The squad walked into the arena without speaking; the weight of the upcoming fight sat heavy on all of our shoulders.
Park was in the stands with bruised ribs and a medic's instruction to stay seated. We were down a man, five against six. And the six we were facing had just dismantled the strongest individual fighters in the barracks.
Osei's network entered through the opposite gate, and the difference from every previous opponent was immediate. They didn't hesitate on the terrain, they didn't scan the walls or study the elevation, they flowed into the arena. Each member arrived at their position through coordination with no visible mechanism.
The crowd was already quiet with anticipation. They'd watched Osei's network dismantle Miller's squad in round two. The murmur that had accompanied our first two matches — surprise, excitement, the energy of an underdog story — was no longer present.
"Positions," I said.
The squad moved. Ren was already sliding toward a ground-level sightline before I'd finished the word — he'd read the arena on entry. Hsu settled behind a partial wall, mapping out where to position herself to achieve the best coverage. Jin didn't need direction; she was always forward. I drifted to the western approach while Tomás took a flanking position near the depression's southern rim.
The horn sounded.
Osei's fighters advanced in pairs, testing approaches, retreating before contact. Each retreat happened a half-second before our response could connect, the kind of anticipation that shouldn't exist without lines of sight. The skin on the back of my neck prickled. This was a probe— and it felt wrong before I could name why.
"South pair rotating to the east wall," Ren called. "Third pair holding centre — screening."
"The screening pair is bait," Tomás said. "They want you to engage the centre so the south pair flanks through the—"
He stopped mid-sentence.
I looked at him. He was staring at the arena with an odd expression, as the central pair began to fall out of their previous position.
"I think they can hear me," he said quietly.
Silence.
"Then stop calling patterns," I said. "Positions only. Nothing interpretive."
Tomás closed his mouth. He pulled back toward the depression's southern wall and shifted to a holding position. Guarding an approach with his body.
Jin found the first real engagement by the kill house.
She burst through a wall gap, and the Osei fighter saw her coming. He retreated three steps, his guard high, buying time.
The second fighter arrived from behind the adjacent wall. The timing was seamless; he'd been moving into position before Jin committed, the coordination deciding her opponent's response before the opponent himself had reacted. Two on one, both knowing exactly where the other stood without exchanging a word or a glance.
Jin adjusted. She shortened her movements, tightened her transitions.
The first Osei fighter pressed from the front. Nothing reckless — measured combinations that kept Jin's guard occupied. The second circled to her left, restricting her lateral movement, compressing the space she needed to generate acceleration. The corridor shrank around her. Every step they took tightened the cage.
She found an angle. A gap between the front fighter's combination and the flanker's positioning, where neither had coverage. She burst through it and tagged the front fighter clean. Hard enough that he staggered into the wall.
But the burst had opened her left side. The flanker's strike landed on her ribs before she could reset. Not a finishing blow, Jin was too fast for that, even mid-transition, but the impact had consequences.
Jin fought for about half a minute as we watched, unable to cross the open ground to assist. Eventually, she brought one down before slinking off through a gap in the terrain, moving around to rendezvous with us in the depression.
One elimination for one injury, not a bad trade if we had a full team.
[XP GAINED: 32]
Osei's network adjusted and reorganised in seconds. They regrouped and reformed, three in the front forming a pincer and two in the back for support. Enough distance to exploit.
Five remaining.
I grinned and called out an order, "Hsu intercept their back line, Par—." I paused, realising we were a man down. "You'll have to harass them, break up their rhythm while we can dismantle their centre."
Hsu nodded and moved off, circling around to find the best place to exploit. The two groups moved around each other like a pack of circling dogs. However, there was a shift just before Hsu could get into position.
The two fighters in the rear peeled off from the front three and charged directly in the direction of Hsu. We were caught out of position.
Two fighters advanced toward us while the third cut across the depression, blocking Ren's sightline to the western approach. Isolating the squad's eyes from each other.
"Ren — they're cutting you off," I called. "Fall back to the south wall."
"Can't," He shouted back, "The main element has started to cut off the south approach. "
Shit, they're predicting our moves.
One of Osei's group had partitioned from the main three and positioned themselves on Ren's retreat path. The advancement on Hsu was the visible ploy. The trap on Ren was the real one.
The Osei fighter came through the south approach. Bigger, stronger, almost twenty levels above Ren in every physical stat. Ren didn't try to match him. He shifted to the narrow space between two partial walls — the gap where the drainage channel ran underneath the arena floor. The surface there was different — looser gravel over a hollow space that changed the acoustics. Ren heard the fighter's weight shift before the strike came.
He used it. Three transitions, each one triggered by sound rather than sight — the specific crunch of gravel over hollow space telling him which direction the force was coming from. The fighter overcommitted twice, expecting the static target of a spotter caught out of position.
The fourth transition. The Osei fighter adjusted and started controlling the space. Methodical pressure that didn't rely on rushes that Ren could hear coming. The gap closed around Ren like a fist. A combination he read correctly but couldn't physically stop.
He went down. Hand up.
[XP GAINED: 14]
Without Ren covering Hsu's position, the two Osei fighters converged. Hsu retreated in a performance of her life. She moved through escape routes she'd mapped from observation, ducking through a gap between two panels that the Osei fighters hadn't identified, reversing through the depression's eastern rim where the partial walls created a chicane that forced single-file pursuit. The chasers had to adjust twice.
We tried moving as a unit to catch the outnumbered foe in a typical divide-and-conquer strategy, but as we did so, they immediately responded. Rotating across our front lines, they switched who was targeting whom like a patrol shift change. We were constantly having to skirmish across the open terrain to keep the pressure off Hsu, and we were being ground down slowly.
Tomás appeared to my left as we began our next pursuit.
"We can't keep this up; we have to retreat back to a favourable position. We can use the open terrain, but they're too coordinated to make a real difference. We need to draw them in."
I nodded. It was a sound play, but it meant leaving Hsu and hoping she'd make it out on her own. So we moved, I called for a general retreat, and to regroup. Jin and Tomás both acknowledged as we pulled away.
We caught it just in time, as Osei himself was already making a move onto the depression with his squad. A smaller woman with dark hair, she was quick like Jin but hit almost as hard as Miller.
Our retreat caught Osei off guard as he began to pull back, realising he was outnumbered and out of position. We pressed the advantage, Jin launching herself towards Ripley—Osei's number two. The opening strikes were something to behold; the two moved in a blur of punches, kicks, and blocks. Jin had the upper hand in the opening barrage, but Osei continued his retreat backwards with Ripley. Jin must have caught that something was wrong as she pulled back on the retreat.
Hsu was unfortunately cornered in a dead-end corridor. She turned, raised her guard, and blocked the first strike, her form textbook-correct. The second broke through.
Within moments, her hand was up.
"Two at the south corridor, four metres apart—" Her voice as she went down.
Three of us left. Jin at seventy per cent, and Tomás. All against four Osei fighters with psychic coordination. What's the winning play, Marcus? Think.
The voice infrastructure that had driven our first two matches was gone. We couldn't audibly call out our movements, likely due to an auditory deviation on the opposing side.
They finally decided to come and finish the job,
"Jin — east approach, one incoming. Tomás — hold west, space." I shouted, everything running on maximum.
[XP GAINED: 28]
Alright, Marcus think. Osei can only transmit information he sees or is relayed. So we have to block out the sightlines and minimise his information. Let's spread out. We can't beat them in a formation-on-formation fight. Alright.
I disappeared behind the eastern wall. Three seconds of invisibility to the network. Emerged behind an Osei fighter advancing on Jin's position. He didn't know I was there until the impact.
[XP GAINED: 48]
The fighter who'd eliminated Hsu was four metres away, turning toward the sound I'd made. The corridor between two partial walls only had space for one person.
If I pressed now, before the network recalculated, before the remaining fighters could coordinate a response, I might be able to make something out of this.
I pressed.
The corridor negated the numerical advantage they held. I found the one who took down Hsu and exchanged three blows of genuine resistance. His guard was searching for the pattern in my approach and found nothing. The third exchange — I feinted high and went low, a combination born in this corridor three seconds ago.
He went down.
[XP GAINED: 52]
The stands erupted. Two eliminations in fifteen seconds.
I glanced up, unable to help it.
David's hand had moved to his datapad. Writing. For the first time in three matches.
The roar settled slowly, processing what they'd seen, the volume dropping from eruption to sustained intensity as the arena recalculated the fight.
But the effort had cost me. My lungs burned, the rib from fight one still screaming, and my hands were swollen and hot.
Before I could move to reinforce the main position, Ripley had turned her attention back on Jin.
His other remaining fighter engaged Tomás on the western flank. His transitions flowing around his strikes, counter-attacks arriving from angles the psychic link couldn't predict. For thirty seconds, he held. His body moved with the same strangeness that had confused every opponent he faced.
The Osei fighter feinted a retreat. Tomás followed — half a step into the space he'd vacated. Osei arrived from behind the adjacent wall. Two on one. The two pressed in on him; he adjusted his position and found a tight position within a corridor that would limit it to two one-on-one fights.
In the first exchange, Tomás found the space between them and slipped through, and reset. Second exchange — they'd adjusted. Tighter. Less space to slip through. Tomás' counter caught Osei's fighter on the shoulder, but the return strike landed clean on his guard arm. Third exchange — they had him bracketed. No angle to find. No space to flow into. The style needed room to breathe, and they'd taken it all.
I was running toward his position before his hand went up.
Shit.
Jin continued her fight with Ripley. Seventy per cent acceleration is still faster than most people at full capacity. She tagged Ripley hard enough to stagger her into the wall, and eventually, she went down.
But the engagement pulled Jin out of position, and Osei was already advancing on her position. I pulled from my corridor and began jogging over to her, but I was too far. In moments, Jin closed the gap with Osei, content to use her tried-and-tested method of bullrushing.
Her instincts were sharp, her guard sound. But Osei's read on physical intention gave him a half-beat of anticipation — his guard arriving before her strike, his counter launching before her recovery.
She lasted longer than the numbers said she should.
She went down.
[XP GAINED: 38]
I stood alone in the arena, two against one.
The sound drained away — the crowd noise, the scuffle of gravel, the echoes off the walls.
Osei stood ten metres away. The arena between us was empty except for dust and the marks our squads had left in the gravel. Calm and fresh.
I was breathing hard. Three matches. The accumulated toll of a day that had demanded everything and was now asking for more.
My body wanted to stop, every muscle and instinct screaming at me to give up.
I put up my guard.
Osei moved first. He fought from a low stance — weight forward, hands positioned wider than the rotations taught. We tiptoed around each other, circling. There was still another fighter in the arena. I had to make this quick.
I pushed forward, the first to make a move. I used every feint I'd practised, every strange angle, and every strike in my repertoire.
His guard adjusted before my strikes arrived. He read the twitch of a shoulder, the shift of weight, the body's preparations visible to a sensitivity that operated below conscious thought.
Three exchanges. Each genuine, each close. The gap between us was real — his stats higher, his stamina fuller, his body carrying one match to my three. But my approaches without a pattern found angles that his perception couldn't fully cover.
In the fourth exchange, I found a familiar sensation, my mind working blank as I struck out against him, pure reaction. No thought to telegraph, no thoughts to read. My fist arrived at the gap between his wide guard and his ribs, and I felt the impact land clean.
Osei staggered. The first clean hit anyone had landed on him in three matches. The crowd inhaled — a sound like the arena itself gasping.
For one second, the outcome was uncertain.
Then Osei reset. He'd felt the approach that bypassed his deviation, and in the half-second of recovery, he'd already adjusted. The fifth exchange. I committed to the same angle — the only thing that had worked.
But by the time I realised my mistake, he had read the commitment. The same angle twice meant there was thought behind it, not pure movement.
His counter arrived at the exact moment my guard opened.
Clean. Precise. The impact travelled through my ribs, and I knew before I hit the gravel that the fight was over.
I took a knee. Raised my hand.
"Elimination — Squad Osei takes the match."
[XP GAINED: 264]
Osei walked over. Extended his hand.
I took it, and he pulled me up. His grip was firm and brief.
"Your squad is better than your level suggests," he said.
"Yours is exactly as good as I expected."
The corner of his mouth twitched. He walked away, and his network reformed around him. The surviving and eliminated members gather with quiet cohesion.
Shit, I just lost one-on-one. He didn't even need the extra fighter; that's not good enough, Marcus. Do better.
The squad gathered in the staging area. Jin limping. Hsu holding her side. Park and Ren already there. Tomás with his notebook still closed.
I briefly checked my interface in the down time.
[XP: 499 / 800]
[LEVEL: 16]
[QUEST: PROVING GROUND — ACTIVE]
"You good?" Tomás asked.
"I'll live. How'd we look?"
"Like a squad that should have been eliminated in round one and instead made Osei fight for every inch."
"The sponsors noticed," Park added with a wink.
I looked up at the observation deck. The holographic projections had sharpened — evaluators leaning forward, resolution increasing as attention focused. The blue-tinged ghosts that had been passively watching were now actively engaged.
In the Tiernan section, David was still writing. Michael wasn't smiling. The unknown woman's hands rested on the arms of her chair, fingers extended.
Kael sat beside them. Unreadable. His eyes were on me as I stood in the gravel with my squad around me, bruised and beaten and somehow more visible than I'd ever been.
Phase one was over. We'd lost. And the Tiernans were paying closer attention than when we were winning.
"Phase two brackets post in an hour," Tomás said. "Paired combat."
Jin was standing beside me. Close enough that our shoulders almost touched.
"Paired combat," she said.