The Rabbit clan's best was waiting for me in the center of the ring, and he was not what the word "bunny" had prepared me for.
Picture six feet of muscle with rabbit ears. He was flexing for the crowd when I walked out — actually flexing, working the tiers like a bodybuilder, and the tiers were eating it up. Long ropey arms, a fighter's stance, and a pair of legs I clocked immediately as the dangerous part. You do not want to get kicked by something built like a rabbit. The whole species is legs.
(Remember Minho saying the rabbit-folk were the ones everybody underestimated exactly once? Yeah. I decided, right there, not to be the once.)
He planted himself, crossed those arms, and grinned at me with two very prominent front teeth.
"Welcome, human. My name is Hareleap. The best warrior of the rabbitmen."
I smiled back. "Then let's test whether you're actually the best or not."
I watched a vein come up on his forehead like a road drawn on a map. Apparently the rabbit clan's champion had a temper to match the muscles.
"Huh." His ears went flat. "Let's test it, then."
The referee stepped up between us — a snake-woman, small and frankly adorable in a way that did not match the carnage she was about to officiate. She raised a whistle. Gave us each a look. And blew it.
I moved first.
I'll be honest about why. It wasn't strategy. It was that I needed to know. Ever since the dream — ever since the woman I can't remember put something under my skin — I'd felt it in there, this weight, this potential, and I'd never once been allowed to find the bottom of it. Bandits didn't count. The boss in the camp barely counted. I wanted, for one second, to throw everything I had at someone who could take it.
So I led with a kick at his head — fast, real, nothing held back.
He blocked it. Caught my shin on his forearm clean, barely rocked, and I felt the impact ring all the way up my leg. Okay. So he was real too. Good. This was going to be a fight after all.
Then he answered.
Hareleap came in low and fast and drove a fist into my chest like a piston — a full-power blow, the kind that ends people, the kind the whole front row gasped at.
And I felt it.
I want to be clear: I felt it. It landed. It was real.
It just... didn't do anything.
I stood there with the rabbit clan's best warrior's best punch buried in my sternum, looked down at it, then looked up at him — and watched the exact moment the realization crossed his face. The same one lighting up like a sunrise in my chest.
Oh, I thought. It's real. It's all real. I'm — actually like this now.
I'm not too proud to admit I grinned.
"My turn," I said.
And I kicked him.
I put everything in this time. All of it — the whole impossible weight I'd been hauling around for years and never spending — straight into his guard. He got his arms up. It didn't matter. The kick lifted him clean off his feet and sent him out of the ring like the ground had decided to be rid of him, all six feet of rabbit muscle sailing past the boundary line and into the dirt beyond.
Out of bounds. Just like that.
The whistle blew. The snake-woman pointed at me.
The match was mine.
For a second the whole stadium just stared. Then it started — that low roar, building.
I walked over to where Hareleap was sitting up in the dust, shaking the stars loose. He'd earned that punch. He really was the best of his clan; on any other day, against almost anyone else, that blow ends it. He just had the bad luck to throw it at me.
I held out my hand.
He looked at it. Looked at me. And then — credit to him — he laughed, a big booming bark of a laugh, took it, and let me haul him back onto his feet.
"You hit," he said, rubbing the chest where I'd kicked his own guard into him, "like something that should not be allowed."
"I get that a lot," I said. Which, today, was finally true.
The roar broke open into something with a shape.
"Kim Junha. Kim Junha. Kim Junha."
The whole tribe — all five clans — chanting my name up into the gold-dead sky.
And somewhere in the stands — I didn't look, I swear I didn't look — I knew exactly where a certain fox princess was sitting, and exactly what kind of grin she was wearing.
One down. Four clans and a leader the size of a building to go.
I rolled my shoulders and walked back to the center to wait for whatever the Fox clan was about to send me.
— To be continued.