“That was amazing!” Dorrin gushed, losing his typical stoic composure for a split second. “At first I was certain you had chosen your weapon foolishly, but yet again, my woman has proven me wrong.”
“Yourwoman?” she asked, her heart beating hard, but not only from her exertion.
“So long as you’ll have me.”
A broad smile spread across her lips. “I’ll have you all right. Just you wait until we get home tonight.”
“I can’t wait.”
She looked at her next opponent talking in a huddle with the other elites. Apparently, her performance had shifted their plans, and drastically at that.
“I’m afraid we’ll both have to wait. It looks like it’s going to be a long day.”
He glanced over at them, giving a cheerful wave.
“What are you doing?”
“Psyching them out,” he replied. “I can guarantee you they are far more surprised than I am, and that will work to your advantage. And I assure you, I am quite surprised. That was a most auspicious beginning.”
She grinned brightly. “Well, as we used to say in color guard,act like a beauty, toss likeabeast.”
“Color guard?”
“A band thing. The simplified explanation is we spin flags, which comes in quite handy, apparently.”
“Apparently. You ran up an inordinate number of points on her in no time. It was a deficit she had no hope of recovering from. I do fear, however, that future opponents will learn fromwhat they observed. And Quilla will definitely not be an easy adversary.”
Ziana glanced over at the woman. She was staring at her with quite an intensely unfriendly gaze. Ziana just flashed a bright smile and waved, taking a page from Dorrin’s playbook.
“They’re low in the rankings after her partner’s injury, right?”
“They are.”
“Low enough to possibly be eliminated?”
A look of surprise, then admiration flashed across his face. “Yes, and yes. But to eliminate an elite team? They may fail in an event by their own mistakes, but to be taken out in a one-on-one contest? It is unheard of.”
“Let’s change that.”
He glanced at the scoreboard above, noting not just this day’s stats and rankings, but the overall numbers as well. With her partner hindering them despite the past several days of easy tasks, that pair of elites was actually in jeopardy. It was a crazy idea, but her instincts were not off.
“I like the way you think,” he said, beaming proudly at her gumption and drive. “And if you can manage to put them far enough behind in points, it could actually happen. And oh what a message that would send.”
“Then. I’ll do my best. A few double butterflies and I’ll carve her up.”
“But your rods do not have an edge to them.”
She chuckled. “It’s a band thing. You’ll see. But I guess now we wait a while.”
“Yes. And observe the others. Take note, you will be facing many of them.”
Over the next hour they both did just that, watching as a wide range of fighting techniques were put on display. Many of the combatants were quite skilled, but some had clearlynever trained for this sort of thing. And as the games hadn’t had a martial component to them in longer than most could remember, it wasn’t such a surprising thing.
“You’re up,” Dorrin said when Ziana’s next turn finally came.
Quilla was already in the hexagon, a medium length sword in her hand. She spun it around with a flourish, clearly comfortable with the weapon.
“Elites historically train with all sorts of these things, though just for show.”
