Chapter 3: 1.1.3
The air in the competitors’ lounge had changed. It was no longer just the ambient tension of pre-fight nerves; it had curdled into something thicker, more pointed. Koen could feel the stares like physical taps on his skin as he followed Gabriel through the room. The sleek water-fey from earlier turned his back in a deliberate, theatrical snub. A trio of human pugilists in matching satin robes fell silent as he passed, their conversation dying mid-sentence.
He didn’t get it. He’d won. He’d followed the rules. He’d even asked if the fungaloid was okay.
Gabriel guided him to a relatively quiet corner near a window overlooking the training yards. He didn’t sit, standing instead with his back to the room, a physical barrier between Koen and the rest of the lounge. His voice was low. “They’re talking.”
“About what?” Koen asked, picking at a thread on his borrowed trousers. The fabric was too smooth, nothing like good, sturdy leather.
“About control. About how a ‘creature’ with your… evident capacity for violence… managed to walk away without roaring or posturing. Without, as they see it, losing yourself to the bloodlust.”
Koen frowned. “I wasn’t lusting for blood. I was just fixing the problem in front of me.”
“I know.” Gabriel’s hand came to rest briefly on his shoulder, a fleeting anchor. “They don’t. Their narrative requires a monster on a leash. The fact that you don’t seem to need one is inconvenient. It suggests the monster might be smarter than the leash-holders.”
Before Koen could puzzle that out, an official entered the lounge. Not a clipboard-wielding attendant, but a man in the severe, grey robes of the tournament’s Arbiter Panel. The background chatter cut off entirely.
“Koen Delano,” the man announced, his voice carrying without effort. “By request of the Competitor Safety and Fairness Committee, you are to report for a comprehensive thaumaturgic audit. Immediately.”
Gabriel turned smoothly, his expression a mask of polite concern. “An audit? On what grounds, Arbiter?”
“Grounds of due diligence, Mr. Valenti.” The Arbiter’s eyes, pale and unblinking, swept over Koen. “Extraordinary physical performance, especially from an infernal-adjacent lineage, can sometimes be indicative of… subliminal enchantments. Charms of rage-suppression, or pain-negation. We must ensure the playing field is level for all species.”
It was bureaucratic, wrapped in the language of fairness. The unspoken accusation hung in the air: You are not capable of this control. Therefore, you must be cheating.
Koen looked at Gabriel. Gabriel gave an almost imperceptible nod. Go along with it.
“Okay,” Koen said, standing.
The testing chamber was deep in the arena’s underbelly, a sterile, circular room lined with humming copper coils and crystalline matrices. It smelled of ozone and cold stone. Several Arbiters were present, along with a gaunt woman in technician’s robes, her fingers glittering with conductive rings.
“Stand in the center circle, please,” the technician said, her voice devoid of warmth.
Koen did as he was told. The stone beneath his feet was etched with runes that began to glow a soft blue. The coils around the room vibrated, emitting a low hum that made his teeth ache.
“This will measure your innate thaumic output and signature,” an Arbiter explained from behind a reinforced glass observation panel. “Any active, dormant, or external enchantments will be made manifest. Do not resist.”
The hum peaked into a sharp whine. The runes flared. Koen felt a strange, tingling pull deep in his core, like a hook trying to catch on something that wasn’t there. The crystals around the room lit up, projecting intricate patterns of light into the air above him—a spectral diagnostic chart.
The technician leaned forward, squinting. Her fingers danced over a control slate. The pull intensified. Koen just stood, patient, wondering if this was going to take long. He was hungry.
Minutes passed. The technicians conferred in hushed, urgent tones. One of the Arbiters left the observation booth and entered the chamber, his brow furrowed.
“Run the deep-spectrum again,” he instructed.
“We have, Arbiter Vonn. Three times.” The technician sounded baffled. “The readings are… consistent. And minimal.”
“Define minimal.”
She gestured at the shimmering light chart. The patterns were small, confined, dull compared to the vibrant, sprawling displays in textbooks. “Baseline humanoid thaumic resonance. Lower, even. There’s a tiny, stable spike in the pyrogenic spectrum—utterly negligible. No foreign signatures. No suppression charms. No rage-dampeners. His magical profile is quieter than a street-sweeper’s.”
Arbiter Vonn stared at Koen, who offered a small, uncertain smile, not knowing what else to do.
“It must be a null-field effect,” the Arbiter muttered. “Some infernals can mask their—”
“The array is designed to pierce null-fields, sir. This is his actual reading.” The technician tapped her slate. “The man has almost no innate magic. What he does have is about enough to…” She peered at the readout. “…to consistently ignite a single, small flame. A parlor trick.”
The silence in the chamber was absolute, broken only by the dying whine of the coils.
Koen, seeing everyone looking at him, felt he should contribute. “I use it to light cigarettes,” he offered. “And campfires. It’s handy.”
Arbiter Vonn’s face underwent a subtle but profound shift. The suspicion didn’t vanish; it mutated into something colder, more disdainful. A lack of expected magic was almost as damning as an overabundance. It broke another assumption. To these people, power was either a weapon or a leash. Koen appeared to have neither.
“You’re telling me,” Vonn said slowly, “that his physical capabilities—the speed, the regenerative factor noted in his file, the impact force—are entirely… biological?”
“According to the scan,” the technician confirmed, her professional pride slightly wounded by the unremarkable result. “No magical augmentation detected.”
Vonn’s gaze swept over Koen as if he were a peculiar, slightly distasteful insect. A creature that operated on brute mechanics. It seemed to offend him on a fundamental level. “Very well. Certification: no disqualifying enchantments. Log it.”
The dismissal in his tone was final. Koen was no longer a suspected cheat. He was just an animal that didn’t perform according to the manual.
Gabriel was waiting outside the chamber, leaning against the opposite wall. He took one look at Koen’s face and then at Arbiter Vonn’s retreating, stiff back. “Well?”
“They said I don’t have any magic,” Koen reported. “Just the little flame.” He summoned it then, a single, steady tongue of fire dancing on the tip of his index finger. It cast a warm, tiny glow on his freckled face. “See?”
Gabriel stared at the simple flame, then closed his eyes for a second, a complex wave of relief and fresh frustration passing through him. The cheating accusation was dead. But in its place was a vacuum, and nature—especially the political nature of the capital—abhorred a vacuum. They would fill it with something worse.
“Put it out,” Gabriel said softly. “Not here.”
Koen closed his fist, snuffing the flame. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No. You were perfect.” Gabriel pushed off the wall. “Come on. Your next bout is in an hour. Against a pyromancer.”
The news spread through the arena complex not as a scandal, but as a curious, derisive tidbit. The half-demon brawler is a magical null. All brawn, no spark. A relic. Koen heard the whispers in the corridors now, different from before.
“...practically a mundane..."
“...how is that even possible for his kind? Must be a defect…”
“...won’t last against real magic…”
He didn’t feel defective. He felt like himself. But the weight of their confusion was starting to feel like a physical pressure.
The arena for the main bracket was different—a central, elevated platform under a dome of stained glass that scattered jeweled light across the floor. The crowd was ten times larger, a sea of fashionable hats and expectant faces. The announcer’s voice boomed with hyperbolic grandeur.
“...and in this corner, a study in primitive force! Hailing from the gritty pits, a fighter who proves that sheer savagery still has a place in our modern age… Koen ‘The Cinder’ Delano!”
The nickname was new. Cinder. Like the useless, dead thing left after a fire. Koen blinked up at the announcer’s booth, baffled.
His opponent made his entrance with a shower of actual sparks. Elias Vance, the Pyromancer of the Purple Flame. He was tall, slender, dressed in flame-retardant silks that shimmered with embedded wards. He gestured, and arcs of vivid amethyst fire traced beautiful, harmless patterns in the air, drawing oohs and ahhs from the crowd. He was showmanship incarnate.
The referee gave the signal.
Vance didn’t close distance. He never intended to. He snapped his hands forward, and a torrent of purple fire, hot enough to blue the air around it, roared across the platform toward Koen. The crowd gasped, anticipating a scream, the smell of burning meat.
Koen saw the fire coming. He felt the wave of blistering heat. Instinct, deeper than thought, told him to brace. But no deeper instinct told him to run. The fire washed over him.
It was… warm. Unpleasant, like standing too close to a roaring hearth. It smelled of ozone and magic. His clothes, the bland, official-issue trousers and shirt, began to smolder and blacken at the edges. But his skin? It tingled. A mild, familiar sensation. Like a memory of warmth without the pain.
He stood there, wreathed in dissolving purple flame, squinting slightly against the brightness.
The Pyromancer’s triumphant smile faltered. He increased the stream, the fire turning from purple to a desperate, roaring white-hot.
Koen took a step forward. Then another. His smoldering shirt fell away in ashy patches. He emerged from the heart of the inferno like a man walking through a dense fog, his tan skin untouched, not even reddened. His ashen hair was undisturbed.
A dead silence gripped the arena, broken only by the whoosh of magical flame.
Vance’s eyes widened in genuine terror. This was impossible. His magic, his art, his entire identity—it was just… air to this thing.
Koen finally reached him. The pyromancer, panicked, tried to conjure a wall of flame between them. Koen reached through it, grabbed the front of his silken tunic, and pulled him close.
“You’re really warm,” Koen said, his voice almost conversational in the sudden quiet. Then he headbutted him, a crisp, sharp crack of his forehead against the bridge of Vance’s nose.
The pyromancer dropped, unconscious before he hit the floor. The pretty flames died instantly.
The silence deepened, then erupted. Not into cheers, but into a tumultuous wave of boos, shouts, and confused uproar. It wasn’t a victory they understood. It was an offense. He had made a mockery of their idea of power. He had made beautiful, dangerous magic look trivial, silly.
Koen stood over the fallen mage, the acrid smell of his own burnt clothes in his nose. He looked out at the sea of angry, contorted faces, the jeering mouths, the shaking fists. He saw Gabriel at the handler’s rail, his expression tight, calculating the storm.
The referee, stunned, mechanically raised Koen’s hand.
The boos crescendoed. Something arced out of the crowd—a glass bottle. It shattered on the platform near his feet. Then a rotten apple. A shouted slur, sharp and clear above the din: “Freak!”
Koen lowered his raised hand. He looked at the splintered glass, the pulpy fruit. He felt the heat of the vanished flames still lingering in the air, harmless against his skin. He understood the rules of a fight: you win or you lose. These people were playing a different game entirely, one where his very existence was a violation. A deep, instinctive prickle, one he hadn’t felt since his bounty hunting days, traced down his spine.
He turned his back on the screaming crowd and walked to the exit, the noise crashing against him like a physical wall. The monster they’d wanted to see on a leash had just calmly walked through a magical inferno. They’d gotten their spectacle. Now they were terrified of what they’d asked for.
And in the shadows of the tunnel, waiting, Gabriel’s mind was already racing ahead, the cold, protective strategy hardening into something sharper. The playing field was gone. They were in the wilderness now.
The tunnel’s mouth offered only a deeper kind of noise, the clamor of the crowd mutating into the aggressive buzz of gathered reporters. They were a wall of flashbulbs and shouted questions, a chaos of outstretched microphones and hungry eyes that Gabriel had not been able to head off. The scent of their cheap cologne and hot breath hit Koen first, then the strobing light.
“Delano! Was that a charm? A ward!”
“How did you survive that blast?”
“Are you using prohibited alchemical treatments?”
Koen flinched, the sensory assault worse than the purple fire had been. He took a half-step back, his shoulder bumping solidly into Gabriel’s chest. A hand settled firmly between his shoulder blades, not pushing him forward, but steadying him in the storm.
A woman with razor-sharp cheekbones shoved a recorder toward his face. “Your thaumic audit showed negligible power. That conflagration would have carbonized a granite-warden. Explain the discrepancy.” Her tone was an accusation wrapped in a question.
Koen blinked, his mind still stuck on the feel of the flames—warm, not painful. He looked at the recorder, then at her. “Discrepancy?”
“Between your listed magical capacity and your demonstrated fire resistance,” she snapped, as if speaking to a child.
“Oh.” He processed this. The answer seemed obvious to him. “I’m just immune to fire. It doesn’t hurt me.”
A momentary silence fell over the scrum, broken by the whirr of cameras. Then the questions exploded, louder, more insistent.
“Immunity isn’t a recorded infernal trait!”
“What’s the source? Is it a symbiotic demonic contract?”
“Are you internally warded? A branded sigil?”
Koen’s brow furrowed, his confusion genuine and deepening. They were asking the same thing in a dozen complicated ways. He glanced back at Gabriel, whose gaze was fixed coldly on the reporters, his jaw set. He’d told Koen to be baffling. This was just being honest.
“It’s not a ward,” Koen said, raising his voice slightly to be heard. The simple effort of it made him flush. “It’s just me. My soul’s infernal. Fire’s… part of that. It’s a side effect.” He shrugged, the motion making charred bits of his shirt flake off. “I can’t make much, but I don’t feel it either. It just is.”
His explanation, delivered with the plain frustration of someone stating the blatantly obvious, landed like a dead weight. Magic in the capital was studied, codified, compartmentalized. It was formulas and academy degrees. A ‘side effect’ of a soul’s nature was messy, uncontrollable, and terrifyingly inherent. It wasn’t a tool he used. It was what he was.
The razor-cheeked reporter recovered first, her eyes gleaming with a new, vicious angle. “So you admit your inherent physiology gives you an unfair advantage? That this isn’t skill, but an unregulated biological cheat?”
Koen stared at her, his orange eyes utterly blank. The question circled in his head, tangling with the echoes of the crowd’s boos. Advantage? Cheat? He’d just stood there. His opponent had thrown everything he had. Koen had walked through it and headbutted him. That was the fight.
“Was he not allowed to use his fire?” Koen asked, genuinely seeking clarification. “That was his skill. My not burning is just me. How is that different?” He looked at the other reporters, scanning their faces for an answer. “Is the stone-warden cheating because he’s stone? Should he fight without his skin?”
A beat of stunned silence. Gabriel’s hand pressed a fraction harder against his back, a signal to stop. But the dam had cracked.
A male reporter with a sweaty brow laughed, a sharp, ugly sound. “So the monster argues semantics! Cute. Tell us, does your ‘inherent physiology’ include a resistance to steel? To bullets? What else are you hiding?”
“Well I heal really fast, fire doesn’t hurt and all my magic can do is make a match flame. That’s it, honest.”
Koen’s earnest answer, delivered with a slight flush of embarrassment at having to state his own limits, seemed to inflame them further. The admission of rapid healing was gasoline on the smoldering coals of their outrage.
“Healing factor? Documented, I assume? Verified by which accredited Institute?”
“Is there a moral threshold for the pain you can feel?”
“Does your ‘soul’s infernal’ nature require a specific diet? Raw meat? Souls?”
The questions became a weaponized cacophony. They jabbed with their words, aiming for a flinch, a snarl, any confirmation of the beast they’d already written into their headlines. Flashbulbs popped, bleaching the dim tunnel in stark, frozen moments of Koen’s confused face, of Gabriel’s stony mask.
Koen felt his own temper, a slow, warm coil in his gut, beginning to tighten. It wasn’t the anger of being challenged. It was the frustration of being spoken to in a language where all the words were wrong. He could parse a threat in a shifting stance, a tell in a fighter’s eyes. This was just noise with sharp edges.
Gabriel’s voice cut through, low and cold, meant only for his ear. “Don’t. Just walk.”
But another recorder was thrust past Gabriel’s shoulder, grazing Koen’s chin. A man with a pencil-thin mustache sneered. “They say infernals are barely more than intelligent animals. That your kind needs handlers for a reason. What’s your comment on that assessment?”
Something inside Koen, patient and baffled, finally snapped. Not into rage, but into a pure, uncomprehending need to understand.
He didn’t step back. He leaned into the forest of microphones, his orange eyes scanning the ring of hostile, expectant faces. His voice, when it came, wasn’t a roar. It was loud, clear, and utterly, devastatingly genuine.
“Why do you keep saying things like that?”
The scrum faltered for a second. The mustached reporter blinked. “Like what?”
“Like I’m some kind of beast. Or a monster.” Koen’s gaze moved from one to another, searching. “You keep asking about my… my ‘nature.’ About being an animal. About needing a leash.” He said the words as if tasting them, finding them nonsensical. “I answered your questions. I don’t burn. I heal fast. I’m not very good at magic. I’m just here to fight in the tournament.”
He spread his hands, a small, charred piece of fabric fluttering from his wrist. His expression was open, profoundly confused. “What did I do to make you think I’m a monster?”
The silence was abrupt and total. It was the silence of a machine grinding to a halt because a single, simple question had jammed its gears.
The reporters stared. Their mouths, so ready with the next barbed question, stayed half-open. The mustached man’s sneer froze, then melted into something uncertain. The woman with sharp cheekbones looked down at her recorder, then back at him, her professional venom momentarily unmoored.
What had he done? He’d won fights quickly. He’d walked through fire. He’d answered questions with blunt, artless honesty. He’d been… polite.
The beast in their story was supposed to growl, to posture, to confirm its brutality. It wasn’t supposed to look at them with wounded, fiery eyes and ask a child’s sincere question. They had scripts for anger, for defiance, for vile confession. They had no script for this.
One younger reporter at the back, her press hat slightly askew, mumbled something about “infernal ancestry and societal risk.” It sounded hollow, recited from a textbook, and died in the thick air.
Koen waited, still looking for an answer. The silence stretched, becoming awkward, then deeply uncomfortable. The momentum of the pack had evaporated. Gabriel seized the moment, his hand firm on Koen’s back.
“That’s all,” Gabriel stated, his voice slicing through the quiet. He didn’t push Koen; he guided him, and the wall of reporters parted without another word, their collective will to berate shattered by a simple, unanswerable query.
They walked down the cleaner, quieter corridor toward the private locker rooms. The roar of the arena was a distant wave. Koen’s shoulders slumped, not in defeat, but in exhaustion.
“They didn’t answer,” he said softly.
“No,” Gabriel replied, his own mind racing. “They couldn’t. You asked for a reason, and they only have prejudices. It’s a currency that becomes worthless when you demand a receipt.”
He unlocked a door and ushered Koen into a small, tiled room. It was blessedly quiet. Koen sat heavily on a bench, staring at the floor between his knees. The emotional whiplash of the fight, the fire, the hatred, the confusing interrogation—it all settled on him like a heavy, wet cloak.
“I don’t understand what they want,” Koen muttered.
Gabriel knelt in front of him, a rare gesture that put them at eye level. He didn’t touch him. Not here, where anyone could walk in. “They want you to be simple. You are. Just not in the way they think.” He kept his voice low, practical. “You asked the one question they’re terrified of answering honestly. Now they’ll have to work harder to paint their picture. The next opponent won’t be a pyromancer. They’ll send you something designed to make you look like the monster.”
Koen looked up, meeting his eyes. The confusion was clearing, replaced by a colder, more familiar focus. The focus he had before a hunt. “Who?”
“I don’t know yet. But it will be brutal. And ugly. They’ll want a spectacle of savagery from you.” Gabriel’s gaze was intense. “They will try to make you lose your temper. To confirm everything they’ve said.”
A slow breath left Koen’s lungs. He thought of the troll’s broken jaw, the pyromancer’s surprised face. He hadn’t been angry then. He’d been efficient. “What if I don’t get angry?”
A faint, grim smile touched Gabriel’s lips. “Then you’ll confuse them even more. And that might be the most dangerous thing of all.” He stood, the moment of proximity ending. “Clean up. I’ll get your next match assignment. And Koen?”
“Yeah?”
“You did well. Better than well.” Gabriel’s praise was a concrete thing, solid and real in the shifting, hostile world outside the door. “Now rest. The hard part isn’t over. It hasn’t even started.”