Clouds were gathering.

Win this tournament, Ryn thought, as fast as possible. Get the Earth Emerald. Get out of here. Find the other Jewels. Save the world. Stay with Nuthea. Live a meaningful life.

Don't lose.

The hulking figure of Huld regarded him from the other side of the arena, bald and brawny in his green robes. The monk stood legs apart with one foot slightly further forward than the other, hands held up with splayed fingers in a fighting stance, something he had not even done for Sagar.

Sagar had forfeited his match in the end to chase after some woman he had fought earlier while Ryn and Nuthea had been speaking to the Governor. That meant that Ryn had to fight Huld instead of the skypirate.

He was actually more nervous at the prospect of fighting the monk, but at least he wasn't having to fight a friend. Cid had healed Ryn after his last match against Vish, so that he was fighting fit again and ready. But Huld hadn't even needed any healing after his match with Sagar, despite it being offered according to their agreement with the Governor.

The Farrian audience made no sound at all. Ryn could hear his own breathing. He reviewed his plan. He had already decided how he would open in this match. He didn't want the monk to have an opportunity to get close to him. The boy knew he couldn't win against Huld in a straight fight, but if he was able to keep the monk at bay with his elemental projection, he might just have a chance. Vish had said as much, anyway, and Vish knew a lot more about fighting than he did.

"READY…FIGHT!" shouted the announcer for the last time that day.

Ryn flung his hands forwards immediately, launching a hot, orange fireball at Huld.

The monk made a raising hand gesture at once and a section of the stone arena floor rose up to form a wall in front of him, which the fireball broke apart on, scorching it black.

Cid's words of advice echoed in Ryn's mind: Elemental projections still obey the normal laws of nature. Fire may consume earth or wood or vegetation, but it cannot burn stone. It is young man's Huld's body that will be especially susceptible to fire attacks.

But that meant Ryn would need to land a hit on Huld's body.

The wall of stone that the monk had raised suddenly broke off from the floor and shot towards Ryn, a man-sized slab rushing along the ground.

He dived to one side out of the way, lost his footing and stumbled over, but then came up again as fast he could, not wanting to spare Huld a single moment to exploit, throwing another fireball at him as he rose.

This one the monk dodged, casually side-stepping out of its path.

Ryn threw another. Another. Another, trying to anticipate where the monk was going to dodge to next. This tactic had just about worked on Vish, but somehow Huld sidestepped and weaved so unpredictably that Ryn couldn't hit him. The fireballs only hit with the floor or shot over the heads of the audience. Huld didn't jump into the air like Vish had, and he didn't even bother using earth manipulation to block Ryn's projectiles any more.

It looked like landing a hit was going to be even more difficult than he had thought.

His first tactic exhausted, hot panic flooded Ryn's head. He lit himself on fire with a shout and ran at Huld. If he couldn't land a hit with a ranged attack, he would just have to try hitting him up close.

The flames billowed around Ryn's body as he ran. The monk held his ground, standing stone still with bunched fists.

Ryn arrived putting all of his weight behind a mad punch, another angry shout involuntarily issuing from his lips.

He almost connected, but at the last moment Huld side-stepped out of the way again and Ryn went past him.

Fearing a counter, Ryn turned immediately with a flaming kick. The monk took a step back out of the way of it.

Ryn tried another kick with his other leg, then another and another, then even threw in one of Vish's roundhouse kicks, surprised that he had remembered how to do it from the week's training.

The monk moved out of the way of them all. His movements were deliberate, controlled, efficient, expending the minimal amount of energy required to dodge out of the way of the Ryn's desperate attacks.

The boy switched back to punches, chasing after Huld and flinging his fists out at the monk, who only danced away from them.

Ryn came to a halt, breathing hard, the fire around his body still burning, having failed to land a single hit.

Huld merely continued to regard him from where he had ended up a few paces away, now holding his hands behind his back.

Damn it, but the monk wasn't just strong, he was also so fast. A man that size shouldn't be able to move so quickly!

"Are you toying with me?" Ryn asked, keeping his voice quiet so that the crowd, and Nuthea, wouldn't hear.

"No," the monk said straightforwardly with his omnipresent smile. "I am just observing your style some more." Then the smile disappeared into a flat line, possibly the first time that Ryn had seen it drop. "What there is of it, at least. This would be toying with you, foreigner."

A wedge of stone rose up out of the floor in front of Ryn, smashing into his chest, hitting him so hard he was chucked up into the air.

His fire went out.

He hung for a moment at the apex of his flight, aware that he was about to fall back to earth.

But then something else smacked into his back, bright pain erupting across it, one, two, three times, he lost count in the pain.

Now he flew upwards, delirious with shock, the dark clouds in the sky getting nearer for a few moments, then hung weightless once more.

He began to fall again, and as he did so he turned over in the air helplessly and fell head-first.

Huld, moving towards him, standing atop a pillar of stone that he was causing to rise up from the ground.

The monk reached him and punched him in the stomach.

Now Ryn was thrown along the horizontal, he knew from the thrilled faces of the crowd that passed below.

He was going to land among them, out of bounds.

No I'm not, damn it!

He found his bearings and thrust his hands in the direction he was moving in, projecting fire from them. Jets of flame appeared, the push-back from them arresting his flight, then reversing it, so that he began to move back the way he had come, flipping over and beginning to fly back into the arena, now holding his hands out behind him.

He shut his jaw tight against the pain setting in all over his body, then looked for where he was going to land.

Huld had come down from his pillar and stood waiting, no sign of surprise on his smiling face at all.

Ryn found the wherewithal to light himself on fire again, and at the same time he projected fire from the soles of his feet, further accelerating his flight, and directed himself at the monk

But Huld still had time to raise another stone barrier before Ryn made impact.

Ryn screamed with rage and pulled his limbs in to his chest, curling himself up and holding his fists in front of his face.

He cannonballed into the wall, the impact smashing against his forearms and rattling his teeth, then heard the shuddering sound of stone breaking apart.

He collided with Huld beyond it in a shower of stone and dust, smacking full into the monk's body and bouncing off him and to the side, where he hit the floor hard, bounced a few more times and came to a stop on his back.

Spinning dark clouds above him, and the noise of the audience's angry shouts in his ears.

He groaned as the pain caught up to him fully. Terrible, aching bruises on his arms, the backs of his hands, his chest, his back, his stomach, his head. His whole body throbbed with them. His flame-aura had extinguished again, but at least he was still conscious, and he was dimly hopeful that the flames had still been around him when he had collided with Huld.

The monk wasn't following up with any attacks, Ryn realised.

In spite of the pain, he forced his body to turn over and push itself shakily to its feet.

Sure enough, the monk was only just getting up from where he had landed some length away himself, near one edge of the arena.

A blackened semi-circle marred the front of his robes where they hung down over his chest from one shoulder. Little flames still burned here and there on them.

Huld grunted as he grabbed the robes with one hand and tore off the top of them, ripping them from his body and throwing them out of the arena where they landed in the sand in a smouldering heap, leaving only his legs covered.

His chest, a chiselled arrangement of discrete rectangular muscles, was now marked by its own big, purple bruise where Ryn had cannonballed into him when on fire. The monk grimaced–he was standing, but he didn't look like he was going to attack again in a hurry.

The crowd roared their one-sided approval of Huld standing up, but Ryn still detected a note of anger that the Farrian had suffered a hit.

Cid was right! Ryn thought amidst the delirium of his ringing head. He could hurt Huld if he connected with him while on fire.

But it had taken an awful lot just to connect with him. Ryn couldn't do that again–there was no way that he could throw himself through a barrier of stone again just to land a single hit on his opponent. His body was bruised and bleeding from smashing through the wall and he could barely think straight. And his fireball attacks were useless too–Huld was so fast he just dodged out of the way of them.

He needed a way of guaranteeing that his fire attack would connect with Huld, without breaking his body in the process.

Ryn had an idea.

A last-ditch, bet-it-all, everything-or-nothing kind of idea.

It was crazy, but it was the best chance he had right now.

He took a deep breath, trying not to wince at the stabs of protest from his ribs. He would definitely need Cid to heal him after this match, whatever its outcome. He gathered his energy and concentrated on where he was going to project it.

Huld frowned at him, wavy lines carving his forehead, and Ryn enjoyed that the monk wasn't smiling anymore.

"Fiiiiireaaaaaagggggggaaaahhhh!" Ryn shouted, lifting his hands straight up palms-out towards the sky, his focus-word cracking and turning into an agonised cry of effort and then pain as he broke his limit.

Flames rose all over the arena.

He willed them upwards from the floor, searing and intense, so that they engulfed the entire arena, engulfed him, engulfed Huld, and all was consumed in an exploding inferno of red and orange and yellow fire that leapt up higher than their heads.

Somewhere distant he heard the audience calling out in surprise, but he barely paid them any attention.

He was at home in the roar of the fire. He didn't feel it as burning heat, but as a delighting, exultant expulsion of energy.

After a few moments his arms began to quiver with new pain. He was aware that he had almost exhausted all of his energy, or 'mana', or whatever Cid called it, and he suddenly let the flames cease, keeping back just a bit of it in reserve in case this attack didn't work.

The inferno disappeared, leaving only steam hissing up from the now hot stone tiles of the arena.

And there lay Huld, on his side, his body and his remaining robes blackened and burned.

Oh no.

"Cid!" Ryn shouted as he sprinted as fast as he could manage over to where the monk lay. "Help! I think I might have killed him!"

He reached the monk and knelt on both knees next to him. The monk's eyes were shut; his mouth open.

But his chest was still moving up and down.

The monk's hand shot out and grabbed Ryn's wrist, tight as a vice.

The boy went rigid with shock.

Huld opened his eyes, brown irises shining. "No, you haven't killed me, foreigner," he rasped, "though you may have come close. And I hope now that you have used up enough of your energy that you won't be able to do that again."

Huld's fist hit Ryn in the nose and he went over, skidding along on his back and coming to rest. He clutched his face against the pain and tasted the metallic tang of blood as it ran down into his mouth.

He stumbled up again.

Huld had got to his feet and was staring at him defiantly, jaw set in grim, stony determination.

Ryn couldn't believe this man. What strength did he possess, what unfathomable reserves of endurance, that he was able to stand up again and continue to fight when his body and face were red and brown and covered in burns?

But at the same time, it looked as though the fire attack had weakened him considerably. And his latest punch hadn't hit quite as hard as before. And the monk was trembling slightly, clearly struggling to stay standing.

Maybe now this would be more of a fair fight.

Ryn's heart missed a beat. Huld was running towards him.

The monk arrived with a punch that Ryn side-stepped, to his own amazement. His attack had slowed the monk down, too.

He countered with a punch of his own, which the monk blocked, palming it away harmlessly into the air to the side of him, but no counter came and Ryn had time to try another, which found Huld's gut.

"Ungh," the monk grunted, and took a step backwards. He had hardly been bowled over by the punch, but he had taken the full brunt of it, and it had clearly hurt him.

He had been weakened. This would be a fairer fight now.

Ryn ran in again and the pair traded more blows. He found that he was able to land some punches and kicks on Huld, and they even seemed to hurt him and knocked him back. He was able to dodge some of Huld's strikes as well, though some still connected with him and hurt like all the hells, but they didn't send him flying across the arena as they had done before.

The two of them continued like that for some time, grunting and groaning and flinging their limbs against each other's increasingly worn-out bodies in what Ryn knew had to be the endgame of this match–neither of them could last at this much longer.

Then Huld used his earth projection again.

The monk willed a pillar of stone up out of the arena floor, aiming it at Ryn–but it didn't move with the rapidity that it had done before. It came up slowly, like Huld was straining to pull it out, and Ryn was able to stagger out of the way of it, then strafe round and run back in to punch Huld, who blocked and lost his concentration, losing his mental grip on the pillar and letting it sink back into the floor.

The monk tried several more earth attacks, interspersing them more or less effectively among his forced and stuttered movements, but Ryn had time to get out of the way of them, and they all fell short.

Ryn stumbled back a few steps to regather himself, and watched Huld, who for the moment kept his distance too.

He's got some mana left, Ryn thought, but he's been severely weakened by my fire. His projections are slower. I can win this.

Still, the longer they kept going this way, the more tired Ryn was getting, and the more likely he was going to be caught out by an earth projection or one of Huld's blows. After all, even though he was burned and blackened and bruised, at the end of the day the monk was still far bigger, stronger and faster than Ryn was just in terms of the raw size, strength and speed of their bodies.

It was time to finish this.

Ryn drew on the last of his energy and lit himself on fire one more time. His whole body ached in complaint as he drew on the last of his physical reserves to project.

Huld's eyes grew and his mouth dropped. No doubt he was shocked that Ryn had any energy left himself. But Ryn wasn't using his mana—which was gone. He was projecting from his physical energy.

Ryn ran at Huld, pulling his fist back for what he was sure would be the final blow of this final match. The monk wouldn't have time to hit him with an earth attack. This was it.

Time slowed.

As Ryn's fist got closer, through the flames surrounding his body he saw Huld raising both his hands.

Unable to arrest the momentum of his run, Ryn watched in horror as the stone of the arena floor rose up around Huld and encased the monk, moulding around his body to turn him into a brown-stone-encrusted golem.

Ryn didn't have time to pull back, and followed through with his punch. His fist crunched into the centre of the stone golem's chest and stopped, his knuckles cracking against it.

"Ow," said Ryn.

And then pain sang out from his knuckles so loud he yelped and howled and shook his hand up and down.

Huld's eyes looked at him from within the little slit in the stone encasing that the monk had left for them. The muscles around them tightened. He appeared to be smiling once again within his earthen armour.

The Huld-golem pulled back a stone fist, and then delivered a massive, jumping uppercut to Ryn's chin that he had no time to block.

Ryn lost a moment of consciousness, but regained it while he was still hurtling through the air.

He hit the sand outside the arena on his back at the same time he realised that he couldn't scream properly anymore because his jaw had been broken.

"Out of bounds!" bellowed the tournament announcer, whom Ryn had landed somewhere near to. "Victory to Huld of Farr! Huld of Farr is the winner!"

The crowd exploded with joy.

Amidst the muddle of his pain, Ryn saw them climbing and leaping over the wooden barriers that fenced off the arena floor and running onto it. Farrians, men, women and children alike, invading the arena and roaring with triumph and glee. The ones passing Ryn ignored him completely, stepping over him or even knocking into him on the way so that his body protested with fresh pain.

Eventually Cid appeared at his side; a friendly, weathered face in the sea of screaming Farrians.

"Oh dear," the old man said. "that looks nasty. Sorry it took me a moment to get to you. I went to Huld first because you burned him so badly, but actually it looks like I should have come to you first…"

He lay a hand on the top of his Ryn's throbbing head, spoke the word "Cure-ah," and relieving warmth spread from the old man's hand into Ryn's head, through his jaw, and down to the rest of his body. His jaw bones clicked back into place and his ribs stopped aching.

"Ahhh…" Ryn gasped. "That's better... Thank you, Cid..." He took the old man's hand, who helped him to his feet.

"My pleasure," said Cid, clasping his hand and giving him an affectionate wallop on the back, which would have hurt like hell had Ryn not just been healed. The lines at the corners of his eyes looked particularly pronounced just now. He must be tired from all the healing he had been doing today. "Good effort out there. I'm sorry it didn't work out in the end."

And then it hit Ryn, harder than a stone-fisted uppercut.

He had lost.

He had lost the Grand Final.

He had lost the Grand Final and failed to win the Earth Emerald.

He looked over at what was happening to Huld. The invading members of the audience had swarmed around the monk, who was no longer encased in his stone armour, and hoisted him up so that his huge form bobbed up and down atop a sea of hands. He was smiling again.

"HULD! HULD! HULD!" the crowd were chanting over and over in celebration.

The entire arena was filled with Farrians. More were scrambling to get in to try to touch their new champion, but there was barely any room left inside the fighting square to accommodate them.

"What do we do now?" Ryn asked Cid over the noise of the cheering. "How are we going to get the Earth Emerald now?"

"I am not entirely sure," said Cid. "I must admit I did not expect things to turn out this way…" A stab of shame pricked Ryn's guts. "But don't worry, lad. It doesn't matter. There will be a way. The One will show us a way."

As he watched the crowd of Farrians jostling around in the arena and starting to repeatedly launch Huld into the air, Ryn wasn't so sure. Sorrow tugged at his heart. He had let Nuthea down. He had let himself down. He had let everyone down.

"ENOUGH!" boomed a voice so loud it shook the sand Ryn stood on.

It got the crowd quiet too. As one, they turned to look at who had shouted.

The Governor. He was standing on his viewing platform, hands held up for silence again.

"While I understand your justified jubilation," the Governor said loudly, though he didn't need to shout it anymore, "this disorganised display does not become us. All of you, back to the viewing area! Then I shall present Brother Huld with his prize for winning the Grand Final of this tournament."

Slowly, reluctantly, the audience members returned Huld to the ground and began to walk back out of the arena circle, clambering back over the dividing barriers. Apparently they respected the Governor enough to obey him, even in spite of their jubilation at seeing Huld win the Final.

Ryn and Cid went and stood at the side of the arena to watch what would happen next. Ryn tried to keep his head down out of view so that people wouldn't see that he had been healed.

The Governor descended his platform and a gate in the barrier was opened for him by a monk so that he could walk into the arena, where he went and stood next to Huld.

The thick-set man walked around the champion to address the once more patiently watching Farrians from all angles.

"Fellow Farrians!" he proclaimed. "What you have witnessed here today is yet another demonstration that—though barbarians and rogues may visit us from over the seas and skies to gaze upon our wonders and challenge our strength—in glory, in might, in power, FARR WILL ALWAYS REIGN SUPREME!"

The crowd bellowed its approval, so loud it felt like the earth trembled under Ryn's feet.

The Governor turned to the monk at his side. "Brother Huld, Monk of Eto, loyal servant of the Republic of Farr, for your prowess and victory at this Grand Tournament here today, for your defeat of these foreign challengers with their strangest of sorceries, for your impeccable demonstration of the finest fighting arts that Mother Farr has to offer, as prize I now present you with the highest honour I can bestow: The long-lost Earth Emerald of Eto, fabled Jewel of Mid!"

The Governor pulled a hand from his robe and thrust it into the air, holding the gleaming green stone aloft. As he did so the arena flared briefly with distant light, which the stone caught with a flash, and a heartbeat later a loud peal of thunder rolled across the sky, like celestial furniture being moved somewhere above the ceiling of cloud cover.

Ryn craned his neck upwards. The gathered clouds were thicker and blacker than ever, pregnant with rainstorm.

"Congratulations, Brother Huld!" proclaimed the Governor.

He handed Huld the stone, and at last the storm broke, and rain burst from the clouds, drenching them in an instantaneous downpour of uncountable water droplets.

And with the storm, through the dark clouds, flew a fleet of black, blimp-suspended, sharp-prowed Imperial airships.