The arena crew finished the reset in their usual four minutes.

The crowd used the time the way it had been using the time between fights all day—processing what had just happened, arguing about what came next, replaying the moments that had defined the previous fight. Jelo’s name was still moving through the stands with the particular energy of something that had just confirmed itself, the noise of the previous finish still present in the air the way noise lingered in enclosed spaces after the source had stopped.

But the bracket kept moving.

Fight 6 was next.

The announcer raised the microphone with the particular manner of someone who had found his second wind—the energy of the afternoon building rather than depleting, the quality of the fights feeding his performance rather than drawing from it.

"Fight six."

The crowd reorganized itself back into attention.

"From Aurelius Academy—Tyke."

The home crowd gave him their response—warm and immediate, the Aurelius sections producing the particular sound of home support that didn’t require prior knowledge of the fighter to generate. He was theirs. That was enough to start with.

Tyke walked out of the Aurelius tunnel and the crowd got their first look at him.

He was compact and quick in his movement—not small, just economical, built in a way that suggested his ability and his physicality had developed around the same principle. He moved across the arena floor with a looseness that was different from the deliberate looseness fighters performed for audiences. This was genuine—the looseness of someone whose body was always slightly ready to be somewhere else, always holding the option of a different position in reserve.

He reached his starting position and looked across the floor at the Dravenfall tunnel with the easy patience of someone who had been in difficult situations before and had found that patience was the correct response to all of them.

"Tyke," the announcer said. "Class 3, Aurelius Academy. His ability—Snapback."

A murmur from the crowd—the name doing its first work before the explanation arrived.

"Tyke can store the exact position, momentum, and physical state of his body at any moment—and snap back to that stored state within a five second window." He paused. "Mid-fight, he tags a position. A stance. A location on the floor. A specific body configuration. If the exchange goes wrong—he snaps back to that tagged state instantly." Another pause. "To anyone watching—he vanishes from one position and reappears in another. He can hold one tagged state at a time. There is a brief cooldown between uses."

The crowd processed it.

The Aurelius sections gave it a surge of noise—the home crowd responding to an ability that sounded, from the description alone, like something worth watching.

"Used correctly," the announcer added, "it means every exchange Tyke enters has a reset option. He can fight aggressively knowing he can undo the consequences." He paused. "Used incorrectly—the position he snaps back to may no longer be safe."

Then the Dravenfall tunnel opened.

Maldrick walked out.

The Dravenfall sections gave him their heavy territorial response—the sound they produced for all their fighters, the announcement rather than the celebration. Maldrick was broad and deliberate in his movement, not rushing, not performing, covering the arena floor with the particular pace of someone whose ability operated at whatever speed he chose to move and therefore had no reason to hurry. His hands hung at his sides and at the edges of them—barely visible, requiring attention to notice—a faint dark shimmer moved across his palms like shadow that didn’t belong to him.

The crowd noticed it before the announcer named it.

"Maldrick," the announcer said. "Class 3, Dravenfall Academy. His ability—Graveweight."

The murmur from the crowd was immediate and had a different quality from the Snapback murmur—heavier, more instinctive, the particular sound people made when something was described that connected directly to a physical fear.

"Maldrick generates and controls gravitational pressure fields directed outward from his hands. He can increase the gravitational force on a specific target or area—making opponents feel two, three, or four times their own body weight. Crushing their movement. Collapsing their stance. Slowing their strikes to the point of uselessness." He paused. "He can also reverse the field—reducing gravity on himself for explosive upward movement, or on objects to throw them as projectiles." Another pause. "The fields are invisible until they land. The only indicator—the dark shimmer at the edges of his hands when he’s generating pressure."

The crowd looked at Maldrick’s hands.

The shimmer was there.

Faint. Present. Building.

"If Maldrick catches you under maximum gravity output," the announcer said quietly, "you will not be moving quickly enough to matter."

Both fighters were at their positions. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

The referee raised a hand.

Tyke settled—feet light, weight distributed forward, the stance of someone ready to move in any direction at any moment. His right hand moved briefly to his hip—not reaching for anything, a small gesture, the physical habit of someone tagging a position as the fight was about to begin.

The crowd caught it.

Didn’t fully understand it yet.

Maldrick stood upright, the dark shimmer deepening at his palms, the gravitational fields building before the fight had officially started.

The referee’s hand dropped.

Tyke moved immediately.

Not toward Maldrick—laterally, a wide fast arc across the arena floor, covering ground at speed, his feet light enough that each step barely registered as sound against the stone. He was moving before Maldrick had committed to anything, creating angles, refusing to give the gravitational fields a stationary target to lock onto.

Smart opening, the announcer said. "Tyke isn’t engaging—he’s denying. No fixed position means no fixed target for Graveweight to find."

Maldrick tracked him.

His hands came up—slowly, deliberately—the dark shimmer spreading from his palms outward as the gravitational field built in his hands. Not firing yet. Building pressure. Waiting for a moment when Tyke’s movement committed to a direction long enough to be worth targeting.

Tyke felt the building and changed direction.

Sharp lateral cut—left to right, the movement committing briefly to the new direction before he changed again. Testing how fast Maldrick could track a changing target. Testing the response time of the gravitational fields.

Maldrick fired.

The field was invisible until it landed—a directed burst of compressed gravity aimed at the space Tyke was moving through, not where Tyke was but where the calculation said Tyke would be in the next half-second.

It caught the edge of him.

Tyke’s left leg—mid-stride, the left foot in the air during the direction change—caught the edge of the gravity field and the weight that hit it was immediate and wrong. Not crushing—the edge of the field rather than the center—but the leg came down with twice its normal weight and the impact against the stone was audible.

Tyke snapped back.

The crowd saw it—saw him vanish from the position where the gravity field’s edge had caught his leg and reappear in the tagged position he had set at the start of the fight. It was not a blink, not a teleport—a snap, a brief moment of absence and presence, a physical effort visible in the sudden reset of his stance—but the effect was clear. The caught leg was un-caught. The edge of the gravity field had hit something that was no longer there.

The crowd made a sharp collective sound.

"There it is," the announcer said immediately. "Snapback on the first significant contact. Tyke tags a position and resets into it the moment Graveweight finds him." He paused. "And now Maldrick knows—every time his fields land on something, it might disappear."

Maldrick lowered his hands briefly.

Looked at where Tyke had been when he snapped back.

Looked at where Tyke was now.

The shimmer rebuilt at his palms.

Tyke moved again—different direction, new arc, already tagging a new position as he moved. The right hand gesture at the hip, brief and small, setting the new reset point before the next exchange began.

The crowd had caught it now.

They knew what the hip gesture meant.

Every time Tyke’s right hand moved to his hip—a new tag. A new reset position. The crowd watching for the gesture the way they watched for the tells of an ability they had just learned to read.

Maldrick fired again—two fields this time, one ahead of Tyke’s arc and one behind it, bracketing the movement rather than targeting a single point. The field ahead landed empty—Tyke had read the bracketing and cut inside it. The field behind landed at the edge of Tyke’s trailing foot.

Partial catch.

Tyke snapped back.

Reset. Clean. The trailing foot un-caught, the position restored, the brief physical effort of the snap visible in his expression for a fraction of a second before it settled back into the easy patience he carried everywhere.

"Two snaps in thirty seconds," the announcer said. "And Tyke still hasn’t taken meaningful damage. But the cooldown between snaps is real—there are windows where the reset isn’t available. Maldrick needs to find those windows."