He was nearly at the rope line when something on the far side of the room caught his attention.
Not deliberately. Just the way certain things pulled the eye without asking permission.
She stood near the equipment wall, arms folded, watching the current bout with the detached expression of someone who'd already assessed everyone in the room and moved on to more interesting problems.
Rich brown skin marked with a single, jagged line of stark white that ran from her forearm up past the shoulder—not a tattoo, but a marking she'd carried since her first breath. White hair pulled back. Pointed ears half-visible beneath it. She was built lean and dense in the way of people who'd trained not to look like they trained.
Half the men near her were looking at her.
None of them earned a second glance from her.
I've seen her somewhere.
Crow frowned slightly, reaching for the memory. It sat just past the edge of recognition—not a face he knew, but a face he'd encountered, some context he couldn't immediately place. The markings. The posture. Something.
It didn't surface.
He filed it and let it go.
The current bout ended with a clean takedown, chalk dust rising from the boundary line, the crowd reacting with the muted approval of people who'd seen enough fights to know when one was technically correct but not particularly interesting.
A bracket runner moved to the board.
Berthold approached Crow's side.
"You can fight one of the seven. I recommend not picking her," he said. "Unless you'd prefer to wait and see the fights."
Crow watched the dark elf across the room turn her head—not toward him, toward the board, her eyes moving across the chalked names with the same quiet efficiency she applied to everything else in the room.
"I will go with the first," he said.
Seven rings.
Crow hadn't noticed immediately—the room was too loud, too dense with bodies—but stepping past the rope line made the layout clear. Seven squares marked in chalk and iron stakes driven into the stone floor, each one maybe six meters across, rope strung between the stakes at chest height. Not a tournament bracket. Not a staged elimination. Just seven rings running simultaneously, bodies cycling through as fast as outcomes resolved.
A handler near the entry point shoved a numbered token into his hand without looking up. Fourteen. Crow turned it once between his fingers.
Berthold appeared at his shoulder, already moving toward the selection board.
"Choose an opponent," he said. "Anyone not currently marked active. Any time. Rings run continuously—win one, stay for the next. The last seven still standing at the end of the day get promoted. Simple."
The board ran long—two columns of names, some crossed out, some circled, most still open. Crow scanned it.
Regular soldiers. Senior rankings. A handful of names without titles, which either meant new entries or people who'd decided anonymity served them better than reputation.
Then, near the bottom, unmarked and unchosen, a name written on the back:
Minion 47.
No rank. No designation beyond the number. Just the name, and beside it a small notation in different handwriting than the rest—a single word that someone had written and then partially scratched out, leaving enough to read:
Queen's.
Yeah, no secret.
Crow tapped it. "This one."
The handler glanced up for the first time. Looked at Crow. Looked at the name. Then back at Crow with the particular expression of a man who had thoughts and had made a professional decision not to share them.
"Ring three," he said. "Wait for the arbiter."
Minion 47 was already standing in the ring when Crow ducked under the rope.
The word golem surfaced in Crow's mind the moment he got within five meters—not from any formal knowledge of this world's classifications, just from the accumulated evidence of his own eyes. Wrong proportions. The joints sat slightly off, shoulders too wide for the torso's depth, arms hanging at angles that didn't quite match the geometry of a human skeleton.
The skin, if it qualified as skin, carried a matte, dense quality, like clay that had been fired and then painted to approximate something living. Seams ran along the jaw and the back of both hands, not wounds—construction lines.
The eyes tracked him the moment he cleared the rope. Pale. No pupil depth. The tracking itself was mechanical—smooth, continuous, no saccade, no blink.
Ah.
Crow stopped a few paces out and studied it properly.
Someone had put considerable effort into making this thing look approximately human. They had not quite succeeded, but the effort was visible. A collarbone that was slightly too geometric. Ears shaped correctly but attached at a fractionally wrong angle. Fingers that moved with individual deliberateness, each one curling and extending in sequence, over and over, like a system running a diagnostic.
The arbiter stepped up onto the ring's low platform, unrolled a short document, and began reading the rules in the flat, practiced cadence of a man who'd delivered them too many times to find them interesting anymore.
"Exit the boundary, loss. Unconscious, loss. Submission, loss. Death—"
"K-kill," said Minion 47.
The arbiter didn't stop reading.
"—is not the objective of this exercise, and any participant who—"
"K-kill," the golem murmured. Its head tilted three degrees toward Crow. "I k-kill, weak."
"—deliberately escalates to lethal force will be disqualified and subject to—"
"K-kill." A pause. The fingers cycled through their sequence again. "Kill."
The arbiter rolled his document back up with the energy of a man long past being surprised by anything.
Crow watched the golem's eyes track him.
...Maybe I chose a lunatic without realizing it. Just my luck.
He glanced sideways at the nearest ring. Two soldiers were trading blows with visible effort. He looked back at ring three's roster, mentally running through the names he'd scanned on the board— how many had been open, active, and how many already marked complete.
And how many had been standing beside Minion 47's entry without a single tally next to them.
None. Not one.
Hm. Too late now.
The arbiter stepped down.
Crow rolled his neck once. Settled his weight.
Minion 47 moved first.
No warning, no settling into stance. It crossed the distance in three strides too smooth, too metronomic, no wasted oscillation in the hips—and swung a right hook that arrived faster than the wind-up suggested was possible.
Crow got his forearm up.
The impact drove him sideways two full steps. His boots scraped chalk.
What? That... was a little heavy.
He recovered, circled left, and the golem tracked him with those unblinking pale eyes and came again—a straight drive at the sternum, linear and efficient, no telegraphing because nothing in its mechanics telegraphed, no shoulder drop, no breath change, no micro-expression to read.
"K-kill."
Crow checked it with a crossed guard and felt the force travel all the way up to his shoulders.
He shoved the arm out of the way, stepped inside the guard, and threw a tight hook right at the jaw. The impact jarred up his arm like he'd punched a wall. No vibration, like hitting a solid block of iron.
What the heck.
What's this thing even made of?
He disengaged fast, shaking the hand out, already circling. The golem's head tracked the movement, that same smooth rotation.
"K-kill," it said quietly.
"Someone seems to have a broken disc."
Crow kept moving. He threw two jabs—testing, not committing, and the golem deflected both with a flat sweep of its forearm, not a block so much as a structural refusal to be moved. He pushed a kick into the lead knee, checking stability, and the golem planted through it without shifting weight. Planted through it, like he'd kicked a load-bearing wall.
Okay. Different problem.
He worked the angles. Grabbed the extended forearm on the next swing, tried to redirect it, and for a half-second had the leverage—then the golem simply reversed the force without mechanical hesitation, no hesitation because hesitation required something to hesitate with, and Crow found himself off-balance instead.
He threw himself into a backward roll before the follow-up landed, came up with chalk dust on his spine, immediately moved laterally.
Around ring three, a small cluster of soldiers had gathered at the rope line, watching in silence.
Right.
He breathed steadily, watching the golem reset for another approach.
That's why nobody chose you.
The golem didn't telegraph. That was the problem.
Every fighter Crow had ever faced carried their intent in the body before the body moved—a breath held half a beat too long, a shoulder that dipped before the swing, pupils that flickered toward the target. Twelve years of reading men in alleys, arenas, and places with no name and no witnesses had wired him to catch those signals the way other people caught words.
Minion 47 carried nothing. No breath. No shoulder. No eyes that meant anything.
It came in again with that same metronomic advance, and Crow moved to meet it—not back, not sideways, into it—and caught the swinging arm at the wrist with both hands, torqued his hips, tried to use the momentum.
The golem didn't have momentum. It had mass and direction and no opinion about either.
The throw half-worked. Minion 47 didn't go down, but it stumbled—the first stumble, the first broken stride—and Crow stepped clear, shook out his left hand, and took stock.
Three ribs complained. The forearm he'd been using as a shield felt like someone had been using it as an anvil. His boots had left two long chalk lines across the ring from being pushed, and the watching soldiers at the rope said nothing, because there was nothing to say.
He'd landed maybe eight clean hits.
None of them had done anything.
The golem reset, turned, and came again.
Crow took a body shot rather than eat the follow-up to the head—let it crash into his side, grunted through it, wrapped the arm, and drove his elbow into the junction of neck and shoulder three times in rapid sequence, targeting the seam he'd spotted earlier.
The third one landed with a different sound. A grinding sound, ceramic-dry.
The golem's arm twitched.
There.
He filed it. Disengaged before the other arm came around, moved right this time, kept the pressure off his ribs.
The straight drive caught him mid-step.
It arrived at his chest like a battering ram with no windup, no warning, just force relocating him across the ring at speed, and Crow hit the rope corner post with his shoulder and the back of his skull and the entire left side of his ribcage in rapid, unpleasant succession.
The rope caught him. The post didn't give.
He hung there for a half second, blinking chalk dust out of his eyes, and the world reassembled itself in pieces.
To his left, past the rope: a ring standing empty.
Not empty, waiting.
She stood at the center of it with her arms loose at her sides, rich brown skin carrying those white markings from wrist to shoulder, lines of pale stark against dark—jagged, branching, alive in a way that had nothing to do with art. They caught the arena light differently than the rest of her, a faint luminescent quality, as though the marks held their own opinion about visibility.
No opponent, no arbiter reading rules, and no cluster of soldiers at her rope line, because of something.
Her ring had been empty since the draws.
Her gaze skipped past the empty ring. It settled on him—or rather, the direction of him, the way a person watched weather coming across flat ground. No expression he could name. No lean forward, no narrowed eyes, no smallest tell that she found the sight interesting or uninteresting or anything in between.
Just observation, patient and utterly without comment.
Crow held her gaze for the exact amount of time it took his ribs to remind him there was a golem in his ring.
He pushed off the post.
Right. Focus.
Minion 47 closed the distance with those ground-eating strides, and Crow stopped retreating—planted his feet, let it read the stillness as a target, watched the arm draw back for the same straight drive that had just sent him into the ropes.
Same mechanics. Same angle. Same complete absence of deception because deception required the capacity to deceive.
He angled off the line.
Not back, but forty-five degrees left, slipping inside the path of the punch, and the fist sailed past his ear close enough that he felt the air displacement, and he was already moving—both hands locking on the extended arm, one at the wrist, one just below the elbow, weight dropping, hips rotating, the whole structure of his body converting forward momentum into lateral redirect.
The seam at the neck-shoulder junction crackled.
The arm didn't reverse this time.
He steered it. Used the golem's own forward drive, added his own force to the vector, kept the leverage for the full arc instead of giving it back—and Minion 47's feet left the chalk.
One stride. Two.
The rope hit it across the shins.
It went over.
"K-kill???"
THUD!
The sound it made hitting the floor outside the ring was dense and final, the way a stone pillar sounds when it decides to stop being vertical.
Silence.
Then the arbiter stepped up onto his platform, unrolled the short document, and cleared his throat.
"Eliminated."
He didn't look up. "Left the ring boundary while combat remained in progress—"
"K-kill!" it shrieked, seizing the arbiter by the feet. It slammed him against the stone floor, whipping him back and forth like someone shaking out a dusty rug.
The arbiter was lying there unconscious, his face a mangled ruin of crushed bone and purple bruising. A thick, bloody foam bubbled from his lips, staining the cracked floor.
Crow barely had time to blink before the air shifted.
A blur of motion, so fast Crow's eyes could only just track the displacement of wind, streaked across the place. It was a vampire. With a violent crash, she slammed the creature into the stone floor. She pinned it instantly, driving her knee into its spine with enough force to crack it, and the floor.
The golem groaned.
"K-kill? K-kill???"
Its face mashed flat against the stone as it struggled feebly under her weight. She didn't look at the monster, she looked straight at Crow.
Another one for the list of women I must never, ever piss off. Sharon.
She grabbed the creature by the scruff and hauled it away like a piece of unruly luggage.
In the vacuum left behind, Sophia stepped into the ring to take the arbiter's place. With practiced elegance, she ignored the pool of blood nearby. She carried a silver tray holding a pitcher of water, a crystal chalice, and a pristine white towel.
She moved toward Crow with a slight bow, ready to dry the sweat and blood from his skin as if they were in a ballroom rather than a slaughterhouse.
Crow glanced at the broken body twitching nearby, then back at the calm vampire.
"I appreciate the service, Sophia," he said, his voice dry, "but the previous arbiter is currently leaking all over the floor."
He looked to the side as he drank the water, while Sophia began to pat the sweat from his skin with the towel.
Just my luck.
The big guy, the one who had warned him to stay away from Sophia for his own good, was standing there. Staring, seething, and drooling with rage like a mad dog, two veins bulging from his forehead.
I don't need to be a genius to guess what happens next.
"I told you..." the man said, approaching the ring where Crow stood.
***
Author's Note: Guys, I'm publishing today instead of tomorrow. Some things came up and I might not have the chance to post tomorrow, so I wanted to make sure you got the chapter early. That's all, I'm out!