Champion Kevintor Neverloss's Arc

Chapter 27 of 42

Kevintor stood by the closed door of the Iron Match Ring with the towel still on his shoulder. The fifth art pressed under his ribs and would not settle. Rita Ripley watched him without speaking. Armstrong sat on the platform edge, rubbing his arm. Kevintor asked where the belt-holder had trained before he took the ring. Rita pointed down the slope, past a row of pines, to a low building at the mountain's edge. He walked there alone. The dojo had faded wooden siding and a sagging roof. A bowl of cold tea sat on the step, half full, as if someone had set it down and forgotten to come back. Inside, the mats were swept. On the wall hung a printed flyer, edges curled, the paper sun-yellowed. Below it, on a small shelf, sat a medal on a striped ribbon. The plate read jiu-jitsu master. No one had taken it down. No one had claimed it either. Kevintor lifted the medal and weighed it in his palm. A title with no holder. A door with no man behind it. He set it back on the shelf. The art would not come out of an empty room. It needed hands that knew the ground. He had broken Armstrong in eleven seconds, and Armstrong was the best the mountain still had. He walked back up to the ring. Rita was coiling a rope by the post. He told her what he had seen and what he needed. He said he could not stay on the mountain another week waiting for a man who would not return. She listened. Then she said, "My father trained a girl once. She fought him into the floor every night for two years. She runs a school three valleys south. She takes all comers and she will not run from a name." She wrote the road on the back of a card and handed it to him. "Go now. Word of you is already moving up the trail." Armstrong stood up on the platform. "You're leaving? I'll take the belt then. I beat the warm-up, I take the room." Kevintor looked at him. He thought of telling him the belt was a hook and a strap and nothing more. He said nothing. Armstrong could have the hook. The match Kevintor needed was no longer here. He folded the card into his sleeve and started down the back trail before the sun cleared the ridge. The fifth art still pressed under his ribs, unopened. Four circles closed, two to go, and the grappler who could finish the fifth was three valleys away, waiting for a name she had not yet heard.