An announcer’s voice filled the arena from speakers at all six tier levels simultaneously.
"Wave Three teams, welco to Gold Rush. To advance, your team needs to acquire three gold coins. At the sound of the horn, sixty coins will drop from the upper dispensers into the arena floor. Your team needs three. Once you have three, your team leader presents them at the northern exit to advance. You have thirty minutes from the horn. The clock does not stop for injuries."
The voice montarily stopped.
"Combat is permitted. Coin theft is permitted. There are no Dominion restrictions. dical staff are positioned at the arena’s four corners and will not enter the field during active play. If a team mber cannot continue, they exit through the nearest corner gate, and their team continues without them."
The voice paused, longer than she had the first ti.
"Everything in the arena is contested from the mont the horn sounds."
Alina looked up at the dispensers mounted on the sixth-tier ceiling. There were twelve of them, evenly spaced. She looked at the platform below each one and traced where the coins would fall based on angle and height.
"The dispensers drop the coins in a spread," she said. "They won’t cluster. That ans the upper tiers have no inherent advantage. The coins will reach every level."
"Then why is everyone moving up?" Ash said, watching the other teams on the lower platforms already shifting their weight toward the vertical shafts.
"Because everyone thinks the upper tiers have an advantage." Alina looked at him. "The coins that drop to the lower levels will have fewer teams competing for them for the first two minutes while everyone clusters above."
Alexis raised a hand. "Art thou suggesting we forgo the heights entirely? The lower levels are easily surrounded."
"For two minutes they aren’t," Alina said. "After that we move up."
"The teams that drop back down will be moving through a space we already know," Ash said.
Alina nodded once.
Alexis lowered her hand. "A cunning stratagem," she said. "Though I reserve the right to ascend when the mont demands it."
"Noted," Alina said.
The horn sounded.
Ash stood at the edge of their starting platform and looked at the space.
The arena looked like it was custom built for this event. There were tiered platforms at six different heights, with walkways connecting between them and vertical shafts where students could climb between levels.
Three waves had already run. Nobody had nded anything. A platform on the third tier had lost its eastern corner, the broken edge hanging over a fifteen-foot drop. A support pillar at the arena’s mid-level had cracked from what looked like a high-pressure Dominion discharge; the pillar was still standing but leaning two degrees from vertical, and the walkway beside it bowed inward where the shift had pulled the anchor. The walls carried smoke residue from sothing exothermic on the second wave. Ash could sll it. Char, and the sharp bite of a Shade pushed past sustainable output.
Sothing distant and wet hit the floor of an upper platform.
Alexis’s hand moved. A small, involuntary tremor, her fingers spreading and then tightening against her palm.
Ash looked at the hand. "You good?"
"Dost thou question mine resolve?" she said.
He looked at Alina.
"She’s still in," Alina said.
The horn sounded.
Each team moved simultaneously. The sound hit first. It wasn’t the horn directly, but the cascading response to it. Boots on tal platforms, Dominions activating across the full three-dinsional space of the arena, and two students sowhere on the fourth tier already in combat at the sound of the horn, the impact carrying through the platform scaffolding as a low vibration.
Ash felt through the soles of his feet. A student on a second-tier platform to their left scread. He wasn’t in pain; he was coordinating. Calling their team. The sound echoed off the damaged walls and ca back from two directions at once.
Alina put her bare hand flat against the platform’s tal surface. Her eyes moved across the architecture, not looking for any student. She saw the load-bearing points, the platforms, the compromised pillar’s lean, and how far it had shifted from center. She was reading the arena the way she read the machinery in her workshop, mapping what would hold weight and what wouldn’t before she committed movent to any of it.
Ash ran his Shade-sense across the full arena.
There were at least 60 teams, including them. Over a hundred Shades in a confined space, each one spiking with the adrenaline of the horn. He let the read run wide first, pressure and distance and density, then narrowed to behavioral pattern. Most teams were moving imdiately, instinct driving them toward the upper tiers where the coin density would be higher.
Seven teams weren’t moving on instinct. Their Shades held a different pressure: deliberate, positioned, the weight of a plan already in motion.
"There are seven teams running setups," Ash said. "They aren’t hunting coins. They’re getting into position."
Alexis turned. "Thou art divining the field?"
"I’m reading it." He pointed left. "Three of those seven are lateral from us. On the mid-level."
"Do you see the coins?" Alina asked. Her hand was still on the platform.
"No. But I see who knows where they are. Two teams on the fourth tier have the pressure of people who’ve found sothing."
"Up or lateral," Alina said.
"Lateral," Ash said. "The setups are closer, though. They will block us if we go up."
Alina lifted her hand from the platform. "Then we move lateral."
Alexis drew herself to full height. "Valor demands the highest—" She looked at both of them. "That’s strategically sound," she said instead. "Let’s move."
They dropped from the starting platform to the connecting walkway and went left.
The walkway was narrower than it had looked from above, the tal grating underfoot warped at its center where heat from a prior wave had bent it upward. Alina moved across it without breaking stride, her weight distributed forward, crossing the warped section with the sa weight distribution she used on her workshop floor. Alexis crossed it in three quick steps, cape lifting with the motion, and landed on the far side with more precision than her theatrical posture suggested was coming. Ash crossed behind them.
The mid-level platform they reached had two teams on it already. One group of three in the far corner clustering around a gap in the platform floor and the other three-person group between them and the far corner. The second group spread to block the path when they saw Ash’s team arrive.
Wade, the spokesperson, stepped forward. "We only have a single coin so far. You?"
Ash ran a read on him.
Wade’s Shade fluctuated on the word one. A small pressure variance, the suppression architecture tightening at the surface as Shades tightened when the person behind them was maintaining a position they knew wasn’t true.
He had seen it in every extraction. He had seen it in every person who lied and said "I’m fine" when they weren’t. The read was fast and clear.
Alina was watching his face.
"Do you want to tell us," she said quietly, "or do we act without it?"
"They have two," Ash said, sa volu.
Alina moved her weight to her front foot.
"Treachery!" Alexis said, not quietly or subtle at all. "Their tongues are forked!"
Wade’s Shade spiked. Surprise, defensive recoil, the pressure shifting outward fast. The three mbers of the blocking team exchanged a look that lasted less than a second.
"You have two," Ash said to Wade. "Show us the other one, and we walk."
The platform went quiet for a second.
He grinned, then looked at his teammates with an understanding nod. "So be it," he said, raising both hands up to his shoulders.
Then Sean’s moved first.
Ash had been watching the upper levels throughout the mid-level approach. The fourth tier was the highest accessible platform in the arena, the fifth and sixth tiers being the sealed upper structure where the scoring officials sat. Most teams had converged on the fourth tier’s western section, where the coin density was highest. The Shade-sense read the clustering clearly: forty teams compressed into the sa space, with combat sounds from that direction running continuously.
Davos was not among that cluster.
Davos’s team was on the fourth tier’s eastern section, which was quieter and had worse coin density, which ant there was a reason to hold that position that had nothing to do with coins. Ash had swept that section twice and found the sa read both tis: three teams in coordinated positioning, their Shades running with the pressure of people waiting rather than hunting.
Two adjacent teams and Davos’s team were arranged at the three access points to the eastern fourth tier. Anyone moving up from the third tier’s eastern section would arrive at that arrangent.
Ash began to move, already sensing an attack coming.
Just then, a strike from Sean ca crashing at Alina’s left side.
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