The next bout was Verna against Aza.
They took their positions, found their distances, and waited.
The king's hand came down.
Verna didn't ease into it. The moment the signal dropped she let her quality loose, and the temperature of the entire arena plummeted — a cold so sudden and complete that it reached the stands, and people in the crowd pulled their arms inward without thinking. A chill settled over everything.
Aza responded immediately, pulling a stone wall up between them — thick, solid, the kind of barrier that bought time and created options.
Verna froze it.
The wall turned white and still in an instant, and then she walked through it — or rather, through what it became when she was done with it — her blade leading, ice shards spraying outward in every direction as the frozen stone shattered around her. Aza moved, dodging the fragments, and in the next moment a silhouette emerged from the icy mist that had spread across the arena floor.
Verna was already there.
The blade came to rest against Aza's throat.
The crowd erupted — and Verna turned to face the stands, raising her hand. Not a fist. An open palm, fingers together, directed outward toward the thousands of people watching. A quieting gesture.
Remarkably, it worked.
The roar tapered into something close to silence, the crowd leaning forward collectively.
"I want to thank everyone for the chance to participate in this tournament," Verna said, her voice carrying cleanly across the arena. "But I am choosing to forfeit my next match."
The silence held for exactly one beat.
Then it broke into confusion — voices cutting over each other, heads turning, the particular noise of a crowd that has just heard something it cannot immediately categorize.
What is she thinking—
Is she serious—
Has she lost her mind entirely—
She walked off the arena floor without elaborating.
Ivel found her in one of the corridors off the main floor, and fell into step beside her before she had gotten very far.
"Are you out of your mind?" he said. "You just forfeited."
Verna laughed — genuinely, without any trace of regret.
"Because I want you to win."
He looked at her.
"Why?"
She considered him for a moment, something moving behind her grey eyes that she seemed to decide not to fully translate into words.
"I can't explain it precisely. I just feel like it."
She held his gaze a moment longer, then turned to go.
"You'd better win," she said, over her shoulder.
And then she was gone, and the king's voice was already filling the arena behind him.
"The next battle — Ivel of Revenant against Lom of Light."
The crowd split itself in two as Ivel walked out onto the floor.
His name came from one side of the stands in rolling waves — Ivel, Ivel — and from the other side Lom's answered it, the two chants overlapping and pushing against each other until the whole arena was noise.
King Auburn raised a hand and the stadium quieted.
"Whoever wins this bout takes the prize." He looked between the two boys on the floor below him. "Without further delay — begin."
Ivel moved toward Lom at a measured pace, reading the space between them as he closed it.
At roughly a meter out, he felt it.
His mana flickered. Dimmed. Then went quiet entirely, the way a fire goes quiet when you cut off its air — not extinguished, just unreachable, somewhere below the surface where his hands couldn't find it.
A meter, he noted. That's the radius.
He kept walking.
There's no point staying outside it. He can close the distance whenever he wants, and even if I charged the quality fully before entering — who knows how much survives the transition. Better to work with what's certain.
He entered the range, felt his quality go completely dark, and didn't break stride.
Their swords met in the center of the floor.
Steel rang across the arena, clean and sharp, and then they were into it — trading, adjusting, reading. Lom was brown-skinned with blonde hair and eyes that ran toward yellow, a vivid and unusual color, striking in its own way. He was as focused as Ivel, and his agility was something close to extraordinary — fluid and constant, never fully still, always creating new angles before the last one had finished being dealt with.
The curved sword was the problem.
It shouldn't have been — it was shorter, lighter, less suited to power — but its shape gave it a recovery speed that a straight blade simply couldn't match. Every time Ivel deflected, the sickle arc brought it back into position almost immediately, removing the window that a conventional parry would have opened. Ivel pressed harder, deflecting faster, pushing the pace until the sound of steel was nearly continuous.
That sword, he thought, with genuine irritation. That absolutely infuriating sword.
He watched it come back for the hundredth time and made a decision.
He found the gap in Lom's grip — the natural vulnerability the curved shape created at full extension — and drove his blade into it. Not a slash. A thrust, precise and angled, catching the sickle-sword and leveraging it sideways.
It flew out of Lom's hand.
His own sword went with it.
He looked at his empty hand for half a second.
"What's the point," he said, and raised his fists. "Let's settle it properly."
Lom looked at him across the floor. Then at the two swords lying somewhere behind them. Then back at Ivel.
He raised his fists.
The crowd, which had been loud, became something beyond loud.
What followed was not elegant.
The careful, measured sword exchange — all footwork and angles and reading — dissolved into something rawer and more direct. They moved into each other and stopped keeping distance and simply fought, trading strikes with the full weight of their bodies behind them.
Lom's mind was working hard beneath the surface of it.
Most opponents shut down when the mana goes. They panic. They change. They try to find a way back to their quality and end up fighting half a fight.
This one isn't doing that.
He isn't even trying.
Is he — is he actually smiling?
He was.
Ivel was smiling the way some people smile when they are precisely where they want to be, doing precisely what they are built for, and have temporarily forgotten that the outcome is something to worry about. There was blood at the corner of his mouth from somewhere and he didn't appear to have noticed.
What is wrong with this person, Lom thought, with something that was not quite fear but was adjacent to it. What kind of person smiles like that?
Lom threw a hook.
Ivel dropped under it — and the motion of dropping looked exactly like the beginning of a leg sweep. Lom had seen it twice already. He read it, raised his leg to avoid the takedown, shifted his weight back.
Ivel wasn't going for the sweep.
His foot came up while Lom's weight was still moving, catching him full across the face before the adjustment could complete. Lom's head snapped back, his nose breaking in a vivid burst of red, his body rocking backward on instinct.
His eyes stayed open.
His focus stayed there — diminished, pained, but not gone. He steadied. He came back to his stance.
And found Ivel already in front of him.
Close. Too close. Looking at him with that expression — bright, blood-stained, completely at ease.
How, Lom thought. How do you beat something that enjoys this. How did I ever think I could.
He swung anyway.
Ivel turned with it — not away from it, through it, his body rotating into the momentum — and brought his elbow around in a tight, violent arc that connected with the underside of Lom's chin with everything the spin had gathered behind it.
The sound it made was final.
Lom left the ground briefly.
Then he was on the arena floor, and he wasn't getting up.
The crowd was on its feet before the king was.
Auburn rose from his seat and looked down at the boy standing alone in the center of the floor — chest heaving, blood on his face, fists still raised out of pure habit — and said the only thing left to say.
"Ivel of Revenant — is the winner."