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[ ZEE KAZRANA LESTUNE — POV ]
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The hum of the cyan barrier thickened, sealing Arena One from the outside world. The ambient noise of the courtyard — the clash of training blades and the shouts of the cohort — faded into a dull, distant murmur.
I rolled my shoulders. The heavy, cold iron of my interlocking knuckles bit through the fabric of my gloves. I raised my left hand, and my Shard materialized in the air over my right shoulder — a heavy, aggressive crimson crystal that pulsed with raw, volatile energy.
Across the cracked stone and crushed grass of the arena floor, Arga Orlando stood perfectly still.
He wore the same red-edged Haldia uniform that I did. He raised his free hand. His Shard materialized directly behind his head — not pristine or elegant like the aristocrats, but a jagged, unpolished fragment that burned with the dull, heavy, immovable light of a dying star.
To me, he was just another face in my own House's first-year cohort. He was simply the unfortunate target standing in front of me at the end of the absolute worst day of my life.
My jaw clenched so hard my teeth ached.
Yesterday, that deadpan, mud-stained lunatic from Abyssion strolled into my perfect setup in the northwest corridor, completely dismantled a second-year noble, and then looked me in the eye and called my effort a pity.
And today? I tried to blow up his alchemical cauldron to get even. Instead, he weaponized my sabotage to finish his assignment early. Instructor Claire caught me, confiscated my priceless custom gear, slapped me with a catastrophic thirty-point deficit, and humiliated me in front of the entire class.
And then, as if that wasn't enough, he walked up to me forty seconds before my match to explain — in creative and exhaustive detail — every reason I should feel terrible about walking into this dome.
My opponent doesn't use weapons against people like me.
The best I can hope for is making him change that policy.
My shoulder telegraphs.
He already called it a loss.
My blood was practically boiling in my veins. I needed an outlet. I needed to break something, or I was going to lose my mind.
This boy was going to have to do.
"Three."
I bent my knees. Crimson Vein-light ignited under my skin, flooding down into my iron knuckles. The air around my fists warped with rising heat.
"Two."
"Before we start," Arga said.
Completely flat. No tension, no anticipation, nothing. It cut through the barrier hum like he'd said it in a quiet room.
I kept the heat building in my fists. "You have about one second."
"The boy by the Eastern racks." He still wasn't looking at me directly. His gaze had that quality of someone who had already run the numbers and was now just watching the variables arrange themselves. "Astarte. What did he say to you?"
We are sealed inside a barrier dome. The countdown is still running. And the first thing out of your mouth is a question about that lunatic from Abyssion.
"He told me my shoulder telegraphs," I spat. "And I'm going to make him eat every word through your teeth."
Something moved behind Arga's eyes. Not surprise. Confirmation.
"Your shoulder," he repeated.
"You heard me."
"He noticed your shoulder." Arga said it the way someone says so that's what happened when a puzzle piece clicks into place. "And he told you before the match. Not after. Not as leverage. As—"
"As a head game," I cut him off. "Same as you're doing right now. You want to talk, or you want to fight?"
Arga looked at me for a long moment. Something in his expression shifted — the faintest tightening around his eyes, the kind of micro-expression that means more than it should.
"He was trying to help you," Arga said. "You know that, right?"
The words landed wrong. Not like an insult. Like someone poking a bruise I didn't know I had.
"I don't need your psychoanalysis," I said. "I need you to fight me."
"Fair enough."
"One."
"Begin."
I didn't wait for the echo to die.
The stone cracked under my boots. I wrenched the raw heat from the air and forced it straight into my arms, all of it, as fast as it would move. The Vein-light blazed blinding crimson across my skin. Six meters. I closed it in a second and a half.
"Burn!"
I planted my left foot, locked into a textbook Haldia vanguard stance, and threw a right hook with everything I had. The heat roared from my knuckles like the mouth of a furnace, aimed straight at his jaw.
Arga tilted his head three inches to the left.
The fire washed past his ear and hit empty air.
Before I could register the miss, he stepped directly into my guard. He didn't draw his sword. He just flicked his wrist and drove the steel pommel into the nerve cluster on the inside of my right bicep — hitting the exact point where the mana was still traveling down my arm. Blocking the exit before the strike fully formed.
The unreleased fire had nowhere to go.
It rebounded.
CRACK.
"Ghh—!"
The breath hitched in my throat. My right arm went completely dead. The fire extinguished instantly, replaced by the agonizing sensation of boiling copper flooding my nerve endings from the inside out.
He didn't dodge. He didn't block. He just — closed the door on my own strike and let it burn me from the inside.
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[ ODICIOS / PRACTICE SPARRING PROTOCOL ]
Zee Kazrana Lestune [███████████░░░░░░░░░] 58%
▶ Right Arm — Mana Backlash / Spellblast (Locked)
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Forty-two percent gone. One exchange. He didn't even swing.
My survival instinct screamed retreat. My pride grabbed it by the throat.
"Don't you dare look past me!" I twisted my hips, forced the remaining heat into my lower body, and threw a blazing roundhouse at his ribs.
He stepped back exactly far enough. My leg swept past him by a margin that felt deliberate. Then his boot came down on the back of my supporting knee, clean and unhurried, and my balance shattered completely.
I stumbled hard, boots skidding against the stone.
"Your fire is suffocating."
He wasn't winded. Wasn't even close. His voice carried the flat, worn weight of a man reading from a report he'd already filed and forgotten about.
"You're strangling it into a straight line because you want the impact to feel like a brawler's punch. So you cage it. Compress it. Kill everything that makes it dangerous before it even leaves your hands." He deflected a jab without looking, the flat of his blade turning my fist into empty air. "Every time your Vein-light flares, I know exactly where the hit is going. You've been announcing yourself since the first step."
"Oh go to hell," I snarled, throwing a left cross hard enough to shatter stone.
He rolled under it.
"And your shoulder," he added, like an afterthought. "Rises two centimeters before you commit. The boy was right about that."
He saw it. He saw it on the first exchange. Arzane saw it from the weapon racks and this bastard saw it in the first three seconds of the match.
I threw another combination. He walked through it like rain.
"You're angry," Arga said. "That's the second problem."
"Second?" I spat. "What's the first?"
"You're not angry enough."
I stopped.
Not because he'd hurt me. Because of the way he said it. Not dismissive. Not mocking. Almost — disappointed. Like he'd been expecting something and this wasn't it.
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"It means you're using your anger like a torch when you should be using it like a furnace." He wasn't even breathing hard. "You're burning it at the surface. Flash and flare and noise. All heat, no pressure. All announcement, no arrival." He tilted his head. "You learned to fight from someone who channels fire like a blade — clean, controlled, disciplined. And you've been trying to shove your fire into the same shape ever since. But you're not him. You never were."
My blood went cold.
"You don't know anything about—"
"Your brother," Arga said. "He projects fire through structured geometric arrays. Pins. Precise. Every strike a surgical instrument." He watched my face with the clinical detachment of someone reading a chart. "You channel yours through your knuckles. Blunt. Chaotic. Close-range. You've spent years trying to make a hammer act like a scalpel and you're confused about why it keeps failing."
"Don't you dare talk about my brother—"
"I'm not talking about your brother. I'm talking about you." He took one step forward. Just one. "He fights like someone who trusts his tool. You fight like someone who's apologizing for hers."
The words hit somewhere that nerve strikes couldn't reach.
I rushed him.
Wild. Furious. No stance, no form, just raw screaming heat pouring through my iron knuckles in a sustained barrage that should have melted the air between us. Left cross. Right hook. Spinning back fist. Each strike carrying enough mana to crack stone, each one hitting nothing but empty air and the faint shimmer of heat displacement as he moved through my guard like water through a broken dam.
He wasn't even trying.
"Better," he said, from somewhere behind me. "That's the first honest thing you've thrown this whole match. The rest was choreography."
I spun, threw a hammer-blow at his shoulder. He stepped inside and deflected my elbow with his forearm, using the momentum to push me past him. I stumbled forward two steps before catching myself.
"Stop moving like that!" I whipped around, unleashing a rapid three-hit combination — left, right, left — each carrying enough heat to melt the blade of a standard-issue sword.
He parried the first. Ducked the second. Let the third graze his shoulder without flinching, and while I was still committed to the follow-through, he drove a sharp, precise strike into the nerve cluster just below my left shoulder blade.
My arm spasmed. The fire died before it formed.
"That's twice," he said. "Same nerve. Same side."
He wasn't even keeping score for himself. He was keeping it for me. Like a teacher marking corrections.
"You absolute piece of—" I bit the rest off and threw a kick instead, fury bypassing vocabulary.
He caught my ankle. Held it for exactly one second — long enough for me to feel the complete, humiliating stillness of being held in place — then released it and stepped back.
"You have good instincts," Arga said. "The best in your year, probably. But you've been burying them under six layers of someone else's technique and calling it discipline." He looked at me the way you look at a locked door you've already found the key to. "Every time your body tells you to swing wild, you correct it into something cleaner. Every time your fire wants to explode, you cage it into a shape. You're so busy trying to fight correctly that you've forgotten how to fight at all."
"I don't need your commentary, I need you to fight me—"
"I am fighting you." He tilted his head slightly. "This is what it looks like when I fight you. Did you think it would look different?"
The words hit somewhere worse than the nerve strikes.
He's not fighting me. He's diagnosing me. Every exchange is a test. Every dodge is a data point. He's not trying to beat me — he's trying to understand me, and he's already done it, and now he's just reading his notes back to me in real time.
I roared and stopped aiming entirely. I just dumped the heat into both fists and swung — wild, relentless, every ounce of frustration from the corridor and the alchemy lab and the thirty points and Arzane's stupid blank face and his stupid shoulder comment and his stupid "the loss is going to matter" — pouring out through my iron knuckles in a sustained, furious barrage.
Arga moved through it like water finding cracks in stone.
He didn't block. He redirected. Every strike I threw, he was already somewhere adjacent to where it landed, close enough that I kept thinking I had him, far enough that I kept hitting air. He made me feel my own speed working against me — the faster I swung, the more committed the miss, the harder I stumbled into the next empty space where he wasn't.
"You're chasing me," he said, from my left.
I swung left. Empty air.
"You've been chasing me since the first second." From my right now.
I swung right. Empty air.
"Every fighter you've ever beaten — you overwhelmed them with pressure and heat. They broke before you did." He was in front of me again, close enough that I could see the faint red burn on his forearm from the backlash. "I'm not going to break, Lestune. And you don't know what to do when something doesn't break."
"I'll figure it out," I spat, blood and fury hitting the stone.
"No," Arga said simply. "You won't. Not today. Not against me."
He didn't say it to hurt me. That was the worst part. He said it the way you say the ground is hard. Just — true. Already done. A fact he'd arrived at before he even stepped into this dome.
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[ Zee Kazrana Lestune [████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░] 22% ]
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I stopped aiming for his head and slammed both gauntlets into the stone at his feet, dumping my entire remaining mana pool into a point-blank localized detonation aimed straight down.
BOOM.
The shockwave ripped through the dome like a contained thunderclap. Smoke and superheated air and shattered stone fragments exploded outward in a three-meter radius. At this range there was no clean dodge. I heard the sharp hiss as the edge of the blast caught him — the brief, satisfying smell of scorched fabric.
The smoke was thick. I was gasping, lungs burning, knees threatening to give.
Then something moved through the haze.
A hand came out of the smoke, grabbed me by the collar, and drove me straight down into the stone. Not a throw. Not a redirection. He planted me. Face-first. Into the arena floor with the cold, mechanical certainty of someone finishing a sentence they'd started three exchanges ago.
My teeth cracked together. Stars detonated behind my eyes.
He didn't let me fall. He held my collar the whole way down, controlled, deliberate — making sure I hit the floor hard enough to feel it completely but not hard enough for the safety system to trigger. The distinction between those two thresholds was apparently something he had memorized.
A boot settled onto my spine. Not my chest. My spine. Directly between my shoulder blades, pressing down with calm, surgical precision on the exact point that locked every muscle in my back simultaneously. Every time I tried to draw mana, the pressure snuffed it dead before it could form.
The smoke cleared.
Arga stood over me. His uniform was scorched down the left side, a livid red burn crossing his forearm where the edge of the blast had caught him. His breathing was completely even. His longsword rested against his shoulder like he was waiting for something to finish.
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[ Zee Kazrana Lestune [██░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░] 14% ]
▶ Severe Stagger (Critical)
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"Now," Arga said, looking down at me through the last of the smoke. "What did Astarte say?"
"Get your damn boot off my spine," I rasped, "and I'll tell you exactly which part of the arena to go find it."
"What did he say?"
"Why the hell does it matter?" I gripped his ankle and pulled. Pointless. The pressure didn't move a single millimeter. "You already won. What do you want, a written summary?"
He didn't answer immediately. He looked down at me with eyes that were empty in a specific, unnerving way — not cold, not cruel. Just done. The eyes of someone who had already been through the end of this conversation and was waiting for me to arrive.
"He told you I was going to win," he said. "Didn't he."
The fight went out of my hands.
They fell slack against the stone.
A chill moved up my spine that had nothing to do with the cold floor under me. Arzane's hollow, deadpan voice played back through my skull — not vague doom-saying, not a head game. Something specific. Something that had landed exactly where he intended it and I hadn't even noticed until now.
You'll make him draw it. That's not nothing. Most people in our year won't manage that.
He didn't say I was going to lose. He said I was going to make this bastard take me seriously enough to use his weapon. He framed the entire thing around what I would force out of Arga, not what Arga would do to me.
And I walked in here thinking he was trying to get in my head.
"...He tried to warn me," I said. Smaller than I intended.
Something shifted in Arga's expression. Not satisfaction. Recognition — the specific look of someone confirming a calculation he'd already made.
"He warned you and you still charged in anyway," Arga said.
"I'm Haldia," I said. "What else was I going to do."
Arga looked at me for a moment. Something flickered behind his eyes — not pity, something older, something that looked almost like memory.
"Fair enough," he said quietly.
He lifted his boot off my spine.
I sucked air back into my lungs, rolled onto my side, and pushed myself up. My arms were shaking. My right arm was still mostly dead. I spat a red streak onto the floor beside me and wiped my mouth with the back of my iron glove.
"Yield," he said.
"No."
A beat.
"Lestune—"
"I said no." I got one knee under me. Then the other. Then my feet. The whole process took longer than it should have and he watched every second of it without expression, which was somehow worse than if he'd looked impatient. "You want it, come take it."
Arga looked at me standing there — one arm dead, fourteen percent, blood on my chin, breathing like I'd been dragged through a kilometer of bad road — and something changed in his face.
Not pity. Something older than that. Something that looked like the ghost of a decision he'd made a very long time ago in a place that looked nothing like a training dome.
A sharp metallic clang rang through the dome.
I looked up.
His longsword was on the stone several meters away. Tossed aside mid-motion, without ceremony, the way you put down something you've finished with. He raised his bare hands and settled into a clean, low, grounded boxing stance — no Vein-light, no Shard, nothing but weight and posture and the particular stillness of someone who had done this in worse places than a training dome.
"Guard up," he said.
"You threw away your sword."
"Yes."
"To fight a brawler. Bare-handed."
"I've already seen everything your sword form has to offer." He settled deeper into his stance. "I want to see what happens when you stop trying to use one."
Something ignited in my chest that had nothing to do with my Fire attunement. I raised my guard. Squared my shoulders. Pulled the dead weight of my right arm up into position through sheer spite.
Arga watched my guard settle.
A quiet breath left him. Not relief. Not satisfaction. Something more complicated — the specific exhale of someone who has just committed to a course of action they can't take back.
"I watched your older brother spar once," he said. The same flat, unhurried voice. Completely conversational, like we were standing at the weapon racks and not in the wreckage of a dome with my CVI bleeding out. "He anchors his weight through the back heel. Every strike comes from the ground up. Clean transfer, no waste." He watched my left shoulder with the calm attention of someone reading a clock. "You've been copying his footwork since you were twelve. You still haven't noticed it doesn't fit you."
My guard tightened. "Don't."
"His style is built for reach. For precision. For fighting at range with projected constructs." Arga took one step forward. "You're not a ranged fighter, Lestune. You never were. You're a close-quarters brawler with a close-quarters body and a close-quarters instinct, and you've spent your entire life trying to jam yourself into a shape that was cut for someone six inches taller and forty pounds lighter."
"I said don't—"
"You burn twice the mana to hit half as hard. Not because you're weaker. Because you're fighting his geometry with your body and the angles don't align. You're wearing armor that was fitted to someone else and you've been bleeding through the gaps for years."
"SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH—"
"Does he know?" Arga asked. Genuinely. Like the answer mattered to him. "Does your brother know you've spent years trying to fight like him instead of yourself? Does he know you've been breaking yourself against his template because you thought his shape was the only one worth having?"
"SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP—"
I rushed him.
I dropped every last discipline I had and just went — raw, screaming, furious, pouring the dregs of my mana into my iron knuckles until they glowed blinding crimson and throwing the hardest right cross I had directly at his face. I wasn't aiming for the safe target. I was aiming to drive his skull through the barrier wall.
Arga slipped inside.
One inch of clearance. And then his fist came up from the floor — a full-body uppercut, every kilogram of his weight transferring from his back foot through his hips through his shoulder through his arm — and it drove into my floating ribs with the concentrated force of something that had been waiting the entire fight to arrive.
CRACK.
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[ CVI: 09% ▶ Internal Trauma — Abdomen (Critical) ]
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My breath exploded from my lungs. I stumbled sideways, vision whiting at the edges, and he was already moving — not away, forward, staying in the pocket, not letting me have the distance to reset.
His elbow caught my left shoulder. Controlled, deliberate, precisely placed on the same nerve cluster he'd hit twice before. My arm spasmed and dropped.
He grabbed my collar before I could fall and walked me backward three steps, keeping me upright, keeping me facing him, not letting me hit the ground.
He's not letting me fall.
He's not letting me fall because if I fall the safety system triggers and this ends. He's keeping me standing. He's keeping me conscious and vertical because he's not done yet and he has decided that I'm not done yet either.
And the most terrifying part is that I don't know if that's mercy or something else entirely.
"Stay up," he said quietly.
"Don't you dare tell me to stay—"
He drove a short, brutal hook into my left side. Not wild. Measured. The specific strike of someone who knows exactly how much force a body can process before it stops being a fight and starts being a medical emergency.
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[ CVI: 07% ]
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I grabbed his lapel with my one working hand to stop myself from folding. The grip was pathetic. I kept it anyway.
"You hit like you're trying to prove something," Arga said, from a foot away. Not breathing hard. Not even close. "Every strike is for someone who isn't in this arena. Your brother. Your house. The voice in your head that told you that being loud was the same as being strong." He looked at me — directly, the way he hadn't since the countdown. "That's not fighting. That's atonement. You're not trying to beat me. You're trying to earn something. And no amount of broken knuckles is going to buy it."
"You don't know anything about me," I rasped.
"I know you're still standing." His voice shifted — still flat, still controlled, but something underneath it now. Something that sounded almost like respect. "That part's real. That's the only part that's real. Everything else you're carrying in here—" he tapped two fingers against my sternum, light, almost gentle "—that's weight you put there yourself. Weight you chose. Weight you keep choosing because it's easier to carry someone else's expectations than to figure out what you'd be without them."
Something cracked open in my chest that had nothing to do with the ribs.
Stop. Please stop. I can't—
"Get angry," Arga said. "Not at me. I don't matter. Get angry at the thing that made you think you had to be this. Get angry at the shape you've been forcing yourself into because nobody ever told you it was the wrong one."
"I hate you," I said. The words came out wet and cracked and completely sincere.
"Good," Arga said. "That's a start. Now aim it somewhere that isn't my face."
I swung.
He let the punch graze his jaw — let it, I felt the deliberateness of it, the exact degree he chose not to move — and then his hand came up and caught my fist before I could pull it back. He held it there. Just held it. My iron knuckles in his bare hand, both of us standing in the wreckage of the arena with smoke still curling from the stone.
"Stop," he said.
"Let go of me—"
"Stop." Not a command. Not pity. Just the word, flat and final, carrying the weight of someone who had said it before in worse places than this. "You're done. Your body's done. Throwing another punch won't prove anything to him. He's watching regardless."
I went still.
Him.
The word landed exactly where he intended it to.
My eyes moved before I could stop them, cutting sideways toward the upper tier. Toward the red-trimmed uniform and the perfectly still posture and the face that had been watching every second of this from behind the expression of someone who felt nothing.
My brother didn't move. He didn't look away.
He was standing there with his arms crossed and his jaw tight and his eyes on me like I was a problem he didn't have time to solve. Like I was an equation that hadn't balanced. Like I was something that needed fixing but he'd already tried and it hadn't worked and now he was just — watching.
He's not going to come down. He's not going to say anything. He's just going to stand there and watch me bleed on this stone and add it to the list of things I couldn't do right.
And I've been fighting like him anyway. I've been breaking myself against his shape for years. And it never fit. And I knew it never fit. And I did it anyway because I thought—
I thought if I got good enough at being him, I'd stop being a disappointment.
Arga released my fist.
I threw a wild, desperate roundhouse with my last functional limb, purely on reflex, purely because standing still felt like dying.
He caught my ankle. Stepped inside. And drove his elbow down into my thigh with the patient, precise force of someone ending a sentence they'd started a long time ago.
The dead-leg took me.
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[ CVI: 05% ▶ Motor Impaired — Left Leg (Terminal) ]
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I couldn't stand anymore. I had one working limb and no mana and nothing left to throw. The only thing I had left was the radial blast and somewhere below the screaming panic a cold, quiet part of my brain confirmed that he knew that too — that he'd been walking me toward this exact position from the first second, that every exchange had been a step in a route he'd mapped before the barrier even sealed.
He always knew where this ended. He knew before he tossed his sword. Before he let me stand back up. He was never trying to stop me.
He was just waiting for me to get here.
I slammed my gauntlets together anyway.
My Shard screamed above my shoulder. I poured everything into it — the confiscated gear, the thirty points, the corridor, the alchemy lab, every cruel thing this day had done to me, every year of bleeding and breaking my knuckles just to prove I wasn't a mistake — and I detonated it all outward in a full radial burst.
Crimson Lotus.
The dome turned red. Pure superheated plasma expanding in every direction, violent and indiscriminate and inescapable.
This is mine. This shape. This fire. Not his. Not the Haldia template. Not the clean geometric arrays. This. Chaotic and blunt and close-range and MINE.
Arga stepped into the blind spot of my guard before the flames peaked. Found the exact vacuum behind my swing — the one coordinate in a three-meter radial blast where the fire couldn't reach — and he was already standing in it before I finished the motion.
He looked at me through the wall of fire on every side.
"Good compression," he said quietly. "You finally stopped caging it. That was the real you. Remember what it felt like."
Then he dipped his shoulder and drove the uppercut straight into my jaw.
The impact was absolute. Clean. Final. The specific force of someone who had calculated the exact amount required and used no more and no less, which was somehow the most brutal thing about it — that there was no fury in it, no satisfaction, nothing personal. Just the end of a sequence.
My head snapped back. The world inverted into white static. Every sound cut out simultaneously — the fire, the barrier hum, my own heartbeat, all of it erased in an instant.
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[ ⚠ SAFETY PROTOCOL INITIATING ]
Respondent CVI dropping to Terminal Threshold (00%).
[ ODICIOS / RESULT — 3:08 ]
Arga Orlando [█████████████████░░░] 86% ▶ Thermal Burn — Left Arm (Superficial)
Zee Kazrana Lestune [░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░] 00% ▶ SYSTEM OVERRIDE (CRITICAL)
[ ARGA ORLANDO [House Haldia] WINS ]
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The barrier shattered red and dissolved into light.
The noise of the courtyard came crashing back into my ears like something breaking the surface of water — all of it distant, distorted, reaching me from very far away.
I was falling.
What did I do wrong?
Everything.
And he told me. He told me every single thing while he was doing it and I couldn't stop any of it and the worst part — the part that was going to sit in my chest for a very long time — was that I understood all of it. Every word. Every strike. Every clinical, methodical dissection of every flaw I'd been pretending wasn't there.
He wasn't trying to break me. He was trying to show me where I was already broken.
And I wouldn't listen. I kept swinging. I kept trying to be the shape I thought I was supposed to be.
And it never fit. It never fit and I knew it never fit and I did it anyway.
The hot tear I'd been holding back finally slipped through the grime on my cheek. I didn't stop it. I didn't have anything left to stop it with.
As my shoulder hit the crushed floor, my half-closed eyes drifted past the edge of the arena. Past the gathered cohort. Past the faculty already moving toward the platform.
And found my brother.
He was standing near the stone columns of the upper tier, red-trimmed uniform immaculate, posture completely still. He had seen all of it. The backlash, the stumble, the dead-leg, every second of being methodically walked through a route someone else had already mapped. He had seen me scream his name like a wound and fall apart on the stone.
He didn't move. He didn't look away.
You never taught me how to be me. You only taught me how to be a worse version of you. And I've been doing it for so long I don't know what me looks like anymore.
I looked away first.
My gaze slid right, toward the Eastern weapon racks.
Arzane Vornelius Astarte was still standing exactly where I'd left him. Leaning on that ugly rusted sword, face completely blank, watching me lie on the stone with the same vacant, hollow expression he'd had when he told me my shoulder telegraphed.
The same face he'd had when he told me I'd make Arga draw his sword.
The same face I'd aimed my finger at and threatened.
He tried.
He stood in front of me before I walked in here and tried to give me something real. He told me I was strong enough to matter. He told me my shoulder had a tell because he thought I'd want to know. He told me the match would matter because he knew what was coming and he wanted me to be ready for it.
And I called it a head game. I called it manipulation. I told him he was the worst thing that happened to me today.
He was the only person who tried.
Something moved through my chest that was sharper and cleaner than the broken ribs and the dead arm and the humiliation combined. Not anger. Not grief. Something with no clean name — the specific pain of recognizing, too late, that someone had been reaching toward you and you'd bitten their hand because you didn't know how to be reached.
It sat there quietly, the way things sit when you know you're going to have to carry them for a while.
The darkness pulled at the edges of my vision.
The last coherent thought I had before it took me was small and quiet and completely sincere.
I'm sorry.
The sky went white.
Then nothing.