Maldrick changed his approach.

He stopped firing individual fields at a moving target. Instead he began laying fields into the arena floor itself—not directed at Tyke’s body, directed at sections of the stone, the gravity pressure increasing in specific zones across the floor, creating areas where the ambient gravity was higher than everywhere else.

Not invisible once Tyke stepped into them.

The floor didn’t change visually—no shimmer, no indicator—but the weight that arrived the moment a foot crossed into a high-gravity zone was immediate and unmistakable. Tyke crossed the edge of the first one mid-stride and the step that should have covered two feet covered eight inches, his momentum dropping like a stone, his body suddenly operating under three times its own weight.

He snapped back.

But the tagged position was inside a second gravity zone Maldrick had laid while Tyke was moving.

Tyke reappeared in the tagged position—directly inside the gravity field.

The weight hit him all at once.

He went to one knee.

The Dravenfall sections came alive—the heavy territorial noise of people watching their fighter’s strategy work, the particular satisfaction of a plan executing correctly at the right moment. The Aurelius sections pulled in the anxious collective breath that had become familiar across the day’s fights.

"Maldrick covers the tagged position," the announcer called. "Tyke snaps back into a gravity field—the reset lands him directly in the zone Maldrick prepared."

Tyke pushed against the weight.

Three times his own body weight pressing down from every direction—not crushing injury, not damage, but a physical demand his muscles could not meet at their natural strength. His knee on the stone. His hands braced against the floor. His body pressed down under the field’s pressure.

He tagged the current position—right hand to hip, the gesture visible even under the weight, even on one knee.

Then he waited.

Maldrick advanced—slowly, the gravitational field requiring concentration to maintain, his movement measured. The dark shimmer at his hands was deeper than it had been at any point in the fight, the maximum output sitting in his palms.

He raised his right hand.

Building more pressure—pushing the gravity field toward four times Tyke’s body weight, the upper limit of the ability, the weight that turned movement into impossibility.

Tyke waited until Maldrick was eight feet away.

Then he snapped back to the current position.

Which was—the current position. The same spot. Except the snap back reset his physical state to the moment he had tagged it—when the field was still at three-times weight rather than four. A fraction of a second of reduced pressure. Not freedom. Not escape. But a fraction.

And in that fraction—

He moved.

Not fast—couldn’t be fast under three-times gravity. But a single lunge, driving off the stone with everything his legs could produce against the multiplied weight, aimed not at Maldrick but at the edge of the gravity zone. The boundary. The line where three-times gravity became normal.

He crossed it.

The weight lifted.

Instantly—completely—the gravity returning to normal as his foot crossed the boundary, the field’s pressure ending at its edge like a wall. He stumbled slightly from the sudden absence of resistance—his muscles still producing the force they had been applying against triple weight, now applying it against nothing—but caught himself and kept moving.

The crowd reacted.

"He reads the edge," the announcer called. "Tyke uses the snap to reset his physical state just long enough to generate the lunge—and crosses the zone boundary before the field can consolidate."

Maldrick turned.

Tyke was outside the gravity zone. Moving. Free.

The shimmer at Maldrick’s hands shifted—the floor fields releasing, the concentration redirecting toward a new directed field aimed at Tyke’s current position.

Tyke tagged immediately. Hip gesture. New reset point. And kept moving.

The Aurelius sections came back up—the anxious held breath releasing into noise. Atlas was loud again—hands off the railing and cupped around his mouth. Mira’s expression had shifted from analytical stillness into something more engaged, her eyes tracking Tyke with the attention of someone whose model was being updated in real time.

Maldrick laid two more floor zones—overlapping this time, the boundaries between them not leading to normal gravity but to a second field. He was reducing the free ground available on the arena floor systematically, each addition making the remaining space more constrained.

Tyke moved in the shrinking space.

Shorter arcs now—the wide circuits of the opening impossible when half the floor was fielded. Sharper cuts, tighter movement, the footwork adapting to what the floor allowed.

He tagged constantly.

Every few seconds—right hand to hip, a new tagged position, the reset point always current, always set before the next field could reach him. The crowd had fully locked onto the gesture. Every hip touch produced a murmur—recognition moving through the neutral sections, people tracking the tags the way they tracked a chess player’s moves, understanding that each gesture was a decision and that the decisions were compounding toward a resolution.

Maldrick raised both hands.

A new technique—not a floor zone, a directed field aimed at the space around Tyke’s body directly. Not the floor beneath his feet. The air surrounding him. A personal field that moved with its target rather than staying fixed to the stone, eliminating the boundary-crossing escape because the boundary was no longer a line on the floor but a sphere around Tyke’s body.

Tyke hit it mid-stride.

The weight arrived from every direction simultaneously—not just downward, sideways, pressing inward from all angles at once. The suffocating pressure of a directed personal field at maximum concentration.

He snapped back.

The tagged position was clear and he reappeared in it—outside the personal field, breathing harder than before, the physical cost of the snap visible in the way he stood.

"The personal field is a different problem," the announcer said. "No boundary to cross. The gravity follows him rather than waiting for him to step into it." He paused. "Tyke got out. But that snap cost more than the ones before it. Maldrick knows. He’s going to keep that pressure up."