The Challenge 38

At midnight on All Hallows Eve, seek ye a powerful place;

Pure, of unsullied strength, outside of time and space.

There, the Aspirant meets his challenge, to battle before they wake;

For power is never given; to get it, one must take.

The one challenged chooses the battleground, weapons, terms;

The Aspirant must win, if power they wish to earn.

The defeated suffers the loss of all life's hard toils;

For to the victor...

Go the spoils.

---

The book's leather cover and binding had been nondescript; title and author obliterated long ago by time and humidity by the time it arrived in the rare books shop I had been working in as a young man, nearly three decades ago. There were massive sections of it that were unreadable or missing entirely. But the book had been what started me down the path.

Only nine lines on yellowed paper. But something about it had the ring of truth, had sparked my curiosity. Made me want to learn more.

And so I did. There were scattered references in other obscure texts that corroborated it. That on All Hallow's Eve, every year, there was some kind of...cosmic opportunity for power.

Power was what I had always wanted, you see. I didn't always acknowledge that to myself -- sometimes I dressed it up in more altruistic motivations -- but now, as the moment I had been preparing for my entire life was arriving, I acknowledged it was true.

I wanted power.

And I believed I could get it.

First, you had to be in the right place. And you had to win the power from...

the one challenged

. In some kind of conflict they would pick.

Finding the place had been tricky enough. Power had so many different definitions. I had tried a number of places over the years, thinking they might fit this line as

the place of power.

Most of them had been difficult to get into at midnight on Halloween. Seats of global government. The Wall Street trading floor. Boardrooms of the biggest companies, homes of the most influential celebrities...

Of course, it turned out to be simultaneously much more complicated than that, and much simpler. Power wasn't really in buildings, it was in people.

Minds

were powerful. I needed to make my own mind a place of power.

And the place had to be

unsullied

, the manuscript indicated. Pure.

Virginal.

Fortunately, I had realized that before I got...

too far

in life, if you take my meaning.

So now -- 28 years later -- I lay down in my own bed, at home. It was 11:57. Time to get ready.

I ran through a few meditation exercises, focusing myself and getting ready to drift off to sleep. It had taken years of training to achieve what I judged to be the right headspace. To find the place of power.

Of course, meditation and mental focus wasn't the only thing I had been training.

Once I could access the place of power, I needed to win...a challenge, of some kind. Against...well, someone else. The lines weren't very clear on that point except that

the one challenged

would get to pick the terms.

As such, I had done all kinds of training. I was proficient in dozens of weapons and martial arts. I was excellent at chess, go, and a few other very popular games. I was strong, fast. I was articulate, good at oral debate and reasoning. I trained everything I could think of, body and mind.

I was, in short, at the height of my personal powers. I felt ready for anything, felt like I'd have good odds across a range of contests. I could wait longer, train more, but I was in my forties now, and while I might develop further skills, I knew my physical abilities would wane over time, my reflexes would slow.

It would only be tradeoffs from this point forward. This was the peak of my abilities. This was the moment.

11:59

. I watched the clock tick away the few, final seconds to midnight, and closed my eyes.

The mental training paid off; I found my center in no time.

I snapped my eyes open. I was still lying down on my bed. The clock read 12:00. Everything was the same.

Had it worked?

"Well, hello there."

I turned to face the other direction, startled.

A woman was lying next to me, in my bed, although as I twisted to look at her, she sat up, looking around. "Nice place."

The woman had Asian features; long, straight black hair, brown eyes, high cheekbones, full lips. Certainly pretty, though her features were a little too angular to be truly beautiful. She was wearing a black t-shirt and jeans. Up one arm, a patchwork of tattoos ran.

While I was assessing her, she looked around the room with curiosity. Then she looked back at me. "Congratulations. It's been a good few years since there has been a challenge; achieving the right mental state is difficult." She spoke with a slight accent, although my mind couldn't quite place it.

She stood up from the bed and went to look at a framed photograph on my wall -- me and Kasparov, playing chess. Sometimes the masters of a particular discipline weren't the best teachers. Kasparov had been a notable exception, an excellent tutor.

In the photo, I was two moves away from mate, although that wouldn't be obvious to most people.

She turned and looked at me, her nose wrinkled. "Very complicated board position. I guess I won't challenge you to a chess match, then. Did you beat him?"

This

was the...

one challenged,

from the manuscript? She seemed...just like a person. The moment of confrontation that I had been anticipating was falling a little flat. I had pictured my willpower pitted against bodiless dark forces, maybe some kind of...mental battle of wits...or, I don't know, a one-on-one gladiatorial duel against some horror, in front of an arena full of cheering demons.

Instead, as far as I could tell, it was just me and this woman, in my bedroom.

I sat up, sitting on the edge of my bed. "I, uh..."

She kept walking around the room, inspecting objects. She glanced at the pistol I kept on my bedside table. "No shooting competition either, I guess. Although

real

firearms experts know about gun safety. That should be in a gun safe or something," she said, disapprovingly.

"I live alone, nobody else is ever up here. And I didn't realize you'd be in...my bedroom," I muttered, a little defensively. I felt off-balance.

"Well, I get to pick the battleground and the weapons. And I find that I can tell a lot about a person from their own home..." she paused, trailing off as she pulled a book off my bookshelf, turning it over in her hands.

On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems

by Gödel.

"...Ugh, so we're not doing math or logic, then. I never liked Gödel anyway. Head too far up his own ass for his own good," she said, distastefully.

I opened my mouth and hesitated, realizing now that the stakes in her inspection of my bedroom were rather high. She got to decide the terms, and

everything she looked at

told her something about what I was good at

...and what I wasn't.

She was learning about me, looking for advantages. Well, two could play at that game. "So...you've...done this before?"

"I have defeated eighty nine challengers," she said, promptly. She gestured at the tattoo up her arm -- a swirl of multicolored flower petals, I now realized, looking at it more closely. She pulled the t-shirt up slightly to reveal her abdomen, which was tattooed as well -- the petals must continue up her arm across her shoulder, onto her chest, and then continue down onto her stomach. No doubt if she were naked, and I counted the petals, there would be eighty nine of them.

If she were naked

. She had a great body, I couldn't help but think, as she lowered her shirt and resumed looking around the room. The stomach she had just shown off was tanned, smooth and flat, a trim waist.

She was watching me look at her body, I realized. I met her gaze. Brown eyes looked back at me. They were quite captivating. They had a kind of a...

light

, behind them. Or maybe it was just her expression. Whatever it was, her eyes conveyed excitement, amusement. Possibility.

Then she turned, and resumed inspecting the room. The jeans she was wearing clung to a round ass. Not notably overweight, but not especially athletic either -- just nice, soft curves.

While I was looking at her ass, she was looking at my fencing saber hung on the wall alongside a few other weapons. "Wow. You know how to use all these, huh? You really thought of a bunch of stuff." She said it almost approvingly.

"I, uh, just tried to be prepared," I muttered. I still felt on the back foot here. "Eighty nine? You must have, uh, been around a while..." That was a

lot

of people who had lost to her. I was feeling a little intimidated.

She turned back and looked at me. "Yep. Challengers used to come along more frequently; but even

learning

about the challenge is harder to do these days. Lately, it's been down to one every twenty or thirty years or so." She eyed me up and down, appraisingly. "

You

must be resourceful, to have even learned of it."

I met her gaze again. I felt...uncomfortable. I couldn't place her

age

, I realized. She had the beginnings of crow's feet, but other than that, there were no clues. She could've been in her early thirties...or maybe her mid forties? Heck, maybe mid fifties, if she had aged really well...or late twenties...

The power

. Maybe she

didn't

age. Maybe

I

wouldn't age, if I won.

Her lips curved up into a grin, the light in her eyes dancing, now. It occurred to me, my reaction was probably predictable to her, if she really had won eighty nine challenges. Discomfiting as her ageless features were, I had to admit, it was nice to finally talk to someone who recognized how hard it had been to get here. I nodded. "It

was

a lot of work."

"How did you even find out about the challenge, anyway?" There was an admiring note in her voice.

It was nice to be admired, I thought. "An old book."

"Mmm. How interesting," she mused. "Hey, wow, you've been to the North Pole?" she was looking at another photo.

I didn't respond, not wanting to give her any information she might use to her advantage. I sat silently as she walked around the room, inspecting various things, remarking upon them.

Eventually, I grew impatient. "C'mon, don't you have to pick a battleground and weapons? How much time are you allowed to take?"

She shrugged. "I'm not sure time is even really passing right now, per se. Every time I've won a challenge it's still midnight on All Hallow's Eve afterwards."

She continued her unhurried perusal. I watched her move around the room. I didn't want to say anything else -- I was worried my bedroom was giving away far too much as it was. Instead, I just enjoyed the shape of her ass in those jeans as she stood on tiptoes to pull a book off the top of my bookshelf, bent over to open a desk drawer, and otherwise moved about.

Eventually, she sat down on the edge of my bed next to me with a sigh, and said, "Well, I have to admit, I'm impressed. Most Aspirants have spent far less time preparing."

That made me feel smug...but it might be a ploy from her to make me overconfident, so I tried to stay focused. "So, what do you want the battleground to be?"

She shrugged. "There are a few areas of obvious oversight where you're inadequately prepared, but that's true of everyone.

I blinked.

Obvious oversight? Inadequate!?

"W-what do you--"

She cut me off. "Relax, relax. Everyone has

some

weaknesses. Even me. But for you, one stands out as the most likely, so I'm gonna go with that."

I opened my mouth to speak, but she just kept going.

"I recognize you, Aspirant, facing me on All Hallow's Eve, here in the place of power," she said, formally.

The light in her eyes was cold, now. Imperious.

The cadence of her speech had changed too, and the sound was suddenly...different, like maybe the walls of my bedroom were much further away from us than I knew them to me. Like we were in some vast, hollow, echoing space, not sitting on my bed.

"For the battleground of this challenge, I choose sex. Whoever is brought to orgasm first is defeated. The only weapons are our bodies."

She looked at me, standing still across the bedroom from me, hands folded neatly in front of her. "The challenge commences. Begin when you are ready." Her voice had returned to normal.

Well

fuck

. I blinked, gathering my thoughts.

This

was

an obvious oversight on my part. Potentially a fatal one. Of course the challenge could be about sex. It could be about anything. It was hard to find much information about the challenge, but one of the earliest texts referenced the Aspirant winning a calligraphy competition.

Unfortunately, I hadn't trained for this at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.

And in retrospect, this was obvious. She seemed to know the rules. She would know I had to be a virgin to even be here. And she would be talented. Otherwise why would she have picked sex? Maybe my meditative practices would help me last longer...

Fuck

, I thought, ruefully. I knew there were various tantric sex practices, ways of making women orgasm quickly, of delaying your own climax. But I only knew

of

them. Not how to do them.

"You're stalling," she whispered. There was an amused smile on those full lips.

My face heated. "You took plenty of time selecting the terms," I snapped.

She shrugged, unbothered. "True. Take all the time you like."

"Have you beaten many Aspirants with sex?" The words came out more resentfully than I intended. This was my own fault. Resentment was a waste of energy; I needed to calm down, focus, and look for advantages.

She nodded, amiably. "Many, yes. Not all, though." In a smooth motion, she pulled off her shirt.

She was wearing a practical black bra, not especially sexy -- but her cleavage caught my eye anyway. I tried not to stare. Her breasts weren't enormous, but they were full on her lean frame, pushed together in the bra into appealingly tan cleavage.

My attention was diverted, though, by her tattoo.

The multicolor petals swept up her arm, across her shoulder, and then swirled down between her breasts, before skirting to one of her hip bones and then continuing down into her jeans. The overall effect was, well...

hot

. I couldn't help but stare. The flat stomach, the tattoo, the dark eyes watching me look at her...

I met her gaze, trying to tamp down my arousal. "I-I wouldn't have thought sex was always the best choice," I muttered, trying to think of options, a way out of this situation.

"It isn't. It's different each time. Trickier with women, especially...but most Aspirants are men. And men get so focused on the idea of losing a physical combat of some kind, they tend to forget about...other types of challenges," she noted, her eyes still on mine, that light dancing in them once more. "To be honest, even the fact that you've covered your bases with things like chess and math is really quite unusual.

Bravo.

"

She paused, and then her lips curved back up into that knowing smile. This time it almost had some mockery in it. "You

do

seem more prepared than most...except for

this

." She gestured at her own body. "You

have

tried at least a

few

things with women, surely? I know the line says

pure, unsullied strength

, but that author really took liberties translating from the original...strange that

inaccurate

translation has persisted all these years when there were more accurate options available, isn't it?"

I blinked.

Shit

. The implication was clear: I

hadn't

needed to abstain. No doubt she was responsible for the poor translation. It was undeniably clever -- if you were ageless, why not make sure the most common translation was one that gave you a clear weakness to exploit?

Her mouth formed an O of delight. "Oh dear...you're a

virgin

, aren't you?"

I didn't answer, which was answer enough for her. She giggled. It was low, throaty, and rich. She moved towards me.

It was nothing like when she had been walking around the room. The way her body moved as she walked towards me was so...sultry, now. There was some deliberate sway in her hips, an arch to her back that thrust her tits forward. I was captivated. I tried to stall some more, to distract myself, slow her down.

"W...what do the different colors mean? Of the petals?" I practically blurted the words out, the first thing that came to mind.

"Oh,

my

...have you been

inspecting

my body?" She grinned as I blushed. "A very perceptive question. Each petal is a challenge won; the color shows what the challenge involved. Red means the challenge involved

sex

... the other colors mean other things." She waved a hand dismissively.

Shit

. There were a

lot

of red petals in the tattoo. It was by far the most common color. I tried not to dwell on the implications of that, wracking my brain for other things that would help.

She sat next to me on the edge of the bed. I tried not to look down at her breasts.

"Look," she said, seriously. "No offense, but I'm going to win. The same way I wouldn't beat you at, I don't know, fencing, or chess..." she gestured at the weaponry and photos on the wall. "...With

no

practice, you don't stand a

chance

at beating me at

this

. So with that in mind, let me make an offer, since you've never done this before. Is there...something specific you'd like me to do?"

I blinked, uncomprehending. "Uh, what do you mean?"

She smiled gently, now. "For your first time, I mean. You're going to cum before I do. You have no chance. But I can at least make it

fun

for you. Do you want a blowjob? I'm quite good at them. Should I ride you? Or maybe you'd like to fuck me from behind?"

"I, uh..." When I was younger, such things had been at the forefront of my mind; but over the many years of celibate focus on my goal of winning the challenge, I had learned to temper my arousal, to focus my energies elsewhere. And I tried to do that now, to ignore her confidence...but images all came rushing to the forefront of my mind, with her sitting next to me. How she'd look working my cock with her mouth, or panting as I fucked her from behind...she'd be talented, she'd beaten so many before me...

I was getting hard, I realized.

Not good.

I tried to put it out of my mind, to search for some advantage. I nodded, slowly, as if accepting what she said. "I see your point. I'm beaten."

Then I put on a false, eager smile. "I...I've always found it hot to think about..." I trailed off, hoping I wasn't hamming it up too much.

"Yes?" Her lips parted, the light in her eyes danced.

"Well...what if you used a toy on yourself while we had sex? A vibrator?" I had heard women orgasmed more easily from toys.

She laughed, delighted. "Wow. You have some fight in you. Very clever. No, I'm afraid.

The only weapons are our bodies

. No dildos, no vibrators, nothing like that."

Damn.

I didn't know what to do, but I knew the best thing was to outwardly slump in defeat, discouragement.

I didn't have to pretend that much. I racked my brain, but couldn't come up with anything else as clever. I decided to opt for direct.

"Well...since I'm going to lose anyway, will you at least tell me what you like?" I said, hesitantly. I didn't have to pretend the note of despair that crept into my voice either.

She searched my face, momentarily, looking for some stratagem hidden in the question.