Varran's blade hovered like a drawn line in the air between them—one more step and it would be crossed. The instructor's eyes were cool, unreadable, but the set of his shoulders spoke plainly: he expected obedience, or he expected to break the one who refused.
Eleres didn't lower his sword.
"I won't strike a man who's yielded," he said, voice flat. "But I won't be robbed because someone wears a cloak."
Karven's chuckle scraped along the stone. "Listen to him. Moral lectures from a stray."
Varran didn't look back. "Last warning."
Silence pooled in the ruined court. Far off, steel rang and voices rose, but here the world seemed to hold its breath.
Eleres shifted his weight a fraction—enough to become motion.
Varran moved first.
His sword snapped forward in a short, precise thrust—no flourish, all intent. Eleres twisted, letting the tip graze leather instead of flesh, then slid inside the reach to cut at the wrist that held him at bay. Varran turned his blade, parried with a clipped beat, and answered with a heel kick that thudded into Eleres's ribs and forced him back two steps.
Measured. Professional. A cut without malice—and exactly as hard as it needed to be.
Eleres reset his stance, lungs burning. Varran pressed, point probing like a needle, stitching small dangers into every inch of space. He fought like a man who'd taught a hundred students to bleed and stop bleeding in the same lesson—clean, economical, merciless.
Eleres refused to meet him on that line.
He yielded a pace, then another, drawing the examiner into the slanted patch of ground between two broken pillars. He angled his shoulders so Varran's next thrust had to follow, then let it slip past and snapped a cut toward the tendon above the instructor's knee.
Varran checked the cut with a knee-slide pivot and rapped Eleres across the forearm, a numbing crack of pain that knocked his guard open.
"Obey," Varran said, voice as flat as hammered iron, and came in high.
Eleres dropped, felt air sing over his scalp, and drove forward at the hip. The impact staggered Varran. Eleres tried to rip the instructor's balance away with a wrist trap—Varran rolled the joint out of danger and repaid the attempt with a backhand that clipped Eleres's cheekbone hard enough to star his vision.
A gasp went up from the wall of onlookers along the arena's rim.
On the observation deck, quills paused over parchment. One instructor swore under his breath. Another—older, hawk-nosed—leaned forward, eyes narrowing. "He's reading the ground," she murmured of Eleres. "Not the man. The ground."
Below, Cedric had reached the edge of the ruined court, sword in hand, breathing hard from his own bouts. "Eleres," he called, warning and question bound into one word.
"Don't," Eleres said without looking. His voice came out calm. "This is mine."
Varran's eyes flicked once to Cedric, once back—taking inventory, dismissing everything outside the duel. "You're done," he told Eleres, and stepped in to make it true.
The next exchange was fast enough to blur. Varran feinted high, cut low, turned the cut into a thrust when Eleres went to meet it, then bound Eleres's blade with a short, brutal clinch that threatened to wrench steel from his hand. Eleres didn't fight the bind—he pivoted with it, letting the pressure carry him, then snapped his elbow backward into Varran's ribs.
Breath exploded between the instructor's teeth. A thin line appeared in his composure.
Eleres saw it.
He pressed—not with grand attacks, but with angles. He brushed the tip along the inside of Varran's forearm to test distance, slid his foot along the skewed flagstone he'd mapped earlier, and forced Varran to step where the rock sank half an inch below level. The instructor compensated—too fast for most eyes to see—but that compensation cost power.
Eleres cut for the inside of the thigh. Varran checked it. Eleres reversed and flicked for the wrist. Varran parried and bit back a hiss. Blood darkened the leather wrap below his thumb.
The crowd's murmur shifted tone—curiosity souring into attention. Karven's smirk had thinned to something smaller.
Varran stopped giving ground.
He surged, driving Eleres back on a line that ignored the traps hidden in the terrain. His blade hammered at Eleres's guard, each impact a punctuation that said you will break. The last blow crashed aside Eleres's sword and laid the instructor's edge along his collarbone in a kiss that promised worse. The steel didn't press down.
"Yield," Varran said softly. "Or I make an example."
"Make it," Eleres whispered.
He let go.
Not of the sword—of the line between them. He folded left as if slipping, felt Varran's pressure surge to capitalize, then spun under the blade, his free hand catching the chain of the examiner's nameplate where it lay against the blue livery. Steel flashed; the chain snapped.
Varran's eyes flared cold. "You—"
Eleres didn't keep the plate. He let it fall. Then he cut.
Not for flesh. For cloth. He opened Varran's cloak from belly to knee, a black sail that tangled the instructor's legs for a fatal heartbeat.
The strike he intended next—he never got to throw it.
Varran tore free with a savage rip, cloak falling away in a blue wave. He came back in with the kind of speed that finished careers. Eleres barely brought his blade up in time; the impact felt like catching a falling beam. Pain rammed through his forearms, into shoulder and spine. Another blow hammered high—Eleres ducked it; a third drove at the hip—Eleres turned; a fourth, fifth—
The sixth carved a line across Eleres's upper arm. Heat flooded cold skin. His fingers slipped, found purchase again.
"Enough!" an instructor shouted from the deck.
Neither man stopped.
Eleres abandoned symmetry. He cut while moving backward, slashing not at Varran's steel but at the air of his rhythm—small disruptions that kept the examiner a fraction off beat. He let his heel find the notch he'd felt earlier, pushed off, and slid past Varran's dominant side. The instructor twisted—fast, always fast—but Eleres's blade kissed his ribs where armor thinned. Red welled through blue.
Varran's face didn't change. His sword did.