I was just about to dodge Grisha’s charge when something happened that wasn’t in my calculations.

A smile crossed her face—wicked, private, the kind that belongs to people sitting on information you don’t have yet—and then the ground cracked.

Not crumbled, not shifted, but split, a clean fracture radiating from her back foot as she loaded weight into it, like the earth had simply decided it wasn’t structurally prepared for what she was about to do.

The sound hit my ears a fraction before she did, a sharp report like a gunshot, and then Grisha was moving at twice the speed she’d been using for the entire fight.

Twice the speed...

My brain, bless its optimistic little heart, attempted to process this in real time. I’d already calculated her maximum—mapped it through several exchanges of watching her enhanced lower body carry that enormous frame, factored in the muscle mass, the enhancement ceiling, the physics of it all.

This was supposed to be an impossibility.

You can’t exceed your own maximum by simply wanting to, the same way you can’t run faster than your legs can move regardless of how sincerely you commit to the effort.

And yet.

I had absolutely no time to do anything clever. I threw up the best defense available, which, against an attack carrying that much momentum, was roughly equivalent to holding up a polite sign asking the boulder to please reconsider its trajectory.

Grisha hit me like full force. Her shoulder caught my guard and folded it inward, the impact lifting my feet completely off the sand and sending both of us into a collision that had considerably more consequence for me than for her.

We hit the ground in a tangle that the crowd received with a collective noise somewhere between a wince and a cheer, sand erupting around us in a cloud that tasted like iron and old sweat.

Grisha moved through the fall the way water moves through obstacles—finding every gap, using every advantage—and the wrestling that followed was one of those experiences that teaches you things about your own physical limitations you’d honestly rather not know.

She was immense up close, all heat, muscle, and that strange extra strength that had no business existing. Every attempt I made to create leverage she dismantled with unsettling ease.

We rolled twice, maybe three times, the world cycling through sand, torchlight, and the roaring noise of the crowd pressing closer around the ring.

I got close to a reversal once, almost found the angle I needed, but she shut it down by simply sitting on my attempted escape route with approximately four hundred pounds of enhanced orc, which is the kind of argument that doesn’t really invite counterpoint.

The final configuration wasn’t my preference. I ended up face-down in the sand with Grisha’s weight across my back, her forearm pressing into my shoulder blades with just enough force to communicate that she could make this significantly worse if she felt like it.

The sand was warm against my cheek, the torchlight painting everything amber, and directly behind me, pressed against my lower back with emphatic and unambiguous presence, was evidence that our extended physical contact had done nothing to diminish Grisha’s earlier enthusiasm.

The crowd had opinions. Loud ones.

"Get up, little one!" someone screamed from the back, which I thought showed a touching faith in my circumstances.

"Stay down!" countered someone closer, which showed considerably better spatial awareness.

The wolf-eared man who’d dropped his glass earlier had apparently recovered enough to place a bet, because I heard him call out a number that suggested he’d completely changed his position on my survival odds, and not in any flattering direction.

"Well," I said into the sand, with the particular dignity available to someone in my current position, which was not much but I was working with what I had, "this is a fun development."

Grisha’s breath was hot across the back of my neck, her weight a constant and comprehensive reminder of the power differential currently in play.

"You want to yield?" she asked, and the word carried the specific texture of someone who would genuinely accept the answer but would find the alternative considerably more entertaining.

"Yield?" I repeated thoughtfully, as though considering the concept for the first time. I shifted slightly, testing, and her forearm pressed a fraction harder in response. "You wouldn’t let me even if I tried."

She laughed—a short, sharp sound—and leaned down closer. The heat of her was absurd, radiating off her skin in waves. Her cock, currently pressed against my lower back, pulsed once with what I chose to interpret as emphasis rather than enthusiasm, though the distinction felt academic at this range.

"You’re going to lose a tooth being stubborn," she said, her lips close enough to my ear that the words arrived warm.

"I’ve lost worse," I said pleasantly, "and retained my excellent personality throughout."

I felt her shift her weight fractionally forward—leaning in closer, exactly as intended, drawn by the conversational gravity of someone who couldn’t quite resist engaging with the nonsense being produced directly beneath her. Her center of balance moved forward over her hands, redistributing her considerable mass toward her upper body. And in that very instant—

I snapped my head back.

Not gently. Not with restraint. With every gram of neck and shoulder muscle I possessed, the back of my skull connecting with Grisha’s face at a velocity that sent a white shockwave of pain through my own head and likely reorganized several of my memories.

The sound was visceral—a wet, heavy crack that cut through the crowd noise and produced a collective inhale from every person within earshot.

Grisha’s grip went from controlling to reflexive, her hands flying up in the involuntary response of a face that had just been introduced to the back of a skull with extreme prejudice.

Blood came immediately, pouring from her nose in a dark torrent that hit the sand below us and kept coming.

I was already moving before the ringing in my own skull finished announcing its presence, twisting sideways through the gap her recoil had created, my shoulder rolling through the sand, legs finding purchase, and came up to my feet with considerably less grace than I’d have preferred but considerably more speed than my current condition had any right to produce.

The crowd’s noise went somewhere past language.

Grisha pushed upright. The blood running freely down her face had done nothing—nothing at all—to diminish the light in her amber eyes. If anything it had increased it, which said things about Grisha’s psychology that probably warranted professional examination.

She was smiling through the red, tusks dark with it, and she was even harder than before, which I noted with the detached interest.

She reset her stance, and I then charged.

Something told me—not thought, not calculation, something lower and more direct than either—that the power sitting in my chest was not the kind to be deployed casually or experimentally.

This thing communicated with complete clarity that the timing needed to be exact or the consequences would be mine and mine alone. It sat in my body like a held breath, waiting, and I understood instinctively that it would not forgive sloppy execution.

Good thing I’d been watching her move for the past twenty minutes.

She was staggering now, whatever impossible reserve she’d accessed for that earlier charge clearly spent, and she was weaker than her baseline—I could read it in the slight hesitation in her loading, the fraction more effort required to settle her stance.

She knew it too, yet she set herself anyway rather than retreating because Grisha was the kind of fighter who’d take a loss on their feet before a win on their back.

The gap appeared in her movement then, that same flaw, that rhythmic unconscious habit in how she transitioned weight between positions—a quarter-second window where her guard opened like a door someone had forgotten to latch.

I was already grinning. Couldn’t help it. I probably looked completely unhinged, sprinting toward a seven-foot bleeding orc with a broken nose while grinning like the devil had personally gifted me this particular moment, but authenticity matters.

Four feet away.

The power awoke within me.

It started at the floor—my foot planting, the contact sending something downward first, pressing into the ground like a root finding bedrock, and the energy that came back up was not simply the mechanical force of my own weight returning.

It was more, borrowed from the contact, from the resistance, flowing upward through the sole of my foot and into my ankle with a heat I felt in the bone itself. My ankle lit up—enhancement flooding it not as a separate held state but as a moving thing, a current, and before it could settle it was already traveling. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

Up through the calf, the muscle igniting along the path of the energy like a fuse burning, and there was no pause, no gap between enhancements, no moment of transition where I had to drop one and establish another—it moved the way water moves, finding the next space before vacating the previous one—continuous, complete, and entirely unlike anything I’d ever felt from my own magic before.

Knee. Thigh. The energy built as it traveled, each segment adding its contribution to the chain, and I understood suddenly why this was something the body kept locked away from casual access.

This wasn’t an enhancement—it was a cascade, a sequential amplification that stacked momentum on momentum, each muscle passing the energy forward magnified.

Hip. Core. The rotation beginning, my body torqueing around the axis of a punch that hadn’t landed yet, the chain moving through my torso and the force of it wrenching my shoulder forward with a momentum that had been accumulating since my foot touched the ground—

Shoulder. Elbow. Two feet away, Grisha’s eyes going wide as she read what was coming and understood it a millisecond too late to meaningfully respond—

The energy hit my fist like a wave hitting a wall.

I threw the punch.

The boom arrived before the pain did, which was considerate of physics and entirely unlike its usual scheduling. The sound wasn’t the flat crack of a heavy impact or the wet thud of fist meeting flesh—it was a pressure wave, the air around my fist failing to get out of the way fast enough and expressing its displeasure as a concussive blast that rolled outward from the point of contact.

Every torch in the ring went out simultaneously. Not guttered—extinguished, the flames simply ceasing to exist in the same instant, the ring plunging into the relative shadow broken only by the ambient light of torches further back.

The building shook. Not figuratively, not as hyperbole—the walls of the tavern moved, bottles behind the bar rattling against each other with a sound like wind chimes during an architectural disagreement, one patron losing their drink to the vibration.

The screaming came a beat later. Shocked, confused, electrified screaming from the people who’d been watching a tavern brawl and had just been informed by their own bodies that the category of event had been reclassified.

Grisha folded.

There was no other word for it. Her body collapsed in on the impact point, her torso bending sharply around my fist at an angle the human form was not designed to sustain, and then the air left her in a single catastrophic expulsion, a sound like a door being slammed in a pressurized room.

Blood came with it—not the steady pour from her nose but a torrent, catching the distant torchlight and spraying wide as her head snapped forward and down.

She hit the ground and didn’t bounce.

The pain introduced itself a second later, as though it had needed time to collect itself after the exertion, and it arrived with the comprehensive enthusiasm.

My arm screamed. The skin along my forearm had split in two places, ragged lines opening across the muscle in thin crimson seams, and beneath that the bone was singing a very specific song—not broken, not quite, but standing at the edge of that cliff with both feet and leaning forward.

I staggered back three steps, clutching my arm at my side, and breathed through it with concentrated effort.

I gritted my teeth then.

I’d expected this. I’d felt the cost coming even as the power executed, understood it the same way you understand a debt before you incur it—clearly, inevitably, without the knowledge changing the choice.

A technique that could stack that much force through a single movement was never going to be free. The body wasn’t built for it, and until it was built toward it through whatever development this skill demanded, every use was going to extract exactly this payment.

But saints above.

I looked at Grisha lying unconscious in the extinguished ring, at the sand around her disturbed in a radius that had nothing to do with the fall itself, and I felt something slow and certain settle into the center of my chest beneath the pain.

A Velvet—one of the tower’s elite, trained, honed, and terrifying—had a threshold. A ceiling. I’d seen it, felt the edges of it in my weeks of training with Iskanda.

With time, with practice, with the careful structural development of whatever this cascade technique demanded—

I could touch that ceiling. Maybe breach it.

I allowed myself a smile, despite the arm, despite the blood running freely to my elbow and dripping from my fingers into the sand.

The crowd erupted then.

The cheering hit like a second concussive wave, voices from every corner of the tavern crashing together in a wall of noise that was arguably louder than the punch itself had been, patrons on their feet and pressing forward against the ring’s torch perimeter, drinks raised, bets being settled with the vigorous energy of those who’d backed the right side.

Somewhere in the back, someone had apparently fallen off their chair entirely and was being assisted upright by a neighbor who wasn’t much steadier.

Thorn, at the bar, set down the glass he’d been washing.

He picked up a different one and began washing that instead, taking on the professional neutrality of a man who’d decided that was the most reasonable response available.