Andrew Pacheko had spent the last few months increasingly frustrated as he rotted in a GC pen, waiting for his trial date. He was undeniably guilty. All the evidence pointed toward his team’s involvement in at least eight separate delver's deaths. The kid he’d brought in—not the swordsman, but the one with the pricey armor—had been the nail in the coffin, though. He still didn’t know why the GC rep had listened to him over Andrew and his teammates.

  But the support in the fighter’s armor hadn’t killed Kim in that Rime portal. He hadn’t screwed everything up. Not like Kade had.

  His lawyer had put up a good fight, though. A really good fight. Enough to bog down the inevitable trial in years of red tape and make it a headache for the GC. He didn’t know who’d hired that woman, but she was an absolute, stone-cold bitch in the courtroom.

  So, when he’d been let go—on monitored parole, because the city needed all the delvers it could get, and with the condition that he not go after any other delvers, delve with anyone below his rank, or delve with any of his former teammates—he’d agreed to those terms readily. After all, Andrew had been frustrated in jail, and he hadn’t been able to talk to any of his people. He had dozens of half-baked plans. Dozens of them. But he couldn’t move forward with any while he was behind bars.

  Out and about, he could.

  And then, overnight, every single one of them was ruined. The Carlsbad break. The tournament. And the brackets—the nearly-perfect brackets. They provided a better plan than anything Andrew could have possibly asked for. If he could make it to the second round, he’d almost certainly fight Kade Noelstra.

  Now, here he was, standing on the stairs with the kid who’d ruined the good thing he’d had going. His benefactor had said that he’d set things up for him to get this one shot.

  And, dammit, Andrew was going to take it.

  I wasn’t nervous.

  Andrew didn’t look nervous, either. He walked through the empty cavern and into the sparring room inside the Fallen Delvers portal. I stepped through my door a moment later and stared at the battlefield. That’s when I started sweating—mostly from the heat, but not entirely.

  It was a Lithic world, which I’d known—but I hadn’t expected a Lithic world completely filled with flowing magma.

  A thin, fragile path led from each door, winding toward the center of the room. There, a platform little more than fifteen feet to a side sat, at an almost forty-five degree angle, over a pit of molten stone. The platform’s footing looked atrocious, too, with scattered rocks that looked like they’d crumble away under the slightest wrong pressure.

  Of all the fights I’d watched, this arena’s form was probably the worst possible one for me. It’d require careful footwork to stay atop the slanted boulder, and my opponent’s weapon would make every hit a potential victory for him. Worse, he could stay planted and rely on his armor, while I’d have to move.

  I had time to glance at Sarah Cullman’s face. She looked worried—and confused. Something had gone wrong.

  And then there wasn’t time for anything else except for my shoes on the warm, small stones poking up from the magma’s surface, the man on the far side of the room, and our two weapons. If I could just beat him to the slanted rock…

  I did—but only by a fraction of a second, not by enough time to cut him off and block him from the marginally more stable boulder. His axe crashed down, heavier and more ringing than Logan’s had been in the first round. The full weight of his oversized weapon bore down on me. In this world, his C-Rank strength was higher than mine at B-Rank, and I barely stopped him from cutting into my shoulder.

  Riposte? No time. The massive axe’s butt flashed toward my face. I stepped back off the rocks I’d braced myself on. Those two were ‘safe’ rocks; they’d taken my weight and the axe’s impact. A second parry, this one against a slash at my throat. Andrew’s eyes flashed. He was furious. But there was something else, too. Then the flash was gone. I blocked another blow. This time, I riposted. My thrust caught on the man’s massive gorget. Lightning arced from the blade to his armor.

  No result. I backpedaled. A rock slipped out from under me, and I took a second, more hurried step back.

  Andrew laughed. “I insulated it. Saw your trick last round, Kade. You won’t get me like that!”

  “I wasn’t trying to,” I responded.

  He didn’t say anything else. Instead, he grunted and pressed the attack. I was still off-balance, and there wasn’t time to block. I used my Rainfall Charges instead. Mistform. The axe-blow slammed through my incorporeal body; it gouged into the angled lump of rock, dislodging stones and sending them splashing into the magma below. Another step back. I reformed. My sword shifted into an aggressive stance, and I went on the offensive.

  I had to—I couldn’t work with only Rainfall Charges.

  Two strikes to Andrew’s armor—one to the chest and one to the side of his head. Neither did any real damage. I wasn’t expecting them to, though. My goal wasn’t to hurt him. Not yet. He took a single step back, then another, and just like that, I had room to move. I stepped forward, then right. Gravel and cobblestones the size of my head slipped away. The whole rock was slowly coming undone.

  That was fine. I had two Lightning Charges now. I dropped into Cyclone stance and backed up even as Andrew recovered. Polarity Shift, doubled with Lightning Strikes Twice. Andrew reacted instantly, without thinking. He threw himself across the rock, axe slamming down to stop me from finishing my combo.

  But I wasn’t trying to finish my combo. I dropped Darkness right where I’d been standing and sidestepped up, away from the lava below me and right behind Andrew. Polarity Shift disappeared without activating—I’d been baiting Andrew, trying to get him where I wanted him.

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  Now he was. I launched a thrust into his back, then kicked at where I thought he’d be. My foot made contact in the Darkness. It felt like kicking a wall; the E-Rank power level enforcement didn’t mean his armor was weaker. But it did move him. He fell forward. Then he screamed.

  I stepped back, out of the Darkness, and let the spell fade. Andrew clawed back from the edge of the rock we’d been fighting on, his arm covered in cooling magma, pain written all across his face. But he didn’t look like he was about to surrender. The pain morphed slowly. “I’ll kill you for that, and for Kim.”

  “For the delver you sent to kill me?” I responded. “You brought that on your—“

  The axe flashed out. I hadn’t expected it to be so fast with only one arm behind it, and my parry was slow. The blow slammed into my breastplate. Something cracked, and pain surged across my chest. I coughed. Stamina poured into the wound, trying to stitch the bone together again. The Stormsteel breastplate had held, but the impact had still hurt.

  Again. This time, I got the sword up. I stepped back, then stepped back a second time to dodge another impact. My heel didn’t hit the ground; I was out of space.

  Another parry. Then another. Andrew poured on the speed, and for the first time, I saw what he’d been doing. His Unique skill. It didn’t do what it claimed to do. In the description, it acted like an accelerator—but an accelerator would have been capped at what was realistic for an E-Ranker to achieve here in this portal. No, it wasn’t an accelerator at all.

  Fury. My throat closed with the oppressive fury. It wasn’t just that he’d left me hanging for nine seconds in the hopes that I’d die to an Ice Troll. It was that he’d had a skill that slowed his enemies down the whole time. That was how he’d beaten Marcus—and he’d hidden it from the cameras and watchers somehow.

  By not using it very much? Only just barely enough? That had to be it.

  I could counter that, though.

  Windwalk. It was my ace in the hole for this fight. I burned my Wind Charge, then stepped back again. This time, my whole foot stepped on nothing. Then I did it again. I was a good four feet out, over the molten rock below—and all but out of range of Andrew’s axe. I switched back to Cyclone stance, then cast Thunder Crash.

  Lightning poured down from the ceiling. It slammed into Andrew’s insulated armor. The metal curled and blackened, but he didn’t twitch or hit the ground. That was fine, though; I just needed to maintain a Wind Charge. I sprinted through the air, Windwalk doing just enough to keep me ahead of my opponent. The axe ripped through the air behind me.

  Then I turned. Rain-Slicked Blade. A perfect lunge. The sword caught his armor right in the stomach as he pulled himself back and up to try to dodge. It slid through the portal metal and insulation, then through his gut and out the other side. Lightning surged and crackled as his skin charred; even with the 50% damage reduction, the blow was a brutal one.

  I coughed. My chest was still on fire from Andrew’s slamming attack earlier. Windwalk was close to running out, too; I dropped back into my defensive stance, re-cast it, and stepped away through the air.

  Then I hung there and took stock. The fighter stood on the edge of the platform, his face a mix of pain, anger, and something else. I couldn’t place it, but I didn’t have to. All I needed to do was win.

  I charged him. His axe slammed down again, the one-handed blow aimed for my head. If it had hit, it would have been more than enough to end the fight. But it didn’t.

  Flashstep.

  I appeared right behind him. Two quick thrusts, both into his back. Then another—this one to his burned arm as he spun. His pauldron and gauntlet weren’t working. He couldn’t pull his arm out of the way in time, and Stormsong punched through the heated and weakened metal. It sank into Andrew’s burned flesh. Lightning coursed through it, and his other hand squeezed the axe tight.

  Then it dropped from his hand, and Andrew collapsed.

  “Match,” Sarah Cullman said with a look of relief on her face. She dropped into the battlefield and caught Andrew as his body started to roll. He was unconscious, but as she popped his armor open and started working on healing his wounds, the Spark of Life didn’t even look at me. She did say something—three sentences.

  “Go right to the entrance. Don’t stop for anyone until you’re out of here and with your friends. We’re looking into it.”

  I hesitated. Then I caught a look on her face, and as angry as Andrew’s had been during our fight, it was nothing compared to Sarah Cullman’s.

  I didn’t stop until I was sitting in Deimos’s passenger seat.

  “What happened?” Ellen asked. “The feeds went dead.”

  “I won. It was tough, but—the feeds went dead?” I asked as I relaxed in my seat, trying to ignore my slowly healing chest. Sarah hadn’t even bothered with me. Whatever she’d been worried about, she’d seemed to think that getting out was more important than getting healed. That told me…something.

  The fight with Andrew shouldn’t have been this tough. For one thing, he wasn’t that tough. Insulated portal armor had to cost a fortune, but he’d had it. For another, the arena had countered me, made it all but impossible for me to maneuver, and given him a massive advantage. It was almost the perfect place for him to beat me, but only if he didn’t know about Windwalk.

  And then there was his Unique skill. How had he kept its true nature secret for so long? That seemed all but impossible. I stretched out, groaning.

  “Yeah, the feeds shut off about fifteen seconds into your fight. Something about technical difficulties. I don’t know the whole story, because they started playing reruns of your first-round fights. But I wasn’t worried.” Ellen stared at my chest and the pained, shallow breaths I was taking. “Should I have been?”

  “No.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “No, I’m serious. I should have changed my battle plan instantly; that sparring room was about as awful a place to fight as I could have picked, but I had a revelation while I was in there. Did you know I can just fly around and blast things to death with lightning? It’s complicated, and I don’t know how practical it is, but it’s cool.”

  “Is that how you won?” Deimos started up, and Ellen stared at me. Then she shook her head. “It’s not, is it?”

  “No. It was messier than that. Where are you taking me?”

  “To Sophia’s apartment at the GC building. You need someone to look you over and do what they can for that chest injury, and if the Spark of Life won’t do it, then maybe Sophia will.”

  I tried to protest, but Ellen’s glare shut me up. Instead, I changed the subject. “What about the big fight? Aren’t you worried we’ll miss it?”

  “No.”

  Ellen seemed…confident wasn’t the right word. She seemed to know something I didn’t. “No?”

  “No. We have four hours. That’s plenty of time to get back here and watch Harold the Herald flatten Deborah Callahan.”

  I laughed. It hurt. “Yeah, that’s probably how this’ll go.”

  On paper, Harold had every possible advantage. He was the favorite to win the tournament, especially if he could handle Deborah. There weren’t any other heavy-hitters in his bracket for a while, and while I was pretty sure Ellen’s shadow magic could beat his summons, I didn’t know it for sure, and no one else did, either. I wasn’t sure I could handle him if it came to that. He was incredibly fast, incredibly strong, and I wasn’t built to handle his swarms of minions, either. And, in theory, neither was Deborah.

  But inside, I couldn’t help but wonder. Deborah wasn’t just an A-Ranker; I’d seen her fight, and while Harold had just about every advantage over Deborah, the woman wasn’t someone I’d bet against. And then there was the delay to the fight. It had to be a bad sign…and I had a bad feeling.

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