The guard pair on the Alpha's left broke formation first, and Jax met them before they finished turning. Gold carried him across the boards in two strides that his legs had never owned.
The first grey came apart against his fist in a way that made the crowd sound again. He took the second by a hind leg, swung it clear of the bleachers, and finished it on the floor.
Another pair came off the wall at his back, committed the moment he looked busy. He turned inside their angle without thinking, because the gold turned him, and met them with an elbow apiece.
Both went down and stayed down, which four hours ago would have been a miracle. The room made the sound it used to make for buzzer beaters, twice as loud and half as steady.
Eight of the pack remained when the count mattered, plus the plated commander holding the center. The gym floor had become its board, marked in wrecked barricade and open lanes. Every lane led through him, which was how both sides wanted it.
Power like this had a current in it, warm and approving, rising every time the gym cheered. He could have lived inside the feeling if the script would stop interrupting.
[ Duration: 4:10 remaining. ]
[ Tithe: forty percent of all EXP earned under sponsorship transfers to your patron. ]
He did not know what EXP was worth yet, only that the world had started counting it. Whatever he was buying tonight, somebody else was collecting almost half of it at the door.
Diana watched the golden ropes instead of the kills, because the kills were going fine. With every surge the ropes drew tighter, sinking until they looked less like light lying on him and more like light stitched through.
Marks had climbed his forearms in thin bands, the gold going dull where it touched skin. She had taped enough sprains to know a binding when she saw one tightening.
She tried counting the surges against her own pulse to find the rate of it. The math would not settle, but the direction of the math was plain, and the direction was down.
"Jax, pace it," she called from the cage mouth, and heard the crowd bury the words.
Inside the cage her patients pressed against the mesh to watch him work. She pulled two of them back from the gap by their collars and hated how much of her job tonight was collars.
The cage at least was working the way she had argued it would. Nothing could pair up inside the mesh corridor, and both mouths of it stayed narrow. It was the one piece of tonight that had gone to plan.
The Alpha did not come to him, which was the first wrong thing. It barked twice from the center circle, and its remaining pairs stopped guarding it entirely.
They went for the crowd instead, fanning wide toward the corners where the watchers stood thickest. The big body waited in the middle, plated head low, spending its soldiers to spend his time.
Jax understood the shape of it one rescue too late to be angry. He crossed the gym to pull a pair off two juniors near the ropes, and the timer ate the crossing.
A second grey slipped past him toward the scorer's table, where a boy had left the cage for a fallen water crate. The gold got him there in time, barely, and the save cost another straight line across the floor.
He set the boy on his feet harder than he meant to. There was no breath spare for a lecture, so he spent one word on it, and the word was move.
[ Duration: 2:55 remaining. ]
"Stay in the cage," he shouted, and the doubled voice held the room for almost a minute.
Almost turned out to be the entire shape of the Alpha's strategy. A girl bolted for her brother on the far side, two more followed her, and every one of them turned open floor into his problem.
An older senior went out next, herding younger kids ahead of her with both arms. Brave came in expensive flavors tonight, and every flavor billed its seconds to the same account.
He caught the senior's stragglers one stride short of a waiting pair. The gold made the catch look easy, and the meter quietly made it expensive.
He was magnificent about it, which Diana thought was exactly the trap. Every impossible catch proved the gold worked, and every proof burned seconds he would want back at the center circle.
She could see the patron's arithmetic even if Jax refused to look. A duel would have ended two minutes ago, so the Alpha had declined the duel and bought the room instead.
The Alpha took its chance while he was untangling a screamer from a fallen pair. It hit him from the side at a full drive, and even gold-braced ribs moved wrong under that weight.
He rode the momentum, came around with it, and got both arms under the plated jaw. For four seconds he lifted a monster the size of a car off its front legs, and the gym screamed his name loud enough to shake dust.
The throw put it into the bleacher face with a crack that ran the whole frame. He followed, fists dropping like work on the cracked shoulder plate, and felt something structural finally give.
Dark fluid welled along the split and dripped down the plate's edge. The crowd chanted the two letters of his name as though the fight were a scoreboard already decided.
Half the phones in the room were up and recording him now. Whatever happened next would be the story the school told about tonight. None of the phones knew yet what their footage was actually documenting.
Diana did not chant, because from the rail she could see the ropes now. They had gone through him entirely, gold thread under the skin of both arms, and the thread was reeling something in.
[ Duration: 1:20 remaining. ]
Under him the Alpha stopped protecting its shoulder to bark once, short and hard. Across the gym a grey rose out of the wrecked barricade with a freshman's collar in its teeth.
The choice was not a choice, and everything about the animal's timing said it knew. Jax left the finish, crossed the floor a last time, and broke the grey against the doorframe while the freshman ran.
Behind him the Alpha got its legs back under its weight in stages. Its cracked plate hung loose, weeping dark, but the body under the wound stayed patient.
He came back at it with the last of the timer and no breath left for the crowd. The gold thinned with every stride now, less like sunlight and more like the end of a match.
Numbers he had ignored all fight long began pressing at the corner of his sight. He refused them again, because heroes did not check the meter, and the refusing cost him nothing he could feel yet.
His first blow landed on the ruined shoulder and drew a sound that was almost enough. The second blow never arrived, because the light died between one heartbeat and the next.
[ Duration expired. ]
[ Sponsorship suspended. Renewal available by contract. ]
The floor came up slow and enormous under legs that had spent everything gold had loaned them. His arms hung off his shoulders like borrowed equipment somebody had come back to collect.
Cold moved in where the warmth had lived, deeper than tired, older than sore. Whatever the gold had burned for fuel, it had not entirely been gold.
Renewal sat waiting there in the script, patient as an open hand. He understood, distantly, that the first taste had been priced to make the second one certain.
The crowd's roar died away into a silence with edges on it. In the middle of that silence the Alpha limped one step toward him, then another, dark blood dropping from the cracked plate.
Somebody in the cage began crying with the particular rhythm of a person trying to be quiet about it. Nobody chanted anything anymore, and the difference between the two sounds was the whole night's lesson.
Diana was moving before her plan was, dragging a hurdle bar off the floor as though a bar would matter. Around her the gym discovered that its hero had a battery, and that batteries end.
Jax knelt in the center circle where the gold had left him, making his body answer by fractions. A finger moved, then a wrist, nothing above the elbow, nothing that would block a bite.
He had been enough for four minutes and fifty seconds of the fight. The fight, unfairly, had gone on longer than that, and the animal in front of him had planned for the difference.
The Alpha closed the distance without hurry, reading him the way it had read the room all night. Whatever it had learned about heroes, it intended to finish the lesson while the price was low.