The first round wasn't over.
Jake sat against the wall with blood on his knuckles and watched the rest of them fight. Match after match, team after team, the center of the room filling with violence and then emptying and then filling again. The bunny walked to the center after each one. Jake closed his eyes after each one. The sounds didn't change.
Roden's team fought near the end.
Their opponents were coordinated — a trio that moved together, covering angles, clearly from the same world or at least the same training. Two Corpus fighters with hardened skin and a Modus user who generated something dark and fast from her palms.
Roden let them come. He stood in the center of his three, big, still, his hands at his sides. The two Corpus fighters rushed Pol and the chitin woman. The Modus user hung back and threw.
The dark projectiles hit Roden in the chest. He didn't move. They hit him again. He checked the impact points, turned to the Modus user, and raised one hand.
The clasps on the Modus user's armor — small metal buckles at the shoulders and waist — twisted. Not much. A centimeter, maybe two. Enough to pinch, to distract. She flinched. Her next throw went wide.
Pol met the first Corpus fighter head-on. His four arms came up and Jake saw the iron for the first time — the grey skin darkening, going metallic, the dull gleam spreading from his elbows to his fingertips. Four iron arms against hardened skin. He hit the fighter with all four at once, two high, two low, and the sound was like hammers on an anvil. The fighter staggered.
Then Roden raised his other hand. Toward Pol.
The iron on Pol's arms shifted. Darkened. The next hit landed heavier than the first — the same swing, the same four arms, but the impact was wrong. Bigger. Denser. Roden was doing something to the iron in Pol's body, tightening it, concentrating it, making the metal harder than Pol could make it alone. The fighter went down and didn't get up.
Jake stared. Same phenomenon. Different categories. Working together.
The chitin woman fought defensively — her plating absorbing strikes, her body turning so the angles caught and deflected. She didn't win her fight so much as outlast it. Her opponent exhausted himself hitting something that wouldn't break. When he slowed she stepped inside his guard and put an elbow through it. Clean. Fast. Over.
Roden hadn't moved from the center. The Modus user was on the ground — her armor had shifted further, the metal plates pulling in wrong directions, pinning her arms, pressing into her ribs. Roden's hand was still raised, his face concentrated. The metal remembered the shape of what you made. He was reminding it.
"Done," Roden said.
Three opponents on the ground. Alive. For now.
Jake watched from the wall. Four iron arms strengthened by the man standing behind them. Armor that turned against its wearer. Chitin that didn't break. A good team. A strong team.
The bunny walked to the center.
Jake closed his eyes.
The last first-round fight ended. The bunny disappeared. The room went quiet.
Sixteen teams. Forty-eight people. The rest were against the far wall under a sheet someone had found in their pack. Jake didn't look at the far wall.
He walked. The room was bigger now — or felt bigger, with half the people gone. The clusters had tightened. Teams sat together, close, talking low or not talking at all. Some people were eating from their packs. Some were sleeping. One person was sitting alone in the middle of the floor, cross-legged, hands on their knees, eyes closed. Meditating or breaking down. Hard to tell.
He stopped near Roden's group. Roden was sitting with Pol and their third — the chitin woman, tall, angular, her plating catching the light in segments. She had her arms wrapped around her knees. Pol's lower-right hand was tapping the stone.
Roden's eyes were heavy.
Jake sat down across from him. Roden didn't invite him but didn't push him away. Pol glanced at him. The tapping didn't stop.
"The traveler who told me about my brother," Roden said. "She talked about link three. Said it was a test. She didn't say anything about this."
"Maybe her batch got something different."
"I don't know," Jake said. "I'm just saying. This thing — the rabbit — it decides. Maybe not every batch gets this."
"Maybe." Roden didn't sound like he believed it. He didn't sound like he didn't believe it either. He sounded like a man who had beaten three people and watched them die and was trying to find a box to put that in.
Kitch was the one who said it.
They were sitting against the wall, the three of them, the silence after another round of sounds Jake wouldn't describe. Kitch's feathers had slowly loosened from the rigid flat they went to during the killings. His talons had retracted.
"We're going to have to fight them eventually," he said.
Jake opened his eyes. "Who?"
"Roden's team. If they keep winning and we keep winning, the bracket narrows. There are only so many rounds."
Jake said nothing.
"You know this," Kitch said.
"Yeah. I know this."
"His metal Nexus is a problem for all of us. He strengthened Pol's iron mid-fight — you saw that. He can influence any metal near him. There's trace impurities in my glass. If he figures that out he can shatter everything I make before it reaches anyone."
"You're already thinking about how to beat them."
One eye on Jake, one on the room. "One of us has to."
Vauren was facing the far wall. The sheet. His face gave nothing. But his hands were in his lap, completely still. Vauren's hands were always doing something — adjusting his sleeves, resting precisely, finding position. When they stopped it meant something else was.
"Vauren," Jake said.
"I heard."
"What do you think?"
"I think we survive the next round first." He didn't turn from the far wall. "Then we survive the one after that."
"And if we face Roden?"
Vauren's head turned. The black eyes were flat. "Then we face Roden. And we win. Because the alternative is that we do not."
The three of them sat with that.
Jake went to the bunny.
It was sitting in the center of the room, the same spot, the same posture. Cross-legged, ears up, hands on knees. The dark eyes open. Watching nothing. Watching everything.
Jake sat down across from it. Three meters. The same distance as the first time.
"Why a tournament?" he said.
The rabbit's ears tilted toward him. The dark eyes focused.
"Why not a puzzle? A race? Something where people don't have to die."
"You assume those are different," the bunny said.
"They are different. A puzzle doesn't kill ninety-four people."
"Every test kills. The question is what it costs to pass." The ears rotated slightly. "You climbed thirty-one platforms. People fell. You did not catch all of them."
"That's different."
"How?"
Jake opened his mouth. Closed it. The bunny watched him with those dark patient eyes.
"They fell because the climb was hard," Jake said. "This — you're choosing. You could let everyone through. You could test them another way. You're choosing this."
"Yes," the bunny said.
"Why?"
The ears moved — small rotations, tracking sounds in the silence that Jake couldn't hear. The room existed around them, forty-eight people against the walls, and the bunny sat in the center like it had always been there.
"Some threads need cutting," it said. "Some doors need to stay closed. I do not decide who deserves to pass. I decide what passing costs." The head tilted. "You think the cost is too high."
"The cost is people dying."
"Yes. And you will carry that through every link that follows. That is also part of the cost." The dark eyes held him. "You have not asked the question you came to ask."
The white fur. The long ears. The hands on the knees, the same hands that had put his ribs back together and then stopped nine hearts in one afternoon.
"Can I stop this?" he said.
"No."
"Can anyone?"
The bunny's ears shifted. A flicker in the dark eyes — a depth, the kind of thing you'd miss if you weren't sitting three meters away with nothing else to look at.
"The last one who burned the way you burn came through here a long time ago," it said. "Same light. Different shape. He asked me the same question."
Jake went still.
"Who?" he said.
"I do not trade in names."
There were a dozen questions after that one. When. What did he look like. Which direction. Did he make it. Jake had them all lined up and he didn't ask any of them. Because if he let the shape of it finish — if he let himself put his father's face on the man who burned the same way and asked the same question — and it turned out to be someone else, some other light, some stranger a long time dead, he didn't think he'd be able to stand up tomorrow. So he didn't let it finish. He took the thing the bunny had said and he put it in the back of his head with the rest of what he couldn't look at, and he closed the drawer on it.
"You should rest," the bunny said. "Tomorrow is harder."
The ears folded back. The dark eyes closed.
Jake sat there a moment longer than he needed to. Then he stood up and walked back to the wall.
"You were there a while," Kitch said.
"Yeah." He didn't say what about. Kitch waited a moment, and when nothing came, let it go.
Kitch's eyes were on him. Both of them, for once. Then the head tilted and one drifted back to the room.
Vauren said nothing.
Jake closed his eyes. Tomorrow was harder.