I had mispriced the risk.
Gravely.
That truth settled in my chest with the weight of a failed forecast as another explosion thundered somewhere behind me—too close to where Lady Aurelian had last gone dark. The battlefield was no longer a controlled environment. It was a collapsing market, volatility spiking on every axis.
Fortune's Gambit was missing. Completely off the board.Seraphim Ascendant had disengaged and pivoted back toward the blast zone—never a good indicator.And Argent—
No. Equinox.
I'd underestimated her capability ceiling, and that was on me.
I'd already dismantled the illusions—clean work, efficient execution—which meant the conclusion was obvious. Argent had isolated Gambit and tucked him into a subspace of her own design. Clean capture. Minimal exposure. High upside.
I barely had time to finish that thought before a building came screaming toward me.
I slammed my gauntlets together and discharged a fully charged electric pulse. The structure detonated midair, but the recoil ripped through my arms and hurled me backward like a bad trade snapping shut.
Pain flared. Sharp. Immediate.
Before I could recover, Equinox moved again.
She didn't waste assets.
Every fragment of the destroyed building—metal, concrete, glass—was crushed, compacted, and restructured into blunt-force projectiles. At the same time, gravity spiked around us. My boots sank into the asphalt. My muscles screamed under the sudden load.
Then she fired.
If this had been anyone else, they'd have folded.
I wasn't anyone else.
I expanded a plasma field outward, electricity roaring as it formed an electromagnetic barrier. Metallic debris veered off violently, nonconductive matter disintegrated on contact. The street lit up like a reactor breach.
That was my opening.
I dumped power into my legs, velocity spiking, and blurred behind her—
—and immediately took a chunk of rubble to the ribs.
The impact sent me straight up.
Bad positioning.
Worse timing.
Cars. Concrete slabs. Steel beams.
Everything closed in.
No room to dodge. No angle to redirect.
I braced and threw up another plasma field just as the mass collapsed inward, crushing me into a spherical cage and hurling the whole construct into a nearby building.
The explosion swallowed me.
If I hadn't reacted in time, that would've been terminal.
Instead, I skidded through fire and debris, my suit tearing, blood running freely down my side. Flames licked at broken glass and twisted rebar. The air smelled like ozone and burning insulation.
I laughed despite myself.
So this is how Lady Aurelian beat you.
Getting up felt like renegotiating gravity itself.
Equinox approached, calm, composed, debris orbiting her like obedient satellites.
"Want to quit," she asked evenly, "or should I knock you out?"
I straightened—slowly—and wiped blood from my mouth. "Strong play," I said honestly. "I came in expecting a soft close. That was my mistake."
Her expression tightened.
"Just because I lost the first day," she snapped, "doesn't mean anything. This is part of my revenge."
Ah.
There it was.
"I figured," I said. "If I'd known you were holding this much back, I'd have gone all-in from the opening bell."
That did it.
Her pride took the hit.
She raised her hand, gravity warping again, projectiles tightening their orbit. She was done entertaining commentary.
So was I.
"Alright," I said, electricity crawling up my arms as my output spiked. "No more games. Full commitment."
Because if I didn't pivot now—
This fight wouldn't just be a loss.
It would be a total collapse.
* * *
Voltstrike crossed a line.
I felt it before I understood it—like a bad comment in a boardroom that flips a switch you didn't know existed. The moment his electricity surged higher, sharper, more aggressive, something inside me locked in.
Then the thunderbolt hit him.
The sky split. Light swallowed everything.
When it cleared, he wasn't human anymore.
His arms and legs were no longer flesh—just raw electricity shaped like limbs. His eyes were pure white, empty of pupils, empty of doubt. Cracks of lightning ran across his face like fault lines, and the magnetic field around him bent the air itself, sparks snapping and screaming every second.
For the first time since this started, I didn't have a response ready.
Voltstrike looked at me like the outcome had already been approved.
"I'm faster than sound now," he said calmly. "Prepare to lose."
So confident.So certain.
I smiled.
I hurled my projectiles.
He vanished.
Not metaphorically—vanished. One blink he was there, the next he was already past them, already in front of me. I reacted on instinct, kicking a pebble at my feet and spiking its gravity to obscene levels.
Voltstrike dodged it.
The stone didn't stop.
It kept accelerating, matching his speed, and slammed into a building behind him. The explosion flattened half the block.
He punched.
I raised a stone pillar just in time. The impact shattered it, and before I could reposition, another pillar I'd launched from the side missed him by inches as he twisted through it, then dipped under, then vaulted over the next wave like gravity was just a suggestion.
He grabbed a slab of metal mid-motion, flooded it with electricity, and threw it.
I stacked cars in front of me—three, four, five—
They disintegrated.
Then he was behind me.
The punch landed.
It wasn't the force that broke me—it was the electricity. It ripped through my body, hijacked my nerves, locked my muscles. For half a second, I couldn't even scream.
I forced an anti-gravity zone outward.
He floated.
I staggered back, lungs burning, blood already coating my tongue. Only then did I realize how close that hit had come to ending this outright.
This wasn't sparring anymore.
This was escalation.
When he dropped back down, I slammed my foot into the ground and released shockwaves through the earth. The street flattened, glass and debris lifting into the air.
I coughed hard.
So that's the damage report.
"Get ready," I told him, forcing the words out. "Because I'm done holding back."
I multiplied gravity—tenfold—for both of us. Buildings groaned. Cars lifted like toys. I sent them all at him, not to finish the job—
—but to buy time.
My real play required focus.
I compressed gravity to a single point at the tip of my finger.
The air darkened.
A small, unstable sphere formed—deep violet, swallowing light, pulling everything toward it. Dust, metal, sound—everything bent inward.
Voltstrike saw it and grinned.
He gathered power, electricity screaming as he released his own finisher. A massive magnetic field erupted outward, crushing everything in its radius, tearing structures apart at the molecular level.
"Event Horizon," I said, and fired.
The two forces collided.
The explosion erased the square.
Buildings ceased to exist. The ground caved. The hostages—holograms or not—were wiped out in an instant. Light, gravity, magnetism—all of it collapsed into one catastrophic moment that left nothing intact.
When it was over, I couldn't move.
Neither could he.
We lay there, broken, exhausted, conscious just enough to watch the rest of the battle play out without us.
No victory speech.No last words.
Just the quiet understanding that we'd both gone all-in and the market had burned down around us.