Balcony wind, mild but persistent, swept across the upper-level bar of a Commercial Core high-rise.
Matt had one foot hooked over the lower rail, phone wedged between shoulder and ear. His free hand kept moving in the air—cutting shapes, pointing, dismissing something the person on the other end had said.
He was dressed slightly better than usual. Not a suit. Just not the Trust No System T-shirt. The top button of his shirt was still open.
Inside, the projection wall flickered once. Image warp. Volume low. The bar was officially “reserved.” In practice, it was Matt’s operations room.
Three were stationed at laptops. One monitored group chats on a phone. Two were working through payments. A wheeled whiteboard stood near the wall, covered in numbers, arrows, abbreviations, and freshly adjusted odds. Printed transfer confirmations had been taped beside it. Behind the counter, the bartender had already been “borrowed” out of the room’s social life. His job now was simple: pour drinks, ask nothing.
Someone started talking about Stabilin prices and whether tonight’s split should be adjusted.
Matt cut it off immediately. Yeah, yeah, fine, they could rebalance—jus kept the room moving. No doom language before kickoff. He wasn’t letting one bad topic drag everyone into pre-loss mode.
Tonight was his roommate versus Rank 39. Rooftop, New Terraces South.
No physical seats this time. Full livestream only. A city contact had patched them into a private feed.
The opponent was a pure close-quarters type. Matt had already told Solan not to use the black blade. Spectacle first.
“Listen,” he said into the phone, pacing the balcony rail, “it’s not about strength. If it was about strength, no one outside the Academy would care.”
He glanced through the glass toward the projection wall.
On the rooftop feed, 39 had already triggered Overdrive. His movements had sharpened—faster, cleaner. No technique flourishes. Just velocity.
Solan stepped back half a pace. The edge of his shoe scraped loose grit from the rooftop lip.
Matt shifted the phone to his other ear.
“People don’t pay to see gods,” he said. “They pay to see the gate.”
He tapped the glass with one finger, watching the fight through the reflection.
“Access. That’s the product. You’re not betting on power. You’re betting on getting inside something you’re not supposed to see.”
A pause.
The voice on the other end asked,
“Is he winning?”
Matt waited half a second. Looked back at the screen.
Blood at the corner of Solan’s mouth. The punches were landing clean. 39 was pressing hard.
“He will,” Matt said, slower than before.
Then he continued, already moving on.
“Break the Field. That’s the next headline.”
He was contacted for a Scratchlist fight. As current Rank 39, Daniel Liu was confident in what he could do.
His opponent was current Rank 46—the one drawing heat across campus lately. The caller wanted a livestream and promised good money.
Daniel had no problem with that. This was exactly what his Kamuy was built for. Unlike those almost-magic Kamuy people liked to talk about, his was simple. His Kamuy did one thing. It made him hit harder.
The first punch told him something was wrong.
The fist landed flush on the cheekbone. Clear feedback through the knuckles. Skin split. Blood sprayed.
A normal person would blink, wince, step back half a pace to reset rhythm.
He just put his head back where it belonged. Like straightening a tilted frame. Then raised his hand.
Not the way trained fighters lifted their guard. More like someone who had never learned to fight—arm too straight, shoulder stiff, fist clenched so tight the knuckles blanched white. The angle was awkward, almost clumsy.
And yet the punch landed exactly where it needed to.
Daniel stepped back. For one split second, he didn’t know who he was fighting.
The exchanges started. The worst part was that his opponent didn’t look like anything. Not a style. Not a school.
The punches came irregularly. The balance slipped sometimes. Footwork corrected itself a beat too late, like someone remembering mid-motion that standing properly mattered.
There were openings everywhere.
Every strike Daniel threw should have created a follow-up. Every mistake should have been punishable.
None did.
It was like the rules only applied to one side.
Daniel accelerated. His Kamuy, Overdrive, surged through him. The world narrowed into a clean line.
Shoulder. Hip. Foot. Cut the line. End the fight.
He drove his opponent backward toward the rooftop edge and fired three punches in sequence—rib, stomach, jaw. Each one landed full weight, the sound of flesh and bone snapping together like wet cloth slapped against concrete.
The balance didn’t break. No collapse.
Daniel had seen durable fighters before. They could tank, sure—but they got messy. Structure warped. Timing frayed. They became human.
This one didn’t. He took the blows stupidly—no deflection, no slip, no redirection. Just standing there, absorbing them. Standing like someone who never learned fear.
Then it got worse. Rank 46’s posture began to simplify. Not cleaner. Not prettier. Just… more usable.
Like the pain was knocking unnecessary things out of his body.
Daniel paused half a beat to reset tempo.
46 stepped in during that half beat, slipping into the space between them. A punch skimmed Daniel’s ear and dragged a thin strip of heat with it.
It missed. And yet cold sweat lifted along his back.
He hated admitting it, but something in him was already cursing. This was not something a student was supposed to have.
He took a breath and tried to drag the other man back into human frequency. “Hey,” he said, voice rough. “Can you even hear me?”
No response. Not even a blink. 46’s eyes stayed fixed on something farther away, pupils tightened as if tracking an invisible line.
For one second Daniel had the absurd impression his opponent wasn’t looking at him at all—but at air just behind him, like someone else was standing there giving instructions. He threw again.
This time 46 reacted—not like someone waking up from being hit. His shoulder dipped a fraction, like some added weight had pressed down onto him.
Then he got steadier. Closer to the floor. Less dependent on breath.
Daniel’s stomach twisted.
In fights, what he feared most wasn’t losing. It was losing to something meaningless. Lose to speed, skill, power—fine. Lose to “there is something else living in his body”—that made you disposable.
He gritted his teeth and pushed Overdrive higher.
Sound began to recede. All he could hear was blood in his ears.
He threw the next punch at Solan’s temple—clean, terminal, the kind of shot that gives cameras the ending they came for.
At impact range, 46 raised his arm to block. The block itself was still amateur: elbow high, shoulder jammed, body absorbing instead of redirecting—
But the angle was perfect.
Perfect in the wrong way. Like he had watched this exact punch happen a hundred times in advance. Like he already knew where Daniel would choose to end it.
Knuckles collided. Daniel’s hand went numb. The boy’s arm felt like iron. No—like a metal doorframe bolted into concrete. Next second, the boy closed distance. Breath gone. Space gone.
Daniel saw the boy’s eyes up close—no excitement, no fear, no hate. Only cold concentration, like executing a preloaded step. Then the punches came. Short, urgent, ugly close-range stuffing shots, crammed along bone.
First one hit the chest and flattened his lungs. Second hit the same point, like driving a nail deeper. Third forced a low, ugly sound out of his throat.
He tried to retreat and felt his heel slipping. Wind at ring edge went cold, like a seam had opened behind him. The world off-camera was waiting for him to fall through it.
He swallowed blood and forced the words out, barely audible: “…Who the hell is actually fighting in there?”
Rank 46 still didn’t answer. He just stepped forward once. Like shutting a door.
The staff break room in Aurichen was lit with cold white light.
More honest than the amber glow downstairs. It showed everything—fatigue around the eyes, the edge of someone’s foundation, loose fibers along a cuff.
She set a paper cup under the coffee machine and pressed the button. The machine hummed like it was quietly complaining.
A single wall-mounted TV was on, muted to a near-whisper. The news replayed footage from two days earlier: a police station sealed off after what officials were calling a gas leak. No one in the break room was watching. She picked up the remote and changed the channel.
An Academy duel feed came up. Another excuse to turn violence into entertainment. She was about to switch again when the camera caught the boy lifting his hand.
Her fingers tightened. The rim of the paper cup bent slightly.
The coffee machine kept dripping. She didn’t look.
Blood hung along the boy’s cheekbone. A red line at the corner of his mouth. His skin still had that pale tone—the kind that hadn’t spent much time in the sun. He looked less like someone fighting and more like a photograph of a guest.
The same face from two weeks ago. His clothes hadn’t been impressive, but they weren’t desperate either. The kind of young man who clearly didn’t have money—but hadn’t yet been bent by life enough to hide it.
There had been a friend with him. Talkative. The kind of person who looked like he’d wandered into the wrong building and decided to narrate the tour.
That evening she had been working asset verification. The process was simple to the point of humiliation. Scan. Confirm. Check access tier. Assign a tag.
She had expected an awkward refusal. Instead the system displayed something she had never seen outside the training manual. One line.
PEREGRINE TRUST — VERIFIED ACCOUNT
Beneath it was a string of internal notes she recognized immediately. Not a bank. Something closer to a private financial aristocracy—a certification that meant the person in front of you belonged to a table you could not see.
And the people at that table did not like questions.
The access card itself had been stranger still. No branding. No design. Just matte black, like a piece of polished stone.
She had barely dared to look at it again. For a moment she had even wondered whether the two of them had stolen it.
Then Mr. Michel had appeared. In two years at Aurichen, she had seen him only three times. Every appearance meant the same thing: top-tier clients. Staff at her level were expected to step back, stay quiet, and reduce their presence to near zero.
Mr. Michel did not use that phrase lightly. And yet he used it for the young man.
Their most expensive guest.
She had thought she misheard.
The boy standing there had been young. Slightly awkward. Almost uncertain. Aurichen’s important clients usually moved differently. Heavier steps. Slower breathing. The kind of gaze that treated other people as furniture.
At the end, Mr. Michel even offered the young boy and his companion the choice of any relic they wanted.
She had assumed that would be the last time she ever saw him. Young people backed by money appeared all the time—given a moment of privilege that didn’t really belong to them, then quickly taught how to waste it.
She never expected to see him again. She certainly didn’t expect to see him like this. The coffee finished dripping. She lifted the cup. The heat burned her fingers, but she didn’t let go.
Someone in the break room clicked their tongue, the way people do when watching an accident.
“Who is that?” someone asked casually.
On the screen, the boy’s eyes still weren’t focused on his opponent.
She remembered Mr. Michel’s expression that night. Not surprise. Not admiration. Something closer to confirmation.
Yes. That one.
She swallowed her coffee.
For a moment, the air in the break room felt colder than the floors below.