Rico's post-fight interview went exactly as badly as anyone with common sense should have expected.
The league had already realized what the younger demographic thought of the raccoon. He was chaos, commentary, a mascot, a meme engine, and somehow—against all logic—an useful fight analyst whenever he wasn't operate entirely on raccoon logic. So, before Alex had even fully stepped off the ring after defeating Kenai, Rico had been cornered by microphones, lights, and one anchor smiling with the desperate brightness of a producer who knew ratings gold when she saw it.
"What do you think of the fight between Alexandra Vogel and Kenai Haida?"
Rico sat on the desk in the commentators' booth like a furry little warlord, tail twitching, headset crooked, one tiny paw resting on the table with entirely too much authority.
"Alex scary," he said immediately.
The host laughed, because that much was obvious.
"In what way?"
Rico gave the camera a grave look.
"Especially when she didn't get dose of vitamin P."
The booth lost its mind at once.
The commentators turned on him like sharks catching blood.
"What is vitamin P?"
"Can you elaborate?"
"Does team Nemean have a special regimen for Alex?"
Rico opened his mouth.
Phong, on the coach's bench below, felt pure ancestral dread crawl up his spine.
The raccoon was absolutely about to expose something no one in this country, on this network, or in this tax bracket needed to know.
Then the ring shook.
Alex had not even looked toward the booth. She had only stood up, summoned a storm of psychic constructs around herself while waiting for the next match to begin, and the sheer visual violence of it was enough for Rico to understand one thing very clearly: the safest place in the known world was no longer inside the interview.
"Tactical retreat!" he squeaked, and promptly vanished from the desk, abandoning the commentators to their confusion and the audience to their laughter.
Phong rubbed both hands down his face. Dominic wheezed beside him. Jake nearly fell off his seat. Even Emma, who had spent the last fifteen minutes triaging the internet's reaction to Alex's fight with Kenai, had to hide a smile behind one manicured hand.
The camera shifted back to the ring.
Tara Inuit was already there.
She stood under the arena lights with Wings of Ascension resting in her hands, both axes quiet for the moment, but no less wrong for that stillness. She looked toward Alex with the sort of respect that only came after fighting someone hard enough to know the shape of their danger personally.
When the interviewer shoved a microphone toward her, Tara did not waste time pretending confidence for the crowd.
"She improved too fast," Tara said plainly.
That made the commentators go quiet.
She kept going.
"I watched her against Kenai. I watched Boston. I watched everything before that." Tara shook her head once. "She got too versatile. I honestly don't see a weak point right now."
The stadium loved that answer.
Not because it was flattering. Because it was honest.
Then the horn sounded.
And the fight began before most of the audience had fully sat back down.
Tara moved first.
No caution, or gradual read. No attempt to test the shape of Alex's current form with a conservative opener either.
She activated her relic at once.
Wings of Ascension answered with a violent flare of spectral light and blackened wind. The phantom wings that erupted from her back looked less like feathers and more like sharpened gusts. Wind rolled off her in a surge strong enough to make loose debris skitter across the ring and several front-row spectators clutch at their hair and clothes.
It was smart.
Tara had already seen what happened to Kenai when he tried to play a technical ranged game against Alex's current style. She understood better than most that if she let Alexandra Vogel settle into another long-form adaptation cycle, she would die by inches and then by shame. So she chose the one answer that had once forced Dominic Torres into using a suicidal God's Roar Canon.
She became a divebomb.
Wings of Ascension hurled her upward with terrifying acceleration, then folded her back down into a killing descent so steep and so violent that it looked less like a person attacking and more like an anti-air projectile deciding the ground had offended it.
Alex answered exactly as Phong expected and still in a way that made the audience's nerves spark.
Bai Hu's storm erupted around her.
Then the psychic constructs compressed.
Marbles again—dense, pale, spinning things the size of golf balls, beautiful and hateful all at once. They whirled in the storm like planets of concentrated murder, while Alex herself vanished inside the pressure and came out moving faster than anyone sane thought a Mindblade should.
Tara hit the storm head-on.
The brim of Bai Hu's storm caught the first impact and the whole ring shook. The structure beneath their feet groaned. The ward-lines flashed. Dust leaped from hidden seams in the floor.
In the commentary booth, Rico had somehow reappeared just long enough to yell, "This is like throwing a metal ball at a spinning top of death!"
Phong hated how accurate that was.
Because that was exactly what it looked like.
Tara was all singular force—one murderous line, one body weaponized by speed, wind, rage, relic, and terrifying control. Alex was rotational violence—an orbit of crushing psychic mass and storm-pressure wrapped around a center that kept slipping away just enough to avoid becoming prey.
The first clash already established what kind of fight it would be.
Tara rebounded upward immediately, using the winged relic and her wind-magic to yank herself out of the kill zone before the marbles could collapse fully on her. But even that retreat cost her. One dense psychic sphere clipped her thigh as she rose, another smashed into her shoulder, and the psychic pain riding those impacts made her face tighten harder than the physical contact alone should have justified.
Alex did not switch her constructs to long-range weaponry to pursuit. Instead, she pivoted beneath the storm.
Every marble reoriented in a rotating lattice around her. Her body twisted under telekinetic acceleration, eyes tracking, mind already running faster than the crowd's ability to follow. The moment Tara came down again, a dozen attack lanes were already waiting.
The second dive was sharper.
Tara angled her descent to break not through the center, but through one rotating flank of the storm, using wind pressure to disturb the orbit and force an opening. It was good. Very good. A weaker storm-user would have lost the line there. A more static Mindblade would have been pinned for half a breath too long.
Alex changed the storm instead.
Bai Hu's wind compressed on one side and widened on the other, distorting the orbit just enough that Tara's read became wrong in the final instant. The first marble she expected to smash aside hit lower than intended and the second arrived behind it with a whole body's worth of altered spin. Tara got through the edge of the formation but paid for it across her ribs and hip.
Then Alex herself moved inside the opening Tara had just created.
A flash of telekinetic speed delivered a shoulder-line strike. A short, brutal hit that did not look heavy until Tara was thrown sideways by it.
The crowd screamed.
The battle turned into an arm-race of adaption. Tara kept changing forms inside her own class—barbarian pressure one second, caster-like wind control the next—while Alex kept rewriting what her class could look like with every exchange.
Tara rose again.
She had to.
That was one of the cruel truths of fighting an Arbiter Mindblade alone. If you ever gave them a long pause to settle, the problem multiplied. Every second Alex spent alive and studying was a second she got worse to fight. Tara clearly understood that, because even after three direct psychic impacts and one close-range exchange with storm and telekinetic speed, she still forced herself into motion with no visible hesitation.
The third dive came with full rage behind it.
The audience could feel the change. Tara's body thickened with mana turned physical. Her arms, shoulders, and core moved with the terrible rage of a barbarian propelled forward by a cyclone.
She came down like a falling execution.
Alex met her with the storm widened and the marbles accelerated into tighter orbit.
The collision sounded like a building taking a car crash in the sky.
Tara's axe hit one of the condensed psychic spheres and actually cracked the sound barrier around it. The sphere shattered, but the rebound sent two more into her forearm and sternum. Her other axe found the body of the storm and tore through enough wind pressure to make her path lurch through toward Alex's centerline.
For half a second the stadium thought she had done it.
Then Alex vanished sideways with telekinetic acceleration, and Tara's follow-through passed through empty violence instead of flesh.
Another marble hit.
Then another.
Then Alex struck from the blind angle with a compact psychic-laced blow that made Tara hiss air between her teeth.
The commentators were not even pretending professional composure anymore.
"Every exchange is catastrophic!"
"That passive Arbiter Mindblade has is simply unfair!"
"This is absurd!"
Rico, now fully reinstalled and treated by the network like some kind of demonic weather monkey they had no legal right to control, banged on the desk and shrieked, "Too much processing power! I demand a new patch! Both should be nerfed unless they create Kamen Rider armor!"
Below, Tara was still fighting.
That was what made the match so compelling.
If this had been any other one-versus-one, the answer would already have settled. Alex had the field. Alex had the adaptation speed. Alex had the class advantage in a long solo fight.
But Tara was not "any other."
She had Wings of Ascension. She had the kind of raw bodily violence that made mistakes fatal. And she had the sort of stubborn warrior's pride that refused to let an impossible problem become an immediate surrender.
So she kept divebombing.
Again and again and again.
Each descent a fresh attempt to break the spinning geometry before it could finish taking her apart. Each rise a little rougher. Each landing a little less stable. Wind screamed. Psychic marbles hammered. Telekinetic speed turned Alex from a center into a shifting point of reference the eye could not quite trust.
It became, exactly as Rico had said, a metal ball colliding with a spinning top of death.
And after the first minute, the fight stopped feeling like strategy and started feeling like attrition.
Not on mana. Not yet.
On pain.
That was the part the commentator had warned everyone about.
Tara's breathing grew harsher in ways her physical stamina should not have allowed. Her movements stayed strong—too strong, even—but the seams between them started to show. A half-beat too slow on recovery. A jaw locked too hard. One blink too long after taking a marble to the shoulder.
Every psychic impact carried more than bruising force.
Arbiter Mindblade pain rode the contact like a curse. Not enough to shut Tara down in one blow. But pain accumulated, and people self-preservation instinct screamed avoidance, demanded rest, and ordered retreat.
Tara was being worn from the inside of sensation itself.
Alex's own exhaustion showed too. The cost of running Bai Hu's storm at this intensity while repeatedly boosting her own body with telekinesis. Sweat shone along her neck. Her breath sharpened. The storm remained deadly, but a little less effortless with each sequence.
The crowd felt that narrowing.
So did the online audience.
Viewership exploded.
The numbers crashed through thresholds that streaming infrastructure had not expected a league match to hit. Several live feeds dropped. Some backup feeds lagged and reconnected. Cable channels posted emergency on-screen notices about "unprecedented audience demand." By the end of the second minute, people were already saying the back-to-back spectacle of Alex versus Kenai and now Alex versus Tara had reached the kind of numbers only a Super Bowl or a global disaster usually touched.
On another channel, Adam Choi was already being interviewed live about the fight as it happened.
But in the ring, no one had time to care.
The final sequence came after one especially violent exchange where Tara tried to use a suicidal divebomb attack to obliterate the ring all together in that same way Dominic had forced a draw on her. She slammed against the outer edge of Bai Hu's storm with enough force to make the entire rotating orbit shudder. Two marbles burst apart. One of her axes clipped Alex's shoulder. Alex's return strike drove a compressed sphere into Tara's abdomen hard enough to fold her.
For a heartbeat, both women remained upright by pure refusal.
Then Tara dropped to one knee. One hand still clutching an axe. The wings behind her flickered, reformed halfway, and then stuttered.
Alex stood a few feet away, storm still alive but visibly thinner now, the psychic marbles spinning slower as her breathing finally showed the cost.
Tara looked up.
She was panting hard enough that every inhale seemed to catch on something broken. And yet when she spoke, her voice still carried the rough honesty Phong liked about her.
"This," she said, dragging in another breath, "is unfair."
The audience went silent enough to hear her.
"A solo fight against an Arbiter Mindblade," Tara said, with one short bitter laugh that had no malice in it. "Is simply absurd."
Then she tipped sideways and fell unconscious.
The referee called it immediately.
Winner: Alexandra Vogel.
The stadium detonated.
Alex had beaten Kenai. Then Tara. Back-to-back.
Under the eyes of the whole country and half the internet.
Adam Choi, on cable television, was asked almost at once for his analysis. The producers had clearly intended drama, but Adam answered like himself—precise, cool, and annoyingly correct.
"I think everyone who knew a thing or two about Alexandra Vogel have realized it by now: Tara did not lose to lack of mana," he said. "Nor to ordinary physical exhaustion. She was worn down by the pain layer of Arbiter Mindblade psychic attacks. That changes how long one can function at peak decision-making."
When asked whether the current Alex had any real weakness in one-versus-one, Adam hesitated just enough to make the answer feel expensive.
"Right now," he said, "outside of perhaps Kaiser, Yue Ting, or Vân... no."
That quote would be repeated for days.
In the ring, Alex barely looked like a woman who had just furthered her own legend.
She looked tired. Very tired.
The storm around her collapsed in stages. The last psychic marbles dissolved. She straightened once, slowly, and then stepped back toward Team Nemean with the controlled exhaustion of someone refusing to look weaker than she felt in front of a crowd this large.
Phong stood before she reached them.
He did not say anything at first.
He only let himself see the truth of it. The sweat. The strain. The small tightness at the edge of her eyes that meant the fight had cost her more than the audience would ever know.
Then he handed her water.
And the whole stadium, the feeds, the ratings, the commentators, the analysts, and the raccoon yelling about game balance could do nothing but orbit around the fact that Alexandra Vogel had just devoured two of the East Coast's best.