My eyes watched the fights one by one.
It was the benefit granted to all who participated in the main event — and used by few. The opportunity to see the opponents before facing them, to map patterns, to identify what worked and what didn't before needing to discover that in the heat of the fight, when discovering cost blood instead of time. For me it had been, by far, what had contributed most to the approaches in the previous fights. Glory for the first was wisdom for the last — and I preferred the second with the clarity of someone who had calculated the cost of both and had arrived at the same conclusion repeatedly.
I had grown accustomed to being alone in the chairs that gave an interrupted view through the gate, but close to the arena. The silence around me said everything: the other competitors preferred to repeat the same mistakes as the previous ones — where only some survived while most died — and it completely escaped me as logic. For them, there was something in the specific combination of urgency and pride that made observing predecessors too passive an act to be valued. As though sitting and watching was admitting there was something to learn — and admitting there was something to learn was admitting something was lacking. I didn't have that problem. I had too many things to lose to worry about what the posture communicated — and my life was the foremost of them.
"What do you think, Lord?"
"He's strong." — I said, without taking my eyes off the arena. — "Stronger than I had calculated. And he's patient — which requires real intelligence, not just instinct. I don't believe we can repeat what we did with the Thick-Hided Rhino."
It was incredibly difficult to identify flaws in the Griffin. The creature was beautiful in a way I hadn't expected to find in an arena — beautiful with the quality of something that had been made with intent before being captured, the beauty existing before the confinement and surviving it in a way the confinement hadn't managed to completely erase. White and brown feathers that caught the light at different angles depending on the movement, with the specific quality of material that had evolved to communicate something beyond appearance. Large dense feline body that made the environment part of its territory simply by being in it — not through aggression, but through the quality of presence.
But it was the caramel eyes, large and always attentive, that communicated what the rest of the body hid: the almost human sadness of being an eternal piece of entertainment — of having enough intelligence to understand what was happening and insufficient to change it. It was the kind of sadness that existed beneath the rage, that the rage covered but didn't replace.
The size varied between individuals — it became clear to me that it was a variable related to age: the larger, the older. And the older, the more intelligent — to the point of being able to evaluate the opponent in seconds and adapt the approach before the opponent realized they had been evaluated. While everyone saw in the size strength and superiority — which was also true — I saw accumulated experience and intelligence. It was obvious that the larger ones won almost always. But the reasons for the victory clearly escaped those who watched without truly seeing, who registered the result without cataloguing the process that had led to it.
Against magic users, it used its claws and beak — Chimera-level strength applied directly before the magic had time to become a problem, eliminating the threat in the window before the casting. Against tanks and the resistant, it used its wings — gaining altitude, converting the opponent's strength into irrelevance with the specific logic that ground strength doesn't reach what's in the air. It didn't have particularly strong magical power: a wind bullet and a paralyzing roar. The roar was an immediate-effect problem. The wind bullet was the bigger problem — because it was invisible, and the fact that the damage seemed paltry in comparison to other magic made it systematically underestimated by almost everyone who had fought up to that point, who had registered it as a lesser threat and had directed attention to what seemed more urgent.
Magic wasn't that creature's strong suit. But it flew. And flying made any attack difficult to predict or counter in a way that went beyond mechanics — it was psychological, there was something about an opponent that moved in three dimensions that made the ground opponent spend energy calculating angles they had never needed to calculate before, and that expenditure accumulated.
"Perhaps I can hit him with arrows and force a close-range fight, perhaps with Blood Magic we can overcome him before he realizes."
"Impossible." — I said — "He'll understand that Blood Magic is temporary. He'll wait for the rebound and focus on killing you before wearing me down with the wind bullet. If you become the visible threat, I lose position — and without position, I lose the only advantage we have."
The more I observed, the narrower the path seemed. The Griffin was superior in almost everything — strength, resistance, speed, mobility, tactical intelligence. The only advantage I could identify was that this creature had probably never fought against a human — and that humans were, by the established reputation in the Oasis, a race that didn't justify special caution. They weren't tall, weren't strong, weren't relevant in the threat catalogue that any competent creature had developed over sufficient existence to encounter real threats. For many races, the difference between humans and something like the Skaven was small details — intelligence slightly above average and little more.
The Griffin's ignorance of what I was capable of was, therefore, the best card I had. Perhaps the only one. And unique cards required being played with the right timing — because a second chance didn't exist when there was only one card.
"Perhaps we can do what that Infernal warrior did. Marfini."
I knew who Morgana was talking about. Marfini had been the first to face the Griffin — and because of her, the five competitors that followed had died even being superior. The reason was that Marfini had made it look easy in a way that had created false expectation in everyone who watched — the fight being short, direct, almost without drama, which had communicated to those observing that the Griffin's difficulty had been exaggerated by reputation. The problem was that nobody had noticed what she had really done.
"That Infernal certainly has some kind of putrefaction power."
"Really? I never saw her use it actively."
"Exactly." — I said. — "She used it, but made a point of not making it obvious that she had. She understands that the fewer competitors she deceived, the fewer competitors would get in her way — every power she demonstrated was false information that others collected and used to prepare. She used the power on the Griffin's feathers — I saw her destabilizing the Griffin's flight even before the first serious contact, in a way so discreet it looked like she was merely grazing the creature as she passed. If the later competitors had watched the fight as we did they would have seen the real reason for the quick victory."
"So that's why the creature seemed to have difficulty rising after the first blow."
Morgana had been blinded by the way Marfini presented herself — always fast, always powerful, winning fights on pure strength with the ostentation of someone who had learned that ostentation was a tool as much as ability. But that Infernal wasn't stupid. She had attacked in the same way as always while casting the putrefaction discreetly — two seconds that had been sufficient for those who knew what to look for, invisible to those who were looking at the spectacle instead of the mechanism beneath.
"And what about Vrikor?"
"That one is on another level entirely."
I had to admit that with the honesty of someone who had calculated and arrived at a conclusion they didn't like but had no argument to dispute. If someone had told me before that a competition for beginners would contain a competitor like that, I would have doubted not because the argument seemed implausible, but because the level difference created a distinct category, not just a different degree. Vrikor was too strong, too fast, too resistant — the kind of Infernal that seemed to have been placed there by a categorization error, as though someone had applied the wrong criterion when classifying and the result had passed through some filter it shouldn't have.
He had killed the Griffin before the creature had time to process what was happening. Pure strength and agility, without visible strategy — because strategy wasn't necessary when the power difference was of that scale, when the gap was large enough that the efficiency of the approach didn't matter.
What I didn't give myself the luxury of saying to Morgana was that the two Griffins the Infernals had faced were visibly smaller than those of the other competitors — smaller in size, which I had calculated as younger in age, which I had understood as less intelligent and experienced. There was favoring of the hosts that was evident to those who compared, invisible to those who didn't compare because there was no habit of comparing or because comparing was politically inconvenient for those who had an interest in the result.
Saying out loud that there was favoring for the hosts would resolve none of our problems — it would only create tension with those who controlled the environment in which I still needed to operate for one more fight. But it had become clear that there were pieces moving beneath the veil, and ignoring the pieces was different from not seeing them. I saw them.
I just needed to win that specific fight. Everything else was noise.
Very likely the oldest would be left for me, with all the experience and intelligence that greater size communicated — after all I wasn't collecting fans, and the organizers understood the value of a spectacle where the result wasn't predictable.
For a second I was glad to know I wouldn't be competing against those monsters for the final prize. I just needed to win this fight — and winning this specific fight, against that specific creature, was already challenge enough to occupy all available attention.
"So we have no ideas. How are we going to act?"
"Calmly." — I said, with the tone of someone who had arrived at an idea and was verifying whether it survived analysis before presenting it. — "I have an idea."
Watching all the fights and all the approaches, it had become clear that against the Griffin there were only two apparent paths that worked: extreme strength or silent magic. I had neither in a form that seemed sufficient under normal conditions — not the extreme strength that allowed ignoring what the creature did, and not the silent magic that resolved before the creature got to resolve things. But I had come prepared — not with the resources that would have worked for either of those two paths, but with what I had, a new path opened.
"What we see from the Griffin is that it chooses the form of combat based on the enemy it faces. It evaluates, categorizes, adapts. It's methodical in this — more so than any other creature I've observed in the Oasis. But what if the enemy didn't make it clear what the best way to deal with it was? What if the evaluation didn't reach a result the Griffin recognized?"
"What do you mean?"
"Then let's do this…"
✦
The arena opened to me with cascading boos — arriving before I was completely visible, as though the rejection had been prepared in advance and was merely waiting for the trigger of presence to be released.
The Infernals' hypersonic power was constant — not as a direct threat, but as background noise that required maintenance. I always needed healing magic just to stay functional before a fight, the healing compensating for the passive damage that arrived in a way I hadn't managed to block completely. What comforted me was knowing the Griffin suffered the same problem — that the arena didn't distinguish between target and collateral when it came to distributing the discomfort the Infernals caused with their screams.
The noise would stop when the fight began — the arena didn't like me, but also wouldn't waste the spectacle it had been waiting for. There was an implicit contract between the arena and what it contained, and the contract had clauses the Infernals respected even when they preferred not to.
I advanced to the location I had selected while watching the previous fights — not the geometric center of the arena, but the point I had identified as having the specific combination of visibility and access I needed — and waited. With the Roman shield in position and the sword lowered, posture that communicated neither retreat nor advance, that existed in the space between the two like a question mark.
I knew what happened with each competitor: the gate opened, the creature came out, and what happened in the first seconds determined how everything else developed. The first seconds were where the Griffin collected information — movement, posture, type of weapon, breathing pattern, micro-adjustments that communicated what the opponent had trained and what they had improvised. And all the previous competitors had provided that information immediately, each in their own way.
It had worked for some — those who had enough strength that the information didn't matter. Most had been unproductive — those who had provided information and had discovered the Griffin was capable of using information more efficiently than they were capable of using strength. Those who tried to retreat and conjure from a distance had discovered that despite the wings, the Griffin was an exceptional ground creature — the paws reached before the distance was sufficient for the magic to be cast with margin.
I was standing in the middle. I wouldn't retreat. I wouldn't advance.
The question that remained was: what would the creature do with that.
"He's coming, Lord."
I felt the pheromone — a territorial characteristic I had identified from the first fights, though it took several battles to fully understand what it really was. Initially it had seemed merely space demarcation, the kind of chemical communication that predators used to communicate presence before communicating intent. But observing the behavioral patterns of competitors over the course of the fights, with the attention that hours of accumulated observation allowed, I realized there was something beyond that: a weak incitement magic embedded in the pheromone. A chemical suggestion that arrived as impulse before being processed as thought — the very quiet voice in the ear saying that advancing was the right answer, that waiting was weakness, that action was what the situation required.
It was subtle enough to go unnoticed as magic — it was perceived only as urgency to act, and urgency in an arena was easy to attribute to the conditions of the arena or nerves rather than to influence. And therefore efficient: most of the non-magic users had advanced prematurely, and the advance itself wasn't necessarily an error — it was the timing that was, the window being earlier than what would have worked. Only when the pieces fit together did it become clear: for that fight, the pheromone was a behavioral control tool, not merely communication. The Griffin wanted to control who acted first — which revealed more about that creature's intelligence than anything else I had observed.
The question was why control of initiative mattered so much.
My answer was simple: the Griffin was more intelligent than it appeared. Much more. Setting aside the dragons — which were said to be capable of dialogue with a sufficiently elaborate vocabulary to communicate abstract concepts — Griffins were considered substantially inferior in intelligence, a category below superior primates in most catalogues. But I believed it was the opposite: Griffins were intelligent enough to hide their intelligence, most likely because they weren't as strong as dragons, which didn't need to hide because strength made intelligence secondary information.
Everything they did was premeditated, including the appearance of being merely an instinctive predator. Fortunately it was in the fights that such intelligent behavior couldn't be hidden — after all the incitement magic wasn't an accident — it was a deliberate tool of an opponent that knew that controlling the enemy's behavior was a more reliable advantage than brute force, because brute force depended on being larger and wasn't always larger, but controlled behavior depended only on the enemy not realizing they were being controlled.
"Lord, the magic has gotten stronger."
"Yes, he's quite large." — I said, maintaining position, my feet in the same place they had been since I had entered. — "Stay in control. He needs to choose — this is of utmost importance."
My theory proved real the moment the Griffin came completely out of the gate and I could see the full scale. It was clearly the largest of all I had seen that day — easily reaching almost double the height and density of the others, with the musculature that wasn't the product of common growth but of time, layers upon layers of mass built by years of use. It was a creature that had survived much — and a creature that had survived much had learned much by the only method that taught with that depth: making mistakes, paying the price, not repeating them.
I was a nuisance that needed to be eliminated — too weak to be a real threat by the race's reputation, too present to be ignored by the fact of presence. For any other competitor, that assessment would seem a definitive disadvantage. For me it was potentially the opposite — because that specific creature, with that size and that age, had accumulated years of successful combat always using the same logic: mirror the opponent's weakness from the identified strength. Perceptive. Efficient. And for a creature that had never failed with that approach enough times to question the strategy, had probably stopped verifying whether there were conditions in which it didn't work.
But what if the opponent communicated neither strength nor weakness clearly? What if they stood in the middle — without acting, without fleeing, without attacking — offering the Griffin a variable that the accumulated intelligence had no catalogued standard response for?
I appeared weak. To everyone in the arena, weakness was detestable — it was the state the arena existed to eliminate, the condition the system had been created to filter. For the Griffin, weakness was approach information: identifying the weakness was identifying the most efficient path to the result. The question was what happened when the information didn't arrive in a readable form.
For me, appearing weak was the most efficient way to attract the opponent's mistake — as long as the opponent was intelligent enough to try to process the information instead of merely acting in its absence. A purely instinctive opponent would advance regardless. An intelligent opponent would wait to evaluate. And an opponent that waited to evaluate was an opponent I could control through the type of information I chose to give.
The Griffin was a creature of nobility — not of blood, but of position, accustomed to being at the top of what the arena placed before it. Accustomed to judging by what it saw, accustomed to being right in that judgment because the judgment had been precise enough for being right to be the normal result. But at the same time it was a creature that had been placed in that arena against its own will, chained and used as a piece in a game it had never chosen to participate in. There was accumulated rage in that — the specific rage of something that had understood what was happening and had stopped trying to change it because enough attempts had reached the same result. And accumulated rage made judgment less reliable precisely when there was the most confidence — because rage and confidence occupied the same space and rage pushed confidence out before verification was complete.
"Get ready. He's going to charge."
When the Griffin finally understood that the waiting strategy wouldn't produce the information it was looking for — that the opponent in front of it was communicating neither attack nor retreat, that the variable existed outside the categories it had learned to read and use — it advanced with wings half-open. A position that allowed immediate flight if the opponent proved stronger than calculated, maintaining the option of gaining altitude if the contact revealed a level above what was expected. It was the intelligent approach. It was also, I had calculated, the approach that would leave a specific gap at the moment of first contact.
It would most likely feel the strength at first contact and decide in the air — rise or commit.
I wouldn't give it that chance.
"He's coming!"
"Steady."
Morgana stepped back, without touching the crossbow. We needed to act at the last moment — before the last moment was too early, after was too late, and the window between the two was narrow in the way that important windows always were. When the creature got close enough — close enough being the point where retreat produced less distance than advance produced commitment — I jumped to the side. Getting out of the path of the beak but deliberately staying within the reach of the claws, with the awareness that I was choosing the lesser damage to create the position I needed.
The claw made a shallow cut in the shield — the metal groaning with the kind of ceremony metal makes when it meets force it wasn't designed for — and the impact passed through the shield and reached the arm with the honest pain of real force meeting insufficient resistance. The pain showed me what the numbers hadn't managed to show completely: that creature was too strong for sustained direct exchange.
I had survived the first contact.
That was what I needed — confirmation that the position was correct, that what I had calculated about the window was real and not theoretical.
The Griffin turned to me — eagle face a few centimeters from mine, the caramel eyes I had observed for hours doing the real-time assessment I had hoped they would do. It was a sublime creature up close in a way that distance hadn't fully communicated — there was something genuinely beautiful in it that the rage and confinement couldn't erase. The beauty existed beneath everything else as permanent data that circumstances could cover but not replace.
It opened its mouth ready to use one of its abilities — I knew which one it would be.
An arrow hit the neck — superficially, with the result that had communicated what I had calculated: the natural protection was extraordinary, the arrow insufficient for real damage but sufficient for a startle. The startle was sufficient to prevent the paralyzing roar from being effective — the sound coming out, but fragmented, without the cohesion that made the power functional.
The Griffin turned toward Morgana — identifying the real threat with the speed of something that processed the environment on multiple channels simultaneously, reorienting the fight toward the element that had caused the startle. It was the intelligent decision: eliminate the ranged threat before committing to what was in contact. It was also exactly the mistake I had expected, not because it was a judgment error but because it was an information error — the Griffin didn't know what was coming next.
When it advanced toward her, something grabbed the tail.
The surprise in the creature's eyes was almost human — the kind of expression that appeared when something had gone completely outside the model that had been built to process the environment. Zaetar had emerged without warning, without sound, with the specific summoning timing I had practiced for that moment during the hours of observation, the entry point chosen to maximize the surprise effect of something emerging where the Griffin wasn't looking.
The stunned Griffin was still processing where that creature had come from when the Swamp Abomination's claws came from the flanks and knocked it sideways — weight against weight, the mount using the only resource it had in abundance without depending on the resources it didn't have. A massive body applied from an angle the Griffin hadn't covered because it had been covering the front and the tail simultaneously.
"Hold it. I just need a few seconds."
The Abomination was a mount, not a warrior — and against the Griffin, the only real advantage was the weight of a body that had been built for another function and had arrived at this one through an accident of purpose. The moment the Griffin finished channeling the wind bullet, the Abomination that had nothing more than skin and bone and brute strength would die with the speed of something that hadn't been built to resist that kind of magic. I needed to act before that moment — not to save the Abomination, which was a mount and not an ally in the sense that mattered, but because the moment after the bullet would be the moment when the Griffin would have the chance to break free from my trap.
I leaped onto the creature's head while it was still thrashing — using Zaetar and the Abomination's seconds together as the time I had bought for what I needed to do. The wind bullet that was aimed at the mount passed through my shoulder with the quality of something that had been launched by a creature that knew what it was doing — not rushed, not disoriented, finding the target even under restricted conditions with the precision of years of use. Sharp pain, real damage, the kind that communicated the creature was still operating even restricted, but not enough to change the trajectory of what had begun.
While I clung to the neck that was shaking with the force of something that had discovered that what was on top of it shouldn't be on top of it, the tattoo on my arm began to move with the anticipation of something that had been prepared for that moment — not reactive, but waiting.
There was no time for a weapon.
There was time for one specific thing I had imagined during the hours watching the fights — verifying the theory against each fight I had seen, discarding what wouldn't work, arriving at what could work not as certainty but as a possibility high enough to be what I was betting on. The only thing I thought could work against a creature that processed the environment through sight — that evaluated, that calculated, that adapted — was to remove sight from the equation.
A metal hood began to form — advancing from the tattoo over the creature's head with the speed of materialization I had learned to count as real data rather than an uncertain variable. Molding itself to the contour of the skull and beak with the precision of visualization I had prepared in advance, repeating the mental form with sufficient detail for the Mark to replicate it without ambiguity. Covering the eyes. Leaving only the opening for the beak to breathe — because the objective wasn't to kill by suffocation, it was to remove the capacity to see.
The cry of rage diminished as the metal closed — not diminishing in intensity, which remained, but changing in quality. The rage remained. What diminished was the direction of the rage, which had lost its target when the eyes had lost the environment. There was something unsettling in hearing it — the terror of an intelligent creature that had understood what was happening, and that had been left with the terror alone without the action that normally accompanied it.
When it was done, the creature was immobilized — not by strength, which had lost efficiency when it had lost direction, but by the absence of information. Without sight, without the capacity to evaluate the environment, the intelligence that had made that creature so difficult to face had become the reason it had stopped. The most powerful tool it possessed had been removed, and without it the rest was strength without direction — more dangerous in potential, less efficient in practice.
I came down slowly, with the care of someone who didn't want to communicate threat through movement. I stood facing the beak still visible — the only part that had been left outside the hood, breathing with the accelerated rhythm of something still processing what had happened.
"I know you understand me." — I said, with the volume and tone I had calibrated for that sentence during the hours of observation, quiet enough to be a conversation and not a declaration, to arrive as communication between two who were speaking and not as an announcement from one to an audience.
The beak stopped moving.
It was the only confirmation I needed — that it had understood the word, that it had processed the concept, that it had arrived at the place where conversation was possible. That what was in front of it wasn't just another predator with a different strategy, but something that had arrived with a completely different category of intent. Not through extreme strength or through silent and cruel magic, but through the third path.
"It's time we talked about a deal."