The fight ahead of us wraps up with one combatant on his knees, blood running from his nose, the other lifting both arms to a crowd that screams approval. Spectators line up to bet on the next match.

Our match.

Rhayne walks toward the edge of the ring without speaking. The Cloaked Cape stays on—she’ll drop it on the threshold the way the rules require, but for now the fabric hides her shape from anyone trying to read her stance early.

I keep watching the King Skeleton across the arena.

The drawn finger across the throat was theatrical. The man is hunting attention as much as a kill. But underneath the show, my eye catches what the show is built to hide.

He’s favoring his left leg.

A fraction of weight he isn’t putting through the left ankle. He stands flat on the right leg. He pivots on the right when he turns. The compensation has been running so long he doesn’t notice it anymore.

And the right shoulder.

He keeps rolling it. Slow. Old injury. Maybe a labrum, maybe a partial tear that healed wrong. He’s loosening the joint because if he doesn’t, the first real swing is going to lock the arm halfway through.

I lean close to Rhayne and speak low.

"Focus on his left side. He has trouble there. Left leg, right shoulder. Make him reach with his bad arm."

She nods. Drops the Cape across my forearm.

Then she steps over the perimeter line.

The blue pillars hum at her passing. The arena seals.

The crowd quiets to a breathing hush.

The King Skeleton starts moving first.

He comes in fast. Both hatchets out. The right shoulder rolls one final time as he closes the distance. He’s planning to open the fight with a kill swing—commit hard, end it before the bookmakers can recalculate the line.

Rhayne doesn’t meet him.

She slides.

A real slide. The toe of her right foot cuts a small arc across the dust while her left knee bends, dropping her body two feet lower than it had been a half second ago. The first hatchet whistles through the space where her collarbone would have been and finds empty air. Her left hand is already at the small stick on her hip, and the stick is already drawing the Battle Ribbon out behind her.

The Ribbon unspools.

It snakes around her arm, around her waist, across her back, the metal silk-woven length coming alive like an extension of her nervous system. She rises out of the slide on her left toes, hips pivoting, and the Ribbon flicks forward across the King Skeleton’s right thigh.

He grunts and pulls back. It was a shallow cut, just a reminder, not a wound. The crowd inhales—a hundred people realizing this won’t be a quick fight.

He shifts again. Both hatchets are out wide. Comes in with a high-low pattern, right hatchet for her temple and left for her hip.

Rhayne goes airborne.

A clean flip backward. Heels over head. The Ribbon trailing under her like a banner. The hatchets pass under her body close enough that the crowd gasps, and when she lands, she lands in a half-crouch with the Ribbon already coiled in front of her, pointed at his left side.

She’s reading him. Dancing and reading at the same time. From outside the ring it looks like a girl translating a difficult poem into a language only her body speaks.

The King Skeleton rotates his right shoulder again. Involuntary now. Three exchanges later, she has him backing up an inch every time he reaches with his right arm.

The Battle Ribbon passive skill slows him down after two hits.

But still, the fourth exchange almost ends her, right after she over-commits on a riposte.

The Ribbon’s tip arcs toward his shoulder, but he reads it half a beat early and ducks under, and the second hatchet—the one I had been watching for, the one in his good hand—comes up in a vicious uppercut that I think is going to take her chin off.

It doesn’t.

It misses by a hair.

A literal hair. The blade kisses the side of her face and a small lock of purple-silver hair falls between them, severed mid-strand. The hair drifts toward the floor in slow motion.

I check it twice. Her cheek is unmarked, and I’m glad.

The crowd makes a noise similar to an "ohh," but I can’t say if they are shocked or surprised.

Rhayne lands three feet back from him. Her left hand goes to the side of her head. She feels the place where her hair used to be.

Then she looks at me.

She is furious. I can feel her eyes.

But the fury isn’t aimed at the King Skeleton. It isn’t even aimed at her own near-death. It’s aimed somewhere else entirely—and it takes me three seconds to read it, and when I do, I feel something in my chest do an unhelpful thing.

’She’s worried about how she looks? To me and Veric?’

She turns back to the King Skeleton and the fight changes again.

Now she isn’t dancing. She’s performing.

The Ribbon moves with rhythm and meter, a deadly artistry in motion. She twirls in a blur of silk, snagging the King Skeleton’s bad ankle and yanking him off-balance. He hits the stone on one knee.

She doesn’t stop. She lunges, planting one foot on his bent knee and the other on his opposite shoulder. Using his own frame as a stepping stone, she vaults over his head.

It’s a seamless transition—less like a strike and more like a ballerina’s leap off a partner. As she arcs through the air, the ribbon’s metallic silk grazes his back, leaving a thin red trail in her wake.

He roars and swings, but he’s hitting empty air; she’s already landed, light as a feather, a half-second beyond his reach.

She has him.

I can see it. Three more exchanges and she’ll have his bad shoulder open enough to put the Black Sea Ribbon through it.

Then the location fails her.

She lands too far back. Her left heel touches one of the perimeter pillars. The blue energy flickers once at the contact. She doesn’t feel it. Her focus is forward, on the King Skeleton.

And the King Skeleton sees it before she does.

His blackened eyes flick to the pillar behind her. To the floor under her feet. A grin spreads across his face, slow. He’s seen what she hasn’t. The fight has just been handed to him.

He plants the bad leg, slams both hatchets into the dirt, and speaks one word.

"Bone Prison."

The ground around Rhayne erupts.

Long, jagged spears of bone tear up out of the floor in a ragged ring around her body. They miss her by inches—angled to trap, not to kill. One spear erupts six inches from her face. Another behind her shoulders. Three more above her head, curving inward, forming a cage of skeletal points that closes around her like the inside of a beast’s mouth.

’He used the pillar...’

She’s pinned. Surrounded by bone on every side. She can’t move without impaling herself.

The King Skeleton rises from his crouch. Picks his hatchets back up and starts walking toward her, furious and smiling.

Rhayne’s eyes find mine through the gaps in the bone cage.

For the first time in the entire fight, I see fear.