Both limbs retracted.

The Solmara sections were producing their focused sound — sharp, deliberate, the acknowledgment of a strategy working as intended from the first exchange.

Dravos changed approach.

He deployed a phantom limb above the water — extending it from his shoulder at an upward angle that kept it in the air rather than on the flooded floor, the limb traveling through the space above the water’s surface where the reflective layer couldn’t show its ripple.

Lynara couldn’t see it.

It arrived at her left arm.

The grip closed around her wrist — invisible, the phantom limb’s hand holding her wrist from an angle her physical body couldn’t see or block, the force real and present against her skin.

She felt it.

She pulled — the phantom grip resisting, the twenty-foot reach limb holding its position while her arm tried to retract.

She flooded upward.

Water extending from her right palm in a wide spray rather than a directed jet — the spray covering the air around her left arm’s position, the water droplets hitting the invisible limb at multiple contact points simultaneously.

The phantom limb was wet.

Still invisible — the water didn’t make it visible, didn’t coat it in a way that revealed its shape — but the water droplets on its surface behaved the way water droplets on any surface behaved, and Lynara could feel where the droplets were clustering and not clustering, the distribution of the spray’s impact across the invisible construct giving her information about its position and angle that the flood-ripple technique couldn’t have given her from above.

She formed a water construct around her left arm — the water extending from her own arm’s surface, encasing the wrist and forearm in liquid that pressed outward in all directions from her skin.

The water construct pressed against the phantom grip.

The invisible limb felt the pressure — the water pressing against the grip from inside, the force of the water construct working against the phantom hand’s closure from the enclosed side.

The grip loosened.

She pulled.

Her wrist came free.

She directed the water from the construct outward along the limb’s estimated angle — the spray having given her the angle, the water now traveling along that angle to find the limb’s full length.

The water tracked along the invisible limb — following the angle, hitting the construct surface as it went, the droplets marking the limb’s position in a way that built a picture of where the invisible construct was even without making it visible.

She fired a Tidal Collapse toward the limb’s estimated base — the implosion technique, the water pulling back toward a single point along the angle the spray had mapped.

The collapse hit the limb at its torso connection point.

Dravos felt it — the implosion force arriving at the connection between his body and the phantom limb, the impact significant at the junction.

He retracted all deployed limbs immediately.

Three of them — two that had been waiting in the air at different angles while the wrist-grip exchange had been running, one that had been the wrist-grip itself. All three retracted in the same instant.

Both fighters reset.

Lynara at the center of the flooded arena floor — the shallow water covering the stone in all directions, the reflective surface present and ready for the floor-level ripple tracking. Her right palm still producing water — the reserves mid-fight, the production cost real but not yet showing its floor.

Dravos at the edge of the flooded section — one foot on the wet stone, one foot on the dry perimeter, his visible body carrying nothing visible about four phantom limbs except the knowledge that they were there.

The crowd was producing the sustained engaged noise of people watching a fight that required them to pay close attention to things they couldn’t directly see — the ripples, the spray patterns, the way one fighter’s ability was making the other’s invisible weapons visible through indirect means.

"She can’t see the limbs," the announcer said. "But she can see what they do to the water. And she’s using what they do to the water to hit them where they are."

Dravos looked at the flooded floor.

At the reflective surface that had been revealing his phantom limbs’ positions since the first deployment.

At the spray technique that had mapped the above-water limb’s position through droplet distribution.

At the Tidal Collapse that had found the limb’s torso connection through the angle the spray had established.

He needed to fight in a way that didn’t interact with the water.

He deployed four phantom limbs simultaneously — all four, his maximum, all of them extended above the water’s surface at different heights and angles, none of them touching the flooded floor.

Four invisible limbs in the air around Lynara’s position.

She deployed the spray — wide, covering the air around her in all directions, the water droplets traveling outward from her position in a sphere of fine mist rather than the targeted spray she had used against the single above-water limb.

The mist hit all four limbs.

Four sets of droplet distributions — the mist marking four invisible constructs’ positions simultaneously, the information arriving at Lynara from four directions at once.

Too much information.

She could track one limb through spray distribution. Two was manageable. Four simultaneous above-water limbs producing four simultaneous droplet distribution patterns was more information than the tracking technique could process into four separate positions in real time.

The first strike arrived at her right shoulder — one of the four limbs, the one whose position she hadn’t fully resolved in the mist distribution’s data.

Real impact — the phantom limb’s force arriving at her shoulder from the air, the invisible strike carrying genuine physical weight.

She went back one step. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

The second strike arrived at her left hip before she had finished processing the first.

She went back another step.

The third and fourth — she moved, the spray having given her approximate positions if not precise ones, the evasion partial rather than complete. The third grazed her left arm. The fourth she avoided entirely.

Two clean hits. One graze. One miss.

She was three steps back from where she had been when the four-limb deployment began.

Dravos advanced his visible body — the phantom limbs having created the opening, his physical self now closing the distance while the mist distribution was still being processed.

Ten feet.

Lynara reformed her approach.

The four-limb above-water deployment had exceeded what the mist-tracking technique could resolve in real time — the information arriving from four simultaneous distributions faster than she could convert it into four usable positions. She needed to either reduce the number of limbs she was tracking simultaneously or find a tracking method that processed four positions faster than the mist distribution could.

She flooded upward.

Not the fine mist — a full water surge from both palms, the water projecting upward from her position in a column that rose to the height the phantom limbs were operating at and spread outward in a dome of water above her head rather than around it.

A water dome above the flood — the shallow layer on the floor providing the below-water tracking, the above-water dome providing coverage in the air space where Dravos had moved his limbs.

The dome’s water surface was in contact with any limb that was inside or passing through it — not droplet distribution, sustained contact, the water touching every part of the invisible construct that was inside the dome’s radius continuously rather than in the single-impact information burst of a spray.

A phantom limb entered the dome from the left.

Lynara felt it — not as a ripple, as a sustained displacement in the dome’s water, the invisible construct pushing water out of the space it occupied in a way that was continuously readable rather than requiring her to process a distribution pattern.

She tracked it in real time.

The limb moved through the dome toward her.

She met it with a high-pressure jet — the water directed at the displacement, the jet traveling from her right palm toward the moving space the limb was occupying inside the dome.

The jet hit the limb.

Direct impact — the high-pressure stream arriving at the invisible construct with full force, the displacement having given her the precise position rather than the approximate one the mist had provided.

Dravos retracted the hit limb.

A second limb entered the dome from the right.

She tracked it immediately — the sustained displacement readable, the position precise.

Jet.

Hit.

Retracted.

The Solmara sections were at full output — the focused sharp sound of people watching their fighter find the answer to the four-limb problem and apply it with immediate effectiveness.

"The water dome provides continuous position data instead of impact-burst data," the announcer said. "She knows where the limb is at every moment while it’s inside the dome. Not an approximation — exact position, updated in real time."

Dravos stood at ten feet.

His four phantom limbs — two retracted from the dome hits, two still deployed at angles outside the dome’s current radius.

He looked at the dome.

At the water covering the air above Lynara’s position — the tracking mechanism that had turned his above-water deployment from an advantage into a liability.

He needed to collapse the dome before he could deploy above-water limbs effectively.

He sent both remaining deployed limbs at the dome simultaneously — from opposite sides, the two invisible constructs entering the dome’s water from the left and right at the same moment, both moving toward the dome’s center where the water production was originating from Lynara’s palms.

Lynara tracked both.

Left limb — displacement moving right to center.

Right limb — displacement moving left to center.

Both moving toward her palms.

She fired jets at both simultaneously — left hand at the left limb, right hand at the right limb, both high-pressure streams aimed at the two displacements converging toward her.

The left jet hit the left limb.

The right jet hit the right limb.

Both retracted.

But firing both jets simultaneously had required both her palms to be directed outward — left and right, the water production oriented toward the two limb positions rather than upward toward the dome’s maintenance.

The dome had needed both palms’ contribution to maintain its coverage at full radius.

With both palms directed horizontally for the simultaneous jet firing — the dome’s water, unsupported for the two seconds the jets had required, thinned at the top.

A gap in the dome’s coverage.

Above her head.

Dravos had been watching for exactly this.

He deployed a phantom limb from directly above — downward, the limb descending through the gap in the dome’s coverage at the top, the one angle the simultaneous jet firing had created an opening for.

It struck down at her head.

Lynara’s domes were reforming — her palms returning to upward production after the jets had fired, the coverage rebuilding.

Not fast enough.

The downward strike hit her left shoulder — the angle changed at the last moment by Lynara’s half-formed evasion, the strike landing on the shoulder rather than the head it had been aimed at.

Real impact — significant, the downward phantom strike carrying the full force Dravos’s physical body could generate from that angle, the impact driving her left shoulder down and twisting her toward the ground.

She went to one knee.

The dome collapsed — the knee position disrupting her palms’ upward orientation, the water production dropping to floor level as her body went down, the above-water coverage gone.

Dravos advanced.

Eight feet.

He deployed three phantom limbs — all above the flood, all at different heights, the dome down and the floor-ripple tracking only covering the floor-level limbs.

Lynara pressed her hands to the floor — the flooded stone, both palms in contact with the shallow water covering the arena surface.

She felt everything.