Jake was the first one to object.
"Absolutely not," he said, half rising from the bench. "If Kenai's the third fight, then someone fast should go. Me. Séline. We rush him down before he gets comfortable."
Séline nodded at once. "He's a gunslinger. Range classes hate pressure. If we let him settle, then we're giving him the ring."
Joanne, who had been leaning against the locker with her arms folded and her expression somewhere between offended and curious, looked from one of them to the other, then to Phong.
Phong stayed calm.
That, more than anything, made the rest of the room quiet down.
Because by now, they all knew the look. It was the same one he wore when he had already walked three steps ahead of everyone else and was just waiting for them to catch up.
"Rushing him down," Phong said, "is exactly what Kenai wants."
Jake frowned. "What?"
Phong looked at him, then at Séline, then at Joanne.
"He's a Spirit Gunslinger. Someone who stepped in after Tara and Koda. He's here to win, and we need to respect that whether we like it or not." Phong's voice stayed level. "If we send speed, then we play into the obvious trap."
Séline clicked her tongue softly, not because she disagreed, but because she could see the shape of it now that he said it.
Phong turned toward Joanne. And said something too quiet for the rest of them to hear.
Joanne stared at him. Then stared harder. Then, very slowly, the corner of her mouth twitched.
"Oh," she said.
That one syllable did not reassure anyone. Not Jake. Not Séline. Not even Dominic, who trusted Phong more than most but still looked like a man wondering whether his coach had finally gone around the bend.
Then the call came. Team Nemean's final participant.
Joanne Parr.
If Camille had surprised the stadium, Joanne confused it.
The reaction from the crowd was almost insulted disbelief. The commentators stumbled over their own words trying to make sense of it fast enough for the audience. Even the big screens seemed slower to catch up.
"Joanne?"
"They're sending the Spellsniper?"
"Against Kenai Haida?"
One of the commentators, forgetting all caution in the face of a hot take, just said it outright.
"Team Nemean is giving this one up."
That line spread fast. Too fast. Kenai heard it. The New Jersey bench heard it. The audience heard it.
And, worst of all, a lot of Team Nemean's own newer fans heard it too.
Some of them started leaving.
That part stung more than anyone on the team wanted to admit. The sections in Yankee Stadium that had gone loud for Team Nemean because of Alex, because of Dominic, because of Emma's branding, because of the image of invincibility they had sold so hard, now started thinning at the edges. People muttered, phones came out, a few booed the choice, others laughed and began talking about "saving it for the rematch" and "playing for information."
Kenai Haida walked into the ring looking openly annoyed.
Worse.
Dismissive.
He had heard enough about Joanne to know she was one of Dominic's old teammates. There was public footage on her, old records, league scraps, forum analysis, enough scattered material to build a shape. Not as much mystery as Séline, Camille, or Alexei. Not enough reputation to justify this choice in the public eye.
He looked at her and clearly came to the same conclusion as the commentators. Team Nemean had given up the match.
They wanted to extort information, see his spirits, measure his timing, then come back stronger when the second leg rolled around.
At ringside, Phong saw it happen in Kenai's face. The exact second the captain decided Joanne was not the real threat.
Good, Phong thought. Very good.
The referee called them in.
Joanne looked much smaller standing across from Kenai than she ever did beside her own team. Part of it was class silhouette. Kenai had a presence built for old stories. A carved wooden pistol that looked like a totem pole had been cut down and forced into the shape of a firearm. Animal carvings spiraled the barrel and grip in layered relief, each spirit ready to answer him. He wore long dark leathers with beadwork and clean practical tailoring, nothing flashy, but everything chosen by someone who understood what his own outline meant to spectators.
Joanne looked like a young woman with too much attitude, too many opinions, and spells she had learned to trust because the world kept demanding it.
The horn sounded.
Kenai opened exactly the way Phong expected: With disrespect.
Not stupidity. Not enough for that. But disrespect all the same.
He did not use his strongest spirit immediately. He did not commit some grand opening sequence. He tested her with a simple shot first, a low-cost spirit round from the totem pistol that moved with more life in it than a normal mana bullet had any right to carry.
Joanne snapped a return shot fast enough that the crowd gasped.
The two rounds met in midair and burst apart in a flash of blue and silver sparks.
For one heartbeat, the fight looked even. Then it didn't.
Kenai's second, third, and fourth shots came with almost no wasted motion. That was the first terrible truth of Spirit Gunslinger. What Joanne could do, he could do cleaner. His mana cost was lower. His transitions smoother. His bullets changed trajectory mid flight as easy as breathing.
One curved around her left side after seeming to miss.
Joanne twisted and burned a counter-spell shot to knock it away.
The next split midflight into two pale hawk-like streaks and forced her to choose. She blocked one with a shard-round and ducked the other by instinct more than sight.
The third rode low along the floor like it had a nose for ankles. Joanne leaped.
By the time she landed, Kenai already had another bullet chambered in spirit and mana.
At ringside, the commentators started saying the obvious.
"This is a class gap."
"Spirit Gunslinger really is just a higher-order version of what Joanne does."
"Her toolkit is narrower."
They were right.
Joanne's elemental spell bullets were versatile, but not alive. Kenai's were. They curved, corrected, hunted, and adapted with a predatory wrongness that made his pistol feel less like a weapon and more like a shrine that hated distance.
Joanne fought anyway. Bravely enough that even the mocking parts of the crowd eased.
She ran the ring harder than she ever had in public. Ice rounds to break angle, lightning shots to force dodges, fire slugs to create chaos. She kept changing altitude, pivoting off bad ground, firing while backpedaling, firing while half-falling, firing after feints that only just barely bought her enough time to breathe.
Kenai walked her down. He had more options.
A wolf spirit round that ran the rail of the ring barrier before snapping toward her ribs. A hawk shot that broke apart into dark flickers and rejoined above her shoulder. A bear shot that rushed forward like a battering ram.
Joanne got clipped twice. A graze at the thigh, then a harsher hit across her left side that spun her enough the crowd thought she was done.
She wasn't. She came up swearing, eyes bright and furious, and fired three spell shots in a fan spread so aggressive that Kenai had to finally shift his stance and answer seriously.
That was when he revealed Thunderbird. The shot didn't leave the gun the way the others had, it erupted. White-blue mana roared around him in the shape of a bird too large to be literal. Then it folded back into him. The spirit attached itself to his body after firing and spread into wings of crackling force across his back. For the next five minutes, the captain of the New Jersey Rangers took to the air.
The stadium lost its mind.
The commentators shouted themselves hoarse.
"Thunderbird!"
"He can do that?!"
"That's cheating for a range class!"
Kenai lifted above the ring like range itself had chosen a king and began raining spirit shots downward with the utter confidence of a man who thought the fight had ended the moment he took the sky.
Joanne looked small from below. Tiny, even. A Spellsniper with a narrower class line, fewer options, less elegant mana economy, and no blessed rare upgrade to hide inside.
But Phong knew what he had told her: Use his pride. Use the fact that men like Kenai, like Josh, like Alex, like too many fighters who had been treated as apex too early, could not resist proving they were better once they believed the outcome already belonged to them.
So Joanne gave him that belief. She stumbled once on purpose. Lost a little too much ground. Overcommitted to blocking one spirit round and let another scorch her shoulder.
She made it look desperate. Made it look like she was hanging on by speed, stubbornness, and luck.
Kenai bought it. His class superiority really was obvious in the fight. He had every reason to believe what he was seeing.
That was the trick. He lowered his guard in the one way that mattered most for a gunslinger. He stopped assuming she had a real answer. He started performing dominance, taking wider flight lines, holding sightlines a fraction longer than needed, showing the audience what his bullets could do, letting the Thunderbird wings flare behind him like he was already writing the highlight reel in his own head.
Joanne let him. She kept firing back. Kept losing exchanges by inches. Kept looking more and more like a woman trying to survive instead of a woman waiting.
On Team Nemean's side, Jake and Séline watched in silent, which was rare and quite hard for Jake.
Emma checked social once and laughed softly.
"People are already calling this a mercy killing."
Kenai dove lower once, just enough to fire a tighter grouping. Joanne burned a fire slug to block two and took the third on the edge of her shoulder. She went down to one knee.
The stadium rose. The commentators were practically narrating her death.
"She can't keep this up!"
"Kenai has too many options!"
"This is the end for Joanne Parr!"
Then she looked up. And fired.
One shot.
Lightning bullet.
But not in the usual broad bright way she used it, not the crackling expressive shot people expected from a Spellsniper trying to play catch-up. This one was stripped down, narrow, fast. Too fast for most speed focus class to even react to.
Kenai saw her finger flash. And because he had already had too much advantage, taken too much ground, he thought he still had time. He did not.
The beam of lightning crossed the ring so fast the cameras caught it only as a white line connecting earth to air.
It hit him square.
The Thunderbird wings spasmed. Kenai fell out of the sky and crashed into the ring hard enough that the whole arena gasped like one body.
Joanne, who had put everything she had left into that one attack, stayed standing for exactly half a second longer.
Then her own body gave up. She collapsed too.
The referees rushed in from both sides.
The crowd was no longer cheering in one direction or the other. They were shouting in confusion, disbelief, outrage, exhilaration. The whole sound of the stadium changed from sports noise into something closer to being present when a prediction failed in public.
The ruling came a few seconds later.
Draw.
For one heartbeat, nobody processed it. Then the weight of what had just happened landed.
Kenai Haida had been brought down.
Before this fight, he and Tara had carried perfect records. Tara got a draw against Dominic could still fit the story people already knew. Dominic was a heavy hitter, a centerpiece, a man whose reputation had already started hardening into East Coast legend.
Joanne was not supposed to be that. Which was why this result hit so hard.
It was not Alex illusion shattering loss.
This was different.
This was the league learning that Team Nemean's "supporting cast" contained enough steel to drag a rare-class captain into the dirt if you gave them the wrong kind of disrespect.
The media swarmed Phong afterward. Not because they wanted Joanne first, though they did. but because they wanted the explanation.
He had chosen her. He had seen something. They wanted the shape of that thinking.
"Why Joanne?"
"You knew this would happen?"
"Did you identify a weakness in Kenai Haida?"
Phong let them throw the questions first. Then he answered only once.
"I chose Joanne," he said, "precisely because her class is not as good as Kenai's."
That stunned them. It was so counterintuitive, so blunt, so impossible to package quickly that it created another surge of noise all by itself.
He gave no further comment. And that made it worse for them. Because now they had to think.
Back at the clubhouse, the team did what teams always did once public pressure fell away.
They cornered him. And Joanne.
The moment the doors shut, the girls were all over Joanne first. Emma, Janet, Séline, Camille, even Alex, all circling her with overlapping questions while Jake and Jack played second-line hecklers. Dominic looked too pleased with the entire world. Alexei wanted the exact timing and mana density of the lightning shot. Rico climbed onto the couch and shouted something about "I already knew she had main character moment."
Joanne, exhausted and still half angry at gravity, pointed at Phong from under a blanket and said, "You tell them."
Phong rubbed one hand over his face.
"Traitor."
"Coach privilege expires after emotional stress."
The room laughed.
So Phong gave up. He sat down on the arm of a chair, looked at all of them, and explained.
"What I told Joanne before the fight wasn't a tactic. Not exactly." He glanced at her. "It was advice."
Joanne folded her arms and nodded once. "Annoying advice."
Phong ignored that.
"I told her to use his pride against him."
That made several people go still.
"He's a spirit gunslinger," Phong said. "A rarer, better version of her class line. If he thought his opponent was a real threat from the start, then he'd stay tight, efficient, and ugly. Hard to catch, hard to drag into mistakes." He looked around the room. "So we had to make him believe whoever he would fight wasn't. Sending you, Jake, or Séline would have the opposite effect."
Emma leaned back slowly.
"The same trick Boston pulled on Alex."
Joanne answered this time.
"Exactly."
She looked both smug and tired now that the danger had passed.
"I played weaker than I was."
Jake blinked. "That sounds insulting."
"It was insulting," Joanne said. "To me."
That got another laugh. But she continued more seriously.
"I let him think I was panicking. Let him think I was desperate. Let him think every shot was me barely surviving instead of shaping his rhythm." She shrugged one shoulder. "Once he decided the match was already his, the rest got easier."
Alex's mouth twitched faintly.
So that was the mirror. Boston had used false pain to trick a habit. Joanne used false desperation to trick pride.
Kenai did what Adam needed Alex to do. He committed on the wrong assumption.
Phong looked at Joanne then, really looked, and let himself feel a small pulse of pride.
Because she had drawn on of the league heaviest hitter, and he was happy for her because of that. But also, because she had listened, and because their strategy had worked.
For a while, nobody in the clubhouse talked about the next match.
They only sat there in the afterglow of shock and strategy and the strange, growing certainty that Team Nemean had become much harder to predict than anyone outside the room understood.