"Please get ready for the second match of the top 8 where the contestants are Sammy and Talia!" the announcer's voice boomed across the arena, and the crowd erupted almost instantly. The reaction was louder than it had been for any of the previous matches — and for good reason. These weren't just two skilled fighters stepping onto the sand. These were two of the most celebrated names in the entire empire, representatives of the Rice and Stone families respectively, and the audience had been waiting for this clash since the brackets had been announced.
Somewhere in the upper stands, a man leaned over to his friend with a puzzled expression.
"Hey, what are the names of the four great families of the empire?"
His friend turned and stared at him like he'd just asked what color the sky was.
"Seriously? You don't know?"
"Sorry man, the writer forgot to mention the important part of the novel," he replied with a sheepish shrug.
"Haah... Fine, listen. There are four great families of the empire. There's Sammy Rice of the Rice family, Talia Stone of the Stone family, and then there are two more — the Finn family and the Salt family. Those two choose to work behind the curtain. Their children often use different surnames so they don't get caught up in public attention."
Not far from where the two men sat, Sammy had been stretching his arms near the corridor entrance when fragments of that conversation drifted into his ears. He blinked once, and then a grin broke across his face before he could stop it. A laugh escaped him because it was genuinely funny. Out of everyone in this entire empire, there was apparently someone out there who shared the same level of ignorance as Rudra. The thought alone was enough to make his shoulders shake.
Talia, standing just beside him with her arms folded and her dark hair tied back tightly, glanced at him sideways.
"The match official is calling us in," she said, nudging his arm with her elbow. "Stop laughing and focus."
Sammy stifled the last of it, grunting as he rolled his neck and cracked his knuckles. "Yeah, yeah. Let's go."
They walked out together into the arena.
In the hospital ward, the atmosphere was considerably quieter.
"Are you comfortable now?" the nurse asked gently as Amanda shifted against the pillow, adjusting the bed sheet across her lap.
"Yeah," Amanda replied, her voice calm and even. "I'm back to full fitness."
"Let me check your wounds. Just stay still for a moment."
The nurse lifted the edge of Amanda's garment carefully and stopped. Her hands froze. Her breath caught somewhere in her throat as she stared at skin that was completely unblemished, smooth as though no injury had ever touched it. The wounds that had been logged in the chart twenty minutes as it was deep, the kind that required at minimum two weeks of recovery were simply gone.
"Ho... how did you...?"
"A friend of mine swung by and gave me a pill," Amanda said simply, as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
The nurse straightened up and fixed her with a firm look. "You shouldn't take any pill from someone you know without having it checked first. Do you understand how dangerous that could be?"
"I'm sorry."
"Please don't do it next time. Understood?"
The nurse left with a lingering look of disbelief, shaking her head as she pulled the door shut. Amanda watched her go, then reached over and switched on the television mounted on the wall opposite her bed.
The arena feed came to life immediately.
The roar of the crowd hit like a physical force the moment Sammy and Talia stepped through the opposing gates onto the arena floor. The ground was wide and flat, compressed earth smoothed by maintenance teams, though neither of them expected it to stay that way for long.
They walked to the center, stopped ten paces apart, and looked at one another.
Talia stood with her feet shoulder-width apart, her posture relaxed but grounded quite literally. Even standing still, there was something about her presence that felt solid, like a boulder that had been there long before anyone arrived and would remain long after they left. Her eyes were sharp and dark, measuring him without expression.
Sammy, by contrast, rolled one shoulder lazily and exhaled through his nose. He looked almost too casual. But anyone watching closely would notice the way his fingers had already begun to curl, the faint shimmer of moisture gathering at the tips water drawn in from the humidity in the air itself, coiling invisibly around him like a second skin waiting to be worn.
The official raised his hand.
The crowd fell into a charged, trembling silence.
The hand dropped.
Talia moved first.
She drove her right foot into the ground with a thunderous stamp and the arena floor cracked outward from beneath her heel like a spider's web. A ridge of earth surged toward Sammy at speed, a jagged spear of compressed stone aimed directly at his center of mass.
Sammy sidestepped with fluid ease, and as he moved, the water around him surged forward in a pressurized stream thin and fast as a blade aimed at Talia's left flank. She pivoted, raising her left arm, and a slab of earth rose from the ground to intercept it. The water hit the stone barrier and exploded outward in a fine mist that drifted across the arena floor.
She was already moving through the mist.
Her palm drove forward and a column of earth punched upward beneath Sammy's feet. He launched himself backward just in time, using the momentum to flip midair, and when he landed, both hands swept in a wide arc. A wave not enormous, but dense and fast as it surged across the arena floor toward her, rolling over the fractured earth like it owned it.
Talia planted herself and pushed both palms downward. The ground around her feet buckled and rose into a circular wall, diverting the wave around her. Water crashed against stone and sprayed outward to either side, and for a moment the arena was filled with the sound of rushing water and splitting rock.
Then it went quiet again.
They stood roughly the same distance apart as when they started. Both breathing a little harder. Both watching.
The crowd was absolutely losing their minds.
"She blocked it clean," someone in the stands murmured.
"Did you see that wave though? He split the floor with the pressure."
Amanda, watching from her hospital bed, leaned forward slightly against the pillow. Her eyes tracked the screen with quiet intensity.
Back in the arena, Sammy shifted his approach. He stopped throwing mass at her and instead began to work with precision. He sent thin rotating rings of pressurized water spinning toward her — not to damage, but to occupy her hands, force her to respond, keep her reading each projectile individually. Talia moved efficiently, raising small barriers, deflecting, redirecting, her earth energy pulling from the arena floor in controlled bursts.
But the floor was beginning to work against her.
Every stone wall she raised, every ridge she summoned — it was all depleting the stable ground beneath them. The arena was fracturing unevenly and the terrain was becoming chaotic. For an earth user, that was a double-edged cost. She had the power to reshape it, but each reshape took focus and energy.
Sammy had been counting on that.
He sent one large rolling surge directly at her and when she raised a thick slab to meet it, he didn't fight the slab. He let the water split around it, thin streams curving like living things around the barrier's edges, reforming behind it, and converging on her from both sides simultaneously.
It caught her. Not fully she twisted and the water grazed her rather than struck clean but it was enough to push her back two steps and break her stance.
She responded with something she hadn't used yet.
Her hands came together and the ground beneath both of them buckled violently not just a wall, not a spear, but a wholesale upheaval. Slabs of stone launched upward from the arena floor like scattered teeth, random and explosive, forcing Sammy to abandon his water construct entirely just to keep his footing. One slab clipped his shoulder and spun him sideways. Another rose directly beneath his left foot and sent him airborne.
In the air, without ground beneath him and momentum already broken, he was at a disadvantage for half a second.
Talia used that half second.
She slammed her fist downward and a concentrated spike of compacted earth shot upward to meet him not aimed to injure critically, but aimed to finish the exchange. Sammy threw his hands wide and a burst of water pressure exploded outward from him in a sphere, shattering the spike into gravel and slowing his descent, but the force of it was scattered and imprecise and he landed hard, skidding back several meters on the broken ground.
He caught himself on one knee.
The crowd was deafening.
They exchanged eleven more blows in the span of the next two minutes water against stone, pressure against solidity, fluid adaptation against rooted endurance. Each of them drew closer to the edge of what they had left. Sammy's water constructs became slightly slower. Talia's stone walls became slightly thinner. The arena floor between them looked like something had tried to eat it.
Then Talia made her final move.
It was subtle, which was the most dangerous part. She had spent the last forty seconds slowly, almost imperceptibly, drawing earth energy up through the ground in a wide radius around Sammy's feet without raising anything visible. Just pressing. Just loading. Building pressure like pulling a bowstring back one millimeter at a time.
She released it all at once.
The ground directly beneath Sammy erupted upward in a concentrated burst less an attack and more a detonation, tight and total. He was launched, spun, and came down hard on his back three meters away. He tried to rise. His left arm went beneath him to push up and the exhaustion in it was visible to anyone watching. He made it to one knee. He stayed there, breathing through his nose, and looked at her.
Talia stood at the center of the arena, one hand lowered, chest rising and falling with effort. She was bleeding slightly from a cut above her eyebrow from a water blade that had gotten through twenty exchanges ago. She hadn't wiped it.
The official watched Sammy for three seconds.
He did not rise further.
"Winner — Talia Stone!"
The crowd shook the stands.
Amanda exhaled slowly from her hospital bed, watching as Talia was announced the victor by the thinnest margin the top-eight bracket had seen. She reached over and turned the volume down, lying back against the pillow.
Sammy, still on one knee on the broken arena floor, looked up at Talia as she walked past him toward the exit corridor. She stopped briefly beside him, said something quietly that the microphones didn't catch, and kept walking.
Whatever she said, he snorted. And then despite himself, he smiled.
Sonnet 4.6Extended