Chapter 247 – Vs he who shanks ankles [Lydia POV]

“The barrier is in place,” Luna said, looking for a moment at the princess to her left. Many things lingered in her eyes: amusement, interest, curiosity, and a slight bit of worry. Lydia answered that glance with the same stoic expression she answered almost everything with. Before the crowd could think anything of it, Lydia turned and walked away.

Their relationship was fairly close these days. It hadn’t been when they had first met in front of a recently closed grave, it had been when they met again in front of the open one. Lydia looked at the memories with care, they both were important to her, for very similar reasons. They both had a connection to her parents, they both were part of why she was here today.

She wondered when she would tell John of this. Of the former, maybe one day soon, of the latter… only if it ever became necessary. With the combined stubbornness of a princess and a young woman, that secret would not leave her lips until she deemed it the last possible moment. She was ready to accept the consequences of these thoughts.

“Let us roll for the arena this fight will be in!” the annoyingly hyped announcer shouted out.

Lydia sighed and rubbed her forehead. ‘This man is practically an embodiment of the problem,’ she thought and looked around the cheering masses. ‘By extension, all of these are problematic… maybe I should stop thinking of them as problematic and start with ‘of poor taste’? Evidently, this competition is rather popular amongst the people… I suppose there is some value in the ritual humiliation of politicians?’

“Hey, princess of steel,” the goblin's voice cut into her pondering and forced her to look at him. The goblin was about up to her kneecaps, which made him small even amongst his kind. His green skin, of a lighter tint, was largely hidden underneath the black cloth of his many layered armour – if the assortment of rags even deserved that moniker.

Lydia could feel the many pieces of metals in his clothes, the elemental inside let her feel pretty much everything that she could control within a certain radius. Either the goblin had not been given glass weapons or had refused to use them. Lydia didn’t know whether the latter possibility showed arrogance or certainty. The difference between those two was usually if one lost, as the princess was only too acutely aware of.

She withstood the urge to grab towards her right, inner breast pocket where she stored the three mithril vials that could boost her powers temporarily. Giving the enemy information that there was something there would have been a dire mistake. Instead, she folded her hands behind her back. “What is it?”

“Is it true that they call you a genius?” the goblin grinned in a furious way, as if whatever answer she gave was already wrong. His spiky teeth, like nails someone had flattened on an anvil, were of a sickening yellow shade. The edges were reinforced with some sort of wooden caps.

Even if the goblin was arrogant enough to carry metal weapons into the field against her, he did not make the mistake of giving the same kind of weakness to his innards.

‘I should think of him as the highest threat he could be,’ Lydia told herself and took a step backwards. Technically, there was no set distance to begin the fight in. To her surprise, the goblin, who she deemed a melee fighter because of the one dagger plainly on his hips, mirrored the motion.

“I suppose some call me that. Why is that of interest to you?” Lydia answered, wondering if she should close the distance again. Was the goblin playing mind tricks with her or was he trying to get some space between them as well?

“You know what they called me?” Ankleshanker’s voice asked in an unpleasant tone that only added to the ruggedness of his voice; “They called me small, tiny, miniscule… a flea.” Lydia furrowed her eyebrows; she failed to realize how any of this related to their current situation. She took another step back, only a half one, as she didn’t want the goblin to leave her area of absolute control.

With the sound of a happy little trumpet, the wheel on the screens above finally came to a halt, showing a row of trees. “Today’s fight will be in a forest!” Jeff happily announced. “And from experience I can tell you, it is going to be a thick one!”

“Mhm, this is not necessarily to either candidate's disadvantage,” Dra analysed. “Of course that depends entirely upon what kind of magic this Ankleshanker fellow uses, but the princess’ metal magic should neither be obstructed nor reinforced by this terrain.”

While it was true that Lydia’s magic wasn’t disadvantaged by the terrain, she herself was. She couldn’t attack something that she couldn’t see. The goblin’s sour expression showed that he wasn’t all that happy with the terrain either. Trees sprouted all around them, wide trunks with green and golden crowns of leaves that dimmed the sun to a soft twilight. Only the space between Lydia and her obstacle stayed free of invasive greenery. The floor was still replaced with a dense knot of roots.

Lydia heard the people count down from far, far away. While they were technically still inside the arena, the battleground had shifted into another place, the total size unknown, to prevent fighters from predicting the edge of the arena. An obscuring of information, much like the rest of this forest.

At the last number of the countdown, Lydia focused her powers to turn the weapons of the goblin against himself. A swift elimination could be achieved, if she just managed to turn him into a needle cushion.

Suddenly, the weapons slipped from her grip. The metal shrunk, making it like trying to grip a wet bar of soap. Before she could readjust, the goblin, now the size of a clenched fist, jumped into the trees behind him.

Size changing weapons, Lydia wasn’t exactly surprised by that. A size changing assassin would have size changing weapons. As the metals turned smaller, they were also harder to grasp. At the toothpick size they became, Lydia would have needed to concentrate on each of them individually. The broad attack she had attempted had thus been neutralized and now her enemy had disappeared into the forest.

‘The speed at which he was able to miniaturize is concerning,’ Lydia thought as she watched over the surrounding areas. A throwing dagger, the size of a hairpin, flew at her from the left and stopped half a metre from her face. She had it land in her hand, but it didn’t grow to a size that was usable for her. ‘Personalized,’ she noted and sent it flying into the ground, burying it between the roots. It was too small to be useful to her even if she carried it around, so she might as well make sure that he didn’t get to use it again.

Two more daggers followed. This time she blocked them by turning her rapier into liquid metal. Without a doubt, she could have stopped these two as well, just like she could have stopped the first one further away from her face. Better to hide what degree of control she was capable of until it became pivotal.

Another knife, from the right this time, flew at her. Only for a moment, she wondered why he only sent a single one, then there was pain in her eye and half of her vision went red and black.

‘Glass,’ she didn’t even need to pull it out to reprimand herself. It wasn’t that he had skipped the glass, it was that he was wearing both to fool her.‘Just how many armaments does he carry underneath these rags?’ she thought and decided to put a stop to this. One damaged eye was bother enough.

The metal plates inside her military coat, the buttons and whatever else of metal she had on her body unified into a rotating barrier that kept her safe while she thought of a plan. ‘The main problem here are those trees,’ Lydia finalized; ‘They provide him with cover while they limit my effectiveness.’

Half of the swirling materials were reshaped or rearranged to emulate the teeth of a saw. And, exactly like a saw, these things started reducing the mighty trees around her into nothing but piles of wood. First she felled the trunks, then she methodically removed the branches until nothing Ankleshanker could hide inside was anywhere near her. Only woodchips and sawdust remained.

Occasionally, she spotted the goblin, as he hopped from treetop to treetop in an attempt to get a sure footing again. Once Lydia was happy with her work and at the heart of the piles of lumber, she stopped and laid her one intact eye on the goblin, sitting at a normal size about 10 metres away from her.

At that distance she still couldn’t just crush him between his weapons, not within a time frame that would allow the goblin to transform back into a smaller form and slip away once more. She had to give it to him: he knew his ranges. “Sorry about the eye, genius,” Ankleshanker mocked her. “Must really hurt.”

“It is of no matter,” Lydia, her hands still behind her back, answered coldly, turning to face him and taking the smallest step backwards. “I will heal after this battle ends in my victory.”

“You must be rea- HEY!” the goblin squealed as he dodged an iron ring flying for his head at high speed. Robbed of its binding, Lydia’s braid undid itself within moments. In the sun of the culled forest, her hair was of a shimmering, dark red.

“Want to lose while looking stylish?” Ankleshanker laughed but then was temporarily distracted by several dozen buttons coming for him. A disconnected stream of individual attacks. They were easy to dodge and the small projectiles left her range as they flew. A worthwhile sacrifice to keep her enemy distracted.

The princess allowed herself a faint smile, even as a tear of blood touched her red lips. “What are you laughing about, huh?!” Ankleshanker demanded to know and grabbed his cloth armour. With a simple, strong tug he was suddenly freed from it and all of his weapons. He jumped high into the air. “They called you a genius!” he screeched as he descended upon her, but Lydia kept sending buttons at him, every single one she had. Tumbling through the air, Ankleshanker dodged them all, “Look at how that brilliance proves on the battlefield! They called me small!” The size of a human, he landed directly in front of her. With no metal on his body, only clothed with a sash and heavy boots, Lydia could only hurl a shrapnel fire of her defensive layer against him. The projectiles were blocked by a forearm that was now as thick as the princess’ torso. “Who is small now?!” his still unpleasantly scratchy voice triumphantly roared as the pieces of metal got stuck in his arm.

He stood high and mighty above her, at least four metres tall. Yet still, Lydia kept smiling. Sure, there was a big strain on her bloodied face. A vein popped on the goblin’s forehead, and with a roar, he raised his arm. He wanted to squash her like humans squashed ants. Merciless, quickly, with absolute superiority.

`He is quite easily baited.`

The goblin's arm never came down. Ankleshanker found himself unable to move. Confused, he turned his head and realized the trap he was in. The buttons that had missed him, the several dozen of them, all had wrapped around branches in the still standing trees behind him. Each and every single one was anchoring something, keeping it taut. In the air between them and him, there were thin wires, almost invisible, of a reddish brown colour in the sunlight.

The buttons had never been there to hit him, Lydia only wanted to spread these wires for him to get tangled up in, and when he had tumbled through the air, dodging what came at him, Ankleshanker had played right into her cards. All she then had needed to do was wait for him to get close enough to allow her to pull the wires taut. Lydia wasn’t an ant to be squished, she was a spider at the heart of her web.

She raised the fingers on which the wires ended. To use her hair in this manner was unorthodox for her, but as a partial metal elemental, having some parts of her body enjoy a high concentration of metallic substances inside them was not unusual. It was, however, hard to control the wires themselves, as they were too thin to make for easy targets.

Once she had bound her hair to the buttons, with which she practiced commonly, this drawback was largely negated. ‘And next he will shrink down,’ Lydia thought as Ankleshanker turned his hand with a pained smile. Indeed, he could escape the net by shrinking down faster than she could adjust the tightness; the metal shrapnel would rip his arm apart in the process, but he technically hadn’t lost just yet.

Lydia quickly scrambled to grab a vial from her jacket. Time was of the essence in these final moments. The horrible sounds of bones cracking and muscle fibers tearing accompanied the rather mild sound of the vial being unsealed. The princess’ eye focused closely on his shrinking process even as she gulped down the mithril-mercury mixture.

As she had noted the first time Ankleshanker shrunk down, his shrinking form oriented towards a position between the current one of his feet. That meant that he would stop shrinking exactly above…

The mixture ran down her throat, leaving a chemical aftertaste on her tongue. What was poison to normal humans filled her with true strength. Keeping control of all of her current objectives as well as the miniscule dagger in the ground was suddenly within the realm of her possibilities. The blade shot upwards and impaled Ankleshanker’s right foot. A small miscalculation, Lydia had thought it to hit his jaw, but none the matter as it nevertheless immobilized the goblin.

Unable to dodge with a blade sticking from his foot and suddenly surrounded by sharp pieces of metal, Ankleshanker growled the words, “You win.”