The crowd roared with a single voice as I made my way up the steps to the ring at the center of the arena. They didn’t shout for me as much as at me, and I knew they didn’t care whether I won or lost. They’d come for the violence, and they didn’t care who fed their craving.

The champion nodded to me as I entered the ring, and I returned the gesture emphatically. It was always wise to honor an opponent, especially one who could punch a hole straight through your core.

The announcer gestured for the two of us to join him at the center of the arena. I was surprised to find the dragons were warm beneath my feet. Their bodies had a solidity I hadn’t expected, and the texture of their scales imprinted itself against my soles. The spirits of the challenge were restless, and eager to feed on the jinsei we were about to spill. The dragons wanted the fight to start.

I wholeheartedly agreed with them. The anticipation of this moment had scraped my nerves raw, and the longer I waited for the fight to start, the harder it would be for me to focus on what I needed to do. This was my sole shot to earn a spot in the School.

To repair my family’s shattered honor.

To maybe, somehow, heal the wound that weakened my core.

The announcer shouted my name, but he might as well have been speaking a foreign language for all the attention I paid to him. His words stirred up the crowd, and they howled for the violence to begin. The champion raised his hands as his name pushed the spectators to even greater heights of frenzy.

Through it all, I breathed a circle of jinsei through my core and hoped I knew what I was doing. I had a small bag of tricks for this fight, and if everything went exactly right, I could defeat the champion. I’d rehearsed this moment in my mind, over and over, for what felt like an eternity. My muscles were primed, and the precise series of movements required had been imprinted in their memory over countless hours of exhausting repetition.

I could win this fight. I just had to stick to the plan.

Light surged through the fourth dragon and its spirit rose to join the others that surrounded us in a whirlwind of furious color.

The champion’s aura scorched the surrounding air, but the real threat was the energy he’d gathered into his core. An enormous concentration of fire-aspect jinsei filled the center of Hank’s body like an out-of-control bonfire. He followed the Spear of Magma style, a combat art so renowned for its power that it was banned in many competitive circles. Unrestrained, the power the champion had gathered could burn out an enemy’s core with a flood of flame jinsei.

This close, Hank’s power battered me with a solid wall of heat. It was like standing in front of a raging fire that wanted to add me to the fuel in its belly.

My mind wanted to run from that power, but I stared deep into Hank’s core and embraced the power there. He was strong, and I was a weak, but there was a part of me that no one else could understand. That was my only chance to survive.

To win.

Light flowed under the soles of my feet like warm honey. Jinsei energy tingled through my legs and swirled through my hollow core before it carried the last dregs of corruption out of my shapeless aura. I was as pure and clear as I’d ever been, and in a handful of heartbeats I would know whether that was enough.

Hank and I locked gazes and readied ourselves. We didn’t need to see the color ignite the final dragon, because we felt it. The champion’s eyes narrowed as he tried to decipher my technique, and the faint twitches of concern tugged down at the corners of his mouth.

The School had prepared their champion for every conceivable challenge he might face.

Except for a boy with a broken core and nothing to lose.

The final dragon erupted in a blaze of crimson light.

Hank hurtled toward me, his aura trailing behind him like a comet’s tail. His core was a blinding ball of white-hot power, his fists were surrounded by powerful serpents that transformed them into twin fireballs at the ends of his arms. Sparks leaked from his eyes as the power at his center pushed against his control.

Jinsei cycled through my core in an endless loop. In the space between heartbeats, I found an impossible silence. For one endless moment, nothing in the universe existed save for my infinite breath and the champion’s brutal power. A cold, clear calm settled over me then.

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I’d prepared as well as I could.

My arms fell to my sides. I was defenseless.

It was time to find out whether I’d live or die.

In the split second before the champion’s left fist slammed into my body, he unleashed a burning spiral of flame-aspected jinsei into my core. The inferno of soul energy jumped between us with the speed of electricity arcing to close a circuit. The power was terrifying in its intensity, but I felt no heat from the fire aspects that tainted it. As fast as Hank poured his power into me, my hollow core stripped away those aspects and left behind only pure jinsei.

And that power left my body as part of the endless cycle of my circular breathing technique.

Hank’s plan had prepared him to push jinsei into his foe until their core shattered and they were left defenseless for his follow-up attack on their channels. But my core was hollow and couldn’t be overfilled. Hank poured every bit of his core’s stored jinsei into me, and most of it flowed through me and bled out of my damaged core and into my aura without effect.

The power that filled my core seemed to slow time to a crawl, and my thoughts latched onto the exact steps I needed to follow to survive the second half of this split second. I funneled Hank’s purified jinsei out of my core and into the channels that encircled my torso. The sacred energy hardened the skin over my stomach into an iron-hard shield. The internal channels that surrounded my organs and bones swelled with energy and stiffened into a cage I prayed would protect me.

Hank’s powerful blow slammed into my solar plexus. The attack should have crushed my lower ribs and shattered my sternum. The power of his attack was so great it should have crushed my stomach and pulpled my aorta.

Instead, Hank’s clenched fist stopped as if he’d punched the side of a battleship. The jinsei that protected me was burned off by the attack and burst from my aura in a spray of ephemeral sparks.

The crowd’s raucous cries cut off instantly. They’d expected to see my body hurled across the ring by that attack. No one had anticipated the attack would leave me unmoved and the champion would stumble back with his wounded hand cradled against his chest. Blood leaked from between Hank’s fingers and his face was a tight mask of agony. Thousands of mouths held in breaths as they all waited for what would come next.

It was time for my surprise.

Before Hank could recover from the shock and pain from his wounded hand, I closed the distance between us with a gliding side-step advance called Sliding Shadow. This was the first step in the Dancing Child style that my mother had taught me. It was meant to narrow my profile and make it more difficult for my opponent to focus his attacks on me. The maneuver was weak and never used by those with solid cores who had far more effective and powerful styles available to them.

For me, though, it was the only style I could use. I shifted my feet and swiveled so my right shoulder faced Hank. With my left arm shielded from the champion’s view, my fingers darted into the side pocket of my ratty cargo pants to retrieve my ace in the hole.

The champion sensed that my core was empty, and there wasn’t any jinsei left in my channels to power an attack. He didn’t even try to push jinsei into his aura to defend himself, instead focusing every shred of energy his breathing technique could gather into a serpent of light around his left fist. Hank was confident that I couldn’t harm him without jinsei in my core, and his counterattack would destroy me. With a smirk, he raised one flame-wreathed hand and curled his fingers at me.

“Come, then, camper,” he snarled. “Let’s see if you’ll be so lucky the second time.”

Before the last syllable of his insult could die away, I switched from the Gliding Shadow stance into the Darting Minnow charge and shot across the ring’s smooth boards at a dead run. I opened my right hand and straightened my fingers into a Stunning Slap form and unleashed a sweeping blow at Hank’s left ear. The attack was clean and quick, and if I’d been on the street, my opponent would have been down before he knew what had hit him.

But the Empyreal was far faster and stronger than any street fighter. His empowered left hand crashed into my right wrist with a powerful block that sent a painful shock up my arm. The deflection pushed me out of line and forced my body to spin hard to the right.

It was a perfect response, but it left Hank with no good hand in position to defend his torso and gave me extra acceleration as I threw my weight into a wild Tantrum Flail strike. The uncontrolled blow looked so desperate and weak that Hank didn’t even try to raise his wounded hand to defend against it. To his eyes, it must have looked no more dangerous than a fly about to land on him.

My clenched fist landed in Hank’s solar plexus, and the jinsei crystal hidden within it shattered. The explosion of raw soul energy added weight and power to the aura around my hand, and the attack landed with sledgehammer force.

With no jinsei in his channels or his aura, Hank had no way to cushion the blow. His ribs splintered like dry kindling and his sternum cracked into a dozen pieces. The jinsei unleashed by my attack pierced his jinsei channels and speared through his body to detonate against his spine. Every nerve in the champion’s body was jolted, and his body froze in place.

“Impossible.” Hank’s eyes, wide with disbelief, stared off into the distance.

Pain washed across the champion’s face, his knees buckled, his eyes fluttered closed, and he toppled to the wooden floor. He lay motionless on the floor and the five dragons swooped in to devour whatever traces of jinsei leaked from his body.

The announcer wrenched my arm into the air and bellowed my name to the astonished crowd.

“I don’t know how you did it, kid,” he had to yell into my ear to be heard over the near riot that surrounded us, “but I hope you’re ready for what comes next.”