The Colosseum had settled into that taut, electric hush it only found before a true collision. The sun burned white over the stone bowl, drawing hard edges on armor and spearheads, and every breath from the stands seemed to gather in the center of the ring, waiting to ignite.
Phil's voice boomed, riding the echo. "Semi-finals of the Beginner's Cup! On the east gate—an Amazon forged by discipline and thunder—Tempest! And on the west gate—the warrior with the steel to match Olympus—Cloud Strife!"
A tide of cheers crashed around them.
Tempest walked out to meet the noise, spear balanced low and close, as natural in her hands as a heartbeat. No smile, no salute. Just the measured cadence of a fighter counting distance and wind. Across the sand, Cloud came on with that deceptively relaxed stride, the Buster Sword slung over his shoulder, eyes half-lidded and calm. Two storms, different skies.
They stopped at the mark. Dust curled between their boots.
The gong struck.
Cloud moved first—of course he did. It was a sprint without wasted effort, the sword dropping off his shoulder and filling the air with a whistling arc before Tempest's hair even finished lifting in the breeze.
She met it perfectly level, spear-shaft catching the blade with a crack that rattled the nearest pillars. She didn't try to stop the force—she bent it. Hands slid, feet gave an inch, hips turned, and the Buster Sword's murderous weight went skimming past instead of through.
Cloud didn't blink. The second cut came from the opposite angle, then a third in a tight X that painted sunlight as it fell.
Cross Slash.
Tempest retreated a half-step, parried twice, and pivoted out of the crossing stroke. The tip of her spear flicked at Cloud's wrist; he rolled with it, grip tightening, stance settling deeper. They separated a pace, both unmarked, both taking the measure of the other in the space of one heartbeat.
The stands roared their approval.
Cloud's next approach was lower, sharper—no flourish, just a thresher of steel turned forward. Tempest changed ranges before he could own them. She jabbed three times—throat, knee, shoulder—each thrust fast enough to blur. Cloud's blade swept those lines off course, but not without respect. The last jab clipped pauldron leather and left a mark. Nothing that would slow him.
Cloud's mouth tilted a fraction. A concession. Then he vanished forward.
Sonic Blade.
A streak of motion tore a straight line through the dust; the Buster Sword arrived a hair before its master, driving at Tempest's guarded center. Her spear snapped to the block, but she didn't root. She slid to Cloud's outside shoulder, turned with his angle, and used his own momentum to lift the edge past her ribs. The crowd gasped as steel kissed the braid at her temple instead of her heart.
Cloud didn't stall. The second rush came immediately, and the third. Tempest took the first with a riding parry, the second with a low sweep that shaved his shins and forced him to shorten his step. On the third, she bent the spear like a bar across his hip and actually tripped him. He caught himself with a planted boot and an ugly bite of blade into sand—but enough to break the clean line of the technique.
The chorus rose. Somewhere high in the shade, Zack whooped. Helga's "finally taking it seriously" drifted wry. Kurai's silence felt like a smile behind a curtain. Helios watched with that cool, unreadable interest he wore when adding columns in his head.
Cloud lifted his sword into a vertical guard. The aura around him brightened, as if the sun leaned closer.
He jumped.
It wasn't the height so much as the certainty of descent—blade first, everything else reduced to consequence. Tempest's spear came up across her forearms, a brace more than a block. Steel met steel with a sound like a bell in pain, driving her to one knee. The impact blew a ring of dust off the floor and punched the breath out of the first rows. Tempest's gauntlets whined. Her shoulder jolted. But the cut didn't go through.
She shoved and rolled, the follow-up chop carving a gouge where she'd been. When she came up, she came up stabbing: a snapping thrust at Cloud's ankle that forced him to shorten again, then a lateral sweep that herded him off the gouge and into open ground. She didn't chase. She re-centered, the spear's tip circling in a patient eight, saying I will meet you here, and here, and here.
Cloud obliged. He came on like a tide, no theatrics, only precision layered on power. His "normal" was a constant combo—five, seven, nine strokes that flowed with frightening economy, each one placed to pry open the next. Tempest's spear was never still. She watered each strike, angled each catch, stole inches by letting force pass through instead of bracing against it. Her ripostes were surgical: a flick of the butt-end to the back of Cloud's hand; a thrust that tested the seam under his arm; a low poke that made him check a step. Small taxes. Compound interest.
The hum of the crowd changed—rose and thinned to a wire. Cloud's aura flared gold. His feet blurred. His blade became a wheel.
Omnislash.
The first cut she saw. The second she felt. The third she stole, barely: her spear spun into the path and the sword screamed along the shaft instead of through her ribs. The fourth took air at her cheek. The fifth shaved the back of her hand and left her palm slick with blood. The sixth was already coming from behind as Cloud pirouetted around the center he made of her.
She stopped trying to chase the blade with her eyes. She listened—in the way the sand hissed, in the tone of the sword as it sang across wood, in the micro-hesitation Cloud accepted every time she cost him a half-inch of clean arc.
Block. Give. Bleed. Turn.
Cloud shifted his weight to force a bind. Tempest let the spear bend, shoulder rolling, and the Buster Sword groaned past and cut her braid free instead of her neck. Cloud reappeared at her foreside; she drove the butt-end at his wrist. He took the hit, his grip unbroken, but the tiniest stutter entered his rhythm. Not enough to win. Enough to keep breathing.
Then the spear cracked.
A hairline at first—the song of a trapped splinter—then a visible split where the blade had chewed a groove. The next parry widened it. The next, widened more. On the tenth stroke of the storm, the shaft shattered with the sound of a branch in winter.
Half a spear in each hand.
The crowd's roar tripped, caught, and surged back—because Tempest didn't flinch. She inverted her grip mid-step, short half tucked along her forearm like a baton, long half whipping around in a horizontal smash that hooked the broad flat of Cloud's blade and dragged it off-line. With the other hand she punched—not with knuckles, but with wood—driving the stub-end into the angle of Cloud's elbow.
He grunted. The sword didn't fall. But something changed.
They were suddenly in a tight room together. Cloud's advantage was reach and mass; Tempest stole both by stepping inside the circumference of his kill arc. The long half beat at his guard; the short half hunted wrist bones and the dip above the knee. When Cloud's sword rose to clear space, she slid under and behind, heel clipping his ankle. He took the imbalance and turned it into a spinning back-cut that whistled a hair from her nose. She used the momentum of ducking to slam the long half of the spear against his shin like a staff. He checked his stance and came forward with his shoulder, smart and ugly, trying to post her and reset his range.
She went with it, let him shove, and used the push to angle off, planting, turning, driving the long half like a lever into his forearms to pop them apart for a breath. One breath was all she could steal. One breath was sometimes enough.
Cloud bared his teeth, not in anger, but effort. The next sequence was brutal and honest. His blade carved tight arcs meant not to kill, but to ladder her guard back into a corner. She took them on the halves of wood, wrists screaming, shoulders singing, forearms already bruising through armor. She jabbed when she could: a touch to the ribs, a touch under the jaw that didn't pierce but forced a blink, a sweep at the knee to make his boot slide a fraction in the dust.
Phil shouted something about "what a clinic!" The crowd had stopped picking sides and was simply yelling for the exchange.
Cloud found daylight and stepped into it. The Cross Slash came again, but heavier—weighted with everything that had ramped up since the first bell. Tempest didn't try to meet it flat. She threw the long half into the first line, let it be knocked aside, stepped inside the second line so the blade passed her hip instead of her gut, and then, on the third line—the killing line—she offered the short half, not to block but to wedge. Wood jammed into the guard just above his hand. For a blink, torque lost a race with friction.
She didn't waste it. The long half whipped back low and cracked across Cloud's back knee. His leg buckled. Not a collapse, but a bend he didn't choose. He shoved; she spun. The sword came up for a violent reset. She slid along the inside of his arms, body-to-body for a breath, and drove the butt of the long half up under his chin.
The strike didn't break anything. It didn't have to. It stole a half-second of balance and sight.
Cloud reacted like water poured downhill—he chopped blind at the space the blow should have come from. Tempest wasn't there. She had stepped to his lead side, hip-to-hip now, and scythed his ankles with the long half while the short half rapped his wrist again. The Buster Sword didn't leave his hand, but it dipped—an inch, two—enough for gravity to ask questions.
Cloud answered by dropping his weight and spinning into her, using his mass to ride through the trip and clip her with the flat as he came around. She hit the sand hard, breath bursting out. He was on her before she could roll, sword angling down.
She didn't try to stand.
She bridged.
Back arched, hips snapping, foot hooking the inside of his ankle, the short half jamming up at his elbow again—the same point she had taxed all match. This time, the joint complained. His grip didn't fail, but it stuttered. The long half of the spear came up between their bodies like a pry bar and levered his wrists apart. The Buster Sword kissed the sand and stuck for a heartbeat.
They both knew the fight's shape in that heartbeat.
Tempest twisted, rose on a knee, and drove the long half—not the point, but the shaft—across Cloud's throat as a pin while the short half slammed once, twice into the tendons above his wrist. The sword tore free of the sand with a grunt and came up—too late.
She had the leverage. He had the blade. Sometimes leverage wins.
"Yield," she said, voice low and wrecked.
Cloud's chest heaved. Sweat and dust streaked his face. The edge of the Buster Sword hovered an inch from her shoulder—close enough to split her clavicle if he committed. He didn't. His eyes cut to the spear pressing his throat; then to her hands; then back to her eyes. A long breath. The roar of the Colosseum came flooding in again as if the world had pressed pause and now let go.
Cloud let the sword fall to his side.
"I yield," he said.
For one suspended moment, there was no sound. Then the Colosseum detonated—cheers, stamping, a ragged chant of Tempest's name rolling through stone.
She held the pin a heartbeat longer—caution—and then eased the shaft away, stepping back on unsteady legs. Her forearms were shaking. The spear halves trembled faintly in her grip.
Cloud straightened, rolled his neck once, and—rare as rain in drought—smiled. "Disciplined and mean," he said. "Good fight."
Tempest managed a nod. "Strong and smart," she returned. "You forced it out of me."
Phil was shouting something about "upsets!" and "textbook defense turned into offense!" and "somebody write this down!" Hercules pumped a fist in the stands. Zack's whoop could probably be heard from Thebes to the sea. Helga folded her arms, satisfied—no gloating, but a warrior's respect. Skuld clapped until her palms were pink. Kurai's mouth curved just enough to be felt, not seen. Helios's eyes narrowed, calculating, pleased to file a new datum under Tempest: extreme pressure adaptation confirmed.
The announcer's verdict rolled out like thunder. "Winner—Tempest! Advancing to the Beginner's Cup Finals!"
Cloud lifted his sword in salute to the crowd, then to Tempest. She returned it, then turned away before the adrenaline could shake her legs more than pride allowed. As the gates opened and the sand swallowed their footprints, the arena devoured the noise and demanded more.