I check my OXI before trying to speak again.

[OXI: 327 / 2,500]

The number climbed and stalled. It isn’t rising any further.

Oliver shoved something into my mouth—maybe Scales, maybe Candies, maybe both—but the effect doesn’t pass that point. The system seems to be holding my life on a thin rope, stabilizing me just enough to stay conscious, but not enough to drag me back into the world of the living. The damage is vital. I don’t need a medical readout to understand that. The support items are only buying seconds.

"What... are you... hiding?" I ask.

The question comes out crooked, broken by my own breathing. Every word pulls something wrong inside my abdomen, and the right side of my chest answers with the dry pain of fractured ribs.

Veric is the first to speak.

"You... won, Sands. You won the fight."

The information doesn’t fit anywhere.

I’m destroyed. Lying on the floor of the Oathring. A hole in my abdomen and warm blood spreading under me. My body has become a thing I have to keep convincing not to give up every second.

’Winning shouldn’t taste like this... shouldn’t feel like my life is leaking out faster than any cheap item can refill.’

"What... are you talking about?"

That’s when I notice the silence.

The entire arena is still quiet. Not the normal silence after a beautiful strike. Not the hungry pause before the crowd explodes.

Something else.

The low OXI, the pain, and the wounds had scrambled my situational awareness to the point where I didn’t notice hundreds of people holding their breath at once.

Veric points toward the structure where Rahul Sharma sat.

It takes me a few seconds to process everything that enters my vision.

In the direction of the structure, near a pillar of the Oathring, about fifty feet from where our blades had crossed, Cassio lies fallen. Missing a hand. I can still feel a faint energy radiating from him—too low to be an immediate threat, but alive.

’He’s unconscious.’

On his chest, a mark rises in a diagonal, thick at the right hip, thinning toward the left collarbone. The cut didn’t pass fully through the armor. The Royal Sailfish probably isn’t only a weapon. The transformation must have reinforced his entire body alongside it.

Satisfaction comes for only an instant. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

Then I see the halberd.

The sapphire weapon broke through the energy barrier of the Oathring after the clash of our strikes. The recoil hurled the blade outward, and it’s now buried in the wall behind Rahul Sharma. Deep enough to crack the structure around it.

’This damn spear could have exploded, gone into space, or gone to hell, but it seems Chaos Theory had a curious fate in store for it.’

And that means two things.

First: Cassio went out at the exact moment our strikes crossed. The Ocean’s Law allows things into the Oathring, but only releases them once a fight has concluded.

Second: Rahul Sharma is probably going to kill me. Maybe not here, in front of everyone. Maybe not with his own hands. But men at his level don’t see a weapon planted behind their seat as an accident.

Even after the incident, Rahul hasn’t moved.

That’s worse. For someone of his rank, deflecting the trajectory, destroying the weapon, or simply preventing it from touching the wall should have been easy. The problem is the meaning. If he read that as defiance, as a veiled challenge, I just spat blood on the crime king’s shoe while still bleeding out on the floor.

My veteran instincts wake up before fear has a chance to start.

"Quickly, Veric... announce it to everyone. Fifty Shards... for a healer."

"Did you hit your head? Have you lost your mind?"

I could pay for a whole hospital for a day with this money, but if I wait any longer, I won’t even have a place to spend it.

"Just do it. Don’t argue."

Veric looks at me for half a second. Then he understands enough to execute. If I’m asking for an absurd sum to be shouted across the arena, there’s a reason, and Veric is too smart to waste time demanding explanation from a man with a hole in him.

He fills his lungs.

"FIFTY SHARDS FOR A HEALER TO COME HERE! NOW!"

His voice cuts through the silence of the Oathring like a war bell. A few people start moving before he reaches the second sentence.

"I REPEAT, FIF-TY SHARDS!"

Hundreds of heads turn at the same time. Dozens begin descending toward the center of the arena—hesitant at first, then faster once they realize the offer is real. After all, it’s the prince of Azure offering the money.

"Sly as a weasel..." Oliver says to me.

He smiles. But the smile carries too much warmth to be only a joke. Part of me wants to answer. Another part is busy trying not to black out.

Rhayne wipes the tears from her face with the back of her gloved hand.

"What are you planning, Dryden? We can just run out of here and take you to the infirmary in the academy."

Before answering, I look again toward Rahul’s box.

He isn’t there anymore.

Anxiety arrives with the urgency. Cold, direct. Worse than the pain for a second.

Just as I thought. The bastard wants me dead.

"Quickly... anyone of Class Order A... or higher... I raise it to seventy Shards."

I speak slowly, locking my teeth between words. Breathing harder pulls the ribs against the wound in a way that nearly tears my consciousness loose from where it’s anchored.

A young woman with a shaved head kneels next to me before the others. She wears simple gray temple robes, and her voice is too soft for this arena.

"My name is Zhang Xi. Healer Order S, Rank C, Silver Fang Guild. May I begin, sir?"

I don’t think about it long.

"Go."

Zhang Xi raises her hands.

Veric draws his gladius and brings the blade close to her throat before the first healing light can form.

"Try anything cute and you won’t be the only one to die today. This is a royal order."

Zhang Xi swallows dry. I hear the sound, small and human, even with the world still half away.

Then she begins.

Her energy doesn’t burn like OXI and doesn’t press like combat aura. It’s warm, steady—a soft light entering the wound like water finding cracked soil. The energy floods in like a tsunami sweeping through the streets of a coastal city but not destroying. Reorganizing.

The pain doesn’t disappear. It recedes in layers, enough for me to feel my body trying to assemble itself again. Heat spreads across the abdomen, pulling torn edges back, closing voids, forcing flesh and energy to remember the shape they were supposed to hold and rebuild from there.

For the first time since the strike, I breathe without feeling like I’ll split in half.

But I’m still far from being myself again.

Then I feel the aura approaching.

Immense.

Heavy as a star itself descending over the arena.

’Shit... Will there be enough time?’