.
Like fire that had been burning sowhere underground for a very long ti and had stopped caring about being seen.
When Jelo opened his eyes again—
The fla had turned deep crimson, almost like burning dragon blood.
The temperature in the imdiate area spiked sharply. Students near the front moved back again — not from the shockwave this ti, but from the heat, which pressed against them like an open furnace door.
Students in the arena gasped.
"What kind of fire is that?"
Even Tongen, watching from above, narrowed his eyes slightly.
He had been observing the match from the upper rail with the distant patience of soone who had seen enough fights to stop being surprised by most of them. He hadn’t moved in several minutes. He hadn’t needed to.
But now he was paying attention.
"...Interesting."
Jelo lifted his hand slowly.
The fla twisted around his arm like a living creature — not wrapping around it chanically, but moving with intention, following the shape of his arm the way a current follows the path of least resistance, except this current had chosen him specifically.
Raken stopped walking.
He was five ters away, maybe four, and he stopped. His feet planted. His expression had shifted — the easy confidence was still there, but it was working harder now. Sothing underneath it had gone alert.
"What is that?"
Jelo didn’t answer right away. Partly because he was still feeling his way through it himself — the energy in the fla was familiar and completely new at the sa ti, like hearing a word in a language you hadn’t realized you knew. He didn’t fully understand it. But he could feel the shape of it. The depth. The way it pulled from sowhere further down than his usual fire ever reached.
Sothing ancient.
Sothing connected to dragons.
The fla gathered around his hand, stopped twisting, and ford — slowly, deliberately — the shape of large burning claws. Four of them. Each one edged with that deep crimson at its core and trailing smoke that curled upward instead of drifting outward, as though even the heat was moving with purpose now.
Jelo spoke quietly.
"Ancient Dragon Fla..."
The fire roared louder — not from him, not triggered by anything he consciously did, just responding to the na being spoken aloud, like it had been waiting to be called.
"...Duragon Ignis Claw."
He swung his arm.
A massive dragon-shaped claw of crimson fire burst forward — not a slash, not a projectile, but sothing with dinsion and direction and weight, a shape that moved through the air the way a living thing moves rather than the way a technique travels.
ROOOOAR!
The attack tore through the arena floor as it raced toward Raken, carving a deep channel into the stone along its path — the heat radiating off it in visible waves, the air around it bending and shimring.
Raken reacted instantly. There was no hesitation, no mont of freezing up — he read the speed of it, the scale of it, and responded with the only thing that had ever worked for him against power he couldn’t outrun.
He planted his feet and gathered everything he had left.
"Impact Drive!"
He punched forward with everything he had — both fists stacked, every ounce of built montum released at the point of contact.
BOOOOM!
The collision was not elegant.
It was a eting of two kinds of force that didn’t negotiate with each other, and the result filled the arena in an instant — an explosion of fla and shockwave and displaced air that turned the center of the arena opaque with dust, the shockwave from the impact rattling the upper rails and sending several students stumbling backward.
Atlas stared, one hand braced against the barrier, his eyes wide.
"...That’s new."
Mira nodded slowly, her clones flickering slightly at the edges from the residual shockwave. "He’s never used that before." She was quiet for a mont. "I don’t think he knew he could do that before."
When the dust cleared—
Raken stood there breathing heavily.
His forearms were burned — not severely, but visibly, the skin along both arms reddened where the dragon fla had made contact before he’d broken through the center of it. The ground behind him had been carved open in a long uneven groove, the stone split and blackened where the fla had scraped along it after the impact redirected its path.
His fists were still raised.
He lowered them slowly.
Then he started laughing.
It wasn’t the laugh of soone pretending to enjoy sothing. It ca up from sowhere genuine — surprised, almost relieved, the way people laugh when sothing finally lives up to what they were hoping for.
"Hahaha..."
He looked at Jelo with sothing bright in his expression. Not rivalry exactly. Closer to recognition.
"Now that... was interesting."
Jelo stood across the arena, the crimson flas fading slowly from his hand — dying back down through red into orange into the ordinary flicker of his usual fire, and then nothing. Just smoke curling from his palm. He lowered his arm. He was breathing hard, and his expression — usually so settled, so difficult to read — held sothing unfamiliar in it.
He looked almost surprised at himself.
Above them, Tongen watched from the rail, one hand resting loosely on the barrier edge, his expression carrying the faint curve of sothing that wasn’t quite a smile but was in the sa neighborhood.
"So the dragon inside his fire has started waking up..."
He said it quietly, to no one. A conclusion he was filing away.
The battle wasn’t over yet.
But sothing had changed.
Jelo had just awakened a new dragon-based fire technique — not from instruction, not from drilling it in a training room, but from the pressure of a real fight against soone strong enough to push him past the edge of what he already knew. And the arena, still settling from the collision, still thick with dust and heat, held the particular silence of a crowd that had just watched sothing shift.
This fight had just entered a completely different level.
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