`[1]`
James's weight came forward onto the balls of his feet.
Forty metres away, Cormac dropped his centre and the frost under his boots thickened with a dry cracking sound, like a windscreen going in slow motion.
`[BLOOD WRIT COMMENCED]`
Cormac moved first.
He did not throw anything.
He drove his right hand into the reinforced floor.
**CRACK.**
Ice went out of his palm in a white shockwave, and the temperature in that arena dropped so hard and so fast that James's next breath came out of him in a cloud.
Frost tore along the seams of the combat platform in branching lines, faster than a man could run, and where two lines met the whole surface between them went white and kept going. Twelve seconds after the count hit zero there was no reinforced grey floor left anywhere on the platform.
There was a frozen lake, sixty metres across, and two men standing on it.
