“No one’s going to die,” I said stubbornly. “Your Sword of Damocles only demands that Nik be present for the fight, not that he win. If he throws one punch, the curse’s requirements will be fulfilled. Once your noose is off his neck, he can just surrender, my dad will accept it, and this whole thing will end in a whimper.”
I hadn’t actually considered that angle until I said it, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized I had a good point. Maybe everything wasn’t lost after all! Sure I’d only just thought about it, but my dad was a sneaky snake. I was certain he’d already come up with the same idea, if he hadn’t thought of something even better. But as my hopes began to soar, Kauffman burst out laughing.
“Oh, you poor little thing! You really think the Gameskeeper is leaving any of this to chance? There’s no getting out of this fight. That pedal is already pushed down to the floor.”
I really didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking, but this wasn’t about me, and I had to know. “What pedal?”
Kauffman pointed at the screen. I whipped my head around, looking up just in time for the camera to zoom in on Nik’s eyes. His empty, wild, mad eyes, their gray depths completely devoid of rationality or conscience or anything that wasn’t pure animal rage.
“No,” I breathed.
“Oh yes,” Kaufman purred, savoring the moment. “There’s no reversal this time. He’s Mad Dog right from the start, which means this is going to be the fight of his life whether he wants it or not.”
I didn’t want to believe it, but there was no denying what was in front of my own eyes. The crowd clearly saw it, because their booing at my dad was instantly replaced with a scream of pure delight for the violence to come.
Even knowing that they were being egged on by the raging magic, hearing them cheer for this tragedy made me sick to my stomach, though that could also have been from the fear. I knew my dad was a good fighter—you couldn’t live as long as he had and not be good at keeping yourself alive—but he was still way below where he should be, and Nik would leave him no room for error. He was going to go straight for the kill, which meant my dad would have to fight back for real, and that wasn’t going to end well for anyone. Whatever clever plans he might have come up with would never survive Mad Dog’s mindless onslaught. Any way you ran this scenario, one of them was going to die unless something stopped them, and as the only card left on the table, that something had to be me.
With that realization, I stopped freaking out and pulled myself together. This was no time to be a victim. As bad as it looked, no one was actually dead yet, and if I could just think fast enough, maybe I could keep it that way. I already had an idea. A terrible, half-baked one that was missing several critical steps, but I’d figure out the rest of the details if I got that far. First, though, I had to get out of here.
I looked up at Kauffman through the green-tinted glass of his tacky table, thanking my lucky stars that the arrogant bastard hadn’t bothered to tie anything except my hands. Or get a proper guard. It was just the two of us in here, and while he was unquestionably the better mage, I had more to lose. Also, as he’d so dismissively pointed out, I was a Shaman, which meant I didn’t need to set up a circle or write spellwork to cast. I just needed to find some magic I could actually use.
Unfortunately, that was one of the blank bits in my plan. Despite the power shooting over me like a pressure wash, Kauffman’s spellwork was every bit as good as he’d bragged. No matter how much or how hard I grabbed, the arena magic always ripped right back out of my mental grasp before I could do anything with it.
It was the same stupid problem I’d had since the first time I’d come in here. Now, though, I didn’t have the luxury of shrugging it off. I had to get power from somewhere, so I closed my eyes and forced myself to think.
The Gameskeeper was a spirit, and this arena was his domain. That meant all the magic here was his and thus inside the control of Kauffman’s circle, but the arena wasn’t a pocket dimension. We were still on planet Earth. Still in the DFZ, the city that had been ground zero for both mana crashes. The arena’s magic might be locked up tight, but the land beneath it—not the city, but the physical ground—should still be radiating ambient power just like every other place on the planet. It would be small and heavily dissipated, but that actually worked in my favor, because the one part of my spellwork courses I’d never had a problem with was the list of all the shit we were free to ignore in our equations.
Whatever mages like Kauffman claimed, Thaumaturgical spellwork notation was hardly comprehensive. There were tons of little, annoying, impossible-to-square factors that simply got glossed over, and ambient magic was one of those. I certainly hadn’t bothered to account for it, and while Kauffman was far more meticulous, I bet he hadn’t, either. Why should he when multiple studies had shown that ambient magic wasn’t strong enough to throw off spellwork? If he was ignoring it, though, then that meant there was at
