After Julius and Lin, those who had been holding the inner arena reached Ren first…
His parents, Taro and Liu, whose beasts had specific capabilities that had kept them functional through the sustained defense when others had been forced back, still relatively fresh despite the hours, still clear-eyed in the way that tamers were when they had pushed hard but not past their limits.
Other fighters who had held the inner perimeter and stayed when the outer lines gave ground made their way in from the edges.
The dead mutants covered the ground in every direction.
Moving toward the center required attention to where you placed each foot, which meant the walk itself became a kind of accounting, each body on the ground a reminder that what had happened here in the last several hours was too large to process in a single pass. The mind touched the edges of it and moved on to the next step, and the next, because that was what the situation required.
