The arena reset.
Fight 6.
Varen of Aurelius against Vornik of Dravenfall.
The Aurelius sections gave Varen their home warmth—the particular sound of a crowd that had watched three of their Class 2 fighters already today and was building toward something with each successive fight. The Dravenfall sections gave Vornik their heavy territorial response. The neutral sections organized themselves around the attention this matchup deserved.
Varen walked out of the Aurelius tunnel.
He was lean and still in his movement—the specific stillness of someone whose ability was entirely about reading rather than about generating. He moved across the floor with his eyes active rather than his body, the gaze sweeping across the arena surface and Vornik's tunnel and the space between them with the particular quality of someone cataloguing rather than perceiving. Everything he looked at he was reading for the point where it was most vulnerable. The floor. The walls. The air itself.
