The Sports Captain's Tale полностью

Charming, I thought, sarcastically. My father would have practically murdered my arse if I’d spoken to a lady like that, if her father or brother didn’t get me first. Blair was being cowardly, too. Neither Mildred nor Karen was his equal when it came to practical spellcasting, and he had the numbers on Mark. Or are you trying to provoke them into doing something stupid?

It didn’t matter. I inched forward until the base came into view. Blair and his goons were standing in front, laughing and jeering and generally being thoroughly unpleasant. I tried not to cringe. I’d grown up in a town that could be rough, and my early friends had been crude and rude, but there were limits. Blair was magical aristocracy and yet he was being ruder than any of my peers? He really did think he’d won.

I glanced at my team, then took aim. “On three …”

Blair started to turn, too late. I hexed him in the back. He froze, then slowly started to move … I grinned savagely, realising he really was trying to cheat, then hexed him again and again until the spells were firmly locked in place. His teammates went down just as quickly, without even getting a chance to hex us back. I couldn’t help myself. I whooped. We’d won!

I suppose I shouldn’t have mooned him. But I couldn’t resist.

“You fucking cheats!”

Blair stamped up and down, his face purpling until it looked like a blancmange. I would have felt sorry for him if it had been someone – anyone – else. He’d had a stroke of good luck and taken ruthless advantage of it, only to lose because we’d had a plan in place that had been better than his. And now he was bitching and moaning because his perfect victory had been stolen … honestly, I didn’t know why he was so pissed. We might have scored enough points to proceed to the finals, but so had he.

“You cheated,” Blair repeated. “And you …”

Sergeant Wills cleared his throat. “Kai? Would you care to comment?”

I met the sergeant’s eyes, evenly. “Nothing we did broke the rules,” I said. “We brought nothing into the arena. We didn’t hack the tracking spells. We didn’t even try to free ourselves after we were taken out” – I gave Blair a hard look – “or anything else that could reasonably be called cheating. We just outthought them and then outfought them.”

“You freed yourselves,” Blair snapped. That was a bit rich, coming from him. “You cheated!”

“Mildred freed us,” I countered. “She wasn’t hexed herself, therefore it wasn’t cheating and perfectly legal.”

Blair reddened. I was tempted to point out he’d tried to free himself, which really was cheating, but it would just make me a tattletale. The sergeants hadn’t noticed or Blair would have been frog-marched to the stocks or flogged by now … probably. They weren’t impressed by his lineage or anything else he might have to offer. They would have done something if they’d noticed.

“Perfectly legal cheating,” Darrell commented, sourly. Her face was stained with mud, but I could tell she was embarrassed. She’d had a stroke of bad luck, compounded by a lack of time to recover. Blair would rub her nose in her failure until she snapped and tried to hurt him. “We never even thought of it.”

“But you kept three of your people in the base,” Blair said. “Surely, that is against the rules!”

“No,” Sergeant Wills said, simply. “Good practice is not to let yourself get trapped in your own base. It’s quite possible to lose, as you tried, by putting the base under siege. But it isn’t against the rules to leave someone in the base …”

He paused, his eyes moving from team to team. “Darrell and Ham do not have enough points to proceed to the finals,” he said, as if there was anyone in the room who had any doubt of it. “Blair and Kai will be facing the winners of the next match, winner take all. You have two weeks to prepare yourself before your final challenge.”

“Winner takes all,” Blair said. “How ...”

Sergeant Wills glared him into silence. “BattleBorne is not just about taking out the enemy team,” he said. “It is about learning to work together, as a team, and devising newer and better tactics that can later be used on the battlefield. Points are awarded for victory, true, but also for innovation. If you come up with something new, be it a new technique or an adaptation of an earlier technique, the judges will award points for that too. There is no point in grumbling, like Prince Hastings, when your enemy comes up with something new and beats you. You need to adapt to the new reality and come up with something new yourself.”