The two of them went back at it without another word, and the pit stopped being a fight anyone could follow.

Juna pressed in with her claws, gold trailing off every swipe, and the rabbit met her head-on with that same wild grin. They tore across the floor and traded blows that cracked the root walls on every miss, neither one giving ground for long.

Then the rabbit broke the pattern.

She skidded back a step, opened her mouth far too wide, and a dense ball of purple mana built at the back of her throat. The blast tore across the pit before Juna could close in, and she cut it clean in half with one swipe of her claws.

The two halves split past her and blew chunks out of the wall behind her. The rabbit fired the next one before the first had even finished landing.

She fired again, then again, each one bigger than the last. Juna carved through every single one, but the spillover had to land somewhere. Craters opened across the floor, and whole sections of the wall came down in slabs.

Over at the treeline, a stray bolt of purple punched into the trees a few feet from Cassie’s group, and Vella’s lazy patience finally ran out.

"Alright, move," she said, herding the three rookies away from the edge by their collars, "a lot further than that. This stopped being a safe seat about a minute ago."

The three of them didn’t argue this time, scrambling back through the trees until the pit was a distant flicker of gold and purple. Even from there, the ground shook under them with every blow the two landed.

Back in the pit, Juna stopped trying to cut the blasts and started closing the gap instead. She ate one across the shoulder to get inside the rabbit’s range, the gold flaring where it burned her. Then she drove a claw up under the rabbit’s guard before she could fire again.

The blow lifted the rabbit off her feet and slammed her into the far wall. When she peeled out of the crater, her grin was a lot slower to come back this time.

For a moment the rabbit just looked at her, wiping a line of blood off her chin. Then whatever had been holding her together gave way, and the easy fighter from before was gone.

She came in faster than anything Juna had tracked all day, dropping the taunts and the blasts to throw everything left into closing the distance. The two of them met in the center of the pit and stopped holding anything back at all.

Juna landed three clean hits and took four worse ones in return. A kick caved her ribs in before she could even roll with it. The follow-up caught her across the jaw and put her face-down on the ground.

She got back up with blood running down her chin and one arm hanging wrong at her side. Half her vision had gone dark, and she could feel her own body starting to give out under her.

This was the part of the fight where the smart move was to fall back and let Vella patch her up. Juna had never once taken the smart move, and she wasn’t about to start now.

She dragged every last thread of gold she had left up into her arms, and the patterns down her body flared white-hot with it. The mana around her claws stopped flickering and went solid, stretching out long past her hands into something far bigger.

The rabbit saw it coming and threw out one last blast, point-blank, with everything she had left. Juna took it head-on, let the explosion tear across her chest, and pushed straight through it anyway.

"Gilded Fang," she breathed, and brought both claws down through the rabbit in a single fall.

The gold closed like an enormous set of jaws, tearing through the rabbit and a long stretch of the wall behind her. When the light finally faded, what was left of the rabbit did not so much as twitch.

Juna stood over the crater for a single breath, then her legs simply stopped holding her. The gold drained out of her hair and skin all at once, the patterns going dark as her form shrank back toward the silver she normally wore.

She dropped to the ground beside the body and couldn’t make herself rise, the edges of her vision going grey again. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

Then there was a hand on her shoulder, and Vella’s voice somewhere above her, sharper than she had ever heard it. The warm rush of healing mana hit her a second later, dragging her back from the edge she had been about to go over.

She let her eyes fall shut, the fight finally over, one last thought drifting up before everything went quiet. She had won, and she hadn’t needed him to step in even once.

Vella knelt over her, keeping the healing steady while the worst of the damage closed under her hands.

"You really are just as reckless as he is," she muttered, half to herself, brushing the matted hair off Juna’s face. "The two of you are going to put me in an early grave at this rate."

Then she lifted her head and actually took in what was left of the pit.

The crater where the rabbit had died ran halfway across the floor. The wall behind it had a clean gap punched through it where the strike had kept going. An eight-shard monster, a Beast King in all but name, and Juna had done that to it on her own.

Whatever lecture Vella had been building up to died somewhere in her throat. Looking at the ruin of the pit and the girl who had made it, she felt something closer to pride settle in instead.

"Show-off," she murmured, and there was a small, proud smile on her face as she said it.

A tremor rolled in from somewhere off in the distance, shivering the rubble around the pit. Vella glanced toward the trees in that direction and let out a short breath through her nose.

"Sounds like he’s having the time of his life over there," she said, going back to her healing.

A good stretch of forest away, Hajin stood over the bird where it had finally gone down. One boot rested near its head with the chain hanging loose from his fist.

The bird was a wreck under him, feathers scorched, one wing bent the wrong way, but it still glared up at him with plenty of fight left. That was the whole reason he hadn’t gotten around to finishing it yet.

He crouched down, a smirk pulling at his mouth, and tapped the chain against the ground in front of its face.

"Come on," he said. "Get up, show me more."