My noodles taste like embarrassment.

“Aw, come on Mars,” Jolie chides, digging a heel into my side. “I mean, it’s not every day you have a chance to talk to the literal best-in-class ki fighter. And look on the bright side!” She kisses her fingers dramatically, kicking back in her chair. “Anyone can get an autograph, but you got insulted. What was it he said?”

She’s electric. Ecstatic, in better spirits than I’ve seen her in weeks after that little stint in the elevator. Can’t even eat cause she’s guffawing so much. I’m all thunder. Brooding and dark as I lean over the seat in front of me, shoveling spicy noodles into my mouth like they’ll do anything to fix my mood.

Jolie’s voice sinks to a gravely imitation of the champion’s. “Too impulsive to bow on reflex, boy. God. He might as well have told you your last three brain cells were having a standoff in your head.”

We sit together in the highest, most reclusive seats of a half-empty arena with a half-empty bottle of sake between us. Far below, one of the last fights of the night begins its preliminaries. A junior shoutcaster takes to the mic. Some guy on an internship just like Jolie. I can tell by the uncertainty and reused quips borrowed from silver-tonged casters who run the big fights like oiled clockwork. He’s trying to hype up the midnight crowd and show his stuff, but no one out this late is looking for entertainment on the least prestigious floors of the Metro Blockhouse. They’re either too bored to leave, or like the four talent scouts sharing notes in the ringside seats, here on business.

Unless it’s a really high-profile fight, the M shoves all tryout matches for the minor league into these late-night blocks. Tradition holds that anyone can challenge the professional leagues without an invitation- and plenty of people try to skip ahead that way- but unless they’re incredibly talented or controversial, they won’t even make back the cost of taking the cameras off of a more lucrative fight.

Most of these matches are over and done in seconds. Anyone can try out for the minor league, and in that anyone is a sanity-reducing percentage of people who don’t realize just how vast the gap between the minor league and the rest of humanity actually is. I’ve considered trying out myself, but unlike my university, league records are permanent. I’ll make my move after I’ve graduated and introduced Ajax to the number two rank. Not a moment earlier.

Jolie pours another cup and takes a sip, giggling to herself. Reluctantly, I lean back in my chair and shift my bowl onto my lap. “You’re drunk on power.”

“Rice wine, actually.” She gingerly places a translucent, plastic cup right in the center of my noodles. “Catch up. You’re too serious.”

“If I get where you are, I’ll miss all the thrilling minutiae of combat that…” I pause, squinting to read the shoutcaster’s name in the corner of the scoreboard. “…this guy is about to describe to us five seconds after it happens.”

“Oh bugger off. I’m sure he’s trying his best.”

“It’s the minor league’s twentieth rank against a Venter. Thunder elemental against a Mecha in their main class. Open and shut, textbook eighty-twenty matchup.” I grimace at how logical the dismissal sounds in my ears. “On second thought, I’ll take that drink.”

“Good. It almost sounded like I was talking through you for a second.”

We eat in silence while the preliminaries conclude and the last bored latecomers find their favorite seats amongst a sea of empty hundreds. They don’t even charge for these fights. Idly, I flip open a screen on my JOY, checking the time and my class schedule for tomorrow. If Jolie keeps me out much later, it’s going to turn tomorrow into a sleep in kind of morning pretty quick. Not that I regret getting her out of the apartment. She needs it. I could skip every seminar up through neoclassical techskill and still make it to the martial arts club by noon to run training…

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

Far below, the first warrior to enter the arena emerges from an unmarked set of doublewide doors on the south end of the stage- and surprisingly, it’s the Venter. An undercity native. Dark metal winks against the spotlights as he steps under their brilliance. A Mecha, humanoid, with a slate-grey shell and sapphire cords glowing between rounded plates of armor. Sleek, simple, lethal. His face is a pixelated screen displaying three yellow bars for each eye. I check his metadata in one of Jolie’s projections. His two other classes are Assassin and Martial Artist, the former of which comes as a surprise.

“Assassin does nothing to offset his frame’s weight,” Jolie says, echoing my own thoughts. “That’s an interesting combination to say the least.”

I shrug. “He’s using it for daggers.”

“And wasting an entire class on it. Ten creds says he spread himself too thin.”

She isn’t wrong. Infiltration and stealth tactics are a puzzling foil to a Mecha’s inherent bulkiness. You can’t sneak around if every step clomps like an anvil. Put together, the two classes are a mismatch not even worth the effort of training to overcome. Developing a third on top of that is an almost suicidal challenge. It’s only rare talents that can manage to fully blend three classes at a competitive level- even Champion Fang is mostly known for his mastery of ki, and not the other powers he wields. And a no-name Venter is about as far from the champion as you can get.

This guy’s going to get clobbered.

Not a soul in the exhausted stands claps for the mecha as he takes to the stage. Exposed circuits pump cyan tracers across his shell like blood and veins. My respect for him goes up a single notch when he doesn’t mock the crowd for their lack of interest like so many others might. I settle in beside Jolie and wait for the competition to appear, eyes on the yet-unopened doors opposite the Venter. The twentieth ranker, Bishop, is flashy for a Magus.

“First to arrive on stage, Akis Prazen!” the junior shoutcaster calls. The sound echoes like a stone dropped in a mausoleum. “Tonight’s challenge was issued exactly one week prior to tonight. Prazen is… uh, from the Vents Midside, and has a not-insubstantial record from deregulated arenas in the underground…”

“He’s won three fights and lost five against undercity mooks. Half at some underground dump called the Ibis.” Jolie rolls her eyes and shoves her screen over for me to see, drunkenly swiping it so it covers my view of the arena. “There’s not even replays of his fights out on the Net. Come on. Even kids have a few dozen saved by the time they hit high school.”

I point a finger at the ceiling. “Are you pulling his stats from the mainframe?”

“Yeah?”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“I’m drunk. Who cares?”

I clasp my hands behind my head and grin, returning my attention to the stage below. “Not me.”

A full minute passes while the junior shoutcaster stalls, buying time by describing the intricacies of Akis Prazen’s first and only recorded showmatches- matches of which almost no records exist. He’s good at bullshitting, I’ll give him that. Jolie can’t stop snorting in laughter. It takes the rest of the meager crowd the entirety of that minute to catch on that he’s stalling.

The doors opposite the Venter mecha remain closed. He stands impassively, not even electing to warm up in the extra time. Eight unmoving shadows splay out from his feet in the cardinal directions. Spotlights keep silently sweeping over the stage. Silence on the mic and battlefield. Grumbles begin drifting up from the limited crowd. Seats start emptying. Then the mic crackles. Jolie immediately jerks upright when the gregarious voice of her boss- Rebun, the gregarious king of modern shoutcasting- suddenly fills in for the junior shoutcaster.

“Sit tight folks, no worries here! Ol’ Bishop’s just having a few technical difficulties.” There’s a combined sigh of relief, no small part from Jolie. I flick a finger off her cheek in reprimand.

“This here match will be flaring and raring here in no time,” Rebun says, “so take those shots while you can! You’re not gonna want to miss the show we’ve got in store.”

But the great shoutcaster is wrong.

Ten minutes later, Bishop never shows. And to confused murmurs, Akis Prazen, unassuming Venter, is declared victor by timeout in his first professional match.