Far above the Water Zone, the Micro Colosseum's central dais turned a few silent degrees, lining up five floating rings like gears you couldn't see unless you were looking from the sky. At the top of that machine, inside a glass pavilion wrapped in glowing array-lines—the arena's rule-set made visible—Master Halin bent over a low table.
Halin wore plain white—his usual uniform, not a flag of surrender. Iron-gray hair, tired eyes, ink on his fingers. Six judges stood with him in a half-circle: Herald of Water, Arbiter of Earth, Marshal of Fire, Warden of Wind, Keeper of Void—and one empty spot where a seventh seal should've rested.
Next to Halin stood a woman in dove-gray with a tight, stitched-seam smile. No judge's seal. Just a black ledger tucked under her arm.
"Seat the last probes," Halin said, voice even. "Are we on schedule?"
Her smile didn't move. "The harmonic survey is on pace." She glanced through the glass at the tiny figures fighting across the zones. "You'll have an exemplary finale."
"Not my world," the Herald of Water said from the doorway. "Ours."
Halin dipped his head—half apology, half "drop it." "Herald, your zone is holding well."
"Because I keep hands out of it," the Herald said, eyes on the woman with the book.
Archivist Sable—Agent of Accounts to the people who hated her—blinked once. "Balance needs measurement. Measurement needs tools. Tools need authority."
"We have authority," the Arbiter of Earth rumbled.
"Do you," Sable said, still smiling.
Halin traced three quick symbols in the air to lock a scroll. "Enough. Argue after the finals."
"Of course," Sable said, like the after was guaranteed.
She turned to a quiet man waiting in a pillar's shadow—plain face, eyes that never seemed to be looking where he walked. Attendant blue. Another lacquer box in his hands.
"Put the last probe at the Crown Gate," Sable said. "Reserve probe goes at the tertiary escape."
"Yes, Archivist." He lifted the box and slid out, invisible to anyone who wasn't trying to see him.
Halin looked back up at the glass—then froze. For a blink, his reflection wasn't his. A huge, indifferent eye stared back, like the sky belonged to someone else. He blinked; it was his face again.
"Master?" the Warden of Wind asked.
"Dust," Halin said, wiping the glass with his sleeve. He went back to work.
—
They hit the Fire Zone before the hour turned. Zhen's earlier ward-lines had burned out. Their origin sigil pulsed underfoot like a heartbeat.
"Eyes up," Lenia said. "Everything's a choke point now."
They weren't the only team carrying three banners. Squads sprinted for home in torn clumps—some bleeding, some yelling, some quiet because they were hauling someone who wouldn't get up again.
Korra spotted Vaen's crew cutting low along a volcanic shelf. "They'll reach the mouth first."
"Let 'em," Toba said. "We don't have to be first. We just have to be through."
Zhen fanned out a fresh set of talismans, writing clean and fast. "I can fog the last stretch. Not blind—just… boring."
Korra raised a brow. "Explain 'boring.'"
"I flatten your signal," Zhen said, already pasting strips on their belts and boots. "These damp your Qi spikes, soften your outlines, and deaden footstep echoes. Not invisibility—attention suppression. To hunters and probes, we read like background noise."
Lenia nodded. "Do it. Make us boring."
Korra snorted. "New technique name?"
"Best defense at the end of a hunt," Lenia said.
Aeros kept his Solar cycle low and even, the way he'd practiced in Water—power steady, glare down. He didn't push to "noon", his personal peak output where his Radiance ran hottest and most obvious. Instead he held it in: strong, efficient, easy to hide inside Zhen's fog.
The last hundred paces were ugly—heat pockets popping underfoot; ash gusts hiding needle-stone; a too-many-knees thing skittering out of a vent and right back in when Lenia tapped her staff at a pitch it hated. Zhen's fog did its job: two squads looked straight at them, lost interest, and hunted louder targets.
They crossed their origin line together. The sigil flared and sealed behind them like a jaw.
"Three," Zhen said, small voice, big pride.
"Done," Lenia exhaled, shoulders finally dropping.
"Not done," Korra said, chin pointing skyward. "Finale."
Toba slid his guandao home. "And wolves at the door."
Aeros looked up. The Crown Gate hung over Thunder Bark—five massive rims rotating into a single lock, each rim a different color and mood: Fire, Water, Earth, Wind, Void. At five points, thin slivers of jade glinted in ways your eyes didn't like.
"Probes," he said.
Lenia's jaw tightened. "Balance system."
Zhen swallowed. "And the ledger."
Korra elbowed Zhen. "Hey."
"What?"
"Don't freak out yet," she said, grinning.
He didn't. He replayed Veyra's lesson in his head—short can be sharp. If he learned a fighting style in five exchanges, he could learn a scheme in five clues. He studied the probe-glow. It pulsed out of rhythm with the Gate's native light. He mentally pinned that mismatch—"figure this out when nobody's swinging at you."
Before they moved, an elder-runner from Beast Reign jogged up, breath steady, tablet in hand. "Quick brief while you reset," she said. "Everyone keeps asking how the banners work. Listen once, stop asking later."
"Go," Lenia said.
"Each zone spawns multiple copies of its zone banner—Fire, Water, Earth, Wind, Void," the runner said, tapping the tablet. "They spawn at shrines or judges in that zone. Same emblem, same color, same resonance. You need three different colors to qualify. Dupes don't increase your count, but they're still valuable—good for trades, traps, and upgrades in the finale."
"Upgrades?" Korra asked.
"In the finals, certain gates and bridges unlock only if your ring contains specific banner mixes," the runner said. "Examples: Water+Wind lets you cross a storm span; Earth+Fire lets you stabilize a breaking deck. Void mixes can null traps for a few seconds. Probes read those mixes, too."
Zhen squinted. "What if we lose our home banner?"
"You're out," she said. "Home banner is your team's life line. Protect it. Also, every banner carries a resonance thread—a kind of signature. Probes track those threads to balance traffic and—supposedly—to keep any one path from getting overcrowded."
"'Supposedly,'" Toba echoed.
The runner shrugged. "I'm just the messenger. One more thing: reward weighting. The ledger weights banners by difficulty—late-cycle Fire might be worth more than early-cycle Water, that sort of thing. That weighting affects finals seeding and what the Colosseum gives winning squads afterward."
Korra made a face. "Great. So the book decides how much our wins 'count.'"
"The ledger records it," the runner said. "Archivists claim that keeps things fair. Judges… have opinions. Good luck." She jogged off to the next team.
Aeros kept watching the probes. "They don't pulse like the Gate. They're out of phase on purpose."
"Meaning?" Lenia asked.
"Either they're measuring something the Gate doesn't naturally show," Zhen said, "or they're injecting a signal."
Toba grunted. "Pick later. Fight now."
Above them, the five rims finally kissed, locked, and rang. The tone wasn't loud; it soaked into everything.
Across Thunder Bark, flags snapped toward the sky.
On a far ridge, Vaen looked up and finally smiled for real. "Now," he said.
Deep under the Colosseum, the plain attendant slid a second probe into a hidden slot behind the tertiary escape tunnel and walked away without casting a shadow. The box he left behind didn't look like a box anymore. It looked like a mouth.
In the glass pavilion, Archivist Sable wrote a neat line in her book and closed it with two fingers.
"Let the tithe begin," she said softly.
No one below heard her.
The finals began.