Blue Steel's weapon systems were still new to him. Barely unlocked. But adaptation had always been his strength. Combat was instinct.
And instinct never hesitated.
He counted.
One.
Two.
Nine assholes.
He shifted into stance.
Two of them moved at once.
One launched forward in a Superman punch — body fully committed, fist cocked back.
The other dropped low, charging for a tackle.
Zach didn't hesitate.
He stepped into the airborne attacker's path.
The gauntlet ignited with kinetic surge as his fist drove sideways — not into the armor plating, but into the narrow seam between thigh and knee guard.
The weak spot.
There was a sharp crack beneath the metal.
The joint folded the wrong way.
Momentum betrayed him instantly. His body twisted mid-air, center of gravity collapsing as he flipped awkwardly.
The tackler barreled past where Zach had been — missing by inches.
Zach reached up.
Caught the flipping man by the damaged leg — gripping him by the foot.
He didn't lift.
He pivoted.
Redirected the falling weight.
And drove him downward like a thrown spear.
The armored body slammed into the charging attacker with a violent crunch of metal and breath.
Both men crashed into the ground in a tangled heap — groaning, but alive, armor dented and limbs misaligned.
Zach was already turning toward the next target.
Zach's gaze flicked to the remaining seven.
He didn't hesitate. He charged at the furthest one first.
The man wielded a long sword, rusted and chipped, the edge jagged like old bones. Zach's confidence surged—his speed, now amplified by Blue Steel's armor, made him almost a blur.
The Virex user swung downward, aiming to crush Zach with a brutal arc.
Zach spun on his heel, a tight rotation that let him dodge the blade while building lethal momentum. His body arced into a deadly hook, fist crashing into the armored head. The strike didn't send him flying, just enough to stagger back, creating the space Zach needed.
The remaining attackers lunged from three directions at once, trying to use the numbers the way numbers are supposed to work — overwhelming, suffocating, no room to breathe or think or pick them apart one at a time.
Zach didn't give them the formation they needed.
He moved toward the furthest one instead of bracing for the closest. The Virex user he'd just staggered stumbled backward into two others rushing from the left, bodies colliding in a tangle of lost momentum.
Three people suddenly each other's problem.
He was already past them.
The furthest fighter carried a heavy industrial chain, Virex-modified, the end weighted with a machined chunk of plating. He swung it overhead in a wide arc, trying to use the reach. Zach read the rotation, timed the apex — that half-second where the chain had fully committed — and shot in with a double-leg takedown, driving hard through the hips, cutting the base before the swing could come back around. The fighter went up and over. Zach didn't follow him to the ground. He posted up immediately, turned, found the next one.
Deep violet rig, plasma-edged short sword. The fighter threw a flying knee trying to close distance fast. Zach caught it on a cross-block, redirected the momentum sideways, and as the fighter's weight came down he stepped in with a lead uppercut straight through the chin. Head snapped back. Zach grabbed the collar of the rig before it came forward again, pivoted on his back foot, and executed a full hip throw — O-goshi, , the fighter leaving the ground completely before slamming down onto the arena stone hard enough to crack the shoulder plate on impact.
He didn't get up.
Zach turned. The third one — the fighter who'd untangled from the cluster — was already throwing a wide looping overhand right, fully committed, too close to pull back.
Zach rolled under it, slipping outside the shoulder, and came up firing a left hook to the floating rib. No armor covered the floating rib properly. It never did. The fighter's breath left him in a single involuntary bark, posture collapsing inward on instinct.
Zach locked a Thai clinch — both hands behind the neck, pulling the head down — and drove two knees up the centerline in quick succession. The first bent him. The second dropped him.
Four left. They'd stopped rushing.
Smart. Finally.
They spread wide instead, trying to box him in, use the arena's geometry against him. One of them — Glint rig, neon traces still pulsing orange along his arms despite everything — feinted a charge to draw the response, testing whether Zach would commit.
Zach didn't move.
The feint died. The fighter reset.
Zach exploded forward on his own timing instead — closed the distance in a burst before the Glint user could process the change, slipped inside his guard with a level change and drove a double underhook body lock, lifting and rotating, executing a suplex that put the fighter down on the back of his neck with his own weight behind it.
The Glint rig's neon traces flickered once.
Then went dark.
The three remaining broke formation. One charged straight — a Virex fighter in acid green, running purely on stim-aggression, no technique, just force and forward momentum. Zach sidestepped at the last second, pivoting off his lead foot, and as the fighter blew past him he caught the extended arm at the wrist, used the momentum, and executed an arm drag that redirected the full force of the charge directly into the fighter coming from the right.
The collision was two cars hitting each other at speed.
Both went down hard. One didn't move. The other tried to push up, got one arm underneath himself, and collapsed again.
The last one standing hesitated.
Just for a second.
That was enough.
Zach closed the distance with a level change feint — dropping his level like a takedown, making the fighter drop his hips to sprawl — then came back up with a straight right hand through the high guard the fighter had forgotten to reset. The punch landed flush. The fighter's head snapped back and his legs went unreliable beneath him.
Zach caught him before he fell, locked a rear naked choke — forearm across the throat, free hand cupping the back of the skull, hips dropping to seal the position. He didn't need long. Ten seconds. Maybe eight.
The fighter went limp.
Zach lowered him to the ground.
Checked. Still breathing.
Stood up.
Two stood apart from what remained. Separated from the chaos, from each other, from any help that wasn't coming.
One had a helmet. One didn't.
Zach looked at them both for exactly one second.
Then yanked the Ronin's Requiem from his head.
The brim caught the projected sunlight as it left his hand, blue energy tracing the razor edge, ornamental chains trailing in a flat spinning arc. It wasn't thrown like a weapon — it was a weapon, the trajectory self-correcting mid-flight in a way that had nothing to do with physics and everything to do with what the hat had decided.
It found the exposed neck of the one without a helmet.
Blue light flared. The edge bit deep and didn't stop.
A clean, sickening arc of motion — and then the body collapsed and the hat curved back through the air and settled onto Zach's head like it had never left.
The last one standing watched this happen.
Took one step back.
Zach was already moving.
He came in behind a jab-cross to establish range — not trying to hurt, just measuring, making the fighter's guard react — then dropped his level on the third beat and shot a single-leg, catching the lead leg at the knee, driving forward and lifting in the same motion. The fighter went over his shoulder. Zach didn't let him land clean — controlled the descent, rode him down, transitioned immediately to a top position with both knees pinning the hips.
The fighter bucked, tried to frame, tried to create space.
Zach passed the frame, moved to side control, and delivered a short elbow from the top — compact, no windup, the Doomfist gauntlet focusing the impact into a point the size of a thumb. Once. Twice. Finding the gap between the helmet's edge and the collar plate where the cheekbone sat exposed beneath.
The third elbow ended the bucking.
Zach held the position. Felt the fighter go still beneath him.
He stood up slowly.
Took one breath.
Looked at his hands.
Zach's hand tightened around the last Virex user's face.
What remained of it was ruin.
The helmet had been crushed inward, metal split and folded like torn foil. Beneath it, flesh had given way. Bone showed through in jagged white shards, slick with blood. One eye bulged, unfocused, while the other socket was a dark, caved hollow leaking red.
The man's jaw hung at the wrong angle, barely attached, twitching with the last dying signals of a body that hadn't caught up to death yet.
Zach held him there.
Felt the weight. The warmth. The wetness slipping between his fingers.
A final shudder ran through the body.
Then nothing.
Zach let go.
The corpse dropped.
It didn't fall clean. It folded — like something broken in too many places — before slamming into the stone with a heavy, final thud.
Silence followed.
Not quiet.
Never quiet.
The arena breathed in aftermath.
Wet, dragging sounds. Choked gasps. The faint rattle of someone trying to breathe through a collapsed throat.
Zach looked up.
The arena was destroyed.
Marble pillars had been split open, some snapped entirely, exposing structural frameworks beneath the illusion. The holographic sky above glitched violently — clouds tearing into static, sunlight flickering in harsh, stuttering bursts. Sections of the projection froze mid-failure, like reality itself had cracked.
The ground was red.
Bodies were scattered everywhere.
Not intact.
One lay in two halves, armor sheared through at the waist, the upper torso twisted as if it had tried to crawl. Another's chest had been crushed inward, ribs collapsed into a hollow cavity, something dark pooling where lungs should have been.
A helmet rolled slowly across the stone, coming to rest beside a body that no longer had a head.
Nearby, a fighter dragged himself forward with one arm, the other gone — leaving a torn stump that smeared blood with every inch he moved.
Another sat slumped against a shattered pillar, visor split, skull fractured beneath it. He didn't move.
The air smelled metallic. Thick. Real.
Zach's gaze dropped to his hands.
They were soaked.
Blood clung to the seams of his gauntlets, dripping steadily. Small fragments — bone, something softer — stuck where the metal met his skin.
His hands trembled.
Footsteps approached.
Jet.
He slowed as he reached Zach, bending slightly, hands on his knees as he caught his breath. His armor was dented, streaked with blood that wasn't all his own. A crack ran along the edge of his shield, faint sparks flickering and dying.
"…We actually did it," Jet muttered, voice rough.
He let out a breath that almost turned into a laugh.
"Man… I was already planning what kind of ghost I'd be. Probably the annoying kind. Follow you around, knock your stuff over…" He shook his head, exhaling. "…Didn't think I'd make it home."
Zach didn't answer.
Above them, the broken sky stabilized just enough for the system to cut in.
"Match complete."
A pause.
"Survivors declared victorious."
The lights brightened — too clean, too sudden — washing over the carnage without care.
"Reward allocation: ten thousand gold per surviving participant."
Zach exhaled slowly.
His eyes drifted across the arena again.
The bodies. The ones still moving. The ones that weren't.
All of it.
For a number.
For a reward.
His jaw tightened.
"…All this," he muttered.
His gaze dropped to the blood coating his hands.
"…for gold."