The stadium did not know what to do with Camille Lambert.
When her name appeared on the giant screens of Yankee Stadium as Team Nemean's opener, the reaction did not come as one sound. It came in layers.
First, confusion. Then surprise. Then the low, fast murmur of thousands of people trying to decide whether they had just witnessed genius or surrender.
The press box reacted instantly. The commentators, who had spent the last half hour building theories around Dominic, Eyeless Heaven, and the post-Boston shape of Team Nemean's strategy, tripped over their own expectations.
"Camille Lambert?"
"She's opening?"
"That's... unexpected from Team Nemean."
One of them, too eager for a narrative, said what the crowd was already beginning to think.
"Is this a knowledge-sacrifice? Are they giving up the first match to read the New Jersey Rangers and counter with their heavier hitters later?"
That line spread through the stadium like a spark in dry grass. The cameras caught New Jersey's side.
Kenai Haida did not smile, but one of his coaches leaned in slightly. Denahi Tlingit's face barely moved. Tara Inuit tilted her head. Koda Angaiak looked less amused than curious. That alone told Phong something useful.
They had not expected Camille either. On Team Nemean's side, though, the logic was already understood.
Camille was the best opener they had.
Sure, she wasn't the strongest. Not the most famous. Certainly wasn't the safest choice in the minds of people who only knew Team Nemean through Alexandra Vogel's public shadow.
But inside the team, after some real analysis, the answer had become clean.
Camille had the speed to pressure Kenai and Denahi before either ranged fighter could fully settle into their comfort zones. Her poison, subtle and increasingly vicious the longer a fight dragged, gave her a real chance of matching Koda's flexibility in a close technical exchange. Only Tara was a particularly bad match, and even then Camille could still function as a measuring tool if needed. If the Rangers opened with one of their two heaviest hitter, Team Nemean would lose nothing by learning early.
So when Camille rose from the bench and stepped toward the ring, Séline did not look worried, only focused.
Camille herself looked like she had been born to silence crowds.
She wore no dramatic entrance gear, no flashy cape or stylized branding. Just a fitted combat outfit dark enough to let movement stay clean in the eye, with pale accents that caught the lights only when she turned. Her blades rested low at her sides, more like extensions of intention than separate weapons. Where Séline burned sharp and expressive, Camille felt colder. More controlled.
The stadium's noise changed again when New Jersey answered.
Koda Angaiak, the kind of fighter that coaches loved because he could be adjusted to the match instead of forcing the match to adjust to him.
He entered the ring with none of Camille's cold elegance.
Koda felt grounded in the way of someone whose body had learned not just one way to move, but several, and trusted all of them. His stance shifted even before the bell, weight changing lightly through the balls of his feet, shoulders loose, eyes never still for more than a second.
Then the spirits answered him.
Spectral gauntlets formed around his hands, one over each forearm and fist, animal shapes half-visible in translucent mana.
He had three: Tiger, crane, and monkey.
The commentator booth gave the quick public explanation, but Phong was already comparing it in his own head.
Xingyi Quan with mana.
Not literally, not a one-to-one, but the feel of it was there. Spirit-shaped intent, a system of forms built around animal logic, direct lines of force, and a body choosing which nature to wear at the moment of contact.
The horn sounded.
Camille moved first.
She crossed distance in one clean burst, blades low, body angled so small that Koda had to choose immediately between meeting her center or trying to redirect the line. He chose Tiger first.
The spectral gauntlets thickened, curving into broad phantom claws over his fists. He met her with a direct forward burst, the style almost savage in its efficiency. Tiger was not about defense. It was about taking the line and tearing it open first.
Steel met mana.
Camille's left blade skimmed his forearm guard and her right cut for the throat. Koda parried one with the Tiger gauntlet and shifted just enough that the second only scored fabric and skin across the side of his neck.
The crowd made a sharp sound.
First blood, but not enough.
Camille did not stay to admire it. She pivoted through him, letting her momentum carry her past the direct clash before Tiger could fully capitalize on the trade. That told everyone watching the next important truth.
She had no intention of making this an honor duel. She was going to make Koda chase poison through his own bloodstream.
Koda understood that too. He swapped almost immediately. The spectral Tiger claws thinned and elongated. The shape around his hands changed into Crane.
Now his body rose slightly taller. His elbows came in. His footwork sharpened and lengthened. Where Tiger had been direct impact, Crane became spacing, redirection, and precision.
Camille struck again, this time in a triple sequence. Left hand high, right low, reverse cut through the centerline. Koda met all three with Crane structure, turning her blades off his body by millimeters instead of broad force. His counter came not as a punch but as a pecking strike—two fingers and the sharpened mana edge of the gauntlet driving toward the soft gap below her collar.
Camille bent backward just enough to let it graze.
Too close.
The stadium felt that one. So did Séline. Her hand tightened once on the railing at ringside, but her face never moved.
Camille answered by finally revealing the second layer of her own style.
The first slash that mattered did not look important.
It landed along Koda's upper arm during a messy transition where Crane and Camille's speed briefly arrived in the same place. It was a shallow cut. Nothing special. Far from being enough to end the fight.
Then another. Not even on the skin this time—through the outer thigh where the blade just kissed and moved on.
Then a third, across the ribs as Koda changed to Monkey and went lower.
The poison was stacking.
Not dramatic enough for the public eye yet, but Phong could see its work beginning in tiny places. A half-beat delay in Koda's shoulder recovery, slight heat climbing into his breath. The beginning of irritation in the muscles where none should have existed yet.
Monkey changed the whole rhythm again.
The gauntlets shrank, the spectral shape becoming quick-limbed and trickster light. Koda's movement turned ugly to read in the best way. Sudden drops in level, xidelong darts, shoulder feints that became low-line entries. He stopped trying to meet Camille's speed cleanly and instead broke the exchange tempo into pieces.
That worked. For a while at least.
He caught her with a short Monkey-angle strike to the hip, then another across the ribs when she cut too close after expecting Tiger's direct answer. He even got inside her right-hand blade once and nearly trapped her wrist against his forearm while driving a rising blow toward her jaw.
Camille escaped by cutting him.
Every time Koda solved one line of her motion, she left him with something anyway. A scratch, a nick, or a glancing slice that looked too small to matter.
The commentators began noticing it.
"She's fighting ugly."
"You means efficiently?"
"Ugly. Same way Alexandra Vogel fight. Team Nemean seemed to love death by a thousand cut."
By the second minute, the match had become one of the best technical fights the stadium had seen all day; two people with excellent bodies and dangerous systems trying to force the other into the wrong fight.
Koda used Tiger to threaten her courage, Crane to punish her lines, Monkey to tear her timing apart.
Camille used speed, angles, and the absolute refusal to respect the exchange as a closed system. If Koda touched her once, she wanted to touch him twice. If he blocked, she wanted that block to cost him skin somewhere else. If he took the center, she wanted to leave him a wound in passing.
The crowd, which had started half doubtful and half dismissive, now leaned all the way in.
This was no sacrificial opener. This was real.
One sequence nearly ended it.
Koda, now visibly sweating despite the cool stadium air, shifted Tiger-Crane-Monkey in rapid succession. Tiger to force her high, Crane to redirect the answering cut, and Monkey to slip underneath and come up inside both blades with a palm strike powered by a spirit-loaded short burst.
Camille did not fully manage to evade. The blow caught her in the sternum and sent her skidding backward hard enough that the ring floor screamed under her boots.
The crowd exploded.
Koda saw the opening and went after it. Tiger came back.
He rushed in with the intention of ending the whole thing in one brutal sequence before the poison tax became too high.
Camille, breathing rough now, gave ground exactly the amount he wanted. Then she let him commit.
Her left blade turned. Her right stayed edge.
She took the first Tiger-line strike on the flat of her left blade with a crack that numbed her whole arm, let the second glance past her shoulder, and drove the right-hand blade straight through the opening across his side.
This time Koda felt it: the poison.
His body betrayed it before his face did. One leg hit the floor a fraction wrong, the next step did not arrive where his mind placed it.
Camille saw. So did Phong.
Camille pressed immediately, not because she had huge power, but because she finally had the control point.
Three slashes in under half a second: one across the forearm, another across the calf, the last reversed upward through the ribs.
The last made Koda grunt hard and step away— Then stop.
His body locked for a heartbeat too long.
Paralysis had proc.
The commentators shouted it a split second after the more experienced divers in the audience already knew.
Koda's eyes widened. His spirit gauntlets flickered between shapes in an involuntary half-shift.
Camille did not waste the gift. She drove forward, both blades crossing into his centerline, cut his stance apart with one sweep and struck him hard enough with the follow-up to send him sprawling.
The horn sounded before he could rise.
Winner: Camille Lambert.
For a moment, the stadium forgot that this was supposed to be Team Nemean's weakened round. Then the local fans realized the home side had just taken the first blood in New York and roared loud enough to shake the lower seating.
Camille did not celebrate. She stood breathing hard, one arm looser than she wanted after the sternum shot and the blocked Tiger pressure, but alive, upright, and victorious. When she turned toward Team Nemean's corner, Séline gave her a single nod. That was enough between them.
On the Rangers' side, Kenai stepped forward and said something low to Koda as the Soul Warrior returned.
Phong watched that carefully.
Good team, he thought.
Then New Jersey sent in Tara Inuit.
The crowd changed again.
A heavy hitter always brought a different sound with them.
Tara entered carrying the pair of axes Phong had already learned to be wary of: Wings of Ascension. Even from ringside distance, they felt wrong in the same way relics always did—too present, too self-contained, like objects that knew more about the world's rules than the people using them. Her build split the difference between warrior and storm. She looked broad enough to brawl, but light enough in the shoulders that her weapon work would be much faster than people expected from axes that size.
Camille rolled one shoulder once, reset her grip on the blades, and looked very, very small across from what came next.
And yet Phong did not regret the opening choice for even a second.