2. Kaelor #3
I signal her down with one hand. She drops without hesitation. At least she can follow orders. Sometimes.
We belly down into the cover of the rise and look out over what's below.
A wide volcanic basin. Open ground, no cover, the worst possible terrain for anyone who doesn't want to be seen. But then again, that’s the whole point of it, isn’t it?
At its center, where the melted remnants of the surrounding buildings have fused into a single mass of obsidian, there is a pedestal. Ancient, scarred, threaded through with veins of molten light that pulse slowly, rhythmically.
The Ember Crown rests within it. Dark metal, old enough that its origins predate anything in my knowledge, crowned with slow-moving lines of internal heat.
I feel her breath change beside me.
"Is that it?" she whispers. “That’s one of the relics?”
"Yes."
She looks at the open ground between us and the pedestal. Looks at the routes down from the rise. Looks at the basin with the systematic attention she gives to every new environment, and I can watch the calculation running behind her eyes.
"Then what are we waiting for?" she says, hastily jumping to her feet.
My hand closes around her arm — her arm, this time — and pulls her back down. “Stay down!” I hiss.
And then everything in my body goes very, very still.
Not because of her. Because of what I'm sensing in the ruins behind us, in the basin below us, in the depth of the silence that has just changed in a way that my predator's instincts have been registering for the last three seconds and my conscious mind has just now caught up with.
Something in the ruins moved.
We've been seen.
And they are coming.
I pull her flat and the debris screams over out heads. I'm already reading the next three seconds before the first one has finished.
Thren is high — elevated position somewhere in the ruins to the northeast, using the rise as a blind.
Range attack, redirected trajectory, the debris arriving from an angle that should have made it invisible until impact.
It would have been invisible. I felt the air change a half-second before it arrived, that specific pressure displacement of something very large moving very fast, and that half-second is the only reason we're still here.
He'll send another one. Immediately, before I can reorient — that's how Meteor Shifters work, they layer the strikes, the second one timed to catch whatever evasive response the first one triggered.
I come up off the ground with the female behind me and move toward the incoming line rather than away from it.
It’s counterintuitive but proves right as the second strike lands fifteen feet behind us in a concussive eruption of rock and ash that would have been directly on top of us if we'd run the obvious direction.
She doesn't make a sound. Stays with me, stays low, stays close. Good.
Varketh comes out of the lava channel.
Not over it. Not around it. Out of it — rising from the molten flow like something that was always part of it, magma sheeting off his plated body without leaving a mark, his eyes burning the same orange as the rock he just walked through.
He redirects the channel as he moves, a casual gesture, one arm sweeping outward, and the lava obeys him the way water obeys gravity. It carves a new path between us and the left side of the basin, cutting off that escape route with a wall of slow, inexorable heat .
He's smiling.
I know that smile. I've seen it before, in a different arena, on a different platform.
He smiled the same way the last time we faced each other, right up until the moment I broke two of his fingers and he stopped smiling and started trying to kill me in earnest. He's bigger now than he was then. The Games have been good to him.
I put myself between him and the female and cover the distance in two strides. I drive my elbow into the side of his neck with everything I have, targeting the cluster of nerves beneath the jaw.
It doesn't drop him — nothing drops Varketh cleanly — but it rocks him sideways and buys me two seconds. I use them both.
He recovers fast and comes back hard. The first strike catches me across the ribs with enough force that I feel something bend the way it shouldn't. I absorb it and stay forward, because stepping back gives him the space to redirect another lava channel.
I cannot let him have that space. Close quarters neutralizes his best weapon. Close quarters is where I want this.
He knows it too. And he's not happy about it.
Meanwhile, Thren sends another strike from the ruins. I feel it coming and step left, pulling Varketh into the route of its trajectory.
Varketh takes the glancing impact across his shoulder. It doesn't hurt him meaningfully. It does make him angry, which splits his attention between me and Thren for exactly the two seconds I need.
I go for the Meteor Shifter.
He's moving through the ruins to the northeast, repositioning for a better angle, and I cross the open ground between us at a speed that most species can't match .
He sees me coming and sends debris — not a redirected strike this time but a direct throw, ripping a chunk of volcanic rock from a collapsing wall and hurling it at my chest.
I go under it and come up inside his range, where his ability is useless. I break his left arm at the elbow.
He bellows and goes down. He'll get up — the Games don't allow anything as merciful as staying down — but he'll take time to do it, and time is the only resource that matters right now.
I turn back to Varketh and find him already moving, already raising his arm, already redirecting the nearest lava channel in a wide arc that forces me back and away from where I need to be?—
I feel the heat across my left flank before I see the flow. It catches me along the ribs, the same ribs that are already complaining from Varketh's earlier strike.
The burn is immediate and deep. I note it and set it aside because it’s the only thing I can do right now.
Varketh advances. He's comfortable now. I'm on the back foot, he has lava on two sides of me, and his smile is back.
I let him come.
I know his patterns. I've studied them since the last time we fought, turning the footage over in my head, looking for the thing he does when he believes he's winning.
He leads with his right when he's confident. Steps slightly wide. Creates an opening on his left side that he doesn't know is an opening because no one has ever been fast enough to use it.
He swings.
I go left. Through the opening, through the heat radiating off his body that would blister anything less adapted than me .
I get my arm around his neck and I squeeze, targeting the same nerve cluster but with sustained pressure this time rather than impact force.
He reaches back for me. His hands are burning — actual heat, generated by his physiology, the temperature of something that walks through magma — and where they close on my arm the pain is extraordinary.
I don't let go.
He staggers. Two steps, three, his body trying to compensate for the pressure on his neck, his hands losing some of their coordination?—
And that's when Syrox moves.
I've been tracking him in my peripheral awareness this whole time — the Ash Venter working the edges of the fight, building gas pressure in the collapsed structures around us, patient and methodical and waiting for exactly this moment.
I knew he'd wait. That's what he does. That's what he's always done.
What I didn't account for was the female moving.
She sees an opening — a gap in the fight's geography, a moment where the path to the pedestal looks clear — and she takes it, because she's been looking for it since the fight started.
She's not the kind of person who sees an opening and doesn't take it.
She breaks from cover and runs for the basin.
Syrox ignites the gas pocket directly beneath her feet.
Not a full explosion — he's too controlled for that, and even he knows her value. A pressure release, targeted, enough to throw her off her feet and to the ground, enough to put her in the right position for what comes next.
Which is him.
He's across the ground before she's finished falling, before I can release Varketh, before I can cover the distance, before I can do anything but watch him close his hand around her arm, pull her upright, and against him.
Put himself between her and me with the calm efficiency of someone who has been planning this outcome since before the fight began.
Varketh sags in my grip, semiconscious
She's fighting, driving her elbow back, trying to get her feet under her, doing everything right and none of it mattering because Syrox is twice her size. He was built for exactly this kind of containment.
He has her wrist behind her back and his arm across her chest and he’s watching me over her shoulder with an expression of complete, settled satisfaction.
"Kaelor," he says.
I stand fifteen feet away with a burn across my ribs and blood on my arm and three rivals bleeding but still breathing, at varying stages of functional.
The female's eyes find mine across the distance with an expression that isn't fear — it's fury. It says: come and get me. It's the expression of someone not accepting this outcome and needs me to know it.
Syrox smiles and tightens his grip.
I release Varketh.
He hits the ground and I'm already moving, already across the open space between me and Syrox, because there is no longer a fight happening behind me. There is only this.
Syrox sees me coming. He's smart enough to know what my expression means and smart enough to know it doesn't matter — he has her, and he knows that changes the geometry. He pulls her tighter, using her as the shield she is, watching me calculate the angle.
“Listen to me,” he says. “I recommend we work together and?—”
I don't slow down.
He wasn't expecting that.