The day of the Quarterfinals felt like the first day of a new season. The festive air of the preliminaries was gone, replaced by a sharp, biting tension that clung to the air like the morning mist. The lesser arenas were silent, their sands swept clean. All eyes in the capital, from the highest noble to the lowest commoner, were now focused on a single stage: the Jade Arena, a smaller, more intimate space designed for duels of pure skill. The eight of us who remained were no longer just competitors; we were contenders. Every fighter left was a proven, high-level Artisan, a young monster in the making, and the crowd's expectations were sky-high.
My opponent was Lyra Corva.
As I walked onto the pristine white sand, the roar of the crowd was a distant, irrelevant wave washing against the shores of my focus. I could feel the weight of a hundred thousand gazes, including those from the royal box where Marquis Evander sat with the grim stillness of a hawk on its perch. But my attention was solely on the woman across from me.
Lyra stood there, a slim figure in dark, emerald-green silks that seemed to absorb the bright sunlight. She held two short, wicked-looking daggers in a reverse grip, her posture relaxed but radiating a coiled, predatory energy. Her Path, the Eastern Way of the Silent Step, was the perfect antithesis to my own. My style was grounded in a steady, internal rhythm, a fortress of control. Hers was pure, untraceable chaos, a wind that could slip through any crack.
She gave me a single, sharp, analytical nod. There was no animosity in her eyes, only the cool, professional focus of a predator assessing its prey. This wasn't a battle of honor or ego. It was a problem to be solved, and I was her problem.
The proctor's signal dropped. I immediately sank into the Two-Heart Cadence, the world slowing, my senses sharpening to a fine point.
Lyra vanished.
It wasn't a burst of speed or a dramatic lunge that I could track. One moment she was there, a clear target fifteen paces away, and the next, the space she had occupied was simply empty. My eyes darted around the arena, trying to catch a flicker of movement, a puff of sand. Nothing. The silence stretched for a full, agonizing second, a void in the heart of the roaring stadium.
Then, a whisper of displaced air to my left.
I pivoted on instinct, the cadence guiding my body a split second before my mind could react. A silver dagger sliced through the space where my ribs had been, so close I felt the chill of the Aether-infused steel on my skin. I didn't even have time to register the attack before she was gone again, melting back into the arena's ambient energy, leaving no trace.
A prickling sensation on the back of my neck. I dropped low, and a second dagger whistled over my head with a sound like a tearing sheet of silk. I spun, my palm glowing with the ready light of a Rhythmic Infusion, and slammed it into empty air. She wasn't there anymore.
A sharp, stinging pain erupted on my right arm. I looked down to see a shallow, bloody gash, a perfect, clean line. It wasn't deep, but it was a message, written in my own blood. 'I can touch you whenever I want.'
This was her domain. The open, sunlit arena had become her personal hunting ground. The crowd was a blur, their faces a mix of confusion and excitement. They couldn't follow her movements either. All they could see was me, the confident victor from the previous rounds, being led in a desperate, one-sided dance. She was a phantom, her speed a constant, pressing threat, forcing me onto the defensive, her daggers a relentless series of feints and lunges from a dozen different directions at once.
'She's deliberately shattering my tempo,' I realized, my mind racing as I parried another invisible strike, the clash of my gauntlet against her dagger the only proof she was even there. She had watched my previous fights. She understood that my power was based on a steady, internal rhythm. Her style was designed to overwhelm me with so much sensory input that I couldn't find the single, steady beat I needed to counterattack. She was a storm of static, and my song was being drowned out.
She was winning.
I was bleeding from a half-dozen shallow cuts now, each one a minor annoyance, but the cumulative effect was a slow, steady drain on my stamina and concentration. Every time I tried to gather my focus for a proper Rhythmic Infusion, to find that perfect moment of harmony, she would be gone, her attack coming from a new, unexpected angle. I was a rock in a river of blades, and the water was rising, threatening to pull me under. My perfect defense was useless against an enemy who could choose to simply not be where I was defending.
The frustration was a hot, coiling thing in my chest. I was stronger. My infusions were more powerful than her simple aura-clad daggers. But it didn't matter. You couldn't punch a ghost. The crowd sensed it too, the initial awe at my evasiveness turning into the low, hungry murmur of an impending upset. The great 'Dragon of the West' was being toyed with.
Lyra appeared in front of me, a rare, direct confrontation. I saw it as an opportunity, gathering my power for a strike. It was a feint. As I committed my energy, she vanished again, and a searing pain erupted on my calf. My leg buckled, and I dropped to one knee. The cut was deeper this time, a deliberate, crippling blow designed to slow me, to ground me.
She materialized ten feet away, her daggers held loosely, her breathing even, her expression as calm and focused as it had been at the start. She was dissecting me, piece by piece, with the cold, detached precision of a master surgeon.
I knelt there, panting, the blood from my leg staining the white sand a dark crimson. My eyes were useless. My hearing was useless. Every conventional sense I possessed was a liability, a gateway for her misdirection. I was losing. Badly. The path to victory was closing with every drop of blood I spilled.
'This isn't working,' I thought, the thought a sharp, cold point of clarity in the haze of pain and frustration. 'I'm trying to fight her on her terms. I'm trying to see a phantom. I'm trying to hear a whisper. I need a new sense.'
A memory surfaced, unbidden. The absolute, perfect darkness of the Voidstone Chamber. A place where sight and sound had been meaningless, where the only thing that was real was the rhythm of my own existence, a constant, unshakable beat in the heart of nothing.
Lyra began to move, a circling predator closing in for the final, decisive blow. She saw the wound on my leg, saw my faltering stance. She saw a cornered animal, ready for the slaughter.
'Stop looking,' a voice whispered from the heart of the dragon, a primal instinct that cut through my human panic. 'Stop listening. Start feeling.'
It was a desperate, insane gamble. In the split second before her final attack, I did something no fighter in their right mind would ever do. I took a deep breath, ignored the searing pain in my leg, and I closed my eyes.