Camille had known the moment Tara Inuit stepped into the ring that this was bad.
She had still gone forward anyway.
The crowd, still riding the high of her win over Koda, expected another technical duel. Another fight of speed, poison, and clever pressure. Instead, they got a lesson in why matchups mattered.
Tara did not fight like a barbarian pretending to cast. She fought like a storm that had learned how to pick up an axe.
The first exchange made that obvious.
Camille burst in on a diagonal, blades low, trying to test the footwork before Tara's momentum could build. Tara answered with wind. A pressure wave kicked up from the short turn of her body, not large enough to count as a spell in the audience's eyes, but more than enough to throw Camille's entry line half a foot off.
That was all Tara needed.
One axe came up from low right to high left in a rising cut strong enough to split a ribcage. Camille barely slipped the edge and still got flung away by the force of it. The ring floor screamed beneath her boots as she dragged herself back into stance.
Tara watched her with a poker face.
The crowd felt it too.
This was not Koda. Not a technical stylist that poison could slowly trap and tame. This was a woman standing with two answers in her hands and a third answer in the wind itself.
Camille tested again.
This time she used a wider loop, hoping to bait one of the axes and cut the arms on the return. Tara let her come in close enough to think the plan might work—
Then shifted.
The wind vanished. The body changed.
One breath earlier Tara had been a caster, weight slightly back, mana moving outward. The next she was all barbarian, rage condensing into raw reinforcement so fast it looked like the arena itself had skipped a frame. She stepped in with one axe haft blocking the first blade and the other punching down in a shoulder-bruising strike that forced Camille to dive away instead of countering.
Less than a second.
That was all the delay there was between one mode and the other.
At ringside, Phong felt his stomach sink. She was even worse than he predicted.
Camille fought beautifully anyway. That was what made the mismatch hurt to watch.
She circled, cut in and out, stacked poison where she could. She tried to force Tara into revealing more of Wings of Ascension, more of the relic, more of the thing that made the axes feel wrong.
She failed.
Tara never gave it. She did not need to.
Her wind magic was too strong. Her barbarian reinforcement too direct. Worse, she could feather between the two states with terrifying control. Not one or the other. Sometimes both in sequence so fast the eye could only understand it after getting hit.
Camille got two decent cuts in during the second minute.
One across Tara's thigh. One shallow line at the shoulder when the Black Typhooner overcommitted to a turning strike.
The poison went in. The audience saw blood.
And Tara answered by flexing once, rage surfacing just enough to blast the debuff pressure apart with sheer violent mana conversion.
The commentators nearly screamed.
"Did she just cleanse herself?"
"Her rage had another effect!"
Camille tried one last trap. She baited the axe angle, slipped to Tara's left, and cut for the wrists, clearly hoping to force the relic to show itself under pressure.
Instead Tara used wind to throw herself half a body length sideways without even crossing her feet, then crashed back in with a double-axe sequence that forced Camille all the way to the edge.
One brutal shoulder check later, Camille was out.
The stadium reacted with equal parts shock and bloodthirsty delight.
Phong did not waste the moment.
"Dominic."
He did not need to explain why. Dominic was already rising.
Against Tara, he was their best answer. He could meet the barbarian side head-on. He had a relic of his own. He could survive the raw exchange long enough to force the question Camille never got answered. Could Tara's relic carry her through a wall that hit back?
The crowd exploded when Dominic entered.
They had wanted this the moment Tara sent Camille out. Now that it was real, the entire stadium turned into one huge throat.
Emma checked social once and let out a soft whistle.
"It's everywhere."
Jake looked over her shoulder. "How bad?"
"Dominic versus Tara is trending above half the east coast." She refreshed. "Online viewership flew pass most traditional sports match, and cracked fifty million."
Joanne blinked. "For this?"
Emma's smile had no warmth in it.
"Brands are losing their minds. Half of them want both of these two in a commercial before the match is even over."
Dominic, hearing none of that, took the ring with Eyeless Heaven in his left hand and the weight of every old fight he had ever won in his bones.
Across from him, Tara rolled both shoulders and adjusted her grip on the axes.
No grin. No taunt.
Good. He thought.
That meant she understood what kind of fight this was too.
The horn sounded. And the stadium got the kind of violence it had paid for.
Tara opened in caster mode.
Not because she feared Dominic, but because it was smart.
Wind spiraled around the ring in slicing bursts, short enough not to become wasteful spectacle, sharp enough to force movement. She used the arena like a bowstring, sending pressure from angles that would turn a normal advance into suicide.
Dominic did not give her a normal advance.
He planted Eyeless Heaven and let the first burst of wind hit the shield.
It rang.
The second wind blade came lower. Dominic shifted the shield just enough. The third curled around the edge, trying to catch his ribs. He took that one on the shoulder and kept walking.
Tara increased output.
Two more gust-blades, then a compressed spiral burst aimed for his knees. Dominic answered by stepping into it instead of away, the shield covering high and center while his own body took the lower pressure.
The commentators started shouting about damage trade, about the stubbornness of Judgenaut classes, about how Dominic Torres was trying to physically push through weather.
They were not wrong. But they were incomplete.
Phong could see it.
Dominic was learning Tara. He was waiting.
Tara switched the moment she realized the ranged pressure alone would not stop him.
Black Typhooner became barbarian.
The air around her tightened inward instead of outward. Her muscles hardened under that conversion in a way even the cameras caught. Then she came in with the axes.
The first clash sounded like a wreck.
Tara's right axe crashed into Eyeless Heaven and sparks of mana burst sideways. Dominic answered with a short body blow to her ribs. Tara took it on partial reinforcement and hammered down with the second axe toward his thigh. Dominic twisted just enough and ate the rest on armor and raw spite.
This was not pretty. Not technical like Camille and Koda. Not subtle either.
This was raw collision.
Tara had real strength. The kind that moved Dominic when she committed. And Dominic had the exact kind of nightmare sturdiness that made her pay every time she entered too deep.
She hit him five times in the first real sequence. One axe to the shield, then one haft strike to the shoulder. A wind-assisted knee, a close-range burst of cutting air from the off-hand axe. And a headbutt, of all things, when they locked too close to separate cleanly.
Dominic answered once.
That one answer made Tara slide backward across the ring on both heels.
The crowd lost its mind.
They met again. And again.
Each time Tara mixed the two halves of her class more fluidly. Wind to enter, barbarian power to commit. Barbarian pressure to fix him in place, then a blast of directional force to steal the line of his counter. The woman was a monster not because she could do one thing incredibly well, but because she could change equations before the other side finished solving them.
Still, Dominic held.
Eyeless Heaven took the wind.
His class took the punishment.
His body, synced now to the slower heavier rhythm Vân had burned into him, kept returning force like a grudge.
What he did not do was use God's Roar Canon. Not even once.
The audience noticed eventually. So did the commentators.
"He's sitting on it."
"Why isn't he using the beam?"
"Can he not get the angle?"
At ringside, Phong said nothing.
Tara noticed too.
That was the point.
She started treating the shield's beam as the problem she already understood. A straight-line threat, dangerous if aimed cleanly, but too slow to matter if she stayed mobile and refused the obvious lanes.
Then she revealed the relic.
Wings of Ascension answered her rage.
The moment the name of the weapons became truth, spectral wings burst from her back—not full feathered angel wings like the name suggested, but massive arc-shaped structures of black wind and white-edged force that spread behind her like the sky had grown blades.
The entire stadium rose.
The cameras almost could not keep up.
Tara took one step, let the wings catch the air, and became a dive.
She did not run after that.
She used the wind to launch herself and came down on Dominic with the speed of a peregrine falcon wrapped in murder and relic-grade momentum. Every time she hit the ground, the ring cracked. Every time she rose again, the commentators got louder, the crowd more feral.
Dominic blocked.
Again. Again. And again.
Eyeless Heaven flashed under impacts that would have split normal shields into scrap.
Tara came from above. From the side. At impossible angles with the wings tilting her midair path into something closer to a guided missile than a fighter's leap.
And still Dominic held.
Through stubbornness, through discipline, and through the awful holy patience of a man who had already decided exactly how much pain he was willing to spend today.
The home crowd and the commentators started turning toward one conclusion.
Dominic had no answer.
The beam was too slow. Tara was too fast. The relic had changed the match too much.
Then Dominic proved them wrong.
He waited.
Tara came down again from above, wings folded into a killing angle, one axe first, one behind, whole body compressed around the strike.
Dominic raised Eyeless Heaven.
Everything about the motion looked like another block.
That was why Tara committed fully. That was why she died in any other world.
Dominic did not aim the shield at her. He aimed it down at the ground beneath himself. Then he punched the back of Eyeless Heaven.
God's Roar Canon detonated.
The accumulated punishment Dominic had taken through the whole fight fed it like dry wood into a furnace. The blast turned the center of the arena into instant ruin. Concrete, steel reinforcement, formation layers. All of it came apart in one screaming white-gold eruption.
Tara never expected a suicidal angle.
That was the beauty of it.
She had prepared for him to aim at her. Not to destroy the battlefield under both of them.
The explosion lifted everything: Dominic, Tara, chunks of the ring, dust.
They disappeared in the blast and reappeared only when the shockwave threw them all into the side of the stadium hard enough that half the front rows screamed and the safety barriers flashed in panic.
When the dust cleared, the center of the ring was gone.
And both fighters were down outside the ruined centerline.
The referees rushed in. The officials screamed for medical checks. The crowd did not know whether to cheer, pray, or demand refunds for not being allowed closer to the destruction.
Then the ruling came.
Draw.
The stadium became an animal. The media went insane.
Online, clips of the blast were already being cut, slowed, zoomed, captioned, memed, mythologized. Fifty million viewers turned into more. Sponsors started calling again. Emma's phone vibrated so hard she finally turned it off.
The match had to be paused for two full hours while the organizers repaired the ring.
During that time, the league begged both teams for interviews.
Kenai agreed.
Phong agreed too.
They were brought separately to the same media setup while crews worked furiously on the arena behind the scenes.
Kenai spoke first, calm as ever. He did not complain about the draw. Did not whine about damage or theatrics. He stood before the microphones and said that he would personally fight the third match.
That already stirred the room.
Then he added the challenge.
"And I want Team Nemean to send their heaviest hitter."
Every journalist in the room knew who he meant.
"Alexandra Vogel."
He said her name like a summons.
"So the fight ends in the most glorious way possible."
It was a beautiful challenge.
Public, clean, full of warrior dignity and exactly the kind of thing cameras loved.
Then Phong gave his answer, mellow and calm:
"I'll do everything in my power for Team Nemean to win."
That was all.
In the locker room afterward, the reality set back in.
Alex could not fight.
The organizers had already denied the idea. Fairness, tournament regulation, recovery integrity, probably to sell tickets on the second leg. Whatever the phrasing, the answer was no. Her loss to Shirlene barred her from entering this match.
Rico, for once, was the answer everyone could see and nobody could use.
Emma said it aloud.
"Rico would be our best chance."
No one argued. The raccoon's forms, short-duration or not, were exactly the kind of chaos a fighter like Kenai might struggle to read in a format this compressed. But Rico was "the mysterious treant that stopped Josh's advance". Using Rico would be like going to the police and selling them drugs in the middle of the day and clear view of the cameras.
That left silence, and calculation.
Emma sat on the bench with both hands braced behind her, expression sharp again.
Dominic was getting checked by medics but waved off most of the fuss.
Alex stood near the back, angry at the rules and more angry that she understood them. Jake and Jack both looked like men already making peace with pain. Séline and Camille were quiet.
Alexei was too tense.
Janet watched Phong, because Janet knew first sometimes when he was closest to an answer.
Phong stood in the middle of the room, notes half forgotten in one hand, thinking through the shape of the board. Kenai was stepping in himself. That was the biggest trouble he had since becoming team Nemean's coach.
The captain was not someone who challenge for theater alone. He believed he had the winning line against Alex.
Which meant the final answer could not just be "strong." It had to be right.
Finally, Phong looked up.
"I know who we send."
The whole room focused on him.
And when he gave the name, it was not someone they thought. Someone fast, someone who would rush down Kenai fast enough to overwhelm the spirits gunslinger.
Not Jake.
Not Séline.
"Joanne."
The room held that answer for one hard second.
Then the next battle began before anyone even stepped back into the ring.