Cassio attacks as if he’s decided to end the conversation between our weapons before it can become a definitive answer.

His back foot sinks into the stone. His left hand locks the axis of the haft. His right hand drives the spear forward with his entire body weight behind the motion.

It isn’t a sequence, and it isn’t a feint to push me into a mistake.

It’s a full thrust. Committed down to the last muscle. So heavy the air detonates before the point arrives. The dust between us splits into two parallel lines, and for an instant my body wants nothing more than to throw itself out of the path.

Every Rank D survival instinct I have is screaming at me to evade. To trade ground for life.

But I keep my eyes on the reflection.

The leaf-head scratches a white streak across the stone—at first at chest height. But the brightness rises before the thrust finishes being born. His back arm changes the angle. The shoulder follows. The line that should have crossed my heart ends up aiming at my head.

He wants me to defend low.

I step half a foot inward, ignite Eventide, and deflect the side of the spear at the last possible instant. Not because I planned it. Because his speed is far greater than mine. So, I don’t try to stop his force. I just push the trajectory in the same direction it was already rising, making the point pass even higher than Cassio intended.

The steel tears the air above my forehead with enough pressure to make my vision tremble.

In the same motion, I let the shadow-blade roar.

My hips rotate with the deflection, and Eventide descends in a diagonal cut against his chest.

The impact doesn’t feel like flesh. It feels like a wall. Cassio’s armor receives the cut without splitting, without cracking, without giving me the satisfaction of feeling the blade pass through. For half a second, I think I just wasted the only clean opening he was ever going to give me in this fight.

’Damn Rank C armor.’

Then the blue beneath the plate starts to darken.

A line of blood appears under the armor. Thin at first. Then longer. Staining the cloth in a diagonal too ugly to match the elegance of everything around it. The cut isn’t deep enough to drop a Rank C. Maybe not even deep enough to change the outcome on its own.

But blood is blood.

Cassio can be hurt, and now he’s bleeding too.

That certainty invades my mind harder than any other idea could. The arithmetic of the fight has shifted. He isn’t a wall anymore. He’s a man with a slow line of red on his ribs, and slow lines of red eventually become bigger ones.

I retreat with Eventide low, waiting for the explosion of rage, the rushed advance, or any reaction telling me I broke something past the surface.

But Cassio only looks at his own chest. His expression doesn’t crack. Doesn’t tremble. Doesn’t turn into hatred. He shakes his head slowly, indignant in an almost cold way—as if I had committed a breach of etiquette rather than landed a strike.

Then he abandons the fighting stance.

The spear lowers to the ground, and Cassio plants the haft into the stone beside his own body, like a flag. He crosses his arms and stands there watching me. No smile. No words. No hint of urgency.

My body wants to attack.

But I don’t.

A spearman without his weapon should be an opening. But nothing about that gesture looks like carelessness. I’ve learned to read his attacking stance, not his defensive one. If Cassio is comfortable enough to set the weapon down in front of me, then maybe the trap is exactly to make me believe he’s set anything down at all.

I use the time differently.

I pull the LDP potion from my inventory, tear the cap off with my teeth, and swallow everything in one go. The taste is delicious. Sweet, not medicinal—as if someone diluted warm nectar of the gods in syrup. The effect arrives fast.

[OXI: 2,500 / 2,500]

I tap the comm at my collar.

"All that marketing actually makes sense, Veric."

Veric’s voice comes through rough, immediate.

"You bastard, don’t cut the comm again. I barely had the chance to mock that war name of yours. Uncle Den? Seriously? How do you manage to mock my Soline Bandit while you’re walking around with that piece of garbage?"

I’m already opening my mouth when Oliver answers before me.

"It’s what the little one used to call him."

The channel dies.

Not from static. From embarrassment. A silence that doesn’t ask for an apology, and doesn’t offer a joke to escape, either. Rhayne doesn’t speak. Veric doesn’t either. Oliver has already realized what he said and isn’t doubling down.

I feel my hand tighten on Eventide’s hilt harder than it needs to.

Cassio uncrosses his arms.

Whatever assessment he was making, it’s over. He pulls the spear from the stone and looks upward—toward the dark balcony box where Rahul Sharma watches with the glass cane resting across his thighs. Sharma doesn’t even bother to hide it. He just raises his thumb to Cassio. Calm and almost satisfied.

I knew they were working together. I didn’t know it was this openly. The bookmaker, the staged odds, the matchmaking—all of it was always going to converge here. Cassio was never just a fighter on a list. He was the closing argument.

Cassio turns his eyes back to me. And for the first time since the fight began, I genuinely can’t decide if what I see in him is pity, exhaustion, or just another layer of calculation underneath both of them.

"I’m sorry about this, Dryden," he says. "You were a good man."

My hand closes on Eventide.

"Were?" 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

His aura detonates around the spear, compressing the air like deep water about to burst outward in a wave of bluish pressure.

"Royal Sailfish!"