A day off sounded wonderful.

Two days off was good, too, but by the evening of the second day, Sophia was bored. She'd spent as much time in the Garden and the Mirror portal room as possible leading up to the planned trip into the Maze, so when it didn't happen she was just as happy that Sweetfire was working on other things and couldn't escort her into the underground. Unfortunately, that meant her only real activity was sparring with Dav, and they'd done that already that morning.

When Bai stopped by that evening and invited them to see a tournament being held in the Arena, only Sophia, Dav, and Ci'an were interested. Jax wanted to spend some time in the Registry, while Xin'ri was working on modifying Dav's boots to better handle the flight enchantment they held. When they left for the Arena, Jax was busy trying to talk Xin'ri into visiting the Registry with him. Sophia was pretty sure he'd succeed; they'd been spending a lot of time together over the past couple of weeks.

Bai didn't take them to the main Arena stage; instead, he led them to one of the practice courts. It was far busier than Sophia had ever seen it, with the masking enchantments disabled and seats set out inside the walled-off area. Unlike a sporting venue on Earth, there was no painted line separating the participants from the spectators; it was clear they were simply required to avoid them. If Sophia had to guess, not hitting the spectators played into either the betting or the scoring somehow.

When she put it that way, it was probably both.

Bai led them to seats in the second row. Sophia had the sinking suspicion that she should take that as confirmation that the fight didn't always manage to avoid the front row. "I can't remember if I mentioned it, but this is not a standard Arena fight."

Sophia shook her head. "It's a tournament, you said that."

Bai grinned. He almost looked like he thought he'd gotten away with something. "Yeah, but did I say what tournament?"

Sophia glanced at her teammates, then back at Bai. "No. And I'm getting the impression that if I guess, I'm going to get it wrong."

Bai's grin grew even wider and his eyes seemed to glow a little more than normal. "This is the summer Dyleda tournament. Dyleda follows the seasons, so the stones will all start as hotstones. Each of the four contestants has to grab their hotstones and take them to their autumn bucket, passing the season. This takes time; it's longer if the stone was a hotstone for a longer period of time, but that is also more points. It has to finish to count, so defending the bucket is important if you want to win."

Bai glanced around the group, clearly looking to make sure they were keeping up. Sophia nodded; so far, this was simple enough, even though she was sure it would get more complicated. Basketball sounded simple, and that game only had one ball and two goals.

"Naturally, their autumn bucket is the succeeding season's summer bucket, so it is then a race between each season to either grab the windstones made at their autumn bucket or grab the stones the preceding season dumped in their summer bucket and move them on to make more windstones. The most points come from stones that complete the revolution of seasons, but obviously that means you aren't getting more stones into the process. In a single-person match like this, the conservative play is to track your stones all the way around, but that's rarely a winning strategy. It can get really interesting in a game with multiple players and a lot of Called, but summer Dyleda is for Professionals. Summer and winter, that is; spring and autumn are the Called seasons." Bai grew more and more animated as he talked. Sophia was pretty sure that he was even more enthused by Dyleda than he was by normal Arena matches.

Dav started to ask about betting, so Sophia tuned them out and paid attention to the court. It was circular, and the "buckets" weren't something she'd have used that name for; they were glazed pottery, with wide tops and shallow, rounded bottoms. The sides were painted in fanciful nature scenes that probably represented the seasons; Sophia could see white snow, colorful leaves, flowers, and rain themes scattered across the pots. Each "bucket" was held in a metal stand that put it at about the height of a sink, clearly intended to make it easy to retrieve the "Dyleda stones". She couldn't see the stones from where she was sitting, but she could see a soft red glow of heat-affinity mana leaking out of the top of the pots.

When the game started, only one of the four players moved. The player in blue went straight for his summer bucket, scooped out the four stones that sat in it, and turned towards his autumn bucket. Without moving from where he stood, he launched one of the stones in a perfect throw that landed neatly on top of the stones that already sat in the bucket.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Sophia shook her head, impressed. That had to be an Ability, but she didn't believe in an Ability that just made your throw land perfectly; she had some similar Abilities and they weren't nearly that good. Whatever Ability he was using to help, there was a lot of skill in the throw as well.

Ability or not, his move was enough to prod the other players into moving. The first was the one in red who now had five hotstones in his bucket instead of four. He scooped them up and hurried towards his own autumn bucket, leaving the blue player's autumn bucket empty.

While Sophia was watching that, the other two, brown and white, seemed to be dancing. Sophia watched for a long moment, then leaned over to Bai. "I guess there's no fighting or stealing stones allowed?"

"Not while they're being held. You can catch them if they're thrown or pick them up, but you still have to reset them to being your hotstones first. Telekinesis is treated like holding or throwing an item; you aren't allowed to use it to steal, but you can use it to direct your own throws. Bumping someone works, or knocking stones out of their hands with yours, but the stones have to hit the ground before you can pick them up. Knocking someone down costs points, so people are pretty careful about it; there was an era where faking a foul was common, and…" Bai continued describing the game's strategy and history for most of the match, though he also stopped occasionally to describe why one play or another was important and could decide the outcome of the game.

Sophia didn't get everything that happened; the very first move, for example, when the first player gave one of his stones away, seemed completely counterintuitive. Bai's explanation that it somehow upset the balance of the game for the other players and fooled them into ignoring the first player for a little too long sounded kind of silly, but Sophia couldn't argue with the results; at the end of the game, that player was the winner.

She was certain his telekinesis helped, but perhaps it wasn't as important as she thought. Bai seemed to think that several of the others could have won if they'd played better; the guy with telekinesis simply had a strategy that used his abilities better than the others did.

There was an hour break, during which time Sophia found out that there were at least a dozen other training fields in use as Dyleda courts. They were all individual matches; the team event was inside the main arena, with the extra space it offered. The second match was the last one of the night.

The supposed reason for the limited number of events per day was to give the contestants time to rest. Sophia figured that was probably partially true, but it was probably also for the same reason that formal Arena matches only ran a few hours every evening, even though "practice" and "exhibition" matches could happen all afternoon. Most people had other things to do for most of the day.

The team event was even more confusing and interesting than the individual match. There were four players on each team, the same as the number of stones, so there were only sixteen people on the court, but it was still a completely confusing mess. Sophia never knew where to look; every now and then, cheering would erupt from the stands. Most of the time, Sophia didn't know why. What she did know, now, was where to look for the running score, so she could see how white and red seemed to trade the lead back and forth until right at the end of the game when blue overtook red but didn't quite manage to catch white before white had enough points to win.

Sophia even managed to catch the last few moves the red team made as they tried to catch up, and the way one of the white players held off their attempt to steal a stone before it could pass to the next season in the bucket by staying between them and the bucket. As it turned out, that wasn't even the winning play; it was a distraction from another stone becoming an icestone across the court that everyone other than white seemed to have forgotten was there, possibly because it wasn't worth as many points as the one turning back into a hotstone.

From what Bai said on the way back to their house, that kind of a distraction play was common even in advanced Dyleda play, though it was less likely to work in the championship games, especially during the end-of-season tournament. People made mistakes in the season-opening tournament that they just wouldn't make later.

They waved goodbye to Bai a few blocks before they reached the house. It wasn't until after Bai was gone that Sophia realized that he was willing to walk alone on the surface, even though he was supposedly a Professional. It probably shouldn't surprise her, given his situation. The android had been on his own in Mazegate and then later Mazehold for centuries, and losing his body wasn't actually a final death for him. He'd lose all of the memories he'd made since he last synced them, but now that he had Tiwaz's support, replacing his body would only take a tenday or two.

It did go a long way towards explaining why no one else thought it was strange that he was tied to the Registry and spent a lot of time there, though. Most people probably assumed he was Called, because he acted like one.

Sophia stopped short when she opened the gate in the fence that surrounded the house. A large wagon sat in the covered walkway that led to the rear portion of the house, the part that held Arryn's storage. It was Arryn's wagon, but Sophia was pretty sure he wasn't supposed to be back in Mazehold yet. She checked the spots she could see, but there was no sign of Peaches. The draft sloth must be inside. "Did I forget something? I thought Arryn said he wouldn't be back for a while."

"It's been a couple months." Dav's words disagreed with Sophia, but his tone was doubtful.

"Who cares?" Ci'an passed Sophia as she hurried towards the main entrance. "He might have letters from Izel!"

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