In the palace guest wing, Kain was not eating.
He had walked the arena twice since yesterday — the sight lines, the footing, the distances between the entry points and the center, the specific geometry of a space he had chosen because he knew it and the man across the arena would not. One day instead of three. He had taken the one day and used every hour of it the only way available to him, which was preparation, because preparation was what you did when the gap was what it was and you had decided that doing nothing was not a version of this that led anywhere.
He thought about Klauss.
Klauss — Champion class, the strongest he had personally known. The man whose name had been circulating through the capital's fighter channels as someone exceptional, the benchmark against which Kain had been quietly measuring his own progress. Dead, in a Battle Royale in Einjaar. At Lexel's hand.
