Brack changed tactics.

He stopped moving toward Velis directly—stopped presenting himself as a target that could be flanked by separated sections because the first exchange had demonstrated exactly what that cost him. He planted himself near the center of the arena floor and began working the ground instead.

The iron liquid poured from his feet.

It spread across the stone in a slow expanding pool—not fast, not dramatic, just steady and patient, the metallic liquid finding the cracks and irregularities in the surface and filling them, creeping outward from his position in all directions. He let it spread for ten seconds before hardening it—a wide iron plate across the center of the floor, solid and permanent, a foundation that he had claimed.

The crowd watched the floor change.

"Brack takes the ground," the announcer observed. "He can’t chase Splitform effectively—every time he reaches for a section Velis abandons it and moves elsewhere. So he’s stopping the chase and building instead." A pause. "He’s making the arena smaller."

Velis watched the iron plate form from outside its radius.

He had reassembled—the abandoned arm left iron-encased on the floor near the Virex tunnel, his body operating with three limbs, the missing arm apparently not impacting his movement significantly. He circled the edge of the iron plate at distance, reading it, looking at the thickness and the spread and the way Brack was positioned at its center.

Then he detached both legs.

Not from the hip—at the knee. Both legs separating below the knee, the lower sections drifting away from the upper legs while his torso and thighs remained in a standing position that looked anatomically wrong and functionally fine simultaneously. The detached lower legs moved outward—one left, one right—while his upper body walked forward toward the iron plate on the stumps of his upper legs.

The crowd made the involuntary sound again.

Louder this time.

"Both lower legs," the announcer said. His voice had something in it that wasn’t quite composure—the sound of a professional maintaining his craft through something that was genuinely difficult to be composed about. "Velis separates both lower legs at the knee and sends them outward while the upper body advances. Four independently moving sections simultaneously—torso and upper legs, left lower leg, right lower leg." A pause. "He is walking toward Brack on the stumps of his upper legs."

Brack watched it happen.

The upper body advancing across the iron plate—the stumps of the upper legs making contact with the iron surface without slipping, Velis’s control of each section apparently precise enough to manage footing even in this configuration. The two detached lower legs drifting wide on either side, moving around the iron plate’s perimeter rather than across it, approaching Brack’s flanks from outside the ground he had claimed.

Brack hardened both forearms.

Iron coating climbing from his wrists to his elbows, solid and immediate, his arms becoming weapons that could intercept whatever the flanking lower legs were planning.

The upper body reached him first.

Velis’s torso—armless on the right side, left arm extended—came inside Brack’s reach and the remaining arm drove a strike at Brack’s chest. Not a powerful strike—one arm without the mass of a unified body behind it, the section individually lighter than the whole. But it was a distraction rather than an attack, and it worked as a distraction—Brack’s attention moved to the torso in front of him and his iron-coated forearms came up to intercept it.

The left lower leg hit his right ankle.

The right lower leg hit his left calf.

Not kicks—contact. Deliberate surface contact, the detached lower legs pressing against Brack’s skin and holding rather than striking. And Velis did something that took the crowd a moment to understand—he ran iron liquid from the detached legs in reverse. Not Brack’s iron. Velis’s own skin, the sections pressing against Brack’s ankles and calves, maintaining contact long enough for—

Brack realized what was happening and pulled away.

Both legs stepping back off the iron plate, breaking the contact the detached lower legs had been maintaining. The iron liquid on the detached sections hadn’t found a way to affect him—the transfer only worked from his skin outward, not from contact inward. But the moment of confusion had been real and the step back had taken him off his claimed ground for the first time since he had laid it.

The Solmara sections reacted—sharp and satisfied, the acknowledgment of a tactic that had worked even if the specific mechanism hadn’t landed.

Velis reassembled at the edge of the iron plate.

Both lower legs returning, reattaching, his body becoming unified again in a single instant—complete, upright, looking entirely ordinary except for the missing right arm still lying iron-encased near the tunnel.

He looked at Brack across the plate.

Brack looked back.

The iron plate sat between them—Brack’s claimed ground, twelve feet of solid iron floor that he had spent thirty seconds building and that now sat empty because his step back had ceded it.

He walked back onto it.

Velis didn’t stop him.

The fight settled into a pattern across the next two minutes.

Brack building ground—adding to the iron plate in sections, expanding it across the arena floor in deliberate increments, steadily reducing the stone surface available to Velis. Velis working around the expansion—detaching sections to probe and distract, sending limbs at angles that forced Brack to respond, then abandoning whatever got caught and reassembling from what remained.

The abandoned sections accumulated.

The iron-encased right arm near the Virex tunnel. A left hand, caught when Brack managed to close his fist around it during a probing exchange, now sitting at the edge of the iron plate. Three separate finger sections from two different exchanges—Velis losing parts of parts, sections of sections, the granularity of the abandonment getting smaller as Brack’s interception speed improved.

Velis was running a deficit.

Not critically—he was still mobile, still splitting and reassembling, still producing the multi-section approaches that kept Brack from simply walking toward a unified target. But he had less to work with than he had started with, and the iron plate had expanded to cover roughly forty percent of the arena floor, and the combination of those two things was changing the geometry of what was available to him.

The crowd felt the shift.

The Virex sections were giving Brack sustained noise—the sound of supporters watching a strategy work, watching the patient building of an environment that was slowly taking options away from the opponent. The Solmara sections were matching them in volume if not in tone—more urgent, more focused, the sound of people watching their fighter work against a closing window.

Velis detached his entire left arm.

Sent it high—above head height, floating at the ceiling level of the arena’s open air, a section operating at a completely different altitude from everything else on the floor. The arm moved laterally across the arena at height while Velis’s body moved low across the iron plate, the two sections creating a vertical separation that added a new axis to the approach.

Brack tracked the body.

The arm came down fast—dropping from height toward Brack’s position, the speed of the descent making it a different kind of threat from the drifting lateral approaches he had been managing.

Brack caught it.

Iron liquid transfer. Immediate hardening.

Velis abandoned it.

Another arm on the floor.

But Velis’s body had crossed the iron plate during the distraction—had used the descent of the arm to cover ground, and was now on the same side of the plate as Brack, inside the distance the iron ground had been giving him as a buffer.

Close range.

On Brack’s iron plate.

With no arms.

The Virex sections went tense.

The Solmara sections went loud.