Hajin chased the bird off into the trees, which left just one threat still standing in the pit.

The second signature came in low and fast off the right-hand wall, a lean figure with two long ears laid flat against the wind. She crossed half the pit before her feet even seemed to touch the ground, closing on Juna with both fists drawn back to strike.

Juna didn’t give up so much as a single step of ground.

The rabbit led with a kick that could have folded a man in half, and Juna turned it aside with the flat of the glaive.

The impact rang down the shaft and shoved her boots back through the dirt, though her grip never loosened. She rolled the blade around and answered with a cut that forced her opponent to throw herself clear.

For a heartbeat the two of them stood apart, taking each other’s measure across the broken ground.

Vella watched from the treeline with her arms crossed, a small, knowing smile on her face. She had seen Juna fight plenty of times, back when she had nothing but her claws and threw herself at everything head-on.

That reckless girl was nowhere to be found in the pit anymore.

The Juna standing out there held her ground and made the enemy come to her, picking the rabbit apart one careful exchange at a time.

The rabbit snarled and went wide, bouncing off the curved root wall to come at Juna from a blind angle. It was the same trick that ran rings around lesser fighters, all speed and no straight lines.

Juna simply pivoted with her, the glaive sweeping a flat silver arc through the air. She flicked the blade at the top of the motion, and a crescent of mana tore loose to carve across the pit.

The rabbit folded backward under it, the edge of the blast searing a line across her shoulder. She landed in a crouch with one hand pressed to the wound, real surprise breaking through her snarl for the first time.

The old Juna’s claws had carried mana as well, though only a thin film of it that barely deepened her cuts. The power running through the glaive now belonged to a different class entirely.

Silver light ran thick along the entire blade, dense and humming, fed by a reserve far deeper than she used to hold. Every swing she took left a faint glowing trail hanging in the air behind it.

She brought the weapon up over her head, and the silver on the blade flared until it threw hard shadows across the pit. With a single hard step she swung it down, not at the rabbit, but at the ground between them.

The arc of mana that came off the blade ripped a trench clear across the pit floor. It threw up a wall of dirt and split the ground apart down the middle.

The rabbit barely cleared it, hurling herself sideways as the ground where she had stood caved into a smoking line. She came up staring at the smoking trench, then at Juna standing calm on the far side of it.

When the dust thinned, Juna was walking forward through it, the glaive resting light across her shoulders, her eyes fixed on her prey.

Somewhere in the last few exchanges, the fast little hunter had become the one being cornered.

Down in the bottom of the smoking trench, the rabbit tipped her head back and started to laugh.

It began low in her chest, then climbed into something wild and delighted, until she was grinning at Juna across the broken ground. She wiped the blood off her shoulder with the back of one hand, not bothering to cover the wound anymore.

"Hah," she said, rolling her neck loose. "That actually hurt. I came in here expecting to swat a bug, you know?"

She dropped low, both feet planted, and the air around her began to ripple with heat.

"It’s been years since anyone made me try," she said, her grin sharpening into something hungry. "So thank you for that. Really."

Whatever she had been holding back so far came off her all at once. The corruption in her veins flared bright purple under her skin, and the cracked ground beneath her feet caved an inch from the pressure alone.

Juna felt the shift and set her stance, the silver on her glaive burning brighter to answer it.

"Now the real fight starts," the rabbit said, baring bloody teeth.

She crossed the pit in a single beat and slammed a kick into Juna’s guard, the force of it ringing through the whole clearing. Juna took the hit on the shaft and felt her arms buckle, her boots tearing two long furrows back across the ground.

She answered with a thrust that punched clean through where the rabbit’s heart should have been, except the rabbit wasn’t there anymore.

A heel came down on the back of Juna’s shoulder and drove her face-first into the floor.

She twisted out of it, swept the glaive low, and the blade bit deep across the rabbit’s ribs as she rose. The blow flung the rabbit sideways, and she crashed through the root wall in a spray of splinters.

She tore herself free of the wall and came straight back, faster than before, blood running freely down her side. Juna met her in the middle of the pit, and for a moment neither of them gave any ground at all.

They traded blows too fast for the rookies at the treeline to follow. A claw opened a line across Juna’s cheek; the glaive carved a matching one down the rabbit’s arm. A kick caught Juna in the stomach and folded her around it, throwing her clear across the pit into the far wall.

She hit the roots hard, coughed once, and was back on her feet before the dust settled. Across the way the rabbit dragged in ragged breaths, one arm hanging loose, still grinning through the blood on her teeth.

Juna planted the glaive, pulled in a breath of her own, and lifted the blade for another pass.

Neither of them was anywhere close to finished, and they both knew it.

They came together again, slower this time, both of them feeling the damage now. The rabbit caught Juna’s next swing on her forearm and held it there, the two of them locked chest to chest in the middle of the pit.

"You’re good," the rabbit said, studying her face up close. "Really good. What’s your name?"

Juna almost didn’t answer, since trading words with an enemy mid-fight went against everything she knew.

"...Juna," she said.

The rabbit repeated the name back once, quiet, like she meant to keep it, "I’ll give you this much, Juna, you made me work harder than anyone has in a long while."

She tilted her head to one side, almost friendly about it now, "can I ask you something? What rank do you think I am?"

The question caught Juna off guard and her grip faltered on the glaive, "excuse me?" she got out, thrown for half a second by it. The rabbit only smiled, and that was the last thing Juna saw clearly.

Something slammed into her chest before she ever saw a hand move. The next instant she was airborne, the pit floor dropping away beneath her. She hit the wall and caved the roots in around her, then peeled loose to fall back toward the ground.

Through the haze creeping in, she looked up and finally saw them. Points of hard light sat along the rabbit’s throat and collarbone, hidden under her skin until just now.

Her mind automatically tracked eight glowing points of light as the ground rushed up to meet her. It was an absolutely absurd amount of power for a gate monster to have. That meant the rabbit had just spent their entire brutal exchange treating her like a casual warmup.

She landed on her side and felt something give in her ribs. The strength drained out of her arms, the glaive slipping from her fingers to ring once against the floor.

The pit tilted and smeared at the edges, the rabbit just a small dark shape walking toward her. Then everything went soft and grey, until she couldn’t hold onto any of it.