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Chapter 766: Ashes Against Lorgar!

The crowd noise had not fully registered what it had seen.

Lorgar hit the platform and rolled — once, twice — and her body began to change before she stopped moving. The clothes tore themselves apart as she expanded outward, smooth skin vanishing under a dense coat of light yellow fur, limbs lengthening into something that was not designed to wear clothing or stand in doorways.

“Hmm.” Ashes watched the transformation. “She’s different from Maggie.” Fat Pigeon wrapped herself in feathers and became a bird — a clean swap, one form for another, the old shape gone entirely. This was something else: an inflation, a becoming, the human shape stretching into a larger model of itself. No wonder she fights barefoot. She knows she’ll ruin a pair of shoes every time. Maggie, by contrast, was economical — she kept her clothes, wrapped her packages in feathers, rarely destroyed anything that could be carried. There was a practical argument for Maggie’s approach that Lorgar’s did not make.

“Ow — ow — ow — woo—!”

When Lorgar stopped rolling, the thing that rose from the platform was enormous.

Ashes had seen desert wolves on the road to and from the Land of Fire — yellow-furred, lean, built for heat and shortage rather than the comfortable cold of the snow wolves in the Western Region. Their fur ran short and stiff, and after sunset their eyes emitted a faint green light. They had the permanent look of something that was always a little hungry.

This wolf was of that kind. But it was not of that size.

Even a horse would have stood smaller beside her. Lorgar’s forelimbs alone were half a head taller than Ashes. Standing upright on her hind legs, she would have been the height of two men stacked. And her nose — the nose Ashes had just broken — had carried forward into the animalized body: the bridge collapsed, the nostrils blowing hot air laced with thin threads of blood.

Lorgar howled.

The crowd gasped. Even the Ironsand people, who revered Divine Ladies and knew what Lorgar could do, had apparently never witnessed the full transformation. Fear was the natural response to something that large bellowing at close range. Even Ashes — who had not moved — felt the pressure of it, the air displacement, the sound finding the bones.

Without waiting for the gasp to subside, Lorgar lunged.

Ashes went serious.

The speed was substantially improved. Not quite the level of a God’s Punishment Warrior, but approaching it — and the size changed every calculation. Against human-sized opponents, one or two steps of lateral movement was usually enough to slip an attack and counterattack. Against Lorgar’s reach and mass, she needed four or five steps to get the same distance, and sometimes five steps was not fast enough.

She moved aside to dodge the first thrust and immediately recognized the error.

Lorgar’s range in animalized form was simply too wide. The dodge had been the right distance for a human-sized opponent. For a wolf of this size, it was not. Before she could adjust, the right claw came around in a wide sweep and struck her like a wall.

The collision was equal in force for both of them. The advantage of mass was not. Lorgar shuddered with the impact; Ashes was launched.

She landed, rolled, came up. More wounds were accumulating — most of them from the tail, which Lorgar had started using as a horizontal whip sweeping close to the ground. The range was remarkable: half the platform within its reach in a single rotation, and if you were not already clear of it when it moved, you were not going to get clear.

Below the platform’s edge, Echo grabbed Andrea’s wrist without noticing she had done it. “Will Ashes be all right?”

Lorgar was pursuing her relentlessly now, keeping the pressure continuous, not giving her room to breathe or set. The reversed situation was stark — the thing that had been knocked easily onto its back was now the one pressing forward, and the woman who had controlled the opening of the fight was absorbing hits and moving backward.

“Don’t worry.” Andrea watched without particular alarm. “An attack like this won’t cost her her life. She still hasn’t given everything she has.”

“She hasn’t — what?” Echo stared. Ashes was visibly breathing hard. Several wounds had opened. Her robe was dyed red in patches. “She doesn’t look relaxed at all.”

“Do you know the Extraordinary Training Method from the Taquila age?” Andrea asked.

“No. What is it?”

“A way to accelerate magic power consumption, so you’re in training mode continuously. According to His Majesty Roland, it’s ancient and inefficient — he suggested it would be better to study two books on how muscles and bones convert chemical energy into mechanical energy.” She chuckled. “But I think for someone with Ashes’ particular relationship with books, the old method suits her perfectly.”

Echo’s mouth opened.

“Look,” said Andrea pleasantly, smoothing the end of her hair. “She’s about to fight back.”

The moment Ashes created distance, her hand moved to her inner arm.

She pulled out a length of black cloth — a strap, wide and flat. She held it out toward Lorgar, who had stopped.

“Is that a weapon?” The wolf-girl’s voice was lower now, roughened.

The crowd stirred. A holy duel’s agreement was sanctioned by the Three Gods themselves — deserters and cheats were marked permanently. No one violated the rules, not because anyone checked, but because the shame of it was the kind that could not be undone.

Ashes smiled and dropped the strap on the platform floor.

It did not land like cloth. It made a dull, heavy crash, the sound of something dense striking stone — not a gentle flutter but a thud, as though a small stone had been dropped rather than a piece of fabric.

Lorgar’s howling contracted.

The strap was one of three. She crouched and removed the two shorter pieces from her ankles.

They were handmade by Soraya, and they were not fabric. The construction was three layers: the innermost hollow and packed with special iron bars, the outer layers thick canvas. Even ordinary canvas would have given out within a week under this use; Soraya’s construction held. The ankle straps, each one, weighed roughly ten pounds per short section. The waist strap was the equivalent of carrying an adult person across the shoulders.

She stood.

The feeling was immediate: a vast, abrupt lightness. As though something had been quietly pressing down on her from all sides for weeks, and she had grown so accustomed to it that she had stopped noticing, and now it was simply gone. The ease that returned to her body was not ordinary ease. It was the ease of something released.

“Extraordinaries wear these things to train.” She remembered what Agatha had said, clearly, in the tone the ancient witch used when she was transmitting something important. “The faster the magic is consumed, the stronger the body becomes. Many take them into battle and release them at the critical moment — the most unexpected power, precisely when the enemy believes they have measured you. If all goes well, and you persist for five to six years, you may even break through the body’s shackles and become a Transcendent.”

A year and three months had passed since then.

She looked at Lorgar.

She was not thinking about whether it was enough. She was thinking about whether the wolf could take what came next.

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