The arena was electric.
The Final Match.Damien, the anomaly with no enhancements, against Auren Valebright, the golden prodigy engineered for perfection.
Auren was everything the system praised: a fusion of Ali's rhythm, Tyson's brutality, and the cutting-edge AI neural tech that let him predict moves before they happened. His body pulsed with top-tier fusion serum, a living weapon honed by data, trained by the best, and born to win.
Damien had none of it.Just grit. Scars. And golden eyes that never blinked at giants.
The bell rang.
And the war began.
The first minutes were explosive. Damien closed distance, slipped past AI-predicted jabs, and landed body shots that made even the enhanced crowd wince. But Auren adapted. The AI adjusted. Movements tightened. Reactions sharpened. The tide shifted.
But Damien never backed down.
Ten minutes passed. Then fifteen. Twenty.
The longest fight in Xyprus Academy history was twenty-three minutes. No match had ever gone the full thirty.
They did.
Every second a chapter. Every exchange a clash of ideologies—evolution through machine vs. evolution through will.
Blood hit the mat. Damien's jaw swelled. Auren's ribs cracked. The crowd didn't cheer—they watched, silent, breath held. Two gods in the making. Two truths clashing.
30 seconds left. Damien was exhausted, legs barely holding him. The AI predicted collapse. Sponsors leaned forward, smiling.
But then…
He roared.
Something primal erupted inside Damien. Not fusion. Not code. Just fire. Every ounce of instinct, pain, street-fighting memory, underground brutality — it all ignited.
The Golden-Eyed Beast charged.
Ten seconds.
He launched a barrage that even Auren's AI couldn't fully dodge. A perfect hook. A rising elbow. A slip-counter to the liver. The crowd lost its mind.
But Auren… held.
He bit down, activated full capacity, letting the AI override his instinct and turn his body into a precision weapon. He took the final blow—then returned one.
The bell rang.
Damien dropped to one knee.
Winner: Auren Valebright.
There was no cheer.
Auren stood there, chest heaving, bruised and rattled.
He didn't feel like a winner.
"That wasn't a boy," he whispered to himself. "That was something ancient."
Damien didn't protest the decision. He stood, nodded, and walked away.
Defeated—but undefeated in spirit.
That night, forums exploded. Analysts scrambled. Fighters rewrote training manuals. Coaches reviewed the footage again and again.
A new term was coined across the combat world:
"The Damien Effect."A symbol of what raw, unaltered humanity could still achieve in a world ruled by machines and monsters.
And in the darkest corner of the galaxy, Null Sanctum watched the footage in silence.
"Subject 000… has an heir."