Eight teams. The room had started with a hundred people pressed against every wall. Now twenty-four sat in clusters with gaps between them wide enough to feel.
Jake's quarterfinal was first.
Their opponents were tired. A team that had scraped through two rounds on endurance and luck — a Corpus user whose skin thickened under pressure, a Modus user who generated bursts of compressed air, and a Nexus user who could slow movement in a small radius. Solid. Survivable. Not enough.
Jake, Vauren, and Kitch fought like a team for the first time.
Kitch opened with two panes — cutting the Nexus user's sight line from her teammates, isolating the air-burst Modus user in the open. Jake went through the gap before the panes cracked, light at his feet, closing on the Modus user while she was still looking for her Nexus cover. Two hits. She went down.
The Nexus user tried to slow Jake — the air around him thickened, his movement dragging. He pushed through it. The Vincu cost her more than it cost him. He reached her and she dropped the field to defend herself. Too late.
Vauren fought the Corpus user alone. He didn't rush it. The man's skin thickened with every hit he absorbed, which meant hitting harder was the wrong answer. Vauren hit softer. Faster. Small pressurized strikes at the joints — wrist, elbow, knee — places where the thickening couldn't keep up with the precision. The man's guard collapsed piece by piece. Vauren put him down with a strike under the jaw that the skin hadn't reached.
Clean. Fast. Coordinated. The three of them standing in the center with three opponents on the ground, and the whole thing had taken less than a minute.
Kitch's head tilted. The feathers at his throat shifted.
"Better," Kitch said.
"Yeah."
"The pane timing was off. I gave you four seconds instead of six. You compensated."
"I didn't notice."
"I did." One eye on Jake, one tracking the room. "Next time I'll hold it longer."
Vauren was already walking back to the wall. He'd rolled his left shoulder twice during the fight — testing it, trusting the repair. It held. His stride was even. He didn't glance at the three people on the ground behind him.
The bunny walked to the center.
Jake walked to the wall. He didn't close his eyes this time. The stone between his feet. The sounds. He let them happen. Kept breathing.
Roden's match was called second.
Roden was standing, Pol beside him, the chitin woman behind them. Across the room their opponents stood too — three from the original eight. People Roden had traveled with since link one.
Jake recognized them from the wait. He hadn't spoken to them much. They'd kept to themselves — a tight knot of three within the larger group, already a unit before the bunny announced the rules. Two men and a woman.
The first man was tall, angular, with skin so dark it absorbed the sourceless light. He moved to the center without hurrying. The second was shorter, wider, pale, with hands that were too large for his arms. The woman was average height, average build, with close-cropped hair and an expression that gave less than Vauren's.
"Who are they," Jake said.
Kitch went still. Both eyes focused on the center. "The tall one hasn't shown his power yet. Three fights and he's ended each one before I could identify his category. The wide one is Corpus — his hands do something. The woman is Modus. She generates something black. I've seen it once. It moved fast."
"How fast?"
"Faster than you."
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Roden was talking to Pol at the center. Low voices. Pol's four arms were loose at his sides. The chitin woman stood behind them, her plating catching the flat light.
"Begin," the bunny said.
Roden raised both hands. The fight started the way his fights always started — from the center, controlling metal, using what was already there. He reached for the buckles on the tall man's armor.
The tall man had no metal on him. No buckles, no clasps, no weapons. Roden's hands found nothing to grip.
The tall man moved. One step forward. His hand came up and the air between them changed — a pressure, a weight, something that pushed outward from his palm. Roden braced against it. His feet slid on the stone. The force increased. Roden's hands were up but there was nothing to influence, nothing metal, nothing to remind.
Pol rushed in. Four arms, iron spreading from elbows to fingertips, the dull gleam in the sourceless light. He closed fast. The wide man with too-large hands stepped to meet him.
Their hands met. Pol's iron arms against the wide man's grip. The wide man's fingers closed around Pol's forearm — and squeezed. The iron dented. Pol's iron, hardened by his own Corpus, reinforced by Roden when they were close — dented under the grip of those too-large hands. The sound was wrong. Metal shouldn't bend like that.
Pol hit him with his other three arms. The wide man took the hits. His body rocked but his grip didn't loosen. He squeezed harder. The iron on Pol's forearm cracked.
Roden turned from the tall man and raised his hand toward Pol — trying to reinforce, trying to harden the iron from a distance. The tall man hit him with another wave of force. Roden went sideways, his concentration breaking.
The woman moved for the first time. Something dark left her hands — fast, Kitch was right, faster than Jake could track cleanly. It hit the chitin woman in the chest. The plating cracked. Not chipped, not scratched — cracked, the chitin splitting along a line from sternum to shoulder. The chitin woman staggered. The dark thing hit her again. Same line. The crack widened.
It was over in forty seconds.
Pol was on the ground, his iron arms cracked and dented, the wide man standing over him. Roden was on his knees, the tall man's force holding him there, his hands raised toward metal that wasn't present. The chitin woman was down, her plating split, breathing hard.
The tall man stepped back.
"Done," he said.
Jake was on his feet. He didn't remember standing. His hands were at his sides, the light at his fingertips flickering. Kitch's talons were gripping his arm.
"Don't," Kitch said. Quiet. Flat.
"They're from his group. They traveled together."
"I know."
"He can't—"
"He can. He did." Kitch's grip tightened. "Sit down."
The bunny walked to the center.
Roden was still on his knees. He found Jake across the room. The tired eyes, the heavy build, the forge marks on his forearms. The man who'd torn dried meat in half and offered Jake a piece without asking.
Roden held Jake's gaze. He didn't turn to the bunny. He held Jake's gaze and something passed between them that Jake would carry out of this room and into every link that followed.
Then Roden looked away.
Pol's lower-right hand was tapping the stone. The nervous habit. The only part of him that moved without purpose. It tapped twice more. Then it stopped.
Jake sat down. Kitch's talons released his arm. Vauren was standing beside him, very still. His hands at his sides, his fingers open.
The sounds came. Three of them.
Jake pressed his back against the wall. The grey stone, warm. The sourceless light, even. The room that never changed except for the number of people in it.
Four teams. Twelve people.
The break came. The bunny disappeared. The room settled into the silence of people who had run out of things to say to each other.
Jake sat against the wall. The thorn-scratches from Senna's vines were healing. The bruise on his wrist was fading. His body was fine. Everything else was not.
Kitch sat beside him, both eyes tracking the room out of habit. His feathers had loosened slowly over the last hour.
"The tall one is the problem," Kitch said.
"I saw."
"Force projection. No contact needed. He pushed Roden across the floor without touching him. Roden had nothing to work with — the man stripped every piece of metal from his gear before the fight. He planned for Roden specifically."
"Roden didn't have a chance." Jake's voice was flat. "It was over before it started."
"The wide one's grip cracked Pol's iron. And the woman's projectiles broke chitin plating in two hits."
"Kitch, I was sitting right here. I watched all of it."
Kitch went still. Both eyes on Jake. Then the head tilted and one eye drifted back to the room. "You need to hear it again. Because they're in the final if they win their semifinal. And so are we."
"I know. And I'm going to fight them. But right now Pol's hand just stopped tapping and Roden never found his brother and I need you to stop talking for about five minutes."
Kitch's feathers did something Jake hadn't seen before — a slow, full-body loosening, the plumage lifting away from his skin. The owl equivalent of a breath let out.
"Five minutes," Kitch said.
Vauren spoke after four. "The tall one stripped his metal before the fight. He knew what Roden could do. He watched. He prepared." He paused. "He will watch us as well."
"Let him watch," Jake said. "We'll figure it out."
The room was quiet. Twelve people. Four teams. The sheet against the far wall was very long. Somewhere under it were Roden and Pol and the chitin woman and Senna and ninety other people who had walked through two links to reach this room.
Jake closed his eyes. Tomorrow was the semifinals. After that, the final. After that, six people would walk through the portal to link four.
Six out of a hundred.