Professor Hanae looked up from her clipboard when we walked in, took one look at my face, and set it down.

"Cabana," I said.

She wrote it down without comment. She’d seen enough tournaments to know that arguing with the student who just broke Julian Valerius’s hand in front of twenty thousand people was a waste of everyone’s time.

"Finals start in ninety minutes. Don’t be late."

We walked back out.

Isabelle fell into step beside me, her spear resting against her shoulder at an angle that would have looked casual on anyone else. On her it looked like a queen carrying her own scepter. She didn’t say anything for a long moment. The corridor smelled like disinfectant and old stone.

"You know she’ll have spent the last hour adapting."

"Yeah."

"She fought Natalia and Kira simultaneously. Created ten marionettes at once. That’s not just talent, that’s professional conditioning. She’ll come in fresh enough to be dangerous."

"I know."

"And you’re choosing her anyway."

"Isabelle."

"Yes?"

"Were you building toward a point, or were you just narrating things I already knew?"

She was quiet for exactly two seconds. "I was deciding whether to be impressed or frustrated."

"Let me know when you figure it out."

The corridor opened into the larger prep area, and my team was exactly where I’d left them, arranged around the space like people who were very deliberately not hovering while hovering aggressively. Emi’s healing kit was open on the bench beside her, already reorganised twice at minimum. Skylar’s headphones were around her neck instead of over her ears, which meant she was pretending not to listen while listening to everything. Natalia stood by the window with her back to the room, her reflection looking out at the arena grounds.

"Cabana," I said to the room.

Nobody looked surprised. That was either a good sign or a terrible one.

"I told you he’d do this," Skylar said to no one in particular.

"You did," Emi agreed quietly. "You were right."

"I’m always right. It’s exhausting."

Natalia turned from the window. Her eyes found mine immediately. She didn’t look angry, which was somehow worse. She looked like a woman who’d accepted an inevitability and was in the process of deciding exactly how she felt about it.

"Ninety minutes," she said.

"Ninety minutes."

"Emi needs to finish your treatment before you go anywhere near that platform."

"Natalia—"

"Don’t. You have cracked ribs, a split lip that keeps reopening, and whatever’s happening with your left shoulder that you’ve been pretending isn’t happening for the last hour. Emi heals you completely or I drag you off that platform myself and fight Cabana in your place."

I looked at Emi. She was already standing, her healing aura pulsing that soft green around her palms, her expression somewhere between professional calm and thinly-veiled terror about what happened when Natalia issued commands and didn’t get compliance.

"Okay," I said. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

Emi practically sagged with relief. She crossed to me immediately, her hands finding my ribs first, the aura washing over the cracked areas in warm, steady waves. I sat on the bench. She stood between my knees, working methodically, her brow furrowed with concentration. She was in healer mode, which meant the nervous bouncing was gone and what was left was this quiet, focused version of her that always caught me off guard.

The healing felt like warmth that started from the outside and moved inward. Not exactly painful, but not comfortable either. More like pressure being applied from inside my own body.

"Your ribs are worse than yesterday," she said quietly.

"They’re survivors."

"They’re stress fractures. Multiple. If Reyna hits you in the same spot with full output, they’ll shatter completely."

"Good thing I’m not planning to let her hit me there."

She looked up at me with eyes that were doing the thing where they were both soft and devastating at the same time. "You’re not as invincible as you pretend to be."

"I’m exactly as invincible as the situation requires."

"That doesn’t mean anything."

"It means exactly what I need it to mean, which is that I’ll figure it out when the time comes."

She held my gaze for a moment, searching for something, then looked back down at her work. Her aura shifted slightly, targeting the shoulder next, and whatever had been grinding wrong in that joint for the past hour loosened with a sensation that made me exhale harder than I meant to.

"There," she said softly. "That was nearly a dislocation."

"I know. I’ve been ignoring it."

"I noticed." She moved to the split lip last, one thumb resting very lightly against my jaw to angle my face toward her. Close enough that I could see the faint smudge of concealer she’d been wearing all day, the small beauty mark near her left eye that she usually covered and today hadn’t bothered with. The aura closed the split skin carefully, knitting tissue back together, and then her hand dropped.

She stood there a second longer than the healing required.

"Win," she said. Just that. No qualifiers, no conditions, no desperate speech about being careful. Just the one word with everything she couldn’t say packed inside it like light in a sealed room.

"Yeah," I said back.

Natalia’s hand came down on my shoulder from behind, her cold touch filtering through my jacket. Not comfort. An anchor. The kind of touch that said I see you clearly, every terrible decision you make, and I’m still here.

"On your feet," she said. "We need to talk about Cabana."

What followed was forty-five minutes of the most focused tactical conversation I’d had since the Arborist. Natalia ran it like a military briefing, pulling up footage on her phone, pointing out patterns, dissecting timing sequences. Skylar contributed her own observations about how Kira positioned herself relative to Reyna, how the shadow-step created a specific vulnerability window in the transition moment. Isabelle added structural notes about the platform, weight distribution, how to use the arena’s volcanic rock surface when the fight inevitably moved into close range.

I listened. Actually listened, not just waited for them to finish talking so I could do what I was already going to do anyway.

Because they were right about things I hadn’t clocked. The way Reyna’s marionettes clustered slightly tighter when she was genuinely threatened rather than testing. The micro-delay in Kira’s shadow materialisation when she was operating on low stamina, that quarter-second gap where she was visible. The fact that Reyna’s lightning output correlated with her emotional state, hotter when she was excited, more controlled when she was cold, and that there was a sweet spot between those states where her accuracy dropped without her ever noticing the drop.

Information was a weapon. I had six abilities that should have made this fight winnable. I had Isabelle, who fought with the kind of ruthlessness that came from refusing to be born into a life that didn’t deserve her.

It was going to be enough.