Mark was closing distance and the crowd understood what the closing meant.

The Dead Eyes built faster at close range—the sustained gaze more effective with less space between fighter and target, the simulation’s construction rate climbing as the distance dropped. Mark needed to close. Ordin needed to keep him away. Every exchange was a contest between the closing and the keeping away and the crowd was watching both dynamics simultaneously.

Ordin fired Arrow Bursts continuously—not aimed at specific positions but creating coverage, filling the space between them with compressed air projectiles that forced Mark’s evasion to spend more effort per step of approach.

The silver eyes read each one.

Mark moved through the coverage—not efficiently, the sustained rate of bursts requiring real evasion rather than single-exchange readings, his path toward Ordin not straight but present, the approach continuing through the projectile field.

Thirty feet.

Twenty-five.

Ordin switched to Thousand Arrows—the rapid consecutive claps, the barrage technique, the coverage denser than individual Arrow Bursts could produce, the compressed air arriving from multiple successive claps in the time span that made individual evasions stack.

Mark’s silver eyes processed the barrage.

He evaded seven of the first ten.

Three hit—left shoulder, right side, left thigh. Real force. Real impact. The barrage’s coverage exceeding the reflex’s perfect evasion rate.

He kept coming.

Twenty feet.

The crowd was standing—not all of it, the sections closest to the action, the investment pulling people to their feet without a conscious decision, the fight producing the involuntary response.

"Three hits from the barrage," the announcer said. "The thousand arrows technique overwhelming the reflex’s perfect coverage—too many projectiles too fast, the silver eyes reading most of them but not all of them. Mark is absorbing the ones he can’t avoid." A pause. "And he’s still closing."

Ordin switched to the Vacuum Spear.

Pulling his palms apart to the extended compression position—the larger projectile, the drilling force, aimed at Mark’s approach path rather than his current position, predicting where the approach would carry him rather than targeting where he was.

Mark’s silver eyes read the extended separation.

Read the angle.

Read the predicted path.

He changed his approach angle—not randomly, precisely, the reflex finding the direction that Ordin’s predicted-path targeting hadn’t accounted for.

The Vacuum Spear fired.

It drilled through the space Mark had just vacated—the angle change having carried him out of the predicted path, the large projectile spending itself on empty arena rather than on the fighter crossing the floor.

Fifteen feet.

The crowd’s noise had been building since the fight began and it reached a new level as Mark crossed the fifteen-foot threshold—the specific noise of people watching a plan work, watching distance close despite everything designed to prevent it, the approach that had been absorbing hits and finding gaps and changing angles arriving at the range where the fight’s dynamic would shift.

Ordin understood the shift.

At fifteen feet the Arrow Burst’s speed advantage was compressed—the burst still faster than sound but the reaction window had less distance to work across, the burst arriving at Mark’s position faster than it had from thirty feet because the distance was half. The silver eyes’ reflex advantage scaled with distance—at thirty feet the reading gave Mark more time to act on the information. At fifteen the time was tighter.

He fired an Arrow Burst at fifteen feet—the compression minimal, the release immediate, the burst closing fifteen feet of distance in a fraction of the time it had closed thirty feet.

Mark’s reflex caught it.

Barely—the available time compressed, the evasion smaller than the previous evasions had been, a lateral shift rather than a full sidestep. The burst grazed his left arm.

Real contact. Partial impact.

His left arm went partially numb—the burst’s force at fifteen feet carrying more concentrated energy per unit area than the thirty-foot shots had carried after dispersing across the longer distance.

Ten feet.

Ordin clapped again—Arrow Burst, immediate, the fifteen-foot compression.

Mark’s reflex caught it again—smaller evasion, tighter timing, the burst missing cleanly but the margin having shrunk from feet to inches.

Eight feet.

The crowd was completely on its feet now—every section, every allegiance, the noise at a sustained level that wasn’t the sharp detonation of a single moment but the continuous roar of a crowd that had been climbing for two minutes and hadn’t found the ceiling yet.

The Aurelius sections were producing a specific sound—the sound of people who wanted Mark to take one more step, cross one more foot of distance, get inside the range where the fight would change.

The Solmara sections were producing the opposite specific sound—the sound of people watching their fighter hold a line that kept getting closer.

Ordin pulled his palms to maximum stretch.

Sky Splitter.

The maximum compression—both palms at their widest, the atmosphere between them being drawn from the widest separation the tissue could produce. The largest technique. The one that tore trenches through battlefield.

At eight feet.

The crowd went silent.

The specific silence that arrived when something was about to happen that everyone could see coming and nobody could look away from.

Mark’s silver eyes read the maximum stretch.

At eight feet the Sky Splitter’s buildup window was compressed—less time to cover distance during the compression than the thirty-foot Vacuum Spear had provided. But the silver eyes weren’t reading the buildup to close distance. They were reading it to find the evasion path.

The Sky Splitter at eight feet would produce a wide devastating force that covered more of the available space than a single evasion could clear.

Mark dropped.

Not sideways—down, the evasion that closed zero distance but removed his profile from the horizontal plane where the Sky Splitter’s force would travel.

Ordin clapped.

The Sky Splitter released at eight feet—the full-power force traveling forward at Mark’s previous position.

Over his head.

The compressed air tearing through the space Mark had occupied a half-second before, the wide devastating force traveling across the arena at the height Mark had been standing, the trench cutting through the space rather than through him.

Mark was on the floor at eight feet.

Ordin was on his feet at eight feet.

Eight feet.

Mark pushed up from the floor—immediately, the drop having been a reflex rather than a recovery, his body finding standing in the same motion.

He was at eight feet.

The Solmara sections came alive—Ordin having just produced the Sky Splitter and still standing with Mark at eight feet, the largest technique not having created the distance it had been designed to create.

The Aurelius sections answered immediately—Mark being at eight feet, the simulation building, the distance that had taken the entire exchange to close having been maintained through the Sky Splitter by a reflex that had read maximum stretch and dropped instead of evading horizontally.

The crowd’s noise at eight feet was the loudest it had been.