Neil took the first on his forearm, turned the second downward, and on the third he stepped forward into it instead of pulling back.

The strike caught his shoulder. He didn’t care. He was already inside the reach of someone whose ability was built entirely around striking momentum, and from inside that range there was almost nothing that person could do that would matter.

One strike to the solar plexus. Controlled, placed precisely, carrying a fraction of what he could actually put behind it.

Holt folded and dropped to one knee, pressing a hand flat to the stage while his body processed the input. He stayed there for a moment, breathing steadily and deliberately, then looked up.

"I lost." He said. No argument in it, no qualifier.

"You have good instincts." Neil said, and he meant it straightforwardly. "And that ability with real speed behind it would end most people your age before they had time to think."

Holt looked at him for a moment, then gave a short nod and stepped off the stage.

Mantis raised his hand. "Winner, Neil Yates!"

The response from the crowd was loud and immediate, with the particular quality of noise that came from people who had not been expecting what they just saw.

"He beat him without a single ability and barely moved his feet—"

"1st Origin. His mark says 1st Origin. How does that make any sense?"

"Who is this guy exactly?"

Randy had located the warden he had made the bet with and was standing in front of him with his hand extended and an expression of profound patience.

"Two hundred." Randy said.

"That was not under a minute." The warden replied.

"It was close enough that arguing about it reflects poorly on your character." Randy said. "Two hundred."

Caleb had not moved from the column. His arms were still folded. His expression had not shifted into anything readable. But his attention had transferred completely from Holt to Neil, and it stayed there.

The next challenger stepped up before the applause had finished settling.

He was tall with dark green scales covering his forearms and the sides of his neck, a hooked blade sitting at his hip with the particular design that said it was built for catching limbs and pulling people off balance rather than clean cuts, and he moved with the unhurried ease of someone who had been in real fights often enough that the stage felt familiar. His rank mark read 2nd Origin, Diamond class.

He stepped onto the stage, looked at Neil, and nodded once at the center.

Neil walked back to his position.

The fight that followed was shorter than the previous one.

The draconic lord was powerful in a direct and uncomplicated way, his ability hardening the scales across his arms and upper body into something closer to armour while he pushed forward with heavy, deliberate strikes that were designed to break guard rather than slip past it.

He had good technique underneath the ability and clearly understood how to use the hook of his blade to control range, flicking it toward Neil’s wrist and forearm to disrupt timing.

On the second exchange he managed to catch Neil’s wrist and yanked with the full weight of his enhanced frame behind it.

Neil did not move.

The draconic lord blinked. Just for a fraction of a second, and only someone watching his face closely would have caught it, but it was there.

Neil pulled his arm back and the lord stumbled forward instead, momentum reversed completely, and in the moment it took to stumble, Neil hit him across the shoulder with enough force to spin him sideways and drop him to one knee.

He pushed himself upright immediately, to his credit, and tried to reset.

Neil stepped around him and placed one hand firmly on the back of his neck. No force behind it, no threat. Just a clear and uncomplicated point.

A pause stretched between them.

"Done?" Neil asked.

Another pause.

"...Done." The lord said, quietly and without pleasure.

The hall had that low buzzing energy now, the sound of a crowd that had stopped being surprised by individual moments and started being unsettled by the pattern.

Two more came up after that.

A human lord from the northern settlements who fought with a wind-type ability that kept the stage genuinely dangerous to cross, sending slicing currents at irregular intervals and staying mobile enough to make closing the distance a real problem rather than a simple task.

Neil found the timing gap between volleys on the third attempt and closed it cleanly before the fourth could come.

Then a beastkin lord, bear-type, enormous and unhurried, whose raw output when he swung made the air shudder visibly.

He was Diamond class too, and unlike most of the others he did not overcommit or get flustered when the first exchange didn’t go his way. He reset, adjusted, and came again, and he lasted longer than anyone else had.

Neil had to actually pay attention for that one, working around the force differential carefully until the footwork pattern opened up on the left side and he stepped through it.

"That bear nearly had him for a second there, didn’t he?"

"Nearly. He still didn’t land anything clean."

"Not a single hit on him this whole time. Not one."

Neil stepped off to the side of the stage and stretched his fingers once, already thinking about other things.

Then the quality of the silence in the hall changed.

It was a subtle thing, the kind of shift that didn’t announce itself but moved through a crowd anyway, people straightening slightly, conversations dropping mid-sentence, attention redirecting without anyone being told to redirect it.

A figure was making his way through the crowd toward the stage.

He was not rushing. His pace was even and unhurried, and the people around him moved aside without being asked, which said something about the weight his presence carried before he had done anything.

He was tall, dark-haired, built without excess, with a faint silver mark at his throat that pulsed with a quiet and very steady energy.

The way he moved through the hall carried a kind of density to it, the feeling of something that had been training for a long time and knew exactly what it had become.

His rank mark was visible when he stepped into the open.

3rd Origin, Silver class.

The murmur that went through the hall was different from the ones that had preceded it.

"That’s Varn. From Ironhold Settlement." Someone near Neil said. "He has been a lord for three years."

"3rd Origin Silver and he is participating in this? Among this group?"

"He came with their warden delegation. I heard he wanted to test someone specific tonight."

Varn stepped onto the stage and looked at Neil across the open floor with a calm and measuring expression that had no performance in it.

Not hostile, not the particular flavour of arrogance that younger lords tended to perform when they wanted the crowd to know how confident they were. He simply looked at him the way someone looks at a problem they intend to solve carefully.

"You have handled the others well." He said.

"They were decent opponents." Neil replied.

"I wanted to see it myself." Varn said. "And now I want to try."

The crowd around the stage had gone quieter than it had been at any point during the evening.

Randy had stopped talking entirely, which was the clearest possible signal that something worth watching was about to happen.

Even Caleb had straightened slightly where he stood, his folded arms shifting, his eyes moving between the two figures on the stage with something that was not quite concern and not quite anticipation but sat somewhere between the two.

Mantis looked at both of them and raised his hand carefully.

"Varn of Ironhold Settlement versus Neil Yates of the settlement 2. Begin."

Varn did not charge.

He raised one hand and let his ability unfold outward from his position, a pressure that built gradually in the surrounding air, thickening it, making it resist movement the way deep water resisted movement.

The distortion was visible at the edges of the stage, slow warping waves that pushed against everything within range. Several lords standing near the front of the crowd took an unconscious step back.

Neil felt it press against him evenly from every direction, heavy and constant, the kind of ability that did not need to strike anything to be effective because it simply made everything harder.

’Spatial compression or something adjacent to it.’ He noted internally. ’The output is clean. He has been using this for a while.’

Varn walked forward slowly, each step placed with deliberate weight.

"Most opponents at this point are already on their knees." He said, not cruelly, simply as information he was sharing in real time.

Neil walked forward to meet him.

Varn’s eyes sharpened immediately.

He pushed the ability harder, the pressure increasing until the air between them was visibly distorted and the stage floor had developed faint stress lines from the sustained output. It was a genuinely impressive level of control for a 3rd Origin Silver.

The kind of thing that should have made standing upright difficult for anyone beneath his tier, let alone walking.

Neil’s pace did not change.

Something shifted behind Varn’s eyes. Not panic, he was too composed for panic, but a real recalibration was happening behind that expression, a reassessment of what he was looking at.

He released the ability entirely.

Then he moved fast, finally fast, closing the distance in a burst and delivering a combination strike at three points in rapid sequence, each one targeting a different line, forcing a choice between coverage and exposure.

❖❖❖

Thanks for reading...