The brawl did not remain in the far-left section, because brawls never have the decency to stay where they begin.

The swordsman had hit someone, and that inmate had answered by hitting the nearest person to him, who was not the swordsman. That nearest person hit the person beside them out of reflex and indignation, and the cascade ran through the canteen in the familiar way arguments become fights when the room is crowded enough and the stakes are low enough that no one feels obligated to be sensible.

The three guards at the reached the origin point quickly.

Two of them got hands on the swordsman. He had no blade mounts in here, the hardware was offline like everything else, but he was internally reinforced, dense, and he did not go quiet when someone grabbed him.

He threw one guard sideways into the table.

The guard hit the table, bounced off it, and came back, and the third guard caught the swordsman’s arm from behind and they all crashed into the space between the rows together.

The rest of the room was already deciding what it meant to do about all this.

Proxy watched from their mid-room table and built the picture while he still had one.

The origin cluster was eating three guards. The corner guard had reached the cluster now, which meant his corner was empty. The nearest guard was watching the cluster with the expression of someone deciding whether it required him.

The entrance guards had not moved.

Then a tray crossed the room.

He did not see who threw it.

It came from the far-left direction, spinning in a flat arc, and it clipped the edge of the table two rows to their left and bounced off the corner and struck an inmate in the shoulder.

That inmate was already standing from the sound of the impact, and the second impact turned standing into shoving, and the shove hit the inmate beside them, and that inmate was at the end of Proxy’s row.

Jinx went below bench level in one smooth motion, pulling herself under the table with both hands on the table leg and her knees up.

Panicking into hiding, which is, if one is honest, merely the more disciplined form of panic.

Nyx was already standing.

She did not look alarmed, but interested and engaged, the look of someone finding a situation more worthwhile than it had been a moment earlier.

She looked at the brawl spreading toward them.

Then she looked back at him with a small, warm tilt of her head.

"This’s actually fun," she said.

Proxy barely glanced at her.

"Don’t overdo it," he said.

She was already not listening.

She moved toward where the brawl’s second wave was spreading. The inmate who had been shoved was shoving back, and the inmate they had shoved had a friend with an opinion.

Nyx entered that space the way she entered most spaces, by not announcing herself to anyone who had not earned the warning.

The friend swung first, at the inmate they had originally shoved.

Nyx caught the arm mid-swing, one hand on the wrist, turned with the momentum instead of against it, and redirected the follow-through into the edge of the table beside them.

The arm hit the table corner at elbow height.

The friend made a short sound, sharp and involuntary, and Nyx let go and stepped back without giving them another thought.

The inmate who had been shoved was now free, and decided to use that freedom by throwing a punch toward whoever was nearest.

Nearest was Nyx.

She leaned back from it and let it pass in front of her face, then drove her elbow into their sternum, a clean committed strike, all her weight behind it, nothing restrained about it.

They folded around the impact and sat down on the floor between two benches.

She stepped over them.

A third inmate came from her right with both hands out to shove, a full-weight push that expected to move her across the floor.

She turned sideways and it mostly missed, one hand catching her shoulder and spinning her half a step.

She used the spin to come around and caught the back of their collar as they followed through, pulled them forward into the momentum they had already committed to, and put them into the side of the nearest bolted bench at speed.

They hit the bench and stayed there.

A fourth inmate swung at her from behind with a full arm swing, broad and wide.

She ducked under it, came up inside their reach, and hit them squarely in the jaw with the heel of her palm.

Their head snapped sideways and they staggered two steps and sat down on someone else.

She looked at the result briefly, with a mild expression, then turned back to the room for whatever came next.

"She’s terrifying," Jinx said from below the table, approximately at Proxy’s left ankle.

Proxy kept his eyes on the room.

"She’s having a good time."

Jinx shifted slightly under the table.

"That’s what terrifying means."

He did not disagree.

He kept watching the room.

The brawl’s second wave was now occupying most of the canteen, and the entrance guards had finally made the decision to move.

Two of them crossed the room toward the active zone.

That left the entrance side lighter, but they were moving toward Proxy’s section, which made his edge-of-the-action position less useful by the second.

He moved to the end of the table row, where the view opened up, and he was still watching the room when the inmate hit him from the side.

It was not targeted.

The brawl had its own fluid physics, and someone had been shoved hard from their left and had been sent in Proxy’s direction at a speed that gave neither of them time to plan around it.

The collision was shoulder into shoulder, full-body mass, the weight difference obvious.

Proxy went into the wall behind him.

His shoulder took it and the wall kept him upright, which was the wall’s contribution to the situation.

The inmate bounced off him and turned.

They were processing the collision the same way the collision had processed them, with the immediate sensory priority of what had just hit them.

They saw Proxy against the wall and their expression moved from disoriented to focused in the specific way that meant someone had found a target.

Proxy hit them in the nose.

It was a straight right hand with the weight not properly behind it, no rotation in the wrist, the follow-through not where it should have been.

The punch of someone who understood the theory and had not spent much time on the practice.

It connected because at that distance not connecting required more effort than connecting, and because the inmate had not expected it from someone who had been flat against a wall two seconds earlier.

The inmate’s head snapped back.

Their eyes watered immediately, because that is what happens to eyes when the nose receives force, regardless of anyone’s intentions.

That was one second.

Proxy moved sideways out of their path before the one second finished, because the punch had bought exactly one second and he had no interest in testing whether he could buy another.

He did not attempt a second one.

Hardin was in it across the room, moving with a purpose Proxy recognized as distinct from the general spread of chaos.

He had two specific inmates in his vicinity and was working through them, the first one already down, the second backed against the benches.

Using the environment the brawl had created because consequence inside a brawl was limited, and Hardin had apparently been waiting for exactly this kind of limitation.

Creed was visible farther right, using his size the way his size invited being used, taking up space, absorbing contact, his sheer presence creating a radius others were negotiating around.

Vex was not fighting.

She had moved from her original table during the first wave, while the cluster was still eating three guards, and she had made her way to the edge of the room near the serving partition at the far wall.

She stood with her back to it, watching the canteen with patient, cataloguing attention.

Proxy then noted the kitchen door, the food service staff had retreated.

The serving line behind the partition was empty. Whoever had been working it had pulled back through the kitchen door when the room started going wild, and the door had been left ajar in the process.

The view from his current position gave him a partial sightline inside, a counter, overhead storage, industrial implements hanging on the near wall, cleaning supplies along the base of the far counter in a row, labels facing away from him.

The guards were occupying six separate points of active response.

The far-left guards were still managing the swordsman and the cluster. The entrance guards had reached brawl. The corner was empty.

Nobody was watching the partition.

Vex was standing fifteen meters from it.

He looked at the kitchen door, and at Vex positioned near the partition wall, and he considered how long the brawl’s current state would hold before the guards reasserted control.

Then he started thinking.