"A temple?"
Of all the places the domain could have chosen for this, I hadn't considered a synagogue. And yet here I was in cold harsh night air, stone steps beneath me, and a tall temple rising directly ahead, its wooden doors shut like they were keeping something in rather than keeping things out.
The moon overhead was red. Not the comfortable amber of a normal night— red, the particular shade that belongs to things that are trying to tell you something. I had a reasonable idea of what it was trying to tell me.
"What are you doing?" Amelia's voice had something in it I hadn't heard often. Actual concern, stripped of the editorial. "You're going to get yourself killed."
Before I could respond, the large wooden doors opened.
Cold air pushed through immediately, the kind that carries weight, that you feel in the back of the throat. And from inside the temple, someone walked out.
A girl.
She had the largest eyes I'd seen on a person, stained a deep purple, and her hair was the same colour, moving slightly in the cold air.
The way she carried herself was the part that took a second to process, she walked like someone who had arrived somewhere they were genuinely glad to be.
Not the energy of a fighter coming to a fight. Something closer to someone arriving at a party they'd planned.
The smile on her face didn't help.
"I told you once," I said, after the silence had stretched long enough that Amelia's concern was starting to fill it. "Either I get stronger or I die trying."
"In this case, you're not even going to try before you die!"
"Let's make a bet." I adjusted my stance, settling into something that at least looked like preparation. "If I beat her, you have to be nice to me. Actual niceness. No qualifications."
Amelia pressed her palm flat against her face. Held it there. "Oh, good lord." The sound she made was somewhere between a groan and a prayer. "If you need motivation, the stakes should at least reflect the situation."
I didn't wait for her to finish.
I went down the temple steps fast, closing distance before Ember had a chance to set terms I hadn't agreed to. Impossible difficulty. The one thing I knew about gaps this wide was that you didn't give the other person room to operate, you crowded them, you made the space uncomfortable, you refused to let the fight become the fight they expected.
I came in with a swat, not a real punch, more a disruption, something to read her reflexes.
But she didn't dodge.
She matched it. Brought her own hand up to meet mine in the same motion, mirroring the move with an almost casual precision. When her hand connected with mine the sensation wasn't impact, it was heat. Immediate, sharp, spreading across my palm before I'd fully registered the contact.
I pushed past it. Folded two punches and threw them both.
She met both with one hand.
The timing was perfect, not reactive or scrambled, just right. Like she'd already decided where my fists were going before I'd thrown them. And the force she absorbed should have required two hands. That she used one was its own kind of statement.
I was still processing that when she twitched her wrist, one small concentrated movement, and the energy she'd stored in that arm came back. Not a punch. More like a focused expulsion. It sent me backward across the ground, my back finding the temple's entrance with a sound I felt more than heard.
Right. Impossible difficulty. That tracks.
I stood. Went again, this time with double the force loaded behind it, committed, driving low and fast to wrap her up and neutralise the reach advantage before she could use it. The death-hug. If I could just get my arms around her—
A kick connected with my chin.
The crack that followed was structural. I felt it in my teeth, in the back of my skull, in some fundamental place below the level of pain. And before the sensation had finished arriving, she had my arm — twisted it, used it to bring me upright — and for exactly one second we were close enough that I saw her smile change. Deepen. Like something had just been confirmed for her.
Then her foot came up into my gut and I was back at the temple entrance.
Fuck.
"Fuck, she's tough."
"I did mention this." Amelia had adopted the posture of someone who has made her peace with the outcome. She was rubbing her fingers together and gave me a shrug that communicated, comprehensively, that she had let go of any expectation that I would survive this. "I warned you. Several times. In succession."
I pulled myself upright, one hand braced against the door, the other holding my arm which had gone from painful to a sustained ache that was starting to define the experience of having an arm.
My breathing was ragged and the cold air wasn't making it easier. I ran through the inventory — Analytical Eye, Flow State, Adaptive Reflex — and arrived at the honest conclusion that none of them were moving the needle against Ember.
Against the previous opponents they'd provided edges. Here, they were barely registering.
Was this a fight with a ceiling I could reach, or one that had been placed outside any ceiling I currently had access to?
Ember hadn't moved from the spot where she'd sent me flying. She was still standing there, in the same position, with the same expression, amusement that had fully settled in, like she was watching something unfold exactly as anticipated.
Looking at her from this range confirmed what the profile picture had suggested. She was absolutely a psychopath. The specific kind that didn't arrive at that conclusion through damage or deprivation, just a native relationship with chaos that she'd apparently decided to lean into.
Tyler was a psychopath. So was she.
And I was done getting beaten up by psychopaths.
I went at her again, no clear plan yet, but movement, pressure, refusing to let her just stand there and wait. And she didn't wait.
She hummed.
One note. In a low, sustained voice. Which was such a strange thing to do in the middle of a fight that for a half-second I genuinely thought I'd misread what was happening.
Then my body stopped.
Not gradually. My bones just ceased cooperation, a shrieking tightness moving through them like they were resonating with something they hadn't been designed to resonate with.
The ground vibrated beneath me. The temple walls seemed to move. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the frequency in her voice built toward something that felt like structural failure, like the whole domain was moments away from coming apart at the seams.
Then she stopped.
Showoff.
The sensation released. I found my feet again, stood up straight, still favouring the arm. She hadn't moved. She was still smiling.
I turned the situation over while the disorientation cleared.
How. That was the question sitting underneath everything. How did someone this far above me invite me here instead of finding an opponent who could actually test her? The difficulty gap wasn't interesting, it was a formality, a closing of a door before the conversation was finished.
[New Skill Added]
[Recovery Rate Up — Passive]
A green glow moved across me, faint and warm, working through the surface damage. The arm eased slightly. My breathing found a slightly better rhythm. The skill was low-level, I could tell immediately, more a slow tide than a resolution — but it was something.
The system was at least tracking the situation as one I was surviving rather than one that was finished.
"Who are you?" I put the question out there plainly. "And why aren't you picking on someone your own size?"
The last resort that wasn't about force. Cypher had talked. There was a non-zero chance Ember would too.
The smile changed. Something softer moved into it, not warmth exactly, but something adjacent to it. A genuine response to the question rather than a performance.
"I tried." She said it with an expression that was almost rueful. "Nobody wants to play. They either decline the invitation or they figure out what I can do and quit before we've even started." The softness held for a moment, then dissolved back into that particular smile. "But you're still here. You haven't left." She tilted her head, studying me the way someone studies something that's behaving unexpectedly. "Isn't that interesting?"
And then, she started jumping. An elated, bouncing, clapping jump, the kind of movement that belonged to a child who'd just been told they could have dessert. The entire register of her presence shifted — the dangerous, calibrated fighter replaced in an instant by something that looked genuinely, unguardedly excited.
I looked at her.
Oh. She's lonely.
Not in the way that invited sympathy, exactly. More in the way that clarified the situation. To Ember, friendship was probably measured in willingness to stay in the room while she showed you how best she could kill you.
The people who'd declined or fled had failed a test she hadn't announced. I was still here, which meant I'd passed something she'd been running without telling me.
"You're a psycho," I said. It was a statement of observed fact. "And what makes you think I won't leave?"
The smile deepened. Something knowing moved into it.
"Because that option just closed." She said it the way someone announces a rule change they've already implemented. "Which means one of us has to finish this to end it."
"Amelia—"
Amelia was quiet. Doing the thing she did when she'd decided the lesson was mine to arrive at. I couldn't entirely fault her, I'd accepted this invitation with full information about the difficulty rating and proceeded anyway. The absence of an exit was, in retrospect, the kind of term I should have anticipated for an impossible-tier multiplayer duel.
Right. So. Options.
The Recovery Rate skill was buying time, not advantage. Her physical ability was beyond what I could match directly. I'd tested that across several attempts now. The humming frequency was something else entirely, operating on a different axis from the physical fight, something that acted on the body rather than through it.
Which meant the question wasn't how do I beat her on her terms. It was what does she have no guard for.
Every opponent I'd faced had one. The system hadn't given me an impossible fight to lose, it had given me one with a solution I hadn't found yet.
I went in again. A punch, committed, readable. And the moment she moved to shut it down, I pulled back and swerved right. One nanosecond of angle. I brought both fists up toward her neck in the window it created.
She caught my arm. Threw me over onto the bare ground with a force that bypassed negotiation entirely. I hit the floor and felt it across every bone that was already complaining about the evening.
Standing wasn't immediately available. I stayed where I was for a moment, looking up at the red moon, my body conducting its own internal meeting about what had just happened.
And then the voice arrived. Not from outside, from somewhere inside, the place where the accumulated weight of every person who'd ever looked at me and arrived at their conclusion lived.
Weak...
Weak..
Weak!
That's what you are, Ren. You'll never be anything else.
I'd heard it from bullies. I'd heard it from teachers. I'd heard it long enough that there were days it stopped needing an external source.
Ember was standing over me the same way they'd all stood over me. Looking down from whatever altitude victory put you at. Waiting.
"Why do you keep going?" Her voice had changed. The entertainment was still there, but underneath it was actual curiosity. Real interest in the answer. "Every person I've fought has begged me to stop. You keep getting up instead. Why?"
I laughed.
It came out genuine, which surprised me slightly.
"What's funny?" she asked.
"The begging part." I found her eyes. "I genuinely can't picture someone looking at you and deciding that begging was going to work." I let that sit for a second. "Also, you're just a brat."
The kick arrived at the last syllable. Full force, no warning. I rolled several metres across the ground before friction had an opinion about it, and when I stopped, blood had found its way to my lips from somewhere that had strong feelings about the evening's events.
Right. This is probably where it ends.
There was no three-life system here. No reset point waiting to put me back at the beginning. This was the version with real stakes, and the version with real stakes was running out of time.
Ember walked toward me.
It was the first time she'd moved from her original position since the fight began. She covered the distance slowly, no urgency in it, and stood over me with her face in shadow and her purple eyes catching the red moonlight.
"Interesting." She said it quietly, like it was meant for herself as much as for me. Then she tilted her head and rubbed her fingers against her chin, working something out. "You know what, I'll let you live." Something settled in her expression. A decision made. "You'll be a good playmate. When the time is right."
She turned and walked back toward the temple doors.
"Get stronger and find me, Ren." Her voice carried back over the cold air without her turning around. "I'll be waiting."