The air under the oak tree was thick with what had been said and what couldn't be unsaid.
Hawk stared at the empty lockbox, her hands not quite steady. When she looked up at Snake, her eyes were swimming — tears and fury in the same expression, which is always worse than either alone.
"How could you." Her voice cracked on the last word. "After everything. After I helped you in that tournament. How could you steal from me."
Snake stood with his head down. He had nothing. Any word he said would make it smaller — would turn it into an excuse, which it wasn't. He took it.
"My father was right," she said, and the bitterness in it was old, the kind she'd been defending against for a long time. "He called you all liars and thieves. I told him you were different." She laughed — a sound with no warmth in it. "I should never have trusted you. You didn't deserve me."
She was right. About all of it. He had stolen from her, in her home, while she sat beside him under her tree and told him things. That was what he had done.
His silence made it worse and he knew that and couldn't fix it.
"Leave me alone," she said. Then she shoved him, both hands, and the scream came out of her like something that had been building for longer than this moment. "GET OUT OF MY SIGHT. We're done. I quit the tournament and I quit you."
Snake walked away. He didn't defend himself. The punishment was the fair thing, and he knew it.
The morning of the finals, the arena was full before the gates opened.
Teams gathered on the field. Moto with Lilly, her real steel sword at her hip this time, its edge catching the morning light. Aemon beside Will, who had arrived with the same expression he wore for everything. The other teams arranged themselves across the sand.
One fighter stood alone.
Snake walked in with his head still down, the usual confidence entirely absent, replaced by something strung tight and dangerous underneath the surface. He looked smaller. The swagger was gone. What was left was a man who had already decided what he was willing to lose.
Two weeks without sleep, Sixtus said, coiled at his neck. Your body is shutting down. The adrenaline will kill you if you keep taking it.
"Then we finish this before it does," Snake muttered.
Across the field, Moto watched him. He'd seen plenty of people who wanted to win — for pride, for money, for the look on someone's face. Snake's eyes were something else. Desperation stripped clean of everything except necessity. Moto had seen that look once, in a mirror, on a train through a valley of Terrors with a crying infant in his arms.
He barely heard Lilly talking.
Aemon nudged him. "Focus."
Moto came back. Lilly was watching him with the eyes of someone who had brought a real sword and intended to use it. "My luck ends here," she said. "Nothing is stopping me from that prize money and what it buys."
Moto smiled weakly. Turned back to Snake.
What are you fighting for?
"BEGIN—"
Snake moved before the word finished.
He crossed the field in a streak of green and black, fist connecting with the nearest contestant — a large insect-hybrid — before the man had registered the round had started. The small tattoos on his back detached simultaneously, ink-black arrows shooting across the field, latching onto four more fighters, siphoning strength in seconds. The bodies they left behind were upright but empty. The tattoos returned, merged back into his skin. Sixtus brightened for a moment as the stolen energy ran through him.
Five fighters down. Five seconds.
Snake turned toward the remaining team: Moto and Lilly.
He came for Lilly first.
—
On the arena's far side, Aemon and Will had their own reckoning to handle.
Will attacked with the bored precision of someone for whom fighting had never been impressive enough to warrant effort. Aemon met him. Grillet had been silent since yesterday — not absent, just quiet, a simmering cold beneath the surface that felt less like a personality and more like weather. Aemon pushed it aside. He had been training. He had been present, surrounded by people who expected things from him rather than people who used him. This fight was his chance to find out what that had made him.
He parried with Grillet's physical form, steady, not overthinking. They matched each other blow for blow, neither finding the edge. In the end, a simultaneous strike — both of them stepping into each other at the same moment — and they went down together, out of bounds at the same time.
Aemon hit his back in the dirt outside the line, chest heaving, and lay there for a moment.
He felt deeply, specifically satisfied.
"Leaving the rest to you," he said quietly, to no one in particular.
—
Snake and Lilly clashed in the centre of the arena. He was fast and the stolen energy gave his strikes a power that didn't belong to someone running on nothing. But Lilly's footwork was immaculate — she read each attack before it arrived, her steel blade parrying with the efficiency of someone who had spent their life on this.
She pressed a hidden switch on the hilt.
The blade separated into segments joined by razor wire, the whole thing becoming a whip-sword that moved without a fixed arc. She lashed out. The wire wrapped around Snake's guard and nicked his shoulder. He backed off, tracking the chaotic, lethal swing of it.
She saw the opening. She swung for the finish.
Moto stepped between them, arms spread.
No sword raised. Just himself.
Lilly stopped. The segments hung inches from his face. "What are you doing? Move."
"Let him win," Moto said.
"What—"
"I can't explain it fully." He held her eyes. "He needs this more than we do."
She stared at him. Looked for the joke. Didn't find it.
Snake didn't wait. He sprinted in, and Moto didn't block him, and Snake drove a punch into Lilly's chest that put her across the arena.
She landed hard.
"You didn't have to hit her that hard!" Moto turned.
Snake swung at him too, running on pure instinct now, the energy burning off fast. Moto ducked it easily.
Lilly stood up slowly, wiping blood from her lip. Something was happening in her body — fur pushing through her arms, her canines lengthening, a tail uncurling behind her. She came back to her feet in half-monkey form, the transformation carrying with it a fury that radiated from across the arena.
"Who are you to decide whose goals matter?" she said, raising the whip-sword. "Move, Moto. Last chance."
He stood in front of Snake and breathed.
Smoke poured from him as he moved forward. Lilly stepped through it without hesitating — the Dash Step carried her past the cloud, past his guard, and a kick detonated against his side with a force that bent him around it. He rolled, gasping.
Behind him, Snake dropped face-first into the dirt.
Lilly came in full — slashes and kicks, the whip-sword wrapping around his guard and tearing his obsidian blade from his grip. It clattered away. She swung for his neck. He caught the razor wire between his palms, blood welling immediately, and pulled to throw her off balance.
She released the tension mechanism. The segments flew back toward the hilt.
Moto dropped the wire just before it took his fingers.
She tackled him to the ground, reaching out in the same motion to catch her falling sword before it touched the dirt. The crowd murmured. Even in her fury, she hadn't let the blade fall.
She straddled him, sword raised, and looked into his eyes.
He wasn't fighting back. He was just looking up at her with something sad and certain.
She couldn't do it. The frustration that came out of her was raw — she sheaved the sword and punched him instead, again and again, screaming the same word each time. Why. Why. Why.
Moto took it. He tasted blood. He noticed the boundary line, very close.
"I'm sorry, Lilly," he said.
He bucked his hips, the reversal shifting her weight, and pushed. She tumbled backward across the line.
"Out of bounds!"
She sat up in the dirt outside the ring. Her golden eyes found his, and what was in them wasn't anger anymore. She got up and ran, and Will and Aemon followed without being asked.
In the ring, Moto stood up swaying, bleeding from his palms and his mouth. He looked down at Snake, face in the dirt, motionless.
"Make it count," Moto said quietly.
"I didn't ask you to do this," Snake said, into the ground.
Moto turned and walked to the boundary line and stepped over it.
"Winner by default — Snake!"
The medical team moved in. Snake refused help. He couldn't move, but he refused. They set the prize money next to his head.
In the stands, Tanaka pressed her hands together. "Why would he do that? He could have won."
Najo leaned on the railing, looking at the figure in the dirt below. "He recognised something," he said. "Nobody fights until their body gives out for money. He just couldn't say it."
They watched Snake lie in the dirt as the sun moved and the arena emptied and the stands went quiet.
Darkness. The bag beside him.
Get up, Snake told himself.
Nothing moved.
Blake dies if you don't get up. Is that what you want? Is that why you're here?
A finger twitched. His jaw locked.
You broke Hawk's heart for this. You broke everything for this. Get up.
Bit by bit, by pure will over wreckage, his body came back to him. He dragged himself upright, lifted the bag, and limped into the night.
He shook Blake awake in the dark. "We're going now."
"Snake? What happened to your—"
"No time. Hoodie on." He explained as fast as he could — Jeffery at the concert, the tracking tattoo, the location of the shed. "We go there now. We pay him before he comes to us."
The rain began on the way out.
The shed was at the edge of the city, in the kind of land that didn't belong to anything. Dilapidated metal walls, silence, dark. Snake knocked.
The door came outward hard. Two hyenas on chains, jaws snapping, stopped short of their faces. The boys stumbled back. The chains held, barely.
Jeffery walked out behind them. The small brown dog at his heel. He held a bounty picture, looked at it, looked at Blake.
"You saved me the trouble," he said.
Snake stepped in front of his brother, the bag held out. His left arm was still largely useless. "This is the tournament prize money. All of it. In exchange for his life."
Jeffery looked at the bag.
"You think my son's life had a price?" he said.
He threw the picture down.
Behind him, the shed's shadow moved. Kazuchi walked out into the rain — two legs, hunched, the wolf-Terror's void-fur absorbing the moonlight, the gasoline drum it had been carrying dropped to the ground with a hollow, resonant clang.
Snake looked at it. Looked at his brother. Looked at his left arm.
There was no good version of what he expected next.