The background cheering had a rhythm to it, rising when someone took a clean hit, cresting when someone went down, then resetting immediately into anticipation for whatever came next.
Money changed hands at the edges of the crowd without ceremony, students comparing what they'd bet against what they'd won with the focused attention of people for whom this was a legitimate financial exercise.
The arena had evolved fast. In the months since King built it, it had stopped being just a place where high-tiers vented their dominance and had become something more layered, a venue, an economy, a weekly event with its own culture.
Low-tiers who had no interest in fighting attended specifically to bet. The calculus was simple enough: know the fighters, know the gap between them, put your money on the outcome you could read. Some of them were actually good at it.
Every Friday night without exception, the arena was full.
Tonight, at least, the match running was balanced. A B-rank against another B-rank — two high-tiers going at each other with the specific intensity of people who had something to prove and an audience to prove it to.
For high-tiers, fighting wasn't really about bullying. It was about honour, or what they'd decided honour looked like. Dominance, demonstrated in front of people who understood what they were watching.
THWACK. A clean blow to the jaw, landing hard enough that I heard it from the corner I'd settled into near the exit. Both fighters were still standing. Still going.
I had positioned myself out of the main flow of foot traffic. Not hiding exactly, just not advertising. I'd learned early on that the edge of the room was safer than the middle, and the exit being two steps behind me was a feature rather than a coincidence.
Then the doors opened.
A bunch of guys showed up, eight of them, walking in together with the coordinated ease of people who had done this before.
They wore brown and black leather jackets. Oversized boots over skinny jeans. Several of them had switchblades— carried casually, the way someone carries their keys. The others had baseball bats resting on their shoulders like they were on their way somewhere else and had simply brought them along.
Leading the group was a guy with dark hair and a lollipop in his mouth. He walked in at his own pace, surveyed the arena with the calm of someone taking inventory, and smiled at whatever he found.
These were not students.
The moment he opened his mouth, the arena went quiet. Not gradually— immediately, like a switch had been found and used.
"Sorry to crash." His voice had dropped back to conversational, and he sounded about as apologetic as the tone suggested. "I'm looking for someone. Guy named Ren Mora."
I stood in my corner and remained silent.
A group of gangsters, walking into a dojo at night, calling out a specific name. When that name was yours, the information delivered by that situation was fairly unambiguous.
Sancho. It had to be Sancho. After Aria had put him on the floor in one punch, the natural next move was to redirect, to find someone else to absorb the consequences of that evening, someone with a lower probability of doing what Aria had done. Which, from Sancho's perspective, was probably me.
But these guys didn't look like Sancho's crew. They were older, more put together in the specific way that suggested actual experience rather than gang cosplay. They looked too competent to be at Sancho's beck and call.
Which meant someone above Sancho. Even worse.
"Anyone seen him?"
"Right here." I presented myself before the crowd could do it for me, before someone decided that volunteering my location was the smart social move in a room full of people with gambling investments and no particular loyalty to me.
I walked toward the leader. He watched me approach and let the assessment run across his face openly, head to foot and back up, then he smiled in a way that extended slightly past normal and into territory I decided not to examine.
"So you're the one who put hands on the boss's brother." He tapped the lollipop against his lip, studying me. "Interesting."
The boss's brother.
So Sancho had a sibling above him in whatever this hierarchy was. And that sibling had sent eight people to a Friday night arena with blades and bats and a guy with a lollipop to collect me.
"I'm genuinely tired of this." I let the exhale carry the honesty. "Tyler. Then Sancho. Now Sancho's older brother." I looked at him directly. "So what is it. What do you want?"
He snickered. Something in his eyes caught the defiance and stored it for later. He put the lollipop back in his mouth, let it sit there for a moment, then pulled it out.
"Boss wants to see you." He turned toward the door. "Let's go."
"I don't know if you guys are aware," I said, stopping him mid-step, "but that's the most overused line in this situation. Try something original."
He turned back to me. The halfway smile didn't move. "How about I just hit you first and we do the original version after?"
His men didn't need a verbal cue. They were already moving, blades switching open, grips tightening on the bats, spreading out in the way that communicated they'd run this particular play before.
The first one came with a blade. Red-dyed hair, the kind of guy who was still figuring out whether he fit in here. The blade swiped past my chin, close enough that I felt the air displacement.
I moved before his second attempt could reach my neck— drove low, threw myself into his torso, and kept my balance on the way through. A second guy rushed with a blade aimed low, for my legs. I sidestepped and brought my knee up into his ribs.
The crowd exclaimed. In the arena, even watching a fight you hadn't bet on produced sound.
The third guy came with a bat. Wide swing. I ducked under it, grabbed Strawberry's knife hand on the way back up, knocked it clean out of his grip, and hit him hard enough that he went back to the ground with emphasis.
I caught the bat swing in my peripheral, pulled myself up before it could land, and connected my fists with the guy's head as he came forward.
He panicked. The opening was right there. I grabbed him and introduced his face to my knee.
WHACK.
Three of them down. Five remaining.
"Okay." Lollipop was watching me with the energy of someone who had genuinely found something worth watching. "I see why the boss wanted to handle this himself."
"You guys really commit to the script, don't you." I was still breathing. Still had my arms up.
He signalled. Four guys came at once, two blades, two bats, spread out enough that there wasn't an obvious first point of entry. I watched the perimeter of them, reading for the tell. Caught the twitch of a blade moving before the body behind it had committed.
I threw my leg out too slowly. He caught it.
SLICE. A clean cut across my calf. Sharp, immediate.
"Argh—"
I pulled the leg back and didn't hold it, there was no time. More blades came in at angles that required both hands to manage, bats swinging from the sides, all of it arriving in the window where I couldn't address everything at once.
I dropped low and let the decision-making happen at a level below thought.
CLANG. Blade hit bat handle as something swung past my head. The knives clattered to the ground. I rolled out through the gap between two of them, took two off their feet on the way through, came up on the third before he could recover his dropped blade and buried myself into him on the way down.
He went for the knife anyway. Didn't get there.
The adrenaline had found something somewhere in the accumulated reserves and I used it, turned him over, and hit him. Then again. And again. All of it aimed at the specific geography of his face.
"Useless, motherfucking—"
CLANG.
The sound arrived in my head before the pain did, which was its own particular experience. Then my vision went wrong — blurred, tilted — and the floor came up to meet me in the way that surfaces do when you've stopped being in control of where you are.
The bat guy was standing above me. Looking down with the very specific satisfaction of someone who had been waiting for that moment and had finally gotten it.
"You wanted something original?" Lollipop said, over me now, the candy moving through the air like punctuation. "Here's original; you're coming with me to see the boss." He looked up at the rest of the arena, which had been completely still and watching for the last several minutes. "Sorry for the interruption, everyone. As you were."
I processed my options from the floor.
Two of his men moved to collect me, one on each arm, grip already established before I'd fully decided what to do about it. I drove an elbow backward into the ribs of the one on my left and threw a forearm across the throat of the one on my right. Both of them disengaged.
I didn't give the rest of them time to respond. I went for the lollipop guy directly, take out the leadership, collapse the motivation of everyone else. I went in with a kick aimed at his face.
He caught my leg and threw me toward the exit door. I hit the ground, came back up, and stood there breathing hard with my arms still raised.
From somewhere in the crowd behind me, someone was doing an anxious calculation about how dead I was.
Think Ren!
C-5.
I went at him again. Inside his guard by a narrow margin, sidestepping his counter, his fist passed close enough that I felt the displaced air against my cheek. I reached for him but he caught my hand, and CRACK— the wrist, forced sideways before I could brace for it. I didn't wait for the pain to process. I threw my left fist, with everything I had, directly into his lower abdomen.
CRUSH.
The sound it made was satisfying. The expression that moved across his face — the deep, sourcing anger of someone who had been hit somewhere they care about— was more so.
Then WHACK. His returning punch came through my crossed guard with enough force behind it that it didn't matter. I skidded backward several metres before friction had an opinion.
"Maybe you're looking at me next to these kids," he said, working to reassemble his cool, "and think I'm operating on the same level." He moved his jaw slightly. "That's why you came at me like that?"
"Nahh, I don't think that's it." The voice came from the doorway, calm in the specific way that suggested effort wasn't being applied to keep it that way. "I'm sure you're just weak."
I turned around.
"King?"