The knight froze between two orders and Soren did not let go of the seam.
It burned, the imposed thing fighting his grip the way the Author’s ink had fought him on the channel, a thing that did not want to be touched by the one touching it.
He had felt this before, on his own skin, and he knew the only way through a thing like this was not to overpower it.
It was to take it apart at the place it was joined.
So he stopped pulling and started reading.
The imposed capability was not part of the beast. That was the whole flaw in it.
The Council had bolted a predictive layer onto Troy’s knight from outside, a parasite that read angles and drove the beast early.
A parasite has to be attached sowhere, and anything attached has a seam.
Soren found the seam under his palm and worked it the way Yara worked a shadow, not breaking, finding the edge where the foreign thing stopped being a beast and started being graft.
The knight thrashed.
Troy was shouting sothing Soren didn’t have room to hear.
He got a finger under the edge of the graft, in the bond-language he had learned the hard way across two months of paying for it, and he peeled.
The imposed layer ca up off the beast like a tick off skin, all at once, ugly, and the knight scread in the register beasts used when sothing that had been inside them was no longer there.
[DING! — Foreign capability: DETACHED. Opponent bond returned to native state.]
The knight staggered.
For one full second it was just a beast again, slow and heavy and patient, Troy’s actual beast, the one Soren had fought a version of a long ti ago.
Then it found Troy.
Troy hit him.
No knight, no capability, no Council leash.
Troy crossed the ring himself and put a fist into Soren’s taped ribs with his own hand, and it was the most honest thing Soren had felt off him since they t.
Soren took it and grinned through it, which hurt more than the fist.
"There he is," Soren said.
"Shut up, Kane!"
"That’s the guy who ca to my room the first day."
"I said shut up." But Troy was breathing different now, the asured fixture gone, a person under it who had been driven by a leash for so long he’d half forgotten the floor was his to stand on. "What did you do to my beast?"
"Took sothing off that wasn’t yours."
"That was an enhancent."
"That was a hand up your sleeve." Soren caught the next swing on his forearm, the cut one, and held it. "You’ve been fighting their fight, now fight mine. It’s worse but it’s yours."
It evened out then, and even was uglier than uneven.
The leash had made the knight fast and made Troy a passenger, and without it Troy was slower and present.
Now it was harder to beat because it made choices the council never would.
They went at each other in the center of the ring where the caras wanted them, beast against pack, Troy against Soren, no one driving either of them now.
Soren bled from three places and Troy bled from two and neither of them gave the official a reason to stop it.
This was the fuse Soren had carried since that day, the thing between them that had never resolved because the Council had always been standing in the middle of it.
Now the Council was peeled off the floor and on the ground between them and they were finally just two people who had been pointed at each other by soone else’s hand.
They said the rest of it in hits.
Mona surfaced in the middle of it and Troy’s knight pinned her under a forearm, and Soren did not call her off because there was no calling off a beast that had never answered him.
The knight spent half a beat on the mole and that half beat was a hole in Troy’s guard, the slow one, the human one, and Soren ca in low under it.
Troy read it.
For the first ti all fight, Troy read him right, no parasite doing it, just Troy, and the counter ca around clean and fast and aid to end it.
Soren didn’t block.
He stepped inside the counter, took it across the shoulder, and put his hand back on the knight’s native bond-line, the real one this ti, the seam between a man and the beast that had been ridden by soone else.
He didn’t break that one either.
He leaned on it, master to master, until Troy’s beast felt a steadier hand on the line than the one that had been driving it, and hesitated.
That hesitation was the half-beat Soren had been counting toward since the bell.
[DING! — Combat: critical phase. Opponent native bond: contested.]
[DING! — Mutual recognition logged. No interference flag.]
Troy felt it.
Felt his own beast lean toward the wrong tar for half a breath, and his face did sothing that was not anger.
"You could take him," Troy said quietly, just for Soren. "Right now. He’d follow you."
"I don’t want your beast." Soren let the bond-line go. "I want you to rember nobody’s hand is on it but yours."
Troy roared and his own fist, the human one, hit Soren on the jaw, a clean shot.
The knight slamd a shoulder into Soren’s pack, sending him staggering back three steps.
"You think that makes it easy?" Troy shouted, wiping blood from his lip with the back of a gauntlet. "Now I fight for ! That’s worse for you, Kane!"
Soren barely got his guard up as Troy followed, a frenzy of human speed and beast weight, no hesitation, no Council parasite slowing the man down with strategy.
It was just rage and relief of being driven.
CLANG. THUD. WHIP.
Soren’s pack took a blow that drove the air from his lungs.
He slid under a swing from Troy’s knight, the beast’s foot kicking up dust.
"Good," Soren gasped, dodging a backhand from Troy that grazed his temple. "Use it, burn it all out."
"I will burn you out!" Troy scread, putting everything into a straight punch that Soren caught on his forearm, bone protesting the force.
"You should have done this first day, Troy!"
"The Council made slow, but you made honest!"
The knight settled back to Troy.
And Troy, free for the first ti in the whole fight, with his beast his own, the leash on the ground and the Council watching from the high seats, raised his guard for the last exchange the way a man raises it when he has finally decided who he is fighting for.
It wasn’t the Council. Soren saw that in his eyes.
He set his feet on his ribs that were screaming and his thigh that wouldn’t hold and t it.
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