"What?" Calver’s voice carried clearly across the platform. "Are you mad that your teammate forfeited?" He let a breath out through his nose. "Pathetic. That’s how it is. Weak gets filtered out. Always has been."

Arthur fired.

The marble was half-size, his output barely holding, but it crossed the floor fast and Calver sidestepped it without raising a wall. The ease of it was the point. He wasn’t taking cover from Arthur anymore.

"Brat." Roz’s voice at his ear was low. "Your reserves are thinning. Slow down."

"I’m fine, master." Arthur fired again. Felt the channels in his forearm strain. "I just hate pricks like him." The next shot formed smaller than the last. "Guys who walk over people because they’re a bit stronger."

Vexis said nothing.

Calver looked at the second missed shot, then dropped his arms and planted both feet wide. The platform groaned.

Then it shook.

The vibration took Arthur’s balance and he went down on one knee, both hands catching on stone. A sharp rock came out of the corner of his vision fast and low.

’Duck.’

He dropped flat. It sang through the air where his head had been and cracked against the barrier wall behind him.

He came up onto one knee and tried to aim and couldn’t. His left eye was running blood down his cheekbone and the entire left side of his vision was gray and smeared. He blinked twice. It didn’t clear. He could aim or he could see. Not both.

’Your aim is gone from the left. I’ll call it. You focus the output and fire when I say.’ Vexis settled close behind him. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

"Okay."

He pulled water to his fingertip, coin-sized, and waited.

’Now. Right side.’

Arthur fired right.

Calver sidestepped left without effort. He looked at Arthur the way someone looks at something trying to bite them with no teeth. "Looks like that eye is giving you some trouble."

Arthur raised his free hand and cleared the blood from his brow. It came back immediately.

"FOLKS, LESTILAUT IS APPROACHING HIS LIMIT! THE ACCUMULATED DAMAGE IS BECOMING TOO MUCH—IS THIS THE END OF THE MISFITS?"

In the family section, Welya’s fist was closed on her knee. Velja sat beside her with his wine untouched. She wasn’t looking at the board or the announcer or anything else. Just Arthur’s back.

You got this.

She didn’t say it out loud. Her fist tightened.

Brother.

Calver raised one hand and pointed it at the stone beneath him. The platform cracked open in a radial burst and thirty-odd rock spikes lifted in a slow rotating array above him, each one shaped to a point. He rolled his shoulder, casual, like he was stretching before something boring.

"Oh for the love of—stop doing that to the floor!" Kreasial’s voice cut across from her side. "I’m trying to fight over here!"

The platform shook again, harder. Arthur lost his feet entirely, hit the stone shoulder-first, and rolled. The spike array launched in a wide fan. He kept rolling, heard them crack into the ground in rapid succession all around him, felt one clip his calf through his trousers and another graze his ribs. He stopped face-up and stared at the sky and breathed and did a quick mental inventory of everything that hurt, which was most of him.

His left eye was shut. His shoulder was screaming. His forearms had nothing left to give.

’Arthur. Forfeit.’ Vexis dropped low beside him.

"No."

’You’ve done enough. Theodore is already off the platform. You can barely—’

"I said no." His jaw was locked. He kept staring at the sky. "And prove what? That we’re exactly what they called us? Failures? Rejects?"

’I’m not talking about them. You can barely hold yourself up.’ Vexis’s voice had dropped.

"I know." He breathed out slow. "I know I’m about to lose. I know I’m close to passing out." He turned his head and looked at Vexis directly. "I will never forfeit."

Vexis looked at him. At the blood on his face, at the way his arms were shaking, at the wet stone underneath him.

"Not after Theodore bled out on that platform. Not after Kreasial’s been fighting two people this entire time." He held the stare. "I’m not forfeiting."

’You’ve already done more than anyone expected—’

"You’re just scared for your body, Vexis." Arthur said it flat. No edge to it. Just the fact. "You never really cared about people. About this."

Vexis’s mouth opened.

It closed.

He didn’t say anything.

Arthur looked away and pushed himself upright.

He raised his index finger. Built the marble. Smaller than a coin. The smallest he’d ever made.

"Brat." Roz’s voice went sharp. "I can feel you pulling your entire reserve into that point. Stop. Right now—"

"I have a plan, master." Arthur grinned. Blood had reached his upper lip. He could taste it. "I always have a plan."

Calver looked at the pinprick of water on Arthur’s fingertip and something moved through his face. Not concern. Closer to pity, with contempt underneath it. He lowered his arms and waited.

"That’s barely a pebble," Calver said. "What are you going to do with that?"

On the far end of the floor, the green-haired woman had sat down on the platform next to the broad-shouldered man and her hands were in her lap. "I forfeit," she said, quietly.

Kreasial smacked the top of her head without looking at her and looked at Arthur instead.

She didn’t say anything.

Xavier had one eye on his own fight and one on Arthur’s finger. He ran a hand slowly through his hair. His mouth barely opened.

"Ignorance," he said.

Arthur took a deep inhale.

Held it.

And pushed.

He pushed everything left in his reserve down his arm, through his elbow, into the channel behind his index finger, and into the marble. Not more water. More compression. More density. He was pulling aetheric blood from his chest, from his back, from everywhere in his body that still had anything left. His arm began shaking from the effort of holding something that wanted to collapse inward on itself.

The water didn’t grow.

It changed color.

Dark first. Then darker. Then the black of something that had stopped being water entirely. A faint purple glow pulsed once from the center, dim and deep, like something lit from very far away.

He couldn’t hear Roz anymore.

He couldn’t hear the crowd.

His veins stood out along his forearm and his nose was bleeding properly now, drops hitting the stone below him. The marble on his fingertip had the weight of something three times its size. He was using both arms to hold the position with one finger extended.

Vexis stared at him without speaking.

Calver had stopped looking bored. His eyes were on the water. He raised both arms and the platform split in three separate places, stone walls rising in overlapping layers, the thickest barriers he’d built in the entire fight. His eyes behind the rising stone had gone wide.

Arthur aimed.

Fired.

The marble left his finger and wasn’t there.

No arc. No visible travel. It simply ceased to exist at one point and the walls were already cracking from the inside, fissures racing through all three layers simultaneously, and then the outermost wall blew apart in a burst of rubble and Calver had one word.

"What—"

The shot reached him.

He crossed the full remaining distance of the platform and hit the spectator barrier and came down it to the floor and lay there with his eyes white and his arms out wide and blood at his hairline.

The crowd was silent.

Two full seconds.

"WHA— WHAT JUST HAPPENED? FOLKS, WHAT WAS THAT? CALVER OF CLASS A IS DOWN—"

Arthur lay down on the stone and looked at the sky. His vision had already started narrowing at the edges, darkness bleeding in from both sides.

"Brat! Talk to me!" Roz’s paws landed on his chest, the green healing light spreading fast and warm. "BRAT!"

"Arrogant people." Arthur exhaled. His grin came out crooked because the muscles on the left side of his face weren’t fully cooperating. "They measure you by what’s on the surface. What they can see." Blood ran down to his chin. "So you show them the surface. You give them exactly what they expect. And you let them decide what that means."

"Stop talking. Right now—"

"He already made up his mind about what I was worth, master." He felt the green warmth moving through his chest, slower than he needed it to be. "All I had to do was agree with him long enough to fire." A beat. "That was my biggest advantage."

Roz pressed both paws down harder. The light intensified. He wasn’t saying anything, which was somehow worse than yelling.

Vexis hovered above him and said nothing.

The healers reached him. Hands on his forearm, his eye, his nose. His vision was narrowing faster now, the darkness coming in from both edges at once.

He caught it in the last moment of clear sight.

Across the floor, Elias had both hands wrapped around something small. A vial, red liquid bright and thin inside the glass, and he tilted it to his mouth in one motion and swallowed it whole. He dropped the empty vial and it shattered on the stone and nobody around him seemed to notice. Then he pressed both palms together and the flames that erupted weren’t orange.

They were blue.

Twice the size of anything he’d shown all format. The heat from them reached Arthur from across the entire floor.

No—

How—

The darkness closed.