The world blinks and misses our collision.

Accelerating from thought to attack without existing in the interim, I lunge at Prazen the instant he does the same, seeking to end the fight from the first moment. One solid hit will decide the course of our battle. If he takes it, I lose. His mastery of martial arts is a dead equal to mine, and he has boundless more experience to surpass the rest of my skills with. If I give him a single opportunity, he will snatch victory away and never let it swing back within my reach.

I will not give him that opportunity. So I must fight perfectly.

We crash into each other like a cannonball impact. Prazen’s armored shoulder smashes into my jaw right before my knee can punch into his torso, slamming both rows of teeth together hard enough to crack my molars. I take the hit and twist in perfect form. Grab his pauldron and wrench him to the side. But his mechanical body is built from servos and bolts, not flesh. He’s impossibly heavy and still manages to move like mercury. Shorter and thicker than me in his Mecha affinity, he twists out of my grip and almost explodes my shoulder with a simple jab before I can dance away. I barely manage to throw my body to the side with aura flaring. The impact still launches me sideways in an uncontrolled spin right as Ajax and Mori break the standoff with Vex and his bodyguard.

They’ll win that fight. All they need is time. Ajax is counting on me to hold back Prazen, just like I’m counting on him to rescue my sister.

I flinch as a snap kick cuts off a tuft of my trailing hair.

One of us definitely drew the shorter end of that bargain.

Prazen does not wait for me to recover when I spin away. He pounces to deliver death with faultless aggression. Kipping backwards from the ground, I slam my hands together at my waist, compress a ki blast between heartbeats, and whip through a full-body spin in midair before flinging the beam of building-dusting energy straight at him. He sees it coming, of course. Casually leans to the side to dodge, letting the meter-wide kinetic onslaught churn air to ozone as it blows out an entire wall of the gym and blasts across the skyline beyond, then snakes forward in its superheated wake.

He hits me with the brutal patience of a jet-powered jackhammer, knowing all it will take is time to make me crumble. I see the echoes of the man who raised him in the compactness, the accelerate-decelerate of his movements. But there’s so much more chaos to the way Prazen fights. Styles and timings and angles scattered and mixed seemingly at random, weaving and re-weaving into entirely new patterns as he plucks attacks from a hundred different martial voices. That injected combat experience from the Shimano machine. Discordant, yet forced into a singular forward wedge to through brute-force will. How he’s wrangling it all together without going insane is beyond me. It’s all I can do just to play defense. A rib cracks in my chest when he powers straight through my guard. His legs are scythes that sweep with the power of a titan. Every block I manage leaves my bones creaking and my breaths coming more ragged, but I can’t escape. He’s too good.

Another fist chops my guard down and leaves me open to a snap kick that crumples my lungs and flings me across the square like a ragdoll. I gasp and curl against the ground, nails scrabbling against the sandstone. It takes everything I have to fight back to a knee. My body ratchets back into gear and shunts out all the ki it can on reflex, stealing all my stamina to ramp up the output of my aura. But it’s just more power. More drain. More flash that can’t even land a hit. I can’t let the panic control me. Can’t let it hit that runway to a heart attack.

An armored boot pounds against the sandstone in front of me. “All bark,” Prazen grates.

I jam my teeth together when he sweeps my feet out. A long knife ejects from his forearm and into his hand. The blade humming like a razor, right before he kicks me over onto my back and slams it into my heart.

Twenty seconds after battle begins, I’m flung away dying from what feels like a gaping hole in my chest. Tumbling to a stop on the rough stone. Spotlights burn my vision. Sweat stings and drips down my nose. I look up to see Prazen not coming to ensure his kill, but staring down at his dagger in confusion. The hilt still remains in his hands. But the blade is gone. A coldness like ice slithers around my torso. Rather than impaling itself in my heart, the knife’s blade works its way to my offhand in liquid flow, forming a steel reinforcement around the knuckles like a fingerless glove. Ajax’s elemental control.

The hole I thought Prazen made in my chest closes as breath returns. Just got the air kicked out of me by the blunted impact. Gasping in relief, I flip to my feet and snap into fighting stance as he discards his dagger with a lazy toss. Another distant twitch elemental control tugs at my hand in friendly admonishment. I shake my head, banishing my adrenalized panic as a bemused grin takes its rightful place.

I forgot the simple truth that’s now aching at my heart. I can’t win this fight alone. But even if he’s not beside me, I can feel Ajax’s lessons like a presence just behind my shoulder, reminding me that my strength isn’t all I have. He’s with me too.

I flip back to my feet and swing my head from side to side, starting over like it’s just another day in the gym. Another round with Ajax. But this time, I start from the hands. Picturing the Lungracian style I’ve fought so many times as I sink into. All the answers it contains. And as I adopt a stance far too similar to the one I’ve seen Ajax adopt time and time again, I smile.

Caught in battle, Ajax still glances over when the sound reaches him. Prazen just throws the knife away and closes. He doesn’t understand my sudden confidence, and he doesn’t care. A Mecha, his affinity stops him from realizing that the aura burning around my body hasn’t gotten hotter. It’s cooled, and it’s trickling to a stop.

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I cock my head to the side in challenge. Prazen’s speed builds, eradicating the distance between us, and I meet him with an open hand. Slip right past the opening punch and instantly reply to splinter his momentum. Setting up the footwork, the first Lungracian form. Then I fake a feinted punch at his head, wait a microsecond for his hand to swing up in an all-knowing counter, wait another still for him to realize his mistake and juke to the side in a gambler’s dodge that would leave the champion red with envy, then casually drill him at the end with a whirlwind kick that ejects a blast of air out the back of his torso.

Prazen’s offense carries an unstoppable force. To delay him, I become a movable object unlike any other. Every lesson I’ve learned fighting Ajax rises to the fore. I move like I’ve seen him do so many times, retracing the steps of the Lungracian stance in a martial symphony formed of both our experiences. My path becomes a liquid slurry that flows between offense and defense. Playful jabs crack Prazen’s frame with pinpoint accuracy. I duck his kicks and slam out my own in the same motion. Deflection and strike meld into one. He retreats and my tempo grows. Our balance oscillates on a knife’s edge that a single frame could shatter.

I throw every technique Ajax and I know into Prazen’s defense in tempered cyclone, and he answers in ways I never knew were possible. His infused experience has no end. His strength is so much more vast than mine. But in the stalemate of flashing limbs and thunderclap blows, I can feel, I know that though I might be the worse fighter between us, in the moment, I am better than him. The spotlights are on. There’s nothing he can do to stop me. He slides back to catch a microsecond respite from my onslaught, right hand already striking for my head on pure reflex to ward away a followup. Crimson hair snaps across my vision in a fiery trail as I throw my head to the left. Juke once. Twice. Jab back to crack his faceplate, ball my hand around a kinetic tsunami, and throw my entire weight into a haymaker counter that rewrites his bone structure in a foreign language.

The blow catapults his reinforced body across the stage and into the scaffolding. Metal instantly melts to trap him.

I glance over to find Ajax tearing away from his own battle in a bladed frenzy, trusting it to Mori’s hands. His gaze meets mine through blood and oil and smoke and war. We nod together and dive into motion, meeting the Prazen as he saws through his steel baptism with a wrist laser, cartwheeling away from the liquified tendrils that continue to give chase. His evasive instincts are impeccable. A neon datadagger cuts his hood to fly free and leaves tatters flapping from his shoulders. Cracked pixel eyes narrow as the calculating minds behind them race to solve the evolving mathematics of our battle.

Ajax and I don’t give him a moment to think. My rival joins me in a flash of gleaming light as we reunite. Metal slithers cool and calming over my skin to form a protective barrier, trusting the vanguard to my hands. I reach Prazen first. The assassin’s datadagger wings for my scalp and cuts only air. I slip through a blinding series of three hits and crumple his midsection with an open-palm slam when Ajax forcibly grabs Prazen’s mechanical body and jerks it to a stop with elemental control. I dodge out of the next strike and Ajax answers by shearing half of the incoming arm clean off with a perfect prediction. We move like a single organism. Every hit firing in tandem, not alternating, drawing ever closer to the only one we need to stop Prazen for good.

Ajax shores my aggression with stalwart defense. I cover his flagging stamina with impossible reactions. Perfectly in sync, I slide under a backpedaling kick from Prazen right as Ajax flips over it swinging for the man’s head. My foot reaps the mech’s legs with a scything sweep. Silver steel cleaves through the air. Prazen’s arm flies free in a splash of oil and sparks. And the best fighter of Concordia goes to work, burning at the fading wick of his body with a blowtorch. He leaves only a single feinting gap for a response and opens Prazen’s thigh for taking the bait. The onslaught builds in moments as Prazen is forced across the platform eating nonstop hits from Ajax’s stance. And right when my friend’s stamina is about to collapse under the overexertion, he suddenly leaps back, disengaging with a shout I will always, always answer.

“Now, Mars!”

I switch into Ajax’s place with the supernova already stoked, daring Prazen to dodge. He knows exactly how deadly my ki can be, and just how easily he’s avoided it before. His helmet twitches left and right in the moment before I release, calculating every possible outcome. He could dodge in any direction. Every direction. My attack is the flashiest, most obvious finishing blow. It would never hit anyone with so much as a single day’s experience, and he reacts accordingly. But I don’t need it to hit him. Because at the very last moment before release, I cut off my aura at the source with a shout of effort and let loose not the onslaught Prazen expects, but a simple, blinding flashbang that only Ajax has seen.

Blinded by the blast, I feel Ajax vault over my shoulder, unafraid even as he lunges into the end of his final fight. Golden braid flying free as he flips through a gymnastic tumble. An orb of brilliant metal, not ki, gathers between his palms and releases with a howl of victory as he cuts it loose.

A steel lance flashes at Prazen’s head like a bolt of thunder. His faceplate tilts towards Ajax in shock, then crumbles away into nanolined nothingness. The rest of his plated, mechanical body teeters on its heels, as the true and battered face of the young man behind the mask is made to face the light.

In that moment, he staggers.

Ajax’s blade morphs shape to the straight edge. His body twists in midair with acrobatic perfection. Booted feet land in front of me for a fraction of a second, one knee sinking to the ground. Both hands at his side, fingers wrapped around the hilt. Strands of golden hair flip up as his gaze rises from the floor, looking to a place that waits beyond this world’s horizon. Shoulders straight beneath the crowning light. Strong again, shuddering from all he has given, but never bowing.

Ajax breathes in a shaking breath.

“Don’t forget, Mars,” he tells me. “Don’t ever forget.”

He breathes out.

“First comes hands.”

Then he kneels, draws, and tears forward, purging the world with immeasurable brilliance.

Then he falls.

And he does not rise again.