Zayne opened his eyes and found himself standing in a narrow hallway—concrete walls slick with condensation, dim red lights pulsing along the floor like veins. Every few feet, a black surveillance orb blinked awake, scanned him head to toe, then went dead again.
Steel grid underfoot. A bassy hum below it, like a caged animal breathing.
He was alone, but not unseen.
The voice slid in—smooth, mechanical, undeniable:
FIGHTER: ZAYNE WARD — STATUS: ACTIVE.
MATCH TYPE: RANKED INITIATION.
OPPONENT: "WIDOW."
TIER ONE.
ROUND ONE BEGINS IN 90 SECONDS.
The hallway opened into a circular shaft. No rails. No buttons. Just a lonely platform waiting like an open palm.
Zayne stepped on.
The floor vibrated. A low rumble rose through his bones. The platform shot upward, slicing through darkness. Rings of light—green, blue, violet—flashed past in a blur, then everything slammed to a halt.
Above: a grated ceiling.
Below: silence.
The grate split.
Light knifed down. The platform lifted him into it—and he burst into an arena as if launched from a tomb.
A circular metal floor. Walls like mirrored steel. Floodlights so white they burned.
And a crowd.
Not all real. Some were avatars jittering at the edges. Some were bodies that moved a fraction too late. Some were mannequins until they weren't. But they watched. They leaned forward. They wanted.
A cathedral of attention.
The announcer detonated across the space:
VOID FIST MATCH #F-93217: ZAYNE WARD VERSUS WIDOW.
Across the ring, she entered the light.
Slender. Quiet. Black compression suit traced with a thin violet seam. No helmet. An obsidian mask—featureless, reflective, swallowing the floodlights whole. She moved like water, thinking.
Zayne rolled his shoulders. The tape on his gloves bit into skin. Exhale. Again.
No nerves. Just habits.
"Begin."
They walked.
Ten feet apart, dead center. Stopped.
Silence stretched tight across the roar.
They watched each other breathe. The air around Widow felt different—still, like the room held itself careful not to disturb her balance.
Zayne narrowed his gaze. Clips hadn't lied. No wasted steps.
Widow tilted her head, slow, as if calibrating his pulse through the floor.
They moved at the exact same time.
Two blurs intersecting. No wind-up. No warning. Just fists and intent.
Zayne jabbed—fast, clean. Widow parried with the smallest turn of wrist and let the punch slide past her cheek like a secret. She slipped inside and hooked to the ribs. He caught her forearm mid-turn, pivoted, and snapped a knee toward her hip.
She spun with it—weight gone, limb gone—like striking into smoke.
Reset. Circle. Close.
Zayne pressed. Probing jabs, step-ins, pressure. A fast combo that would've drowned a hundred streetfighters.
Widow didn't absorb. She redirected. Angles, not blocks. He felt his own power go somewhere else—diffused, bent away, turned into nothing.
He swung heavily. She answered lightly. He lunged. She vanished and reappeared half a foot out of phase, exact enough to be infuriating.
Chaos against control.
Every clash ended with a breath-width of space and two new calculations.
The crowd didn't cheer. They held the moment in their throats.
The floor whispered.
Thin red lines stitched across the ring, seam to seam. Heat bled through Zayne's soles. The plates beneath him hissed and unlocked.
"Of course," he muttered.
DYNAMIC TERRAIN ENGAGED — PHASE 2 INITIATED.
The ring rearranged itself—panels rising, plates sinking, ridges breaking the once-perfect circle into tiers and traps. A rooftop shattered and reassembled under his boots.
Widow moved first.
She didn't flinch. She adjusted—stance trimming by a hair, weight settling. She stepped between shifting plates like she'd choreographed the machine.
Zayne slid back, widening his base as a panel bucked. A ridge kissed his ankle. He caught himself on a narrow lip and bounced forward.
Widow vaulted a low wall—one hand, feather touch—came down with a crisp heel aimed at his jaw. He threw his forearm up, caught bone on bone, pain sparking. She landed without sound, already pivoting.
He crashed in, meeting her midair this time. Shoulder to shoulder. Elbow flashes. Nothing clean. Impact. Grunt. Separation.
He hit a lower tier, rolled, and popped up. Toothache throbbed across his side where her shin had almost found liver.
She was circling already, patient as a metronome.
The fight wasn't just fists anymore. It was the room. It was who owned the floor.
Zayne baited right, leapt a split trench, and exploded with a cross he threw like it meant rent. Widow tilted—barely—and it ghosted by her ear. She tapped a knuckle into his cheek on exit. Not power—precision. A needle. A pin.
He swallowed the sting and crowded her, forced her to the narrowest part of a raised plate. He threw a left to the body and a right upstairs, ugly and hard.
She chose neither.
She stepped off the plate.
Midair, she used the drop to slide inside his arc and painted his ribs with two shots—sharp enough to steal breath—then let gravity finish the rest.
He stumbled, hunted a ridge, found it, and stayed standing because he refused not to.
Widow stopped three paces away, hands up, chin level. The mask watched him without eyes.
Zayne set his feet. Stance low. Core tight.
"Again," he said, to himself, to the room, to the old fear snapping at his calves.
He pressed. He changed rhythm—jab-jab—pause—overhand. The pause stole her timing. The overhand cracked against her guard and drove her back a half-step. He chased with a knee.
She took the knee on forearms, rolled her hips, and slid off his centerline, palm-checking his head into the path of a short hook.
Flash. Dots in the lights. Teeth tasted wrong.
He smiled anyway, bloody and mean.
"Cute," he said, voice rasped. "Precision's cute."
He feinted high and dove low, shooting for a leg he had no right to take. His shoulder smashed against her thigh. Balance broke—but not hers. She ghosted backward, heel whispering off the ridge just as his fingers missed purchase.
The floor plates stuttered, rearranged again. A tier rose under Zayne's back foot, and the world tilted. He windmilled his arms and caught himself with a palm slap that burned skin.
Widow came in to finish.
He spun under her arm out of reflex, got a hand on the back of her neck, and yanked her into a short, ugly uppercut. It grazed. Not clean. But it made a sound.
The crowd exhaled.
Widow's mask turned a fraction, reappraising.
He didn't wait. He stomp-stepped into her space and threw the kind of hook that breaks something in your own wrist if you miss.
She rolled with it—barely—and it scraped her shoulder instead of her temple. He felt it. Contact. Not enough. Too close to quit.
He dipped for the body. She snapped a knee up the middle. He shelled, and it thudded into forearms.
"C'mon," he breathed, half prayer, half dare. "C'mon."
The greed in him—credits, proof, not going back—surged. He could feel the door to something opening if he just pushed harder, threw uglier, made it hurt.
He committed.
He chased her across a wobbling plate, ignored the warning scroll of tiny red text cutting across the floodlights, and launched himself with everything from the floor to his fist.
Widow's weight disappeared.
She wasn't there.
He landed heavily on a raised lip, momentum almost hurling him over the edge into the gap. He windmilled again, caught the seam with a slap that skinned knuckles raw.
Widow stood three feet away, absolutely still.
Zayne drew breath to drive again—
—and the world froze.
Not a slowdown. Not a lag. A cut.
Sound died. The crowd became statues. Plates stopped mid-shift. Widow hung there in poise, hand half-lifted, threads of hair frozen in the air like drawn ink.
The system's voice dropped like a gavel:
DATA COLLECTED. INITIATION COMPLETE. MATCH TERMINATED.
Floodlights cooled a fraction. The heat in the floor bled away. The arena felt emptied, as if something had sucked all the oxygen out and left only shape.
Glyphs cascaded across the air between them, white on white:
RESULT: PARTIAL COMPLETION
RANK STATUS: PENDING
PAYOUT: 2,500 CREDITS (50%)
NOTES: ADAPTATION — AGGRESSIVE; STABILITY — INSUFFICIENT; CONTROL — INCONSISTENT
RECOMMENDATION: CONTINUE TRAINING
Zayne's chest hammered. The hook he hadn't thrown yet trembled in his shoulder.
"Hey," he said into the empty quiet that wasn't empty. "We're not done."
Widow unfroze first—no, not unfroze. The program allowed her to move. She lowered her hands. Tilted her head that same measured degree.
For a second, he thought she might speak.
She didn't.
She turned and walked away, steps skimming over plates that no longer shifted, and disappeared into a slot in the wall as if the room had been designed as clothing for her.
The crowd blinked out line by line. The lights dropped.
The platform under Zayne's feet sighed and started sinking.
He stared at the space where she'd been until the grate shut above him and darkness swallowed the ring.
The hum of his building returned like a wave breaking—pipes rattling, someone arguing down the hall, a siren somewhere too close.
Zayne ripped the headset off and realized he was standing. He didn't remember standing up.
His fists were clenched so hard his knuckles blanched through the tape.
The phone lit his mattress with a cheap blue square. A notification pulsed.
VOID FIST CREDIT: +2,500
RANK: PENDING
EVALUATION: SENT TO REPRESENTATIVE
He stared at the number until it doubled. Then halved again in his head. Half pay for half a fight.
He set the headset on the floor a little too hard. It rocked and blinked a slow, steady blue.
Zayne paced the five feet his room allowed him. Back. Forth. The tape on his gloves tugged at hairs. He tasted the clean snap of that almost-uppercut again, and it pissed him off all over.
He'd touched her. Barely. Grazed. Not enough to matter. She'd walked away like it had been a spar, like he'd been a drill.
Fear licked the edges of his thoughts—sharp, mean. Not fear of her. Fear of the space behind him. The pantry shelf with nothing on it. The rent note pushed under the door. The way people look through you when you're broke.
He swallowed and waited for the next message.
It came like a whisper:
NIA: "Partially initiated. Good. Don't chase ghosts. Clean your stance. Tighten your core. Widow will see you again."
The text dissolved after three seconds.
He thumbed the credit screen one more time, just to make sure it stayed.
Two thousand five hundred. Half a month of not drowning as fast.
He peeled the tape off his hands and flinched when it took a thin strip of skin with it. His knuckles were scraped, but not bleeding. His ribs ached, but not like last time.
"Nah," he said to the empty room, to the hum in the walls, to the thing inside him that wouldn't let him sleep. "We're not done."
He sank to the floor, legs folding into stance, and started drilling the same ugly pivot that had almost made contact. Over and over until the motion smoothed into muscle. Until the anger emptied. Until the fear quieted just enough to hear the other thing beneath it—the hunger that had learned a new shape.
He glanced at the headset one last time.
It pulsed. Patient. Certain.
"Half now," he told it, breath misting against the night's stale air. "Full later."
He closed his eyes and threw the next rep cleaner. Then the next. Then the next.