035 moved first.
He closed the distance faster than his own face seemed to expect a five-year-old's body doing something a five-year-old's mind hadn't fully caught up to yet, the kick aimed at 005's stomach arriving with a speed that would have ended the fight against anyone still ordinary. Against her, it simply arrived. She'd already read it.
If you have long limbs, use them. Someone had told her that once, in a drill she barely remembered now, and it had settled into her the way true things settle not as advice, just as fact, the same way the sky is grey was fact. He had the reach. He'd use it first, and use it straight. She twisted at the hip, barely, the kick passing close enough to stir the air against her side, and in the same motion she was already closing the gap he'd just opened for her.
Her left hand found his face before he'd finished recovering his stance.
The sound it made didn't belong in a training yard full of children. A flat, heavy crack, more like a hammer meeting a wall than a fist meeting a jaw the kind of sound that made the nearest instructor's head turn, briefly, before turning back, because a sound like that, on this base, in this week, had already stopped being remarkable. 035's amateur guard had come up half a second too late to stop it, but not so late that it did nothing; it took enough of the force off the blow that his head snapped sideways instead of somewhere worse, and he stayed upright, stunned, blinking hard against a whiteness crowding the edges of his vision.
He reached for her on instinct, a big, clumsy grab meant to end this the way strength usually ended things when technique hadn't caught up yet. She wasn't there to be grabbed. Small and quick in a way his larger frame wasn't built to match, she dropped under his arm, came up inside his reach, and drove a fist into his stomach with everything her five-year-old body currently had to give.
It was enough to lift him off his heels.
He went stumbling backward, arms wrapped around a stomach that had just taken a hit hard enough to fold a grown man in half, gasping for air that didn't want to come easily. 005 didn't follow immediately. She held her ground, breathing controlled, and let a small, worn phrase run through her head on repeat, steady as a heartbeat “wait for your opponent to commit, wait for your opponent to commit “ the one piece of her instructor's voice that had survived the last five days intact.
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035 got back up. Rattled, furious, breathing hard and then, with no warning at all, he screamed.
"Raaahhh"
He came at her with a speed that hadn't been there a second before, something in the scream itself seeming to unlock whatever reserve his body had been holding back, his right fist coiling and firing faster than the fight's rhythm up to that point had prepared her for. She ducked, but late a half-second too late and the punch that should have caught her jaw caught her shoulder and drove clean through her guard, the impact enough to lift her feet off the ground and put her flat on her back in the dirt, dust rising around her in a small, pale cloud.
He saw her down and moved to end it, a boot already rising for her ribs and she rolled, fast, faster than the boot could adjust to, the stomp finding only packed earth where she'd been a heartbeat before.
He adjusted quicker than she expected, dropping low to grab at her ankle before she could scramble clear, fingers closing around nothing but air a half-second too late, because her free hand had already found what it needed on the ground beneath her a fistful of dirt and grit, flung up into his face in one sharp motion.
He flinched, blinded for exactly as long as it took her to get her feet back under her.
It was enough.
She came up already moving, driving a kick into the side of his knee that folded his leg sideways with a sound that made several of the watching children look away, and followed it, before he'd even fully registered the pain of it, with a punch aimed low and precise into his liver a small, brutal, technical strike that dropped him to his knees, all the air and all the fight leaving his body in the same long, wheezing breath.
She looked up toward Ashford, waiting for the word that usually ended a match like this.
It didn't come.
"Knock him out," Ashford said instead, flat, unbothered, tablet already angled toward the next pairing on his list.
005 didn't hesitate, because hesitation, five days into this place, had already stopped being something any of them could afford. She crossed the last few feet to where 035 knelt, doubled over and gasping, and drove her foot into the side of his skull with a speed and a force that no five-year-old body should have carried a sound like something breaking, though nothing had, quite and 035 dropped, and did not get back up.
"005 wins," a voice announced, somewhere over the arena speakers, flat and administrative, already moving on before the sentence had finished landing.
Yasin, watching from the edge of the ring with eighty-two other children who had also learned, in the last five days, exactly how quickly to stop flinching at things like this, thought without quite meaning to, that Sera had never needed a number to be the one people watched.
"Next," Ashford said.