The brackets reset overnight, and whatever ease the first round had offered vanished with it.
"Second round opponents are never soft," John warned them, walking the four of them toward the rings the next morning. "Anyone still standing this deep already proved they belong here."
He wasn't exaggerating.
---
Almond's opponent called himself Vherim, and the crowd on the Aurelian ring had already started calling him something else entirely.
"The Unbound," a nearby spectator murmured, as the man's blade shifted color three times before the match even began. "His deck doesn't hold one shape. It refuses to."
Almond read the blade the moment the fight opened, the way he read everything, and found nothing waiting for him but confusion. The weapon's essence changed between one heartbeat and the next, iron becoming glass becoming something that wasn't quite fire, no single truth sitting still long enough to be read.
