Reyna moved before Hanae’s hand finished dropping.
Not the telegraphed charge Julian liked, not the showy opener designed to intimidate the crowd. She went low and sideways simultaneously, her body doing sothing that didn’t quite obey the usual rules of montum, and three marionettes erupted from her hands like thrown knives. They hit the platform at different coordinates and exploded upright, crackling with electricity that made my back teeth hum.
My Tori-Sense scread in four directions at once.
I went right, then imdiately switched to left because my body knew sothing my brain was still catching up to, and the first marionette’s fist passed through the space my ribcage had just vacated. I used the bat to redirect the second one’s arm mid-swing, felt the shock rattle all the way up to my shoulder socket, and ducked under the third by dropping into a low slide across volcanic rock that absolutely wrecked my knees.
Behind , Isabelle’s spear sang through the air and took the third marionette clean through its electrical core. Green wind scattered the construct into fizzing sparks.
One down. Two still active. Reyna herself closing the distance on my right.
I ca up out of the slide and she was already there, her right hand wrapped in crackling light, aiming for my ribs with the surgical focus of soone who had watched exactly where Emi kept pressing her hands during dical treatnt. She’d clocked the injury. Of course she had.
The punch was perfect. Textbook. The product of seventeen years of professional coaching and whatever unholy dedication it took to be this good at eighteen.
I let Kinetic Absorption take it.
The impact was a full-body event, my ribs compressed, my vision whited at the edges, sothing that might have been bone flexing in a way bones weren’t designed to flex. The Aspect conversion rippled through imdiately, ten percent to Strength, another eight to Agility, the familiar rush of stolen montum flooding my limbs.
Reyna stepped back to reassess.
"You’re insane," she said, and it wasn’t an insult. It was a scientific observation delivered with genuine admiration.
"Neurologically I’m probably fine," I said. "Structurally, jury’s out."
She launched the two remaining marionettes simultaneously.
This was the thing about fighting Reyna that the footage hadn’t fully communicated. Julian threw everything forward like a man trying to bludgeon a problem into submission. Reyna orchestrated. Her marionettes weren’t distractions or support, they were extensions of her actual thought process made physical, real-ti tactical decisions given crackling electrical form. When one feinted high, it was because Reyna had already calculated that I’d drop low and leave my left side open for the other one’s strike.
I dropped low.
The second marionette’s elbow caught across the ear.
My world rotated sideways for about a second.
More Kinetic Absorption. More stolen power. My Strength stat was climbing like a market crash in reverse.
"You’re getting hit on purpose," Reyna said, and now she sounded less like a scientist and more like soone who’d found sothing genuinely unexpected in the data. Her eyes were doing that thing again, that hungry analytical focus, looking for the principle underneath the behaviour. "Every hit makes you stronger."
"It’s a lifestyle choice," I said. "Very niche."
She hit again. Harder this ti, deliberate, testing the theory. Her fist connected with my shoulder and I absorbed the force without flinching, added another twelve percent to the growing buffer, and smiled at her.
Her expression shifted.
I moved.
The bat ca around in a horizontal arc aid at her midsection, enhanced by the Dragon Witch’s Ring running heat through the tal, and Reyna pivoted with a half-step that turned what would have been a solid hit into a glancing blow off her forearm. She winced. Not much, just a fractional tightening around the eyes, but it was there.
She’d felt it.
Good.
I pressed forward, closer than she wanted because her Aspect was most devastating at range and in close quarters she was relying on speed and training rather than electrical artillery. She was fast, genuinely fast in a way that made my Tori-Sense work overti, but my Agility was sitting sowhere in the high hundreds now and climbing, and the gap between us was narrowing with every hit she landed.
Reyna recognised the math.
She stopped hitting .
Smart.
She went to the marionettes instead, not two this ti but five, summoned with a gesture that made the air around her crack with static. Five constructs spreading wide, forcing to track five simultaneous threat vectors, and Reyna herself dropping back to give herself range.
I activated Lightning Rod.
The electromagnetic field expanded from my body in a sphere, invisible except for the way the marionettes’ crackling trajectories bent toward like tal shavings toward a magnet. All five redirected mid-strike, their electricity pulling away from their original targets and pouring into instead. I held it, channelled it, felt my mana channels burn slightly from the throughput.
Reyna watched her entire formation collapse into my outstretched hand.
"Te lo juro," she breathed, and I didn’t speak Spanish but the tone communicated everything.
I pointed at her.
"My turn."
The stored electricity released in a focused beam. Not as controlled as Reyna’s constructs, not as elegant, more of a "here is all of this power back at enormous velocity" than any kind of tactical precision instrunt. Reyna’s body was already moving sideways before it left my hand because she’d seen do this exact thing in the Crucible and her muscle mory had catalogued it. She dodged it cleanly.
The beam took out a section of platform railing instead.
Maximus Hype made a noise like a man who’d just watched sothing expensive get destroyed.
On the other end of the arena, Isabelle and Kira were doing sothing intricate and dangerous with shadows and wind. Isabelle’s Fujin had the platform floor near them coated in a constant churning current that made Kira’s shadow materialisation less reliable. Kira kept appearing slightly off-target, her daggers finding air instead of Isabelle’s vital points, and Isabelle kept pressing her with the spear in a rhythm that was slowly, thodically wearing the other girl down.
Isabelle wasn’t trying to finish Kira quickly. She was conserving Kira’s energy as a tactical resource and spending it as slowly as possible.
Cold.
I loved it.
Reyna reford her marionettes. Six this ti, and she arranged them differently, not in the aggressive forward cluster she’d used before but in a spatial formation that covered angles, denied my approach vectors, created overlapping fields. She’d adapted. In real ti. In the middle of a tournant final, after three previous matches had already drained her reserves, she’d clocked my ability, clocked my tactic, and rebuilt her strategy from scratch.
I had a problem.
The problem was this: I could absorb kinetic force, I could drink lightning like it was water, but Reyna had now stopped feeding either of those things. She’d corrected course. The marionettes held their positions, not attacking, just controlling space. Reyna herself stood in the gap they created, unreachable without running a gauntlet she controlled completely.
"You hit like a truck," she said. "But you can’t get close enough to do it."
"Philosophically accurate," I said. "Practically, give thirty seconds."
"I won’t."
"Forty?"
She almost smiled. The corner of her mouth did sothing complicated. "You’re funny. You know Veronica wants to et you?"
"She can get in line." I started circling. The marionettes tracked , adjusting. "Long line."
"She doesn’t do lines."
"First ti for everything."
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