The gate opened and nothing came out.
For three seconds, the arena held its breath.
Then the Jaguar stepped into the light.
It had purple-black fur with faint, shifting patterns. It was low to the ground as well, the way big cats are.
Its eyes found Holden immediately.
They were gold with pupils like vertical slits, and they did not move off him once.
Outside the cage, someone screamed.
"Shadow-Stalker!" That was one of the ring officials.
"Get the override, get the override!" someone else was shouting.
"Rank Five, that's a Rank Five in a live exam ring! Somebody get Vespera, somebody get the override panel, now!" another voice said loudly.
The examiner's voice cut through all of it.
"Clear the spectators. All personnel to the cage perimeter. Breach team, suit up."
The Jaguar took another step. Then another.
His system screen was present in the corner of his vision.
[Multiplier: 100x.]
He understood what that meant. His brain was currently processing input at one hundred times the density of normal human cognition.
This was the only reason he was not going to die this very moment.
The Jaguar attacked.
Whoosh.
One moment it was six meters away, and the next it was simply there. There was no sign of it moving, just a small puff of air.
He didn't outspeed the beast. That was physically impossible for a Rank 1. Instead, his mind, processing at a hundred times its normal speed, read the shift of the Jaguar's muscles before it even left the ground. He started dodging a fraction of a second early, letting prediction bridge the gap in their physical stats.
Holden dodged to the right. He held his sword at an angle so the cat's power would slide off to the side. The Jaguar's shoulder clipped him anyway, and he stumbled two steps before his Master footwork dragged his balance back and set him upright.
His left arm was numb from the shoulder down for a moment.
That, he thought, is the difference between one star and five stars.
The Jaguar landed, turned, and faced him again.
Outside the cage, he could hear the breach team moving.
He didn't have much time before they opened the gate and complicate everything.
He watched the Jaguar and let his processing run.
Here was the thing about Master proficiency at one hundred times the cognitive multiplier: it wasn't that the world slowed down, exactly. It was more that the world became louder with information. Every movement the Jaguar made was broadcasting, constantly, a stream of data about what came next.
The Jaguar was not predictable. Nothing that fast and that powerful was truly predictable.
But it was readable.
It charged again.
Whoosh.
This time Holden moved into the charge instead of away from it. He stepped left and inside the arc of the paw swipe that was coming for his head, close enough that he felt the wind off the claws pass his ear, and brought his blade around in a tight arc toward the neck.
The Jaguar twisted its body while it was still in the air. It changed its direction. Holden swung his blade, but the Jaguar dodged, and he only managed to cut a few pieces of its fur.
It landed, spun, and hit him with a backhanded swipe from its rear leg that he hadn't seen coming.
BANG!.
His back hit the cage wall.
He slid down about half a meter and then caught his balance. He managed not to drop his sword. He blinked hard to clear his eyes. When the world stopped spinning, he was staring at the Jaguar as it turned back to face him.
His right knee was on the ground.
Get up, some part of him said. You are on one knee and Maeve needs you to get up.
He got up.
Outside the cage, someone was yelling his name. It was the examiner's voice saying something about the breach team being thirty seconds out.
He looked at the Jaguar.
His processing was running something new. Not just the movement data, but the accumulated information from both attacks.
And it found something.
Before every charge, the Jaguar's head dropped forward, chin toward the chest, to protect its throat.
Which meant its eyes were unguarded for exactly one moment. The moment of the drop, when its chin came forward and its head tilted, the angle created a clear, direct line to the left eye.
One moment. He would have to be inside the charge and not going sideways. He would have to let it come completely, trust the read entirely, with no bail-out option once he committed.
The Jaguar braced itself.
Holden lowered his sword into a guard stance.
The Jaguar charged.
Whoosh.
Its head dropped.
He stepped forward.
The world was loud with data and his body was moving through it, finding the one correct path in the space between everything. For the half-second before impact, his processing was so clear that he could see where his sword was going to hit.
Thk.
The Jaguar's momentum carried it through, its body sweeping past him and hitting the cage wall with a BOOM that shook the ring.
He stayed standing, though his legs were shaking. The force of the beast rushing past had nearly pulled his arm from its socket.
One second. Two.
Clang. Bang.
The breach team hit the cage door from the outside.
And then, from somewhere above the body of the Jaguar, a ping sounded.
[Kill Confirmed.]
[Kill Points Awarded: +50 KP.]
[Total KP: 50.]
The chest that appeared above the Jaguar was dark grey and smooth, etched with faint silver lines, and it glowed brighter than anything he'd seen so far. It floated there patiently while three armored breach team members ran past it without seeing it, and while a medic pushed through the gate behind them.
Holden stood in the middle of all of it, breathing.
He became aware that his knees and back hurt and he had somehow lost his sword inside a Jaguar's skull.
He made a note to retrieve it before anyone noticed.
One of the breach team members reached him, hands going to his shoulders to check him over, saying something that took a second to resolve into words through the ringing in his ears.
"...standing? Can you hear me? Can you tell me your name?"
"Holden Voss," he said.
The breach team member stared at him for a moment with an expression that Holden couldn't read.
Then he looked back at the Jaguar.
Then back at Holden.
"You're seventeen," the man said.
"Yeah."
The man didn't say anything else. He just kept his hands on Holden's shoulders and looked at the cage around them. He looked at the fallen hounds, the boar, the Jaguar, and then back at him.
From the platform outside the cage, through the bars and the crowd, the examiner was looking directly at him.
Her clipboard was at her side.
She hadn't written anything down in a while.