Champion Kevintor Neverloss's Arc

Chapter 28 of 42

Kevintor walked the back trail down from Dragon Mountain with the card folded in his sleeve. The road Rita had drawn ran three valleys south, but the lines on the card stopped at the second ridge. After that he was guessing. He kept his hood up and his head down. Word of him moved faster than his feet, and the contract on his life had teeth in every town. He could not ask after a grappler by name. He could not walk a market in daylight. He needed a sign without a mouth. He spent two days off the main road. He drank from streams and slept in a dry culvert. On the third morning he climbed a low pass and saw smoke from a farmstead in the next valley. A boy was driving goats along a fence line. Kevintor did not stop him. He watched which way the boy looked when a cart rattled past, and he watched the cart. The driver checked his wheels at a fork and took the south branch without thinking. Kevintor followed at a distance until the trail thinned to a footpath. The path ended at a clearing. A wooden sign hung from a crossbeam between two posts, the boards weathered pale. The top panel read All challenges welcome ahead. The lower panel named the place: Armbraker Dojo. Beyond the sign sat a hall with a heavy tile roof and double doors standing open. Mats were laid out on the packed dirt of the yard. A shelf inside the doorway held a small gold statue of a man and a girl locked in a grip, both in gi, the girl looking up at the man's face. Kevintor knew the piece without being told. A daughter trained by her father. He had found the school. He stepped into the yard and saw he was not alone. A woman sat on the dojo steps with her elbows on her knees. Blond hair, purple bands at her arms and shins, tattoos down one sleeve of skin. She stood when she saw him. He knew the face before she spoke. Sarah Snakearm. She had fallen to eleventh on the challenger board hunting him, and someone had finally pointed her here. She did not look surprised. She looked rested. "You came to her," Sarah said. "So did I. She's inside. She said whoever wins out here gets the mat with her first." She rolled her shoulders once. "I'm not asking you on a date this time. Hands up." Kevintor set his pack against the post under the sign. The grappler he had crossed three valleys to find was thirty feet away behind an open door, and he could not reach her without going through the woman who had been chasing him since the day he helped her off the floor.