"Begin on signal."
The rune blinked once.Twice.
DING.
They crashed into one another like weather. Kael's first strikes were wind—razor lances that carved the air, ice petals trailing each sweep to stall and trip. Ralph met them with light: blades folded into mirrors, then refractions that split Kael's gusts into harmless spirals. The first impacts shattered the ring; spray of stone and frost rained toward the front rows. Students ducked and roared; bets shifted in real time.
Ralph's form was deceptively simple: a hard-light sword, a reflective cage, and a face that never gave away its math. Teachers watched, unshocked The admiration in the was sharp.
Kael's wind kept him mobile; ice bought him breathing room. For a time it looked like a test of stamina. Then Ralph altered tempo—light rails drew themselves into the air, lattices of gleaming lines that hummed with stored charge. Lightning crawled the rails like captive snakes. The corridors of light snapped shut like a cage. The arena's barriers pulsed as the sigils fought the excess.
Kael slammed a palm to the stone. Earth answered—staggered pillars erupted, jagged and smoking, fracturing Ralph's rails. He followed that with a short, savage cone of fire: not to consume, but to force refraction to misalign, to fog mirrors with steam. Ralph's lattice wavered; for a breath Kael had space.
Ralph responded as if he'd expected it. He bent the lightning into a focused rail, not to cleave but to thread: a thin, continuous arc that sliced air and traced Kael's openings. The bolt clipped Kael's shoulder; blood seared on frost. The crowd screamed. Someone shouted Kael's name into the roar. Others held their breath.
Pain flared like a bell, but Kael kept moving. The combination had cost him—wind and ice already drained him. He could feel the Omnimana fraying at the edges, the threads slipping. He remembered Selene's hand on his brow, the quiet: Don't fall. The memory steadied him like a tether.
Ralph's next trick was obscene in its cleanliness—light bent into a cathedral of glass that forced every step into a trap. Kael danced the seams, each movement a calculus of pressure. The lattice sang with lightning, seeking a place to cook him alive.
He stopped trying to outpace light. He dimmed.
Shadow crawled up his spine and swallowed the glare. The arena's shine dulled around Kael; Ralph's rails flickered as if a lens had been clouded. From shadow's throat Kael moved like a thought—less forceful, more precise. He slipped a gap the lattice insisted did not exist and reappeared inches from Ralph's jaw.
Ralph's eyes widened. He drove a spear of focused light and threaded lightning as a filament—pure intent. Kael met it with everything left: earth braced, wind to shape trajectory, fire to obscure and make the light false, ice to seize and bite, and shadow to hide the final motion. The collision rang out, a clap like a distant storm.
They traded strikes that would have felled lesser fighters. A hard-light lattice shivered and collapsed; a ring of shattered glass steamed as fire met frost; a chunk of the arena's rim exploded outward and was kept from the crowd only by emergency sigils flaring red. The stands were a living thing—cheers, curses, the metallic clink of wagers settling.
Ralph gathered himself for a final, desperate arc—light tightened, lightning braided the edge like a knife. He thrust with everything: a spear of brilliance and current meant to end the fight.
Kael moved through a motion that had no room for error. Wind pulled; earth steadied; a burst of fire detonated under the strike to break its balance; ice laced the blade's path; and, in the tiny breath between one heartbeat and the next, shadow masked the true vector of the counter. His palm found a seam under Ralph's guard—a shoulder, then a fall that was precise not in violence but in purpose.
Ralph's light guttered. The lightning spasmed and died. He fell down, chest heaving, light-blade guttering like a candle in wind.
Kael stood, bent and bleeding, every muscle a map of agony. He swayed, vision narrowing, but he did not fall. He felt the world tilt and held it up because a sister's quiet had become a rope around his heart.
The signal rune blinked once.
DING."Winner: Kael Ardyn."