Reyna Cabana walked off the platform with her back straight and her jaw set and her broken arm sending lightning bolts of pain from elbow to shoulder with every step.
She did not cry.
She did not wobble.
She did not look back at the Stray Dog standing in the center of the arena, holding that stupid bat like a scepter while twenty thousand people lost their collective minds.
Not once.
Takamura fell into step beside her as she entered the competitor’s tunnel, his massive fra blocking the worst of the cara flashes. He said nothing. Good. If he said one word about how she fought well or how it was a good effort or how she should be proud of herself, she would electrocute him through the floor and accept whatever suspension ca from it.
The tunnel swallowed the crowd noise. Concrete walls, fluorescent lights, the chemical sll of the dical station ahead. Reyna’s combat boots left scuffs on the polished floor with each step, and every single scuff felt like a personal insult.
"I yielded," she said.
Nobody had asked. Kira limped beside her on Takamura’s other side, holding her ribs where Isabelle’s spear had found a gap. Diego and Leo waited at the end of the corridor, both of them wearing expressions that said they’d watched the whole thing and were now desperately searching for sothing to say that wouldn’t get them killed.
Diego opened his mouth.
"Don’t," Reyna said.
Diego closed his mouth.
Smart boy.
The dical bay was a small white room with a padded cot, a cabinet of supplies, and a dic who took one look at Reyna’s arm and made a sound like soone had stepped on a small animal. The dic, a woman in her forties with short grey hair and steady hands, guided Reyna to the cot and began examining the damage.
"Hairline fracture in the radius," the dic reported. "Not a full break. Lucky."
Lucky. Reyna’s teeth ground together so hard she felt enal protest. Lucky was not a word she associated with losing.
The dic wrapped Reyna’s forearm in a temporary splint and activated a low-grade healing accelerator that humd against her skin like a trapped bumblebee. The pain dropped from nine out of ten to a manageable six. Reyna flexed her fingers experintally and found them responsive, if slow.
"No training for forty-eight hours," the dic said. "Minimum."
"Tomorrow I have six individual events."
The dic’s face did sothing complicated that landed sowhere between pity and professional resignation. "Then I’d suggest you don’t block anything with that arm."
Reyna stood from the cot. The room tilted slightly, her mana reserves still scraping the bottom of the barrel after manifesting those last marionettes. She steadied herself on the edge of the cabinet and breathed through her nose until the world decided to remain horizontal.
Kira sat on the other cot with an ice pack pressed against her temple. A concussion. Not severe, but enough that the shadow dancer’s usual catlike awareness had been replaced by a vaguely confused expression and a tendency to track objects a half-second too slow. Isabelle Okoye had done that with patience and a spear and absolutely nothing resembling rcy.
"She was good," Kira murmured, sounding almost drunk. "The queen. She was really good."
"I know," Reyna said.
The room emptied out gradually. The dic finished her notes. Takamura checked on both of them and then vanished to handle post-match logistics, because the man had exactly two modes: terrifying combat instructor and ticulous bureaucrat, with nothing in between. Diego and Leo hovered in the doorway until Reyna glared them into leaving.
Kira fell asleep. The ice pack slipped from her fingers and landed on the floor with a damp thud.
Reyna sat alone on the dical cot and stared at the opposite wall and replayed every single second of the fight in her mind until the mories blurred together into a collage of dark eyes and volcanic rock and the specific, infuriating sound of a baseball bat connecting with her forearm hard enough to fracture bone.
He’d told her to stop holding back.
He’d said it like he ant it. Like he wanted the real Reyna, not the version Olympus Rising broadcast to fifty million followers, not the La Sirena persona that had been manufactured to sell energy drinks and combat gear and magazine covers.
The real one. The girl who cursed in Spanglish when angry and bit her tongue bloody when she was scared and fought dirty when the caras weren’t watching.
Nobody asked for that girl.
Veronica didn’t. Veronica wanted the polished product, the marketable prodigy, the brand ambassador with the crimson hair and the perfect smile and the spotless record that had now been permanently marred by a draw against a telekinetic ice queen and a loss to a boy with a bat.
The VHC didn’t want the real Reyna either. They wanted the poster child, the proof that the system worked, that training and investnt produced champions the way factories produced widgets.
Satori Nakano looked at her across a ruined platform and told her to stop performing.
And she had.
For sixty seconds, she had fought without marionettes, without constructs, without the safety net of her Aspect keeping opponents at arm’s length. Just fists and speed and the particular brand of violence that lived in the bones of a girl who’d grown up in Del Mar Heights watching street fights from her bedroom window.
He’d hit her twice.
She’d hit him six tis.
He won anyway. Because his stupid Aspect turned her punishnt into his fuel, and every blow she landed just made him stronger, faster, harder to hurt. It was like fighting a video ga boss that leveled up every ti you damaged it. It was the most frustrating combat chanic she’d ever encountered in her life. It was also, in a way she was not prepared to examine too closely, the most fun she’d had fighting anyone since she was fifteen and first realized she might be the strongest person in any room she walked into.
Reyna looked down at her splinted arm.
He hadn’t aid to cripple. The fracture was hairline, the damage minimal for the force involved. He could have hit her harder. She knew this with absolute certainty because she’d watched footage of him shattering Julian’s golden gauntlet and breaking fingers underneath.
He’d pulled the strike.
Not because he thought she was weak. If he’d thought that, he wouldn’t have asked her to stop holding back. He pulled it because he wanted to keep fighting her, and he couldn’t do that if she was in a hospital bed for three weeks.
Which ant he was already thinking about the individual events tomorrow.
Which ant he wanted to face her again.
Her phone buzzed. She ignored it. It buzzed again. And again. And seven more tis in rapid succession.
Reyna picked it up.
Veronica. Of course.
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