The coin closed in Threxian’s fist, and the room answered through the floor.
Ty felt it through his boots before he saw anything change. The boundary line warmed again, then bit into the soles of everyone standing near it. Several contestants stepped back. Alexander stayed where he was, shoulders tight, eyes on the king’s hand.
Rui-Chai saw the same hand and moved before Threxian finished breathing in. That single early move saved his chest from being opened.
Threxian crossed the distance with less show than before. The cameras still tracked him, but he had stopped feeding them pretty angles. His elbow drove through Rui-Chai’s guard and folded the man sideways. Rui-Chai caught the floor with one hand, pushed off, and met the next strike with both forearms.
Bone cracked somewhere under the impact, and Rui-Chai stayed upright while Ty’s teeth pressed together until his jaw hurt.
Threxian hit him again, and this time Rui-Chai left the ground. His back struck the wall hard enough to powder stone around his shoulders. His blade skidded from his hand and spun across the floor until it stopped near Gears’ boot.
Gears bent for it with his good hand, and the boundary burned blue before his fingers reached the grip. He stopped with his hand still hovering. "Your floor is very committed to being rude."
Rui-Chai pushed one knee under himself. Blood ran from his mouth and down the line of his chin. He wiped it with his sleeve and looked at the stain as if checking the price of a tool.
Threxian watched him stand. "Your people bought you this much room to breathe."
Rui-Chai drew air through his nose and reset his feet. "Then I should spend it before you tax them twice."
The answer earned a low sound from the Black Bulls behind him. It came close to laughter, but none of them had enough breath left to make it clean.
Threxian lifted the coin hand, and Ty stepped over the boundary before anyone caught his shoulder.
The line flashed under him and tried to bite deeper. Heat crawled up his legs and found the old cracks in his bones. He kept moving because stopping would make the pain useful to someone else.
Alexander said his name from behind him, but Ty put himself between Threxian and Rui-Chai.
Threxian’s attention slid to him at last. "The demon mistakes a boundary line for permission."
Ty flexed his hands. They shook a little, which annoyed him more than the pain did. "You wanted the room watching, so let them watch me."
Rui-Chai coughed behind him. "This is a poor time to discover honor."
"I am discovering irritation, which has better stamina."
That pulled a rough laugh from Gears, and the sound made the king’s eyes narrow by a fraction. Ty caught it because Threxian enjoyed fear, while laughter gave pain another use.
Ty moved first, going low toward the damaged side plate where Rui-Chai had cut him. Threxian turned his hip before the strike landed, and the pressure around the coin twisted the force off line. Ty’s knuckles hit armor and slid, scraping bone under his skin.
He drove the other hand into Threxian’s ribs.
The blow landed, then emptied. The force bled away through the floor, leaving Ty’s shoulder numb and useless for half a breath. Threxian’s counter caught him under the ribs and lifted him off his feet.
Ty hit the stone on his back and tasted blood in his throat.
He rolled before the follow-up crushed his head.
Rui-Chai’s blade flashed over him. Gears had kicked it across the floor, and Rui-Chai had taken it with his weaker hand because the other arm hung badly at his side. The blade met Threxian’s wrist guard and rang hard enough to make Ty’s teeth ache.
Rui-Chai looked down at him. "Lower left when he closes the coin hand."
Ty pushed up on one elbow. "You look terrible enough that I believe you."
Threxian came in again, and this time Ty watched the coin rather than the fist. The hand closed half a beat before each turn of pressure. Rui-Chai had seen that because Rui-Chai had been hit enough times to measure it.
Ty hated the debt and used it anyway as his feet found the next angle.
Threxian stepped toward Rui-Chai. Ty cut across his path and drove a shoulder into the king’s hip before the coin fully closed. The impact hurt worse than it should have. Threxian shifted only one step, but one step opened the side plate.
Rui-Chai put the blade into the opening, and Threxian caught him by the throat before slamming him into the floor.
Ty struck the king’s wrist with both hands. Pain ran from his knuckles up to his elbows. Threxian’s grip loosened enough for Rui-Chai to drag air in, then the coin hand opened and the pressure snapped outward.
Ty went across the floor on his side until the boundary line caught him at the shoulder and burned through his shirt.
He heard someone swear from the contestant side. Maybe Aldric. Maybe him. The room had begun to blur at the edges, and every sound came with stone grit between it.
Xuan Wei moved in the corner where the fallen Black Bulls had been gathered.
He looked half dead already. His face had lost color, and dark stains climbed both sleeves from the wrists up. He knelt between two broken dolls and pressed his palms flat to the floor. Lines opened under his hands, thin and pale, then spread through the cracks the fight had left.
Threxian saw him first, and Rui-Chai forced himself onto one knee as Xuan Wei lifted his head. "Rui, buy me enough room for the circle."
Ty realized Xuan Wei had said it only after Rui-Chai answered with movement.
The leader threw himself at Threxian with no clean guard left. He went shoulder first into the king’s damaged side and wrapped one arm around the coin hand. Threxian drove a knee into his stomach. Rui-Chai held on.
The coin burned against Rui-Chai’s palm until his fingers smoked, and Ty got up because the alternative meant watching another man turn into proof.
His legs almost folded under him. He caught himself on the boundary post and left a smear of blood on the metal. Across the room, the pale lines under Xuan Wei’s hands found the Black Bulls one by one and circled their boots.
Medical staff scattered away from the light while Heriean looked up from under fresh bandages. His mouth moved around a word Ty missed.
Gears leaned against the wall with a grin that had lost all humor. "If this escape kills me, I am filing a complaint in whatever afterlife has paperwork."
The doll woman braced herself over two ruined bodies and answered without looking at him. "You would misspell your own name while bleeding on the form."
Ty reached Threxian as Rui-Chai’s grip failed, and Threxian turned toward him with a strike already rising.
The blow took all the air from Ty at once. His feet left the ground. His spine hit stone. Something in his ribs shifted in a way that made his vision go white at the sides.
Threxian stood over him. "You have courage without preparation, which makes it another kind of waste."
Ty tried to answer and produced only a wet breath.
Rui-Chai grabbed him under the arm and dragged him backward by force.
Ty’s heels scraped through grit and blood. "You are shoving me into your retreat after this?"
Rui-Chai’s mouth had gone gray around the edges. "I am sending the only witness who can still hurt him later."
"You are putting too much faith in a terrible witness."
"Terrible witnesses survive court better than honest corpses."
The circle under the Black Bulls brightened as Threxian lunged. Xuan Wei slammed both palms down and coughed blood across the floor. The pale lines flared around everyone inside them. Rui-Chai shoved Ty with the last strength in his good shoulder.
Ty grabbed at him, and his fingers closed on torn fabric before sliding away from skin.
Rui-Chai stayed outside the brightest edge, one arm hanging, coin burn smoking across his palm. For the first time since he had entered, his calm cracked. It lasted only long enough for Ty to see the calculation underneath.
The floor disappeared, and Ty hit something hard on his back. The impact folded him, then rolled him off an edge into water. Cold closed over his head. His body tried to breathe before his face reached air, and water punched down his throat.
He sank with his eyes open while white tile wavered above him through the surface. Broken light moved over it in strips. His chest seized. His hands curled uselessly near his ribs because pain had made both arms slow and stupid.
The ugly thought rose before the panic did, carrying the plain fact that he had lost again. The king had stood there and measured him. Rui-Chai had spent people like coin and still understood the room better than Ty did. The tournament ahead of him felt farther away than Earth, farther than any grave, because the path to it now had Threxian’s hand around its throat.
Something inside him wanted the easy answer, a body without restraint and a room full of targets.
Ty bit down hard enough to cut the inside of his cheek. Pain gave him one clean point in the cold.
His hand twitched, and someone grabbed the back of his shirt before hauling him upward.
Ty broke the surface coughing. Water came out of his nose and mouth while tile scraped under his shoulder blades. He tried to roll away from the hand and failed so badly the person holding him snorted.
"Breathe through your nose before you waste my rescue."
Ty dragged air in, coughed it out, and glared through wet hair.
A wiry man crouched over him with one sleeve rolled above a tattooed forearm. Serpents circled both wrists in black ink, their heads hidden under old cuffs. His nose had been broken more than once, and his grin looked built for making enemies in smaller rooms.
Ty pushed himself onto one elbow. "Who are you, and why are you touching me?"
"Milo, and Rui-Chai said the demon gets dragged out alive."
Ty spat water onto the tile. "That sounds like trust from a desperate man."
Milo slapped him between the shoulders, hard enough to make him cough again. "Trust is above my pay grade today, skeleton."
Ty looked past him and found a bathhouse, or something close enough to one for water to sit in square pools under plain stone arches. Black Bulls occupied the edges, wounded, soaked, and counting each other with the grim focus of people afraid of the final number.
Rui-Chai was absent, and Ty knew it before he finished looking.
Milo saw the question forming and gave him the answer with none of the softness a kinder man might have used. "Leader stayed behind long enough to keep the door from closing on us."
Ty’s stomach dropped colder than the water had made it.
Milo stood and offered one hand. "Get up before guilt makes you too heavy to carry."
Ty took the hand because his legs had started shaking under him.
The bathhouse door shook from a distant impact, and dust fell from the lintel into the nearest pool.