It started without warning.

No stance. No announcement. Lila didn’t even fully raise her hand.

Angel felt it first. The air around her changed, not a breeze, not temperature, just pressure, the room getting smaller without the walls moving, something bearing down on her shoulders like the gravity in her immediate vicinity had decided to have a stronger opinion about things.

The reinforced tiles under her boots cracked. Then spiderwebbed outward in a perfect circle from each foot, the pattern spreading fast, the floor registering something the ceiling hadn’t been told about yet.

Angel looked down at the cracks.

Then she bit her thumb.

One drop of blood fell.

It didn’t reach the floor. It hung there, trembling in the compressed air, and then it multiplied, threads pulling from the cut and rising like smoke, twisting around her body in slow orbit, the beginning of something that hadn’t decided what it was yet.

Lila increased the pressure.

The floor caved. Not explosively, just steadily, the reinforced concrete compressing inward under Angel’s feet like something very heavy and very patient was sitting on the room.

Angel flicked her fingers.

The orbiting blood slammed outward in a circular shockwave. The telekinetic compression broke apart and a clean crater blew into the training floor around Angel’s feet, chunks of Ares concrete material launching sideways and hitting the walls hard enough to leave impressions.

Neither of them had moved from their starting spots.

The room already looked like something had happened in it.

They looked at each other.

They both smiled.

In the doorway, Kelvin pressed himself against the frame and looked at Diana beside him whom he’d called.

"I want you to know," he said, "that I was asked to monitor this for safety reasons."

"I know," Diana said.

"And I want to note for the record that the floor has already caved in and neither of them has thrown a real attack yet."

"I know," Diana said.

"I’m just establishing a timeline," Kelvin said. "For when someone asks me later what happened to this room."

Lila lifted a hand.

Everything that wasn’t bolted down rose.

Benches. Weight racks. Training drones in their charging housings. Wall panels that had been rattled loose by the shockwave. Ceiling lights still running, swinging now in the telekinetic field. Chunks of the cracked floor that had separated from the main slab. A hundred objects lifting simultaneously, rising behind Lila like a metallic halo, each one finding its place in the field without her looking at any of them individually.

She closed her fist.

The entire mass launched.

Not thrown. Guided. Every object bending mid-flight, correcting its trajectory in real time, paths adjusting to close off exits and intercept movement before the movement happened. It wasn’t a barrage. It was a net.

Angel stepped forward.

Into it.

She slashed her palm open and the blood that came out didn’t fall. It split into ribbons, dozens of them, spinning around her body in a turbine pattern, faster than the eye tracked individually, the collective motion producing a sound like something being wound tight.

The storm hit the spinning blood field.

Metal screamed.

Benches split down the middle. Drones came apart at their seams, components scattering. Steel bars from the weight rack got caught in the ribbons and carved into glowing fragments that spun outward and embedded in the walls.

The pieces that survived the field hit the back wall hard enough to dent reinforced alloy.

Angel walked out the other side.

"Okay," Kelvin said from the doorway. "So she just walked through that."

"The blood field is rotating fast enough to generate shear force on contact," Diana said. "Anything hitting it doesn’t just get blocked. It gets cut. The angular momentum of the spin does the work, she’s not generating force on each individual ribbon, the collective rotation handles it."

"So she turned herself into a blender."

"Essentially."

"Good," Kelvin said. "That’s good. That’s a completely normal thing that is happening."

Lila raised both hands.

Angel stopped moving.

Not by choice. The floor under her feet gave way as Lila yanked upward, the telekinetic pull grabbing the concrete slab Angel was standing on and trying to rip it upward with her on it. Angel’s body lifted a few inches, boots leaving the floor, the slab groaning under the force.

Then blood spears came out of her arms.

Six of them, driving down into the floor like stakes, spreading through the cracks in the concrete beneath her, threading through the gaps and anchoring in the material below. The spears spread further, branching, the blood finding every fissure and filling it and hardening, roots going into the building itself.

Lila pushed harder.

The entire training room floor started coming up.

Not just the slab Angel was standing on. The whole floor, the reinforced concrete separating from the structural foundation beneath it in sections, great chunks of it tearing free and rising, the room being dismantled from the bottom up. Angel rose with one of the sections, anchored to a two-ton piece of floor she was refusing to release, the blood roots stretching as the slab lifted.

Lila dropped her hand.

The slab came down like something dropped from altitude.

The impact shook the walls. Every remaining intact surface in the room that could rattle did. The shockwave traveled upward through the floor structure and was probably felt two levels above them. Dust filled the air immediately, thick enough that visibility dropped to a few meters.

From inside the dust cloud, there was coughing. Then laughing.

Angel rose from the crater she had made, blood roots retracting back into her palms, her gear covered in concrete dust and something that used to be a drone. She was laughing the way people laughed when something had genuinely hurt them and they found that funny.

"The floor," Kelvin said.

"The floor," Diana confirmed.

"She pulled up the floor."

"The anchor system Angel used was smart," Diana said. "Blood as a structural material. She threaded it through existing stress fractures in the concrete and hardened it fast enough to create a root system that could resist the telekinetic upward force. The problem was Lila wasn’t trying to pull her up. She was waiting for Angel to anchor so she could drop the whole thing at once."

Kelvin looked at her. "She baited the anchor."

"She baited the anchor," Diana said.

They both looked at Lila standing in the dust on the other side of the room.

Then Kelvin looked at Lila’s face.

Something had changed.

"Oh," he said.

"What," Diana said.

"Her face," Kelvin said. "Look at her face."

Lila was smiling.

Not the small controlled version. Not the expression she wore when something had gone according to plan or when she had made a point she wanted to make. This was wider. It went to places the controlled version never reached, the corners of it pulling further than professional, the eyes doing something that people who didn’t know Lila well found unsettling and people who did know Lila well found significantly more unsettling.

Kelvin knew that smile.

He had seen it exactly twice before. Once in the academy when a third year by the name of Sophie had made the mistake of getting wrapped up with Noah. Same Noah that Lila absolutely and disturbingly desired.

And last year during a contract in the eastern Cardinal’s outer district when three category three beasts had cornered their team and Lila had looked at them with that exact expression before walking toward them instead of away.

Both times the situation had resolved itself very quickly and very completely.

"Oh no," Kelvin said.

"What," Diana said again.

"That smile," Kelvin said. "That specific smile means she stopped playing carefully."

Diana looked at Lila’s face. "She wasn’t playing carefully before?"

"No," Kelvin said. "She was. Relatively speaking." He stepped back from the doorway slightly. "She is genuinely insane. I say this with complete affection. She is a genuinely unhinged person and that smile is her brain switching modes."

The entire room lifted.

Not objects. Not the floor again.

The room.

The walls groaned as the telekinetic field expanded outward and grabbed everything simultaneously. Ceiling beams bent. The remaining wall panels separated from their housings. The floor fractured into floating sections, each piece rising independently. The training chamber was being taken apart in mid-air, Lila standing in the center of it with both arms slightly raised and that smile still exactly where it had been.

Angel looked around at the floating debris field surrounding her on every side.

At the chunks of ceiling drifting at various heights. At the wall sections hovering like enormous playing cards. At the floor pieces distributed across multiple levels of the air space, some close enough to touch and some high enough that the room above them was visible through the gaps.

She looked at Lila.

"Oh," Angel said. "We’re doing this now."

She wiped blood from her nose where the dust had gotten to her and flicked it forward.

The blood didn’t spread.

It compressed. Pulling itself tight, narrowing, all of it converging to a single needle-thin point that launched at a velocity that left a visible trail in the dust-filled air.

Lila saw it.

Stopped it mid-air.

Easy.

The needle hung there, trembling in the telekinetic field.

Then it detonated into thousands of microscopic droplets.

The expansion was instantaneous, a sphere of blood mist replacing the needle in the space of a breath, every droplet suspended and controlled, the whole cloud covering a three meter radius around where the needle had been.

And Lila had to stop all of them.

Individually. Every droplet. Because Angel could weaponize all of them and she was close enough that the response time on any single one getting through was measured in fractions.

Half a second. Just half a second where Lila’s attention was distributed across a thousand points instead of one.

Angel was already moving.

BOOM!

She crossed the distance between them and hit Lila in the ribs.

The impact didn’t just connect. It detonated, the force of it concentrating at the point of contact and releasing outward, a ring of displaced air expanding from the hit that caved in the nearest floating wall section and sent both of them sliding across the debris field in opposite directions, boots finding purchase on floating concrete slabs and using them the way solid ground wasn’t available to be used.

Lila hit a hovering chunk of ceiling, used it, redirected, came back around.

She was still smiling.

"She got hit," Diana said.

"She got hit," Kelvin confirmed. "Angel used the blood mist as a distribution attack to split Lila’s focus and crossed the distance in the window."

"Does that mean Angel’s winning?"

Kelvin watched Lila redirect off the ceiling chunk and come back around with the expression of someone who had just confirmed something she suspected. "No," he said. "It means Lila now knows what Angel’s fastest approach looks like. The timing of it. The angle she commits from." He paused. "Lila is going to use that."

"She let herself get hit to get the data," Diana said.

"I genuinely cannot tell if she planned it or is improvising," Kelvin said. "With Lila those are sometimes the same thing."

Angel didn’t wait.

She stepped onto nothing.

A blood platform materialized under her boot, solid, three inches thick, hovering at knee height. She stepped onto the next one she made before the first one finished forming, climbing air, each platform appearing just before her foot needed it and disappearing the moment she left it, a staircase that existed for exactly as long as it was being used.

She got above Lila.

Then she collapsed every platform simultaneously.

The cascading collapse released the stored force from each one in sequence, a chain of impacts traveling downward through the air, and Angel rode the pressure wave down with both fists aimed at Lila’s position.

Lila looked up.

She grabbed the debris field.

Every floating piece in the room accelerated toward Angel’s descent simultaneously, not to hit her but to create a physical barrier between above and below, a ceiling of debris that Angel would have to go through to reach her.

Angel went through it.

She hit the debris ceiling with both arms extended and the blood around her wrists hardened into twin drills, rotating, boring through concrete and metal and whatever else was in the way, the material spraying outward as she pushed through at a speed that the drills barely had to work for.

She came through the other side three meters from Lila.

Blood discs formed around her in a ring, flat and razor edged, a dozen of them orbiting her body in opposite directions at a speed that produced a sound like an airplane engine.

Lila’s smile had not moved.

She raised both hands.

The debris field reversed. Everything that had been moving outward or hovering now accelerated inward, toward the center, toward both of them, the room collapsing around them like a fist closing. Lila wasn’t trying to hit Angel with it. She was making the space smaller. Making the air between them into something solid and pressing.

The blood discs spun faster, chewing through incoming debris before it reached Angel.

Fragments flew. Metal and concrete ground against spinning blood and the sound of it filled the room completely.

Lila pushed the field harder.

Angel pushed the discs faster.

They were five meters apart.

Then four.

Then three.

Angel looked at her across the shrinking space and the expression on her face was the one she wore when she had stopped calculating and started committing, the look of someone who had decided the next moment was going to be whatever it was going to be and was completely fine with that.

Lila’s smile stretched to the place Kelvin had been afraid of.

They both moved at the same time.

Angel’s blood discs collapsed inward around her into a single dense mass and launched forward as a consolidated spike the width of her torso, every disc compressed into one point.

Lila’s telekinetic field focused to a single concentrated burst aimed directly at Angel’s center.

The two forces met in the space between them.

The room did not survive the collision politely.

---

Kelvin and Diana watched the shockwave hit the doorframe they were standing in. Kelvin’s auxiliary arms braced against both sides of the frame automatically. Diana grabbed the frame with one hand and her other hand went to the Shoal Shield on her arm by instinct.

The dust cleared slowly.

Two figures somewhere in the wreckage of what had been a training room.

Neither of them down.

"Okay," Kelvin said. His voice came out at a slightly different pitch from usual. "Okay. I need everyone to understand that I was asked to be here for safety monitoring purposes." He looked at what was left of the room. "I want that on record."

Diana looked at him.

"I’m getting married," Kelvin said. "I have things to live for. I should not be this close to whatever that was."

From inside the wreckage, there were two voices. Both of them breathing hard.

Both of them already moving.