Luka turns back to Darjan to ensure he is ok. He shoots him a thumbs up. But from the ground the slumped Ikaro wakes up and kicks darjan in the leg.
Darjan slumps on one knee. Ikaro launches another kick to the head but Darjan manages to block. Luka doesn't waste any time and bolts to them.
He comes closer and goes to Darjans side again getting ready to jump Ikaro.
Virek is a crumpled heap against the far wall, leaving the stage set for a final, brutal reckoning with Ikaro. Darjan doesn't give him a second to mourn his teammate. He grabs Ikaro by the collar and slams him back against the hexagonal plating.
"Again, Luka! Don't let up!" Darjan commands.
The 2-on-1 begins yet again. It's a claustrophobic, relentless rhythm.
Luka: A constant, frantic stream of jabs and palm strikes. They are weak, but they are noisy—cluttering Ikaro's vision and keeping his guard high.
Darjan: Methodical, bone-crushing hooks. Each one carries the weight of a falling building, delivered with a rhythmic one-second delay between each swing.
But Ikaro this time isn't as caught off guard as he was when Darjan slammed him with his shoulder into the wall. He manages to put his hands uo this time and defend against the barrage incoming. Dodging and blocking.
Ikaro is a survivor. Unlike the flashier Virek, he doesn't panic under the pressure. Behind his raised forearms, his eyes are darting, calculating the frequency of the assault. He feels the sting of Luka's weak punches and the staggering vibration of Darjan's heavy hits.
"○There," Ikaro thinks, blood trickling from a split lip. "○The kid is constant, on the other hand... one second."
Virek realises something.
"○He has a gap.One second of wind-up where the pressure drops."
He understands he can't win by staying pinned. He has to gamble. He waits for the rhythm to sink into his bones.
Luka-Luka-Luka—DARJAN—Luka-Luka-Luka—
As Darjan pulls his arm back for the next heavy hook, Ikaro moves. He doesn't go for Darjan; he lunges into the weaker link. Using the wall as a springboard, Ikaro thrusts his entire weight forward, slamming his shoulder into Luka's chest.
Luka gasps as the wind is knocked out of him, and both he and Ikaro go tumbling toward the floor in a messy heap of limbs.
Ikaro is fast—he uses the momentum of the fall to scramble to his feet, eyes fixed on the open space of the arena. He thinks he's slipped the noose.
He thinks he found the flaw in the pattern.
He's wrong. Darjan didn't have a "delay" because he was slow; he had a delay because he choose to.
"Hump!" Darjan rumbles.
Darjan is already mid-motion. He hasn't thrown a standard hook. Instead, he's shifted his weight entirely, his body coiling into that same "ball" of explosive potential. As Ikaro stumbles forward, trying to find his stride, Darjan launches a massive downward overhead punch.
His fist moves in a terrifying half-circle arc, like a falling guillotine.
VRDOOMM—
The sound is tectonic. Darjan's fist catches Ikaro squarely between the shoulder blades and the back of the head. The force doesn't just knock him down—it drives him into the earth.
Ikaro's face is buried instantly into the synthetic floor. The reinforced plating, designed to withstand heavy blows, cracks under the localized pressure of Darjan's knuckles.
Ikaro goes limp, his body twitching once before falling into a heavy, unconscious silence.
Darjan pulls his fist out of the crater he just made, his knuckles smoking slightly from the friction. He looks back at Luka, who is still sitting on his backside, staring in awe at the hole in the floor where a top-tier recruit used to be.
"You okay, kid?" Darjan asks, extending a hand to pull Luka up. "That tumble looked like it hurt."
Luka takes the hand, his fingers trembling. "I think... I think I'm starting to hate the floor in this place."
Darjan grunts a laugh. "Get used to it. In the Crucible, the floor is the only thing that'll always be there to catch you."
Cutting back to Zlatko and Kaelros.
The focus shifts away from the crater Darjan left behind, cutting back to the high-speed blur of Zlatko and Kaelros.
While the others were busy with their own fights playing chess with their skills at hand, Zlatko had his own battle, he and Kaelros have been locked in a pure, unfiltered brawl.
Zlatko leans into his rhythm, throwing a stinging left hook. Kaelros's forearm is already there, meeting the blow with a bone-dry thwack.
He immediately counters with a crisp straight aimed at Zlatko's chin.
Zlatko slips the punch, the air whistling past his ear, and tries to hook Kaelros's side in the same motion. Kaelros is a mirror; he blocks the body shot and immediately snaps a kick into Zlatko's midsection.
Zlatko is pushed back, his boots skidding, but he doesn't wait to reset. He goes right back in. He sprints toward Kaelros.
As Kaelros throws a heavy punch to stop the charge, Zlatko slides low across the synthetic floor, using his momentum to catch Kaelros's legs and slip him onto the ground.
As Kaelros is falling, Zlatko attempts an uppercut from a sitting position, trying to catch Kaelros before he can recover. But he's a fraction of a second too slow. The punch barely has any power from thag position. Kaelros doesn't just block the punch—he catches Zlatko's fist in mid-air.
Using the momentum of his own fall, Kaelros twists his hips and executes a brutal overhead throw, slamming Zlatko into the floor and immediately sitting on him to pin him down.
But Zlatko is a specialist for a reason. He instantly uses his torso to maneuver, creating just enough leverage to dodge a downward punch from Kaelros. Zlatko catches Kaelros's hand in place against the floor, using his core strength to push Kaelros upward and off-balance.
Seizing the opening, he drives his elbow into Kaelros's pinned arm, curling it and forcing Kaelros down onto his elbows and knees—the position where a fighter has the least power. With a sharp twist of his body, Zlatko flips the script, putting Kaelros below him.
A complete shift of positions.
But Kaelros doesn't stop. Using the very momentum of the fall and the force of Zlatko's own twist, he bucks his hips and throws Zlatko off him.
Both fighters spring back to their feet, chests heaving, sweat dripping onto the cracked arena floor. They stand five meters apart, sizing each other up again, their hands hovering in combat stances.
Zlatko's Thoughts: "○Damn... this isn't going anywhere. Every time I get an inch, he takes it back."
Kaelros's Thoughts: "○I can't get a solid grip on him. He's reading my flow as fast as I'm reading his."
Zlatko's Thoughts: "○Ugh, what a pain. We've been at this for how long now?"
Kaelros's Thoughts: "○Same speed. Same strength. Same maneuvers. It's like fighting myself."
.
Evenly matched.
Both fighters reach the same conclusion at the exact same moment.
In a rare moment of unintentional 'team synergy', both men let out a synchronized, weary thought as they glare at one another.
"○What a pain," their thoughts align in unison.
The air in the hexagon is thick with the metallic tang of sweat and the heavy thud of impacts.
Punch, kick, dodge, block. It's a continuous, exhausting cycle.
Kaelros leans back and launches a devastating Taekwondo high kick, the air whistling as his heel streaks toward Zlatko's temple.
Zlatko ducks by a hair's breadth, the wind of the strike ruffling his hair. He lunges in, driving a punch toward Kaelros's solar plexus, but Kaelros is already gliding backward, his feet barely touching the floor.
"○What do I even do here?" Zlatko's mind is racing, his lungs burning. I've tried everything. Every feint, every combo, every dirty trick.
He dodges a stinging jab, then a heavy hook that would have shattered his jaw. He counters with a crisp straight right, but it's met by Kaelros's iron-steady cross-block.
"○Think, damn it!" Zlatko snarls internally. "○There's no environmental advantage. I can't out-skill him; we're two sides of the same coin. But if I stay in this same rhythm, I might run out of gas before he does."
Zlatko launches a low kick. Kaelros skips over it and fires a lightning-fast counter-kick. Zlatko barely manages to drop into a crouch, feeling a flying punch graze his cheek.
As the skin on his cheek stings, Zlatko's eyes suddenly widen. A memory flashes through his mind, the Old Man's voice over the intercom—
"Below you are AI sensors that can detect ability usage... if it does, you will get pulled with 150x force."
A dangerous, manic grin begins to form in his mind. The system isn't a real dampener; it's a sensor. It reacts to the presence of an ability. It doesn't nullify the abilities literally.
That means there is a microscopic window—a fraction of a millisecond—between the activation of power and the AI's response.
"○It's a gamble, Zlatko thinks. But if I can hit him before the floor hits me..."
Kaelros senses the momentary daze. He doesn't hesitate. He steps in, his fist
connecting with Zlatko's jaw in a sickening crack. He follows up by sweeping Zlatko's legs and pinning him to the ground, straddling his chest to begin a relentless barrage of ground-and-pound strikes.
Zlatko takes the hits, his head bouncing off the synthetic plating.
"○Now. It has to be now."
"○I have to lower the output," he calculates, his vision blurring from Kaelros's punches. "○Just enough to shock his heart and stall his muscles. If it's too bright, the AI trips instantly. If it's too weak, he won't move."
Zlatko reaches up, his palm pressing flat against Kaelros's chest. A single, tiny spark, a faint blue vzzzt—flickers between his skin and Kaelros's uniform.
"What...?" Kaelros's eyes widen as he feels the unnatural heat.
"○I need to delay the detection as much as possible to ensure contact is made, before i get slammed down" Zlatko continues thinking.
Zlatko doesn't give him time to process it. He floods his arm with every drop of energy he can summon in a single, concentrated burst.
BVZZZZZT—
The electricity arcs through Kaelros's torso, his muscles seizing instantly as his nervous system is overloaded. His eyes roll back, and his body jerks with the violent surge of voltage.
K-thoom—
The AI is fast, but Zlatko's desperation was faster. The sensor trips.
The 350x gravity hits like a falling mountain. Zlatko is slammed into the floor hard. He can't breathe, his lungs flattened against his spine, but as he stares up through the crushing weight, he sees the results of his gamble.
Kaelros has been blown backward by the shock, his unconscious body sliding across the floor, twitching from the residual current.
"○The gap, he found it," the Old Man's voice crackles, sounding genuinely amused for the first time. "○Dangerous. Reckless. A risk. But it worked."
As soon as Zlatko was pinned, he was also unpinned. Realising his ability instantly.
He sits up looking at the electrecuted Kaelros than turns his gaze toward Luka and Darjan who also just turned around to look for him. Both their battles were settled.
The camera cuts to the old man.
"○How facinating," The old man thinks. Turning his eyes toward Luka and Darjan first. "○They all won their respective battles, these 2 used team work based strategy and missdirection to victory."
Darting his eyes on Zlatko now.
"○While he didn't excel in that aspect, he covered it by quick thinking and wits by finding and using the flaw of the system against his opponent."
"Well done, I applaud you." the old geezer says.
Squad 2 all looking up at the man, Darjan and Luka are breathing hard but have neutral expressions while Zlatko has a grit on his face while huffing and puffing.
"Ok, now it's time for the next team." the man says on the intercom.
Zlatko is a mess his condition, like he ran a marathon, while a crowd of people lined the road specifically to punch him in the face.
Darjan and Luka are not better in the slightest.
Luka is even worse. He is a patchwork of trauma: the skin on his leg is raw and weeping from the friction of the floor, his ribs are blossoming into deep shades of purple, and his heart is hammering against his chest with a terrifying, inexperienced rhythm. He is running on nothing but pure, unrefined adrenaline.
Darjan is the only one still standing tall, though 'stable' is a generous word. Blood trickles from a jagged cut on his forehead, matting into his hair and staining his torso. He looks like a rugged mountain that's been hit by a landslide—cracked, but still standing.
After the old man says that they all start walking out. It's time for the second teams to start their battles.
As the 3 of them start walking away exhausted, their shoulders slumped in a desperate craving for a medical bay—from above them.
Suddenly.
Vwooomzz—
Squad 6's platform that they were on, sprawls beneath their feet. Dropping them on the bettle arena.
Three figures plummet from the ceiling, landing with heavy thuds on the synthetic arena floor –Venoh, Hannad and Violet.
The newcomers scramble to their feet, looking just as bewildered as the trio they've just landed in front of. They look at the blood-stained floor, the cracks in the walls, and then at the three half-dead recruits staring at them in horror.
"Oh, yeah," the Old Man's voice crackles over the intercom, dripping with a cheekiness that makes Darjan's knuckles turn white. "I forgot to mention this as well. This isn't a regular Squad-versus-Squad tournament."
The camera drones overhead zoom in on Luka's wide, disbelieving eyes and Zlatko's trembling knees.
"This is a Gauntlet-style system of team-based combat," the Old Man continues, his voice sounding like a predator playing with its food. "Whoever wins stays in the pit. You face the next team, and the next, until you lose... or until I decide you've had enough. Which, looking at you three, won't be for a long, long time."
Luka feels his stomach drop. "○A gauntlet? We can't even stand, let alone fight three fresh recruits."
But Squad 6 has no choice. Their own survival in the test depends on this. They see the state of Squad 2—the blood, the exhaustion, the new kid clutching his side—and they tighten their stances.
They are fresh. They are fast. And they are ready for action.
"BEGIN!"
The roar of the intercom hasn't even faded before Squad 6 moves as one. They don't give the exhausted trio a second to pray.
"Hanad go on Darjan!" Venoh yells, leading the charge.
The fresh participants rush forth, their boots thundering against the floor, closing the distance before Luka can even draw a full breath.
Darjan and Zlatko don't have time to process the unfairness of it. Their muscles are screaming, their Qzi is flickering like a guttering candle, but the instinct to survive overrides the agony. They plant their feet, forcing their trembling legs into wide, defensive stances. They don't have a choice.
The collision is immediate and brutal.
Squad 6 hits them like a tidal wave. Darjan anchors himself, taking the brunt of Venoh's opening strike, while Zlatko tries to find his flow back against the second attacker. The sound of fists on meat and boots on metal restarts, but the tempo is different now—it's the sound of a slaughter, not a duel.
Darjan is fighting through a fog of exhaustion. He throws a heavy, sluggish punch to keep Venoh at bay, his eyes darting frantically across the shifting battlefield.
"Luka! Get behind me!" Darjan bellows, his voice cracking.
But the formation is already shattered.
One of Squad 6's members—moving with the terrifying, sleek speed of someone who hasn't spent the last twenty minutes being slammed into walls—sees the gap. They seize the moment. They slip through the chaos, weaving past Darjan's overextended guard with a sickening grace.
Luka stands there, a ghost in a tattered hospital gown. His vision is swimming, the blue lights of the arena blurring into long, jagged streaks. He hears the sound of boots sprinting toward him—
thud-thud-thud—
that feels like it's vibrating inside his own skull.
"LUKA! WATCH OUT!" Darjan's roar sounds like it's coming from miles away, muffled by a thick layer of cotton.
Luka tries to turn. He tries to lift his arms, to find that "Body Torque" one last time. He tries to breathe.
He never sees the strike.
There is a sudden, sharp whistle of air, followed by a blinding flash of white light behind his eyes. He doesn't feel the impact on his temple; he only feels a sudden, jarring weightlessness as his knees give out.
The cold floor rushes up to meet him, but he never feels the metal touch his skin. The sounds of the arena—Zlatko's snarling, the Old Man's intercom echo, Darjans callout—all melt into a single, high-pitched ring that fades into a heavy, suffocating silence.
.
The world tilts. The blue lights vanish.
.
.
Darkness.