Jake's second fight went worse.
Not disastrously or humiliatingly, but in the clean, frustrating way a bad matchup and a still-imperfect technique could grind a fast fighter down if he stayed in too long.
Eamon Jameson stepped in for Maine with Eagle Soul fully awake in him, and from the moment the spectral shape flared over his shoulders, the whole ring changed. Where Rory had made the space feel heavy and grounded, Eamon made it vertical. His movement wanted height, angles, descents. Sudden exits from the line.
Jake fought him hard.
Too hard, maybe.
He tried to keep the fight ugly and lateral, making Eamon work for takeoff lanes, but the Jameson brother had learned from watching Tara's match against Dominic, and he used the lesson well. He did not only fly to escape. He flew to reset, to force Jake to spend waste his mana dodging or take a full dive bomb attack head on.
Jake's prana coat, still a little unstable under repeated high-output impacts, began to cost him too much. Eamon kept pressure on him from above just long enough to make every answer slightly late, slightly too expensive. In the end, Jake lost not because he fought poorly, but because Eagle Soul mobility plus better ring control beat his current level of refinement.
He came back annoyed, breathing hard, and already cursing himself for two or three choices only he would remember by morning.
Emma did not give him long to stew.
"Séline."
That name turned the room, because now the other half of the French duo would debut.
When Séline stepped into the ring, the audience expected something else entirely.
Soul Fist sounded like a fast class. Agile, dynamic. The kind of close-range specialist who would bounce on the balls of her feet and put on a performance with speed, flurries, and elegant violence.
Instead, Séline walked to center ring slowly.
Calmly.
Her shoulders loose. Her breathing even. Her hands at her sides until she stopped in the middle and ignited both fists with elemental mana. One blazed with a pale heat that looked like fire refined down to its hungriest core. The other crackled with that colder, brighter violence she favored when lightning came easiest.
Then she waited.
The crowd did not know what to do with that. But after Camille's brave fight against Tara and Joanne's uproar of a debut against Kenai, nobody in the stadium was stupid enough to dismiss Team Nemean's "lesser-known" members anymore. The air had changed. People leaned forward now not because they thought Séline would lose, but because they feared they might not understand how she won until it was already over.
At the commentary desk, the regular casters had stopped fighting Rico's existence. In fact, they had gone all the way around and turned him into a feature.
The higher-ups had seen the numbers. A talking raccoon loudly opinionating over fights was apparently irresistible to younger viewers, especially college students, and college students bought merch like it was a moral duty. So now Rico sat in his own baby car seat, with a tiny headset and far too much confidence, treated as an unofficial third caster.
One of the commentators, trying hard not to laugh at his own career choices, asked, "What's your read on Séline?"
Rico snorted.
"She ate too much pastries and too little coffee. Never trust those who do not get enough caffeine."
That somehow got one of the biggest laughs of the segment.
Across the ring, Eamon Jameson rolled his shoulders once and summoned Eagle Soul again. The spectral form wrapped around him in pale-gold arcs, feathered force shaping over his arms and back, and then he moved.
His plan was obvious from the first second and smart besides. He had just beaten Jake with altitude and pressure. Why not use the same basic logic on a fighter who looked even more committed to the ground?
He took off into the sky, aimed carefuly. Then he folded the momentum into a divebomb.
The crowd roared.
Séline did not flinch.
At the last moment, she stepped aside the smallest possible amount, nothing flashy, not even enough to look like a dodge to the untrained eye, and drove one fist into Eamon as he passed.
It was not the elemental flash that sold the hit. It was the timing.
For one perfect instant, her mana flow and the physical moment of impact aligned completely. Her mana exploded out the moment her punch connected, making it felt heavier than a body her size should have been able to produce.
Eamon was blasted sideways. He hit the ring hard, skidded, and nearly went out then and there.
The stadium exploded.
The commentators shouted over one another.
Rico slapped the desk and yelled, "See? Not even yelling Rider Punch. So uncultured."
Eamon recovered fast.
Credit where it was due, the Jameson brothers did not break easily. He used Eagle Soul's aerial control to roll the momentum into a hop and regain lift before Séline could close all the way. But the whole crowd had now seen it. One clean hit from her made him felt like he was just get ram by a missile disguising as those biceps.
He tried again, adjusting the angle this time. Higher arc, sharper descent, less telegraphed commitment.
Séline met him with lightning.
Her second punch landed differently. The lightning mana burst through him in a jagged flare, shocking the whole side of his body. His flight stuttered just enough—
And Séline moved.
She dashed forward immediately, no hesitation, one palm strike chambering low and tight, clearly aimed for the lower abdomen where balance, breath, and pain all agreed to become one problem. Palm strike - a technique that was not utilized often in western martial art - a clear showing of her training with Vân. Séline had recognized the baldy's change the way his mana was released with his hand gestures. A punch hit like a rock, solid, impactful and direct. A chop with mana behaved like a blade, allowing for cuts and slashes with one bare hand. Finally, a palm strike's wide contact area meant more angles for his mana to seep inside enemy prana coat, and destroyed it from within, like water seeping into unseen cracks.
And so, Séline used that technique, hoping to end the fight right then and there.
Eamon felt it too. He ripped himself upward just in time, Eagle Soul flaring hard enough to drag him out of that fatal line.
For a second, the audience thought he had escaped.
He stayed up there too, and did not dive again right away.
One of the commentators immediately explained.
"He's buying time."
And he was. He needed breathing room, needed to break the rhythm Séline had seized. He knew he had to stop the momentum she had built from those first two exchanges before it hardened into total control.
Séline looked up.
Then jumped.
At first the crowd read it as desperation. A grounded fighter trying to contest the sky with a simple leap. Eamon read it the same way. He rose higher, prana coat forming around his body as he prepared to swat her out of the air the moment gravity reclaimed her and left her with neither footing nor angle nor answer.
The commentators were halfway into saying exactly that when reality changed in front of them.
Séline stepped on the air.
Not metaphorically, nor with some obvious spell platform. Her foot struck nothing visible, and from that nothing she launched upward again.
The whole stadium made a sound like one huge intake of breath.
Eamon panicked.
For the first time all fight, true panic.
He dodged in a rush, yanking his body sideways so hard that his own formation nearly broke under him. He barely got clear of the second rise in time.
Then he turned—
And saw that Séline had changed direction in midair.
She was still coming.
The audience lost its mind.
On the commentary desk, both main casters were shouting.
"What was that?"
"Did she just air step?"
Rico, with complete confidence, declared, "Advanced double jump."
That line would live on clip compilations for weeks.
On the field, only Emma and Joanne fully understood what they had just seen. Emma because she watched people for patterns and had known for a long time Séline was an innovative kind of woman. Joanne because she knew how obsessively Séline had been studying the movement of mana through the body since the Tortura statue and the copy of dǒu.
What the audience saw as "double jump" was actually worse.
Séline had taken prana coat and twisted it into something uniquely hers. By forming a thin, dense layer of mana only a few centimeters beneath her foot at the exact moment of extension, she created a temporary base—a false ground, really—and then used it to push herself again. A second launch, a redirection point in midair.
And because her control was that absurd, because dǒu had once shown her what perfect mana shaping felt like, she could do it more than just once in a panic. She could angle it, use it.
Fight with it.
Eamon realized too late that he was no longer the only one who owned the sky. He tried to recover the flow. To circle wider, bait her drop, force her into overextension. But the fight no longer belonged to him.
Now every time he rose, Séline could follow. While she wasn't capable of true flight, it was enough to keep pressure honest and to make his Eagle Soul mobility less of a free kingdom.
She hit him again in the air. Not as cleanly as the first shot, but still so hard it ruin his line. Then once they both dropped, she was there first, meeting the landing with another timing-perfect punch that drove through his hasty guard and sent him rolling.
The stadium now understood that they were watching a first draft of something terrifying.
A Soul Fist who could hit like a proper heavy striker, who moved like a patient predator, and who had found a way to fight airborne threats by turning her own body into a living torpedo.
Eamon kept trying, that was to his credit.
He used Eagle Soul to regain height one last time, hoping to create enough space to reset the whole exchange and maybe drag Séline into wasting her mana on repeated air steps. But the surprise had already cost him too much control.
Séline jumped again.
One step in the air, then another angle. And she was right where he wanted to be.
Eamon turned too late. He had been read like a book.
Her fist struck him square in the chest.
This time the elemental charge behind it came as both flame, and ice.
He was thrown backward, out of the sky, and into the boundary with enough force that the ward flashed under him like a second impact.
The referee stepped in as he struggled to rise.
Winner: Séline.
For one heartbeat after the call, the stadium was too loud to be understood. Then the roar came in properly.
At Team Nemean's side, Joanne stood up and yelled something obscene in French she definitely did not know the full meaning of. Camille smiled in that small, private way of someone who had expected exactly this kind of outcome. Jake stared like he had just watched a problem become even more annoying to spar against. Jack gave one approving nod. Emma was already checking feeds and shaping the new narrative.
And Séline, still breathing evenly despite the effort, came back from the ring with one new thing attached to her name: the woman who stepped on the air.
By the time she reached the bench, the league had already started fearing what her next refinement would look like.