The Stargazer's War - Chapter 23

Chapter 23: Options

“He did what?”

Xavier’s axe slammed into my practice sword, sending the wooden blade flying from my grip. It bounced across the padded floor and over the edge of the dueling ring.

I help up my hands to admit defeat. “He refused to let me pass. Said as my instructor it’s up to him, and he intends to keep me in combat one until my year’s up and I get kicked out.”

“Have you spoken to Elder Lopez about it?” Charlotte asked from her vantage on the sidelines.

“I think she’s behind it. Long mentioned her, and when I tried to schedule a meeting she put me off.”

Charlotte met me at the edge of the ring and handed up my wayward sword. “Even the strong of your blade can’t meet him. Stop trying to match his attacks. You’re never gonna out-Xavier Xavier.”

I nodded at her advice and reclaimed my weapon.

“Have you considered going over her head?” Charlotte continued, returning to the subject at hand.

“To Berkowitz?” Xavier asked. “Good luck getting a meeting.”

“Maybe Lucy could,” I said, only half paying attention as my mind scrambled for a step in the Dragon’s Fang that could counter Xavier’s aggression. Unfortunately, the style tended to answer aggression with more aggression. “Elder Berkowitz seemed a bit enamored with her.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Xavier said. “She’s off world. Won’t be back from her hunting expedition on Ilirian for at least a few months.”

“Wait, really?” Charlotte pulled up her holopad and frantically tapped away for her notes on Elder Berkowitz. “Threads, you’re right. She left three days ago for a spirit beast cull. Return expected in eight months.”

“Welp, so much for that option.” I looked up to Xavier and raised my sword.

“Aaaaand, fight!”

I took a different tact, slipping into The Dragon Lies in Wait for two heartbeats then twitching ever-so-slightly forward in an attempt to through him off before transitioning into The Hidden Claw, a roundabout strike designed to catch an opponent off guard.

Xavier read me like a book, ignoring my feint and bringing up the haft of his axe to bat away my strike before it got anywhere near him. The maneuver forced his blade itself away from me, but that didn’t stop all two hundred and fifty pounds of him from barreling into me.

I landed on my back.

He extended a hand. “Tricks either work once, or zero times. Don’t depend on them.”

I groaned as he helped me up. “I can’t match you for strength or reach, and you know the style better than I do.”

“Understanding one’s weaknesses is the first step to finding one’s strengths. Understanding one’s opponent’s weaknesses is the first step to finding victory.”

I blinked at him askance but he offered no elaboration. I turned to Charlotte. “Can you translate that to Standard, please?”

“Xavier’s very good at what he does, but what he does is simple and predictable. Since you can’t take advantage of his qi weaknesses, you have to use his aggression against him. Have you thought about just leaving?”

“Have I what?” I paused for a moment as I parsed the cognitive whiplash of the subject change.

“You came to Fyrion because you needed instruction, right? Once we get you through the process of forming your core without killing yourself, you’re done. I’ve already given Lucy the full manuals for both The Dragon’s Fang and the Velereau family style, and it’s not like you need the focus rooms.”

“Charlotte!” Xavier snapped. “He can’t just leave.”

I shook my head. “I may not need the focus rooms, but you guys do. If I left the sect that’d mean staying with Lucy, but Fyrion doesn’t have a long term berth for her. It’d either be just the two of us up in orbit for weeks on end, or we’d have to leave Fyrion altogether. I don’t want to abandon you guys down here.”

“You should at least consider it,” Charlotte said. “Don’t limit yourself for our sake. We’ll be fine.”

Xavier glared at her.

“You will be fine, but I can’t leave Nick. Xav’s gonna make it to housing C any day now, then I’ll be all he’s got. Nick’s already done so much for me. The least I can do is stick around until he comes of age and can escape his situation.”

“Cal’s staying,” Xavier said with a finality to his voice. “Doing otherwise would mean letting Long win.”

“Alright,” Charlotte conceded, understandably not too keen on my departure herself. “That takes us back to step one: dealing with Long.”

“That’s easy.” Xavier shrugged. “Just duel him.”

“I’d prefer to keep my head attached to my shoulders, thanks.”

“Cal’s right. Long already hates him. He’d consider a challenge a grave insult.”

“Then win.”

Charlotte and I shared a confused look before turning in sync to gape at Xavier.

My incredulity broke through first. “He’s a Copper.”

“To hell with his tier, he’s one of the sect’s top cadets. Threads, non-cadets included, Long’s rank two-twenty-nine. Cal only has nine months.”

Xavier’s gaze met mine with stony solidity, an icy certainty discoloring his normally boisterous voice. “I know you can do this, Cal.”

A chill ran down my spine. I shivered in spite of myself. “Okay.”

He rapped his knuckles against the shaft of his great axe. “Again?”

Charlotte let out an aggravated sigh. “You two are going to get each other killed.”

I nodded. “Again.”

I settled in to The Dragon Lies in Wait for a second time as Xavier returned to his side of the ring.

As he charged in, I slipped into something… different. The motion came unnaturally from the Dragon’s Fang’s base defensive stance, but the half-remembered step came so imperfectly to my body that any dissonance in the transition fell by the wayside.

I twisted my elbow in and lowered the point of my blade, adjusting my footwork twice in the seconds I had to keep up my balance.

Xavier swung, a crossed overhand strike I’d seen him throw a thousand times.

I didn’t meet it. I didn’t try to match with a strike of my own or even think to fend off his assault. Nor did I leap to the side in some attempt to dodge his overwhelming force. Unimpeded, Xavier knew how to redirect an attack.

So I impeded him.

I swung my wrist up, angling my sword towards the floor just as Xavier’s axe met it. His blade slid readily along mine, altering its course by a handful of degrees before leaving contact. My own weapon’s downward point allowed his axehead to slip free rather than slamming hard into my crossguard, maintaining the axe’s forward—and downward—momentum as I narrowly sidestepped and pulled my blade back to meet his neck.

Of course, Xavier’s bulk just batted the blunt edge of my practice sword away, but even as he came to a stop and turned around, a red imprint remained across his throat.

“Brilliantly fought! Caliban, your prowess grows by the day!”

I caught the remnants of an endeared smile on Charlotte’s face before she caught herself. “That was sloppy but the right idea. Minimize contact, disrupt just enough to gain a positional advantage, then go for the throat.”

Xavier clapped my on the back. “Well done!”

“Where did you learn that?” Charlotte asked. “It didn’t look like an improvisation, and I don’t recall ever seeing it before.”

“It’s one of Cedric’s,” I answered, “the um… Lucy’s precious passenger. She has some old holos of him practicing that I trained against on my way here.”

“Do you know what the style’s called? Where it’s from?”

“No and no. Lucy probably knows more, but she’s tightlipped about her past, especially where Cedric is involved. Why?”

“It suits you,” Charlotte said. “You should consider incorporating it more into your style.”

“But I need to master the Dragon’s Fang to test out of—shit. You’re right. I’m never going to beat Long at his own style, and if I can only advance by dueling him anyway, I don’t need to perfect the Dragon’s Fang.”

Charlotte pulled up her holopad. “I’ll ping Lucy with a request for her files on Cedric’s fighting style. I’ll have to go through them to pick out how to best incorporate it, but that should only take a day or two. In the meantime, enjoy your afternoons off. It’s not like Long is going to teach you anything useful.”

“Bah!” Xavier burst. “Afternoons off? There’re duels to be fought!”

I grinned at him. “Right you are, big guy.” I raised my practice sword. “Shall we?”

I didn’t win again.

Bout after bout Xavier bested me, exploiting the glaring flaws in my technique to barrel through my defense with masterful aggression. I improved in bits and pieces, solidifying my footwork and growing more comfortable with the maneuver, but my inexperience shined through.

Still, I bore my bruises proudly as I walked away from the training session. I had a plan in mind, another secret weapon in my arsenal, and, after three long months of slamming my head into a wall, at long last, I’d won a sparring match.

Threads knew I had a long way to go. Two meridians to open, a core to form, and an entirely new set of moves to meld into to fighting style, but damn did it feel good.

I mean, hey, if we don’t celebrate our victories, what’s the point?

I opted not to comment when Xavier oh so subtly stayed behind as I left the housing C gymnasium for the transport home. He and Charlotte would share their relationship when they were ready, however abysmally they’d hidden it so far. At least Xavier had stopped avoiding eye contact with her in my presence, even if he kept a conspicuously measured distance.

On this particularly evening, it meant I walked alone up the steps of housing D to the third floor, where I found Nick standing alone at the hall window, staring out over Fyrion’s barren expanse and the starry sky beyond.

I stepped up to what had become our unofficial meeting spot and joined him in his stargazing. “We missed you at dinner tonight.”

“I was working.”

A second passed in silence as I waited for Nick to elaborate. He didn’t. “This apple variant of yours?”

He nodded. “I want…” He trailed off for a moment before taking a different tact. “If it’s possible for a human to swap out normal qi for yours, it has to be possible for a plant, right?”

“I… wouldn’t know. I guess so. It’d probably be a lot safer to experiment with a plant than on people.”

“But I have to find your qi first. I can’t know what I’m doing if I don’t.”

“I don’t know how feasible that is. Sensing it, I mean. The stars kind of had to align for me to manage it, and I think working with normal qi makes it harder. All I can tell you is that it’s out there.” I let out a breath. “Maybe I can help with your plant? Outside isn’t the only source or dark qi.”

Nick’s gaze remained fixed on the distant gray horizon. “Yeah. That… that would be nice.”

The conversation lulled once more.

We stood in silence for a few pensive minutes, caught up in our own worlds, before Xavier’s words of worry from that morning floated to the surface of my mind. I looked over at Nick. “Penny for your thoughts?”

“What?”

“It’s a—right. You don’t use pennies here. Credit for your thoughts doesn’t have the same ring to it.” I shook my head. “What’s on your mind?”

“Oh. It’s nothing. I just…” He blinked, just once, for the first time since I’d joined him. A crack showed in his armor. “Is this really all there is?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, look. We’re living in an air bubble on a wasteland, fighting each other for scraps. What’s the point? Win enough and you can fight stronger people for bigger scraps? There has to be more than that.”

“There’s always more,” I said. “You just have to find it. Four months ago, I was content to live my life out on roofie. I had oxygen to breathe, food to eat, and friends to talk to. I only really went looking for more after that was taken from me.”

I paused and took a breath. “That’s a lie. Roofie was the more that I found. It took Brady and I leaving home to find it.” I turned to him, but he didn’t meet my gaze. “I know your parents suck. I know you don’t like it here. The good news is, in a bit under two years, you’ll be free to leave. There’s a whole galaxy out there, Nick, and once you turn eighteen, you can see as much of it as you want. Two years may seem like forever, but it’s not, and I’ll be here to wait with you. Charlotte and Xavier need to keep moving up the ranks for their cultivation, but I don’t.”

I touched his arm, forcing him to turn and look me in the eyes as I added, “I’m not going anywhere. I promise.”

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have a said that with Instructor Long’s shenanigans hanging over my head, but after my progress in the ring, anything felt possible. A part of me acknowledged the precariousness of my position, realized that I was saying what Nick needed to hear, but truthfully, I meant it. I couldn’t abandon him. I just couldn’t.

“Okay. Um… thanks.” Nick pulled away and returned to his stargazing.

“So how about tomorrow, just before dinner?” I strategically picked a time that would allow me to drag him down to join us for dinner rather than eating alone in his room. “You can show me what you’ve done so far and maybe I can help out with those apple seeds of yours.”

“Yeah. Sure. That sounds good.”

“Perfect.” I stepped back, patting him on the shoulder with half the expertise and a quarter the force of Xavier’s back-claps. “I’m going to get some sleep. It’s been a long day. Make sure you do the same, eh?”

“Yeah,” Nick muttered, his gaze still fixed on the night sky. “I will.”

I lingered for a few breaths in the hallway, watching him as he stared out the window. He reminded me of myself in far too many ways, ways I’d have preferred never to relive. As I slipped away into my dorm and readied myself for bed, I could only hope that Nick would heed my words. He had a rough path ahead, one I’d barely survived myself, but one that would, eventually, end.

All I could do, between meditation and cycling and training with Xavier and studying with Charlotte and opening my meridians and developing my fighting style all the other thousand pulls upon my attention, was find time to help him through it.

I owed him that much. I owed myself that much.

Just two more years.

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