Sumit lay on the narrow bed above the Bear's Cave with his eyes on the ceiling.
Tomorrow, he would fight first. He should have been asleep an hour ago, but his mind kept circling back to the one match he had not seen.
He had missed it on purpose, more or less. Jack had caught him in the corridor before the last match of the day and said, "Kid, do me a favor. Tell Ishita I'll be late." Then the wolf had vanished before Sumit could ask why.
So Sumit had gone looking for Ishita instead of watching Avin and Sonal. He found her on the steps outside the arena, one arm in a fresh bandage, chewing a strip of dried meat as if it had personally offended her.
"Jack says he'll be late," Sumit said.
"Of course he will." She did not even look up. "He's been late to everything for fifteen years. He was late to our wedding." She tore off another bite. "Thanks, Sumit. And that trick with the ground? Next time, I won't give you time to try it."
Sumit almost smiled. He turned back toward the arena.
The crowd was already pouring out of the gates, loud and confused, all talking at once.
"Did you see that?"
"—didn't even take his hands off his sides!"
"Sonal didn't get close. One swing. One."
Sumit slowed. The match was over. It had been over in seconds, apparently.
Then the crowd parted, and a lion walked through it.
Avin was tall and broad, with a golden mane that moved a little with each step and amber eyes that did not settle on anything. He did not look at the people who stepped aside for him. He did not look at Sumit either. He simply walked past, ten steps away.
Sumit had seen him once before, on the first day, from the mouth of the tunnel: a figure at the edge of the arena, his aura pulsing like a slow, steady drumbeat. Back then, Sumit had thought only one thing. I need to get stronger.
Since then, he had beaten Raph. He had learned the beginnings of Rumbling. He had beaten Ishita. He had half expected the gap to feel smaller.
It did not. For three breaths, the air itself felt like stone, and every hair on his arms stood up. His mouth went dry. His legs, without being asked, wanted to step back.
It was not killing intent. It was something quieter. It was the weight of a creature who had never once doubted that he would win.
Then Avin was gone, and the air was only air again.
Sumit stood still, breathing slowly. He expected the same dread as the first time. What he found was stranger.
His pulse was racing, and under the nerves there was something warm and bright, something he had not felt since he first woke up in that jungle. He did not have a name for it.
I want to fight him.
...
Back in his room, Sumit shut his eyes, held on to that feeling, and let himself drift.
Knock. Knock.
He groaned and opened one eye. Another knock, quieter this time, as if the person on the other side had already apologized for it.
He dragged himself to the door. Leo stood in the hallway in his guard coat, his eyes tired, his ears flat.
"Sorry to wake you," Leo said. "Have you seen Jack?"
"Jack?" Sumit blinked. "Not since this afternoon. He told me to tell Ishita he would be late, and that was it."
"Late." Leo repeated the word flatly. "He isn't at the barracks. He isn't at any of his usual pubs. He isn't answering anyone. You're the last person I know of who talked to him."
"Did something happen?"
"I need to report something to him. It can't wait." Leo rubbed his eyes. "Never mind. If he turns up, tell him to come and see me."
"I will."
Leo nodded and walked away, his footsteps fading down the corridor.
Sumit closed the door and stood there for a moment. Jack was always late, everyone said so. But Leo had looked more worried than annoyed, and that was new.
He'll show up, Sumit told himself. He always does.
He climbed back into bed, set the thought aside, and returned to the golden mane and the weight in the air. By the time he fell asleep, the only thing in his head was the arena.
...
The next day, the crowd was louder than it had ever been.
Sumit stepped onto the sand with his black wooden sword at his hip and his pockets full of rocks. The seats were packed to the top. Raph was somewhere in the stands, shouting something that sounded like encouragement and also a little like a threat. A few rows up, Ishita sat with her arms crossed and one eye on the empty seat beside her.
Sumit noticed it, and pushed the thought away.
"From the Human Clan, Kaali Billi! And from the Lion Clan, the one and only Avin!" Sushant the Snake announced.
On the other side of the arena, Avin walked out.
He did not hurry. He stopped in the center of his half, drew nothing, and let his arms hang loose at his sides.
That was all.
And already, Sumit's hair was standing up.
It was the same feeling as the night before, only now it was pointed at him. The pressure rolled across the sand like a heavy tide. It settled on Sumit's shoulders and lungs, and the roar of the crowd seemed to go faint and distant.
Don't freeze. Don't freeze.
"Let the match… BEGIN!" Sushant roared.
This time, the chill on the back of Sumit's neck came a heartbeat before the gust did.
He dropped. Aura slammed into his legs, and a claw tore through the air exactly where his throat had been. It sounded like cloth ripping. He had not even seen Avin move.
Sumit rolled, came up with the black blade drawn, and ran a thin line of golden aura down its edge. Avin was already coming again, the same strike at the same target, a little faster than before. Sumit swung to meet it.
Wood met claw. The blade held. The force sent him skidding back across the sand, his boots carving two deep lines.
Straight at the neck. No feints. No tricks.
Avin did not pause. He came again, and again, and Sumit did everything the Cat-man had ever drilled into him. Legs for the dodge. Arms for the parry. Shoulders to swallow the impact. His aura moved from limb to limb faster than it ever had, and it was the only reason his head was still attached to his neck.
He tried to open some distance. He pushed aura into his legs and leaped backward, again and again, and every time his heels touched the sand, Avin was there.
For half a heartbeat, he thought of the punch that had beaten Ishita. But it needed his feet planted and a moment to charge, and Avin never gave him one. Ishita had been a runner, and a runner could be left with no ground to run on. This was a wall that walked.
"Wait!" Sumit gasped, dodging another swipe. "Can we talk for a second? I've got questions! Like, your mane, do you condition it, or is that just natural, or—"
A claw whistled through the space where his ear had been.
Avin did not answer. He did not even blink.
Okay. Talking is out.
But every word had bought him half a breath, and every breath had let a little aura trickle into the stone in his pocket. His back was almost against the wall. Avin's next strike would not be a miss. Sumit's hand closed on the rock, and he flung it at the ground between them.
BOOM!
The blast threw them both backward. Sand and smoke filled the air, and Sumit hit the ground hard enough to knock the breath out of him. He rolled, coughed, and pushed aura through his body, packing it into his ribs and his side to stop the bleeding and close the worst of the damage.
When the smoke cleared, Avin was already on his feet. His mane was singed along one side, and there was a long cut on his forearm. Nothing more.
Sumit looked down at himself. Blood ran down his side, and one arm hung stiffly. He was not even close to fine.
But Avin was looking at the cut on his own arm. Then he lifted his eyes, and for the first time, his amber gaze settled on Sumit and stayed there. It was the look of a man who had just spotted the trick in a magician's sleeve.
He saw the glow.
Avin charged again. Sumit did not have time to think. His hand was in his coat and out, throwing, and this time he pushed aura into every rock before it left his fingers. They flew in a spray, and three of them struck Avin directly. The others burst around him in chains of golden light.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Avin did not dodge. He took the direct hits on his forearms and shoulder as if he had measured what they could cost him and decided the price was cheap. Then he roared, a sound that rattled the seats and shook dust from the walls, and came out of the smoke bleeding and charging straight.
He isn't ignoring them, Sumit realized. He's pricing them.
Then he saw the claw coming, and he did the one thing every instinct told him not to do.
He did not dodge.
His left hand shot out and closed around Avin's wrist.
Energy drain.
It was like swallowing a furnace. Avin's aura poured into him, hotter and denser than anything he had ever taken. It was not wild and rotten like the dark tree's. It was disciplined, vast, and heavy as a river in flood. His knees buckled. His vision went white. Too much, too much— He thrust out his right hand and pushed the flood into the black blade, and the sword roared gold, shaking in his grip. His wounds closed. The ache in his bones faded. For one second, Sumit felt stronger than he ever had.
Avin's strike stopped in mid-air.
For the first time since the match began, the lion's eyes widened.
"What—" he rasped. It was the first word he had spoken.
He wrenched his arm free with a roar and leaped back ten feet. He stared at his wrist, then at Sumit, and the whole arena went silent.
"No one," Avin said slowly, "has ever taken anything from me."
Sumit grinned, blood on his teeth, his hands trembling with borrowed power. "First time for everything."
Avin closed his eyes and drew a long breath.
And the air changed.
His aura, which had been pressing in like a drumbeat, stretched. It flowed out of his hands, past his fingers, and kept going, shaping itself in the air into two curved claws of light, each as long as a spear.
A gasp tore through the stands.
"That's not possible," someone whispered. "Not at this stage."
Sumit's mouth went dry. He remembered a campfire, and a wolf telling him about a stage where aura left the body entirely and took whatever shape its master willed. The high stage. That's where the true monsters lie.
Everything so far, the straight strikes and the bare claws, had been a fight Avin had chosen to have. It had not been his limit. It had been a courtesy.
"You are good," Avin said, in a voice with no pride in it at all. "Now I will stop being polite."
He moved.
The claws of light cut the air in long, humming arcs, and Sumit's blade rang against them like a bell. He threw up a golden gauntlet on his off hand to catch the swipes he could not parry. He shaped a spike of aura from his shoulder to turn aside a thrust that would have gutted him. He scattered charged stones across the sand as he retreated, little glowing mines in his wake.
Avin did not step on a single one.
He flicked the nearest away with the back of a claw, and it detonated harmlessly against the wall. He kicked another high into the air. He read the rest like a man who had read a thousand fighters before him, walking through the trap field as if it were a garden.
He's seen all my tricks. In five minutes.
There was a cut across Sumit's ribs and another along his thigh. The borrowed aura was draining away faster than it had come. The bombs, the drain, the shaping: each one had bought him a moment, and Avin had answered each with calm.
Sumit stood in the center of the sand with blood in his eyes and thought, very clearly, I can't outsmart him.
So he did the thing he had avoided all day. He stopped trying to be clever.
He threw the rest of his rocks in one wild handful, a blinding storm of golden flashes, and poured every drop of aura he had left into the black sword. He ignored the blood. He ignored the shaking in his legs. The blade lit up, bright and white-gold, and for one moment it was the brightest thing in the arena.
Through the smoke, Avin raised both hands.
Behind him, the air rose.
Light poured upward from the lion's body and took form, and a second lion unfolded against the sky: enormous, built of pure aura, as tall as the arena wall. Its mane burned like a sunset. Its jaws opened. A paw the size of a house lifted over the sand, and its shadow fell across Sumit completely.
The crowd had stopped breathing.
Sumit looked up at it. Drain it, said a small voice in his head. Touch it and drain it. But he knew, the way you know a stair is missing in the dark, that the flood would kill him before it ever reached the sword. There was too much of it. Not here. Not yet.
His legs were shaking. His heart was a drum.
He ran straight at it.
Sumit swung the strongest Aura-Slash he had ever made, and the paw came down.
They collided.
A shockwave tore across the arena. The sand blew outward in a ring, the walls shook, and people in the lower seats were thrown from their benches. Light and sound swallowed everything.
For one heartbeat, the sword held. For one heartbeat, a mid-level boy and a mountain of light stood against each other, and the mountain did not move.
Then, with a sharp, clean crack, the black blade broke.
It had been made to hold a mid-level user's aura. It had never been made for this.
The paw swept through the broken sword and through Sumit. He saw the line of red open across his chest from shoulder to hip. He heard nothing at all.
His knees gave out. The sky tilted, and the sand rose up to meet him.
The last thing he saw was Avin standing over him, breathing hard, his aura guttering out like a candle, blood on his mane and a cut still bleeding at his wrist. His amber eyes were not calm anymore. They looked at Sumit the way a man looks at something he did not expect to find.
"I will remember that name," Avin muttered, to no one in particular. "Kaali Billi."
Then everything went dark.
...
At the very top of the stands, a figure in a red robe had risen to his feet.
His round golden eyes, which blinked as if the world moved too fast for him, were wide open and perfectly still.
"Simi," the King said softly. "Find out where they are taking him."
"Your Majesty, please sit down, everyone will—"
"Now, Simi."