Reyna sat cross-legged on her dorm room floor, laptop balanced precariously on her knees, replaying the Crucible fight for what had to be the seventh time since midnight had come and gone. The soft glow of the screen cast flickering shadows across her face as the footage looped, the timestamp in the corner marking each viewing like some kind of obsessive ritual she couldn’t quite break.

Her ribs still ached where Satori’s bat had connected—a deep, persistent throb that radiated outward with each breath. Emi’s healing had done its job perfectly: mended the fractured bone, stopped the internal bleeding, repositioned everything back where anatomy textbooks said it belonged. The medical scan had come back clean, showing nothing but perfectly healed tissue. But pain had memory, stubborn and insistent, and hers remembered with crystal clarity what it felt like to get hit by someone who, by all rights and reasonable expectations, shouldn’t have been able to lay a finger on her.

She watched herself launch the opening barrage for the dozenth time. Watched her marionettes surge forward in perfect formation, crackling with lethal voltage. Watched Satori stand there in the center of it all, completely and utterly still, while her constructs of pure lightning charged toward him like avenging angels made of electricity and wrath.

Then watched him absorb the lightning like it was nothing more than a light summer rain.

That moment. Right there, frozen on her screen. That’s when she’d known something was fundamentally wrong with the entire situation.

The angle of his head had been deliberate. The way his stance had shifted—subtle but unmistakable to someone who’d spent years studying combat footage. The absolute, bone-deep confidence written across his expression like he was following a script only he could read.

He’d been waiting for it.

Had planned for it.

"Pinche cabrón," she muttered under her breath, fingers flying across the keyboard with the kind of manic energy that came from too much coffee and too little sleep. She backed up the footage, slowed it down frame by agonizing frame until each second of movement stretched into a small eternity.

There.

Right there.

The split second before her marionettes made contact, his entire body language had changed. Shoulders squared just so. Weight shifted onto the balls of his feet. Jaw set with the kind of resolve you saw in fighters who knew exactly what was about to happen and had already made peace with it.

Like an actor standing in the wings, waiting patiently for his cue to step into the spotlight.

"You knew," she said aloud to the empty room, her voice echoing slightly off the walls. "Somehow you knew exactly what I was going to do before I even fucking did it."

Her phone buzzed insistently on the floor beside her, the vibration loud against the hardwood. She glanced at the screen. Takamura this time, the message characteristically blunt.

Common room. Now. Bring your ego.

She closed the laptop with perhaps more force than strictly necessary, pulled on her Scarlet Phantoms jacket—crimson and black, with the Olympus Rising logo embroidered in shimmering gold thread across the back—and headed downstairs, her bare feet silent against the cool floor of the dormitory hallway.

The Scarlet Phantoms’ common room looked like someone had been given an unlimited budget to recreate a professional gym inside a high-end sports bar, then abruptly run out of both money and interest halfway through the project. Heavy-duty weight equipment dominated one entire side of the space—barbells, benching stations, a power rack that looked capable of handling small vehicles. The other wall was claimed by a massive screen that currently displayed a frozen frame from the Crucible match: Satori’s face captured in perfect high-definition detail right before impact, blood streaking his jaw in a vivid crimson line, his dark eyes blazing with something that looked disturbingly close to pure, undiluted joy.

Diego Ramos had sprawled across the main couch like a territorial cat, his ash-blond hair sticking up in what had to be at least seventeen different directions, each one defying gravity in its own unique way. Kira Tanaka perched on the arm of the same couch with the poised balance of a bird of prey, her shadow manipulation Aspect making the darkness pooling around her seem somehow deeper and more substantial than it had any right to be—as if the shadows themselves were drawn to her presence.

Leo Vargas leaned against the far wall with his hands shoved deep in his pockets, wearing the particular expression of someone who’d been explicitly asked to care about something and was still running the internal calculations on whether the required emotional investment was actually worth the energy expenditure. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

Professor Takamura occupied the room’s main chair like it was a throne he’d won through trial by combat, his scarred face split into a wide grin that promised imminent violence and seemed to enjoy the prospect far too much.

"There’s our favorite fighter," he announced cheerfully as Reyna entered, gesturing broadly at the frozen image on the screen with one massive hand. "Want to watch your greatest hits on the big screen? I’ve got the part where you ate concrete on an endless loop. Very artistic. Really captures the moment."

"I’ll pass, thanks." Reyna dropped onto the opposite couch with deliberate casualness, folding her legs beneath her. "What’s this about?"

"Tournament strategy," Takamura said, his grin somehow widening further. "Which we desperately need to discuss because the fucking Onyx Hounds are currently sitting pretty at first place in the rankings, which means every other guild in this entire academy is going to be gunning for them with everything they’ve got."

"And we have to go directly through them if we want to take their spot at the top," Diego added, sitting up straighter and abandoning his lazy sprawl. His usual easy-going demeanor had sharpened into something more focused. "The rankings don’t lie, Rey. They’ve survived two separate A-Rank encounters without losing anyone, cleared a goddamn Black Gate when most first-years wouldn’t last five minutes in one, and their Number One prospect just fought our Number One prospect to what most people are calling a draw."

"Fought me to a stalemate," Reyna corrected sharply, the distinction feeling vitally important somehow. "There’s a significant difference between those two things."