"—and that Kazu doesn’t dive into a school exhibition for some no-name replacement squad." James let the words hang, tilting his head like he was still working out a math problem. "So which is it? You him? Or you just liked how the name sounded next to a mask?"
Karl didn’t answer. There was nothing to hand him yet, and giving him nothing was its own kind of answer.
One of the Shark Riders, a shorter guy with a buzzcut, leaned toward his teammates and didn’t bother lowering his voice.
"Wait, hold on. Isn’t that the Elsa chick who ditched her whole roster last week? And her, what, emotional support ponytail?" He grinned at Sana, who did not grin back. "Couldn’t hack it with a real team, so you ran off with the guy in the Halloween mask?"
"He’s not just a guy in a mask," Elsa said, before Karl could get a single word out. "He carried a team of strangers to a win on his first dive. He’s better than James was on his best night, and James’s best night was still him losing to a stand-in."
’Elsa.’ Karl kept his eyes forward. ’Please stop.’
"He reads fights before they happen," she went on, hands moving now, warming up to it the way she warmed up to everything. "You lost three men to one gank because you couldn’t figure out where he’d be. That’s not luck. That’s a different tier of player standing in front of you, and you still haven’t figured out how to say it."
James’s jaw worked once.
Whatever he’d planned to say next, that wasn’t it. His face had gone tight and a little red, the specific color of a guy who’d spent two weeks explaining that loss to people who kept asking about it.
"You know what," he said, stepping closer, close enough that the line around them had already started to notice, phones drifting up on instinct, "let’s settle it. Not in some dive pod with an avater doing half the work for you. Right here. You and me. Let’s see how good rank one is when there’s no game holding your hand."
"I’m not fighting you over a registration line," Karl said.
"Scared?"
"Id rather not."
That got a laugh out of the Shark Riders, the wrong kind, and James’s hand shot out and closed around the front of Karl’s jacket before Karl had finished the sentence.
"Should’ve stayed uninterested in Barton, then," James said, low. "Because you just made my whole week."
Two of his teammates peeled off the group without being told to, drifting wide the way people do when they’ve done this before, and Karl understood, with a flat, sinking clarity, that this had never been a fair fight to begin with.
[Notice: Hostile intent confirmed. Numerical disadvantage: four to one.]
’I noticed.’
The first hit came from the side, not James. Karl turned into it half a second too late and took it across the ribs, the same ribs the Black Snakes had already introduced themselves to two weeks ago, and the sound that came out of him was more surprise than pain.
"Kazu!" Elsa’s voice cracked on it.
He got an arm up. Blocked the second hit, mostly. Threw one back that caught the buzzcut guy across the jaw and bought himself half a second of space before a third pair of hands grabbed his shoulder from behind and the ground tilted.
[Instant Quest issued.]
[Quest: Do not go down.]
[Reward: Skill, conditional.]
’Now? You pick now?’
[This unit has learned to recognize a pattern.]
He hit the ground on one knee, caught himself before his palms did, and came back up swinging blind, and it wasn’t good, it wasn’t clean, and it wasn’t anything like the version of him that existed inside a helmet. Out here his body was just a body, twenty-one years old and sore from a beating it hadn’t finished healing from, and four against one did the math it was always going to do.
[Charlotte does not approve of this.]
[Charlotte states this loudly.]
’Little busy.’
[Charlotte requests this unit intervene.]
Karl took a knee again. Didn’t stay down. Pushed back up with blood in his mouth and his vision swimming at the edges, and something about staying upright had stopped being a strategy and started being the only thing he had left to prove.
"Stop! Stop it, someone stop them—" Sana was already moving, shoving between two of the Shark Riders with more force than her frame should have allowed, and one of them shoved her back hard enough that she stumbled into the crowd.
Elsa wasn’t moving at all.
She stood frozen for exactly one second, watching Karl take a fourth hit and not go down, and then something in her face changed completely, fear folding into something colder and much more useful. Her phone was already at her ear.
"Dad. Dad, it’s me, I need you to hear this—" She held the phone out toward the fight, voice raised loud enough to carry over the crowd noise. "I’m at the registration hall on Ferris Street, there are five guys jumping one person right now, I have their faces, I have their team jackets, and I am not hanging up until you tell me you are coming."
The effect was immediate.
[Skill unlocked: Steel Nerve.]
[Effect: Outward pain response dulled. Internal damage unaffected.]
Karl felt it settle over him like a held breath, just a strange flat calm where the panic should have been, and he straightened up out of the next hit with his face doing nothing at all, which somehow rattled James more than getting hit back would have.
James’s hand had already dropped away from his collar. His eyes went to Elsa, to the phone, to the growing wall of people now filming instead of watching, and something in his expression recalculated fast.
"We’re done," he said, loud, like he’d decided that himself. "This isn’t worth a police report."
"Wasn’t worth it three hits ago either," Karl said, and spat blood onto the pavement.
James’s team backed off in a loose, unhurried scatter that tried very hard to look like a choice. James lingered a second longer than the rest, staring at Karl’s steady, unreadable face like it offended him personally.
"See you in the bracket," he said. "Rank one."
Then he was gone, and the crowd exhaled all at once, phones still up, whispers already stitching the story together wrong in four different directions.
...
Elsa reached him first, phone still gripped white-knuckled in one hand, and for a second she didn’t say anything at all. She just looked at the split at his lip, the way he was holding his ribs a little too carefully, and her eyes went glassy in a way that had nothing to do with anger anymore.
"You’re an idiot," she said, voice shaking. "You just stood there. You just kept standing there."
"Wasn’t much else to do."
"You could have run."
"I don’t think they would have given me that option either."
"That’s not a reason, Kazu..." She pressed the back of her hand hard against her own mouth, and Karl realized, with some distant embarrassment, that she was trying not to cry in front of the entire registration line. "Why did you think to just stand there... And you didn’t even—"
"I’m fine, Elsa."
"You are not fine, you’re just really good at pretending you are, and I don’t know which one worries me more."
Sana appeared at her shoulder, unusually pale, one hand still pressed to the arm the shove had bruised. She looked at Karl for a long moment, and whatever careful distance she usually kept had gone somewhere else entirely.
"Sit down before you fall down," she said. "Please."
[Bond interaction progress: 49%.]
’Not now.’
Karl let himself be steered onto the low wall by the entrance, Elsa on one side and Sana on the other, and above them the banner for the region’s biggest tournament snapped once in the wind, indifferent to all of it. Somewhere behind him, the registration line had already started moving again, because lines like that never actually stopped for anything.
He looked down at his split knuckles, at the blood drying dark against his skin, and thought that James had gotten one thing right without meaning to.
He would see him in the bracket.