebody finally puts him on the floor.”

“Which one of us does that?”

“Any of us. That’s the point.” Brown spread his hands. “He has to win five times. We only have to win once. One bout, out of five. And the instant that happens, the whole thing reverses — he gives back every tower he’s taken tonight, and the White Tower and both companies get split between the five of us.”

It was, on paper, an extremely comfortable arrangement.

Then Yorick spoke, and the order changed.

…

“No,” he said. “I go first.”

Heads came round.

“Grandmaster—”

“He killed my son. I afraid if blue go first, I will have nothing left from him.”

The meeting room turned silence.

“Think about what we are actually building here.” The old man put a finger on the table.

“I go in first, if I win, we win and if I do not win. I will go in to empty him. I will take everything he has — every reserve, every trick, every drop of whatever he’s using — and I will keep taking it until he is standing there on nothing.”

“And then?”

“Then he doesn’t rest.” Yorick smiled. “The next man walks straight out. And the one after that. No breaks, no water, no doctor. Five of the finest magicians in this country, one after another, into a man who’s already finished.”

Blue sat back slowly.

“A marathon.”

“A marathon,” Yorick agreed. “And nobody in the history of magic has ever won one of those.”

“He's alone, while the five of us rank one to five among the greatest magicians of all time.”

…

That was the part the whole country agreed on, and it wasn’t even a matter of opinion.

Every child in the United State of Magic learns it in their first year, in one sentence, before they learn anything else: a magician is a bucket, and a fight empties the bucket.

Power is finite. Reserves run out. That is the entire architecture of five hundred years of tower duelling, and it has never once been wrong.

One man cannot fight five grandmasters in a row.

The strategy leaked within a day, the way everything leaks, and after that there was no argument left anywhere in the country.

Alexander was going to lose.

The only thing anybody debated in the taverns that night was which of the five would be the one to do it.

…

The arena filled from six in the morning.

Twenty thousand people in a grey stone bowl that hadn’t held a crowd in two hundred years, sitting shoulder to shoulder on new timber that still smelled of sawdust and pitch.

Vendors in the aisles. Six colours of paper fan waving in every direction.

The four big screens along the rim lit up at half past seven and the noise that went up nearly took the banners off the rail.

Millions more watched from home.

“Welcome,” the master of ceremonies bellowed, “to the Grand Convocation!”

…

The first ten bouts were the usual thing — tower against tower, master level, the traditional card that had run every year for two centuries.

They were good fights. On any other day people would have talked about them for a month.

Today nobody could sit still through them.

Four hours went by. The sun came up over the eastern rim and the stone started giving off heat, and the crowd went through its water and its patience, and then finally, a little after noon, the screens went dark and came back with one name on them.

“From the White Tower,” the master of ceremonies called. “Grandmaster Alexander!”

The sound in that bowl came up like weather.

Alex walked out to the centre of the sand on his own. No robe. No staff. Coat off, sleeves down, plain black gloves.

Twenty thousand people looked at him and saw a young man with nothing in his hands.

…

“And his opponent!”

The MC let it hang.

“From the Red Tower — Grandmaster Yorick! Ranked third among all living magicians of the United State!”

The old man did not walk out.

He came over the rim of the arena forty feet above the sand and floated there, robes moving in a wind that was not blowing, and the crowd made a sound they had not made for any of the last ten fights.

Then he came down to the sand and looked at Alexander, and he smiled like a man greeting an old acquaintance at a wedding.

“Well,” Yorick said. “We meet again, boy.”

…

Alex looked up at the face he had only ever seen once — in a column of cold light, in a wedding hall in Prussia, over a dead duke’s body.

Ragnar’s grandfather.

“I’m going to ask you one question,” Alex said, “and then we can start.”

“Ask.”

“The house in the Dominion of Beasts.” His voice did not change at all. “Did you kill my people?”

The old man’s smile widened slightly, as though the question pleased him.

“Me? No.” He shook his head. “I didn’t touch them. I sent twenty of mine to find you and kill everyone at that address.”

He shrugged one shoulder.

“They were unlucky, that’s all. You weren’t home.”

…

Twenty thousand people watched a man in black gloves stand very still in the middle of a lot of sand.

That was what the gloves were for. Thin black leather, unremarkable, connected to the Gaia.

“Again,” Yorick said.

He launched a fireball: third circle, fast, flat, and searing enough to decapitate a man.

Alex merely lifted a hand, applying the inverse frequency of its flame matrix.

Four feet out, the spell fractured, unraveling into nothing like a snuffed flame.

“Again.”

Lance of flame. Undone.

Ring of fire around Alex’s feet, the old trick, the one that ends duels. It never finished forming.

A rain of embers. A pillar. The compressed lance that had killed a Brown Tower master in front of nine hundred witnesses in 1502.

Every single one of them arrived, reached two metres, and dissolved into clean warm air that drifted up over the sand and was gone.

…

Yorick stopped.

He stood in the middle of the arena with his hands out and nothing coming off them, sixty years an elder, third-ranked magician alive, and he could not make the air do one single thing it was told.

Behind him, in the stands, twenty thousand people had gone from silence to a low, rising sound that was not quite a cheer.

At the betting tables in the outer hall, a fat cheerful man was reading the same slip over and over and had begun, very quietly, to sweat.

“This isn’t possible,” Yorick said.

“It’s extremely possible.” Alex rolled his shoulders. “You are just stupid.”

“What are you?”

…

Alex started walking toward him.

“Here’s where we are,” he said. “You can’t cast. Not one thing, not for the rest of this fight.”

Yorick backed up a step.

“So since the magic isn’t working out,” Alex said, “how do you feel about a street fight?”

The old man threw his hands up on instinct — something huge, something final, the best thing left in him.

It came apart before it had a shape.

And Alexander closed the last four feet and hit him in the face.

…

The Grand Convocation had never seen anything like it, because there was nothing to see.

No light. No wards. No grand exchange of art between two masters that the commentators could talk about for a decade.

Just a young man walking a very old one backward across forty feet of sand, hitting him.

Yorick got his hands up to cast. The working died in his fingers and Alex hit him again, and his head went sideways, and blood came out of his nose and went down into his beard.

He tried once more. Died. Alex hit him again.

He was eighty-one years old and he had not been struck by another human being since he was a child, and he had spent sixty years in a country where nobody ever got close enough to try.

Alexander was much younger and moved like something built for it.

The old man went down on one knee, then both, then onto his side in the sand with one arm up over his face.

Straddling his chest, Alex drove fist after fist into the man's face.

For the first time in the history of the Great Magic Tournament, an archmage was winning a duel with raw, bare knuckles.