I didn’t even register Warren screaming as he sprinted down the stairs to his son. I stood there, looking down at that broken thing, and felt something crawl up my spine, something I had not felt since I sat across from him at that dinner.

  Fear.

  Not disgust, or revulsion, or contempt. These are the standard things I would feel when dealing with that monster. No. Those feelings and the thoughts accompanying them were correct, but… it was different now. Very different now.

  The bubble deformed, and then both men were standing across from each other. Calder blinked hard as his hands shot to his neck, before he fell to his knees and wretched.

  Boris… just looked tired. Drained. His usual smug grin was gone, as was the hard look that surrounded his eyes. That determined, ready look he had walked up those stairs with before the match now looked foreign in my memory.

  I was whipped back to reality as a member of the crowd screamed, “murderer!”

  His voice carried far, echoing off the silence more than the walls. I scanned the crowd to see a man with only hate in his eyes staring daggers at Boris’s back. Then a man only a few seats away shot up and cried, “Monster!”

  More voices joined in, the shouts growing louder, the crowd growing dangerous. Before long the entire stadium shook from their hatred at a single man. All because they had been promised his defeat, and instead witnessed his greatest triumph.

  And in response, his shoulders sagged, his face growing miserable at the onslaught befalling him. My gut wrenched with pity, in open rebellion at how I really felt.

  The crowd had settled on a singular description, one that encapsulated his entire, pathetic being. What had started with one man screaming into stunned silence became the chant that an entire stadium agreed with. That I agreed with.

  Murderer!

  These chants followed his heavy shoulders as he descended the stairs. I watched him leave, the smug satisfaction at the hatred he had received almost diminishing the fear.

  Almost.

  I felt my mother’s hand grip my shoulder like a vice. “Daughter, do you see why I told you to stop interfering? Nothing but a waste of time and effort. He was always going to win.”

  And make us look bad? Make you look bad? You know, Mother, I realized something else when I was mulling over our earlier conversation. I had never called Boris a civvie before you spared him. So your entire speech on why he was still alive didn't make sense.

  And it still doesn’t explain why you're just ignoring how all of the blessed feel. They made it quite clear just a moment ago, and you ignore it like it’s not even there.

  Why do you like him so much? Why?

  I wanted to scream this at her. I wanted to tell her how wrong and stupid she was being over one civvie. Over the mistake she was making.

  But I said nothing at all.

  She turned me around to face her, her eyes locked onto mine. “You will fight him tomorrow. You will bear your defeat with grace, do you understand?”

  I nodded at her, even as my hands shook. I could not tell if it was from rage or fear.

  “Good. I shall see you after your match tomorrow,” was all she said before she walked away.

  I watched her back as she left, every part of me aching to say something. To disagree, to scream, to beg… but I said nothing. Only watched as my mother left. My mother, who didn’t think I even had a chance.

  Slava whipped me around to face him, “You don’t listen to that bitch. You are strong, your ability and plans will work. You can do this, Sofia. Come, we will be going over tactics for the rest of the day, okay?”

  We went home after, Slava walking with his arm wrapped around me the entire way to the car, almost dragging me out of the stares the other high rankers gave me. I felt like I could hear what they were thinking.

  A healer almost defeated you. How are you going to beat him?

  But I held my head high, even as my lip trembled. I would win. I had too. If I lost to that thing…the tower itself would lose. Everything my father had built would come crashing down because of one stupid civvie.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  By the time we got to the car, my breaths were coming in quick and shallow. My mind felt like it was sprinting, a thousand thoughts entering my head a minute. Every tactic or plan that filtered through the noise was studied, thought through, and then discarded. Each of them had too many holes, too many what-ifs rather than contingencies.

  When I walked upstairs, I felt Slava push me onto the couch before he sat down next to me. He put on one of his bad action films, the soft noise of gunshots in the background somehow reassuring. I leaned into his embrace, and he started stroking my hair.

  “Where’s that whiteboard?” he asked as a string from his halo started floating into the kitchen before it crept through the hall.

  “Second drawer on the left. Not the desk by my bed. But get the papers on the second desk.” I answered half heartedly, thinking back to right before the match started.

  That conversation we had before the match now felt alien, like the last hour had made me into a different person. Boris promised to kill me slowly. He had killed every opponent he had fought. And I had just… been alone with him? Unarmed and without any allies? The danger I had ignored because Calder made me feel safe… now seemed incredibly naive.

  Of course, he beat him. All Calder had to do was kill him, stomp on his head when Boris played dead. All Abigail had to do was stab him three inches higher, through his heart rather than his stomach. All Zach had to do was maintain his distance, and none of this would have happened. He would have stayed where he belonged.

  All the things that could have happened, that should have happened… didn’t.

  And on that thought, all the papers I had asked for dropped down onto the large wooden table between us and the TV. The whiteboard floated in behind it not long after.

  He read through them next to me as cooking sounds came out of the kitchen. No plan was crystallizing, no plan burst out at me, even though I knew everything about him. All of his weaknesses, his reason for why he was trying to leave the tower, and even his ability's strengths, and yet I couldn’t beat him.

  “You still got that crossbow from Johannes?” Slava asked out of nowhere.

  “Yeah,” I said absently.

  “Alright, then you have a method to beat his shield.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I see you have some maps drawn up already for certain scenarios. His abilities are similar to Calder’s, so with a bit of tweaking, they'll still work.”

  “Yeah”

  I felt him put down the papers before sitting me up and making me look at him. He stared at me for three seconds before he raised his hand and smacked me on the forehead.

  “Ow! What was that for?” I said, scooting away from him as I rubbed the spot he smacked.

  “You are behaving like you’ve already lost. That’s just to wake you up a bit.”

  “But Slava, all my plans involved Calder beating him! What am I—”

  “Calder lost. So we’re making new plans. We got about twenty-two hours, after all,” he said, his eyes drilled on the whiteboard as he started drawing out potential changes I could add to one of the scenarios.

  He turned back to me afterwards, “I will help you. But I can’t do it for you. We have everything we need to beat him. Stop behaving like you’ve lost, get your head in the game and let’s fucking beat this murderer.”

  I looked at my hands, unable to meet his eyes. “Slava, my own Mother thinks I am—”

  “Your Mother thinks a lot of things, many of them fucking incorrect. And that is not your only parent. Are you your Father’s daughter, or not?”

  At the mention of my father, I felt all fear and apathy leave me. I hadn’t lost yet. And I could do something about it.

  I looked him in the eyes. “I am Alexander’s daughter. I am going to beat him. I have too.”

  He ruffled my hair with pride, “Good. Now, you need to get the guns away from him. Your chances aren’t nearly as strong as they could be if he has one.”

  “I have a subordinate who can assist with that, but they won’t make as much of a difference as you think. He promised to kill me slowly, so I assume he will refrain from using guns to try and win.”

  Slava went very still at that revelation, something clattering in the kitchen before he turned and looked at me. “...Did he now?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Let’s move on.”

  Slava shook his head, “No, it matters because he’s shown his hand. Still, get those guns away from him, even if he doesn’t try to kill you immediately, he can still shoot to maim, slow you down, before closing the distance and finishing you off. So no guns. And keep yourself as far away as possible at all times. This is how you're going to do it…”

  We discussed strategies for how I was going to win long into the night, only coming to concrete plans at about three AM. The dinner he made, my favorite of course, had kept me going, but fatigue was slowly taking me.

  I phoned Bongi, only taking three rings instead of the standard two before his tired voice answered, “Uhm, hello Sofia. What can I do for you?”

  “You are going to win the match for me. This is what I need you to do…”

  It took me ten minutes to lay out what I needed from him, but he listened to me speak without complaint, and when I was done all he said was, “I don’t know if that’s even allowed, but I’ll do it. And… good luck.” Then he hung up.

  By five AM, I had a few solid plans. No, better than solid. Good plans. Everything I needed to beat that civvie. I was leaning against Slava, and I drifted off to sleep thinking over one of our previous arguments.

  Boris said he hated being one of us. I knew him to be a liar, so I believed his complaints and anger to be nothing but a falsehood. The Idea that being one of us would somehow degrade him, somehow make him a worse person, was nothing more than the ramblings of a madman.

  But… perhaps there was a reason civvies didn’t get their abilities. Maybe Mother, or perhaps even my father, knew that when people like him got powers, they destroyed everything around them. Including themselves.