Level five.

  The number had registered when she'd said it, in the way numbers registered when they were bigger than expected. He'd processed it and filed it and the filing hadn't prepared him for what level five actually looked like when it moved.

  She covered the distance between herself and Crux in a way that made the distance seem like it had agreed to be shorter, not Swift's collapse of space, nothing mechanical, the pure physical speed of a fighter at the top of their developed capability with an Eido that enhanced every component of it. The light sword came up in the same motion as the advance, the arc already in progress before she arrived, and it was the most technically precise strike Aris had seen in a pit that had produced technically precise strikes all evening.

  The blade found the main seam.

  The one Kai had been cutting all night, the one Aris had been pulling at, the one that Harvest had gone deeper into with each pass until the deepest cut of the bout had made Avalanche scream. The light sword went into it and went through it and went through everything behind it, the seam opening in Aerial's light and not closing, the geological mass of Avalanche dividing at the cut site with the completeness of something that had been structured and had been un-structured by a force that exceeded its cohesion.

  The light passed through Crux's Eido and came out the other side.

  Avalanche came apart at the seam.

  Not explosively. Not dramatically. The way a thing comes apart when the thing holding it together has been removed, the mass losing its configuration, the grey stone form dissolving into unstructured mana that dispersed upward into the Underbowl's air in slow threads, the compression releasing, the distortion around Crux smoothing out into ordinary air.

  Crux stood without his Eido for one moment.

  Just a person. A large person with dark hair and a scar from his jaw to below his ear and six months of undefeated bouts and the specific expression of someone who has received something they recognize.

  He looked at Elysse.

  His eyes moved across the light sword and the silver armored form of Aerial pressing close above her skin and the white hair and the grey eyes and the borrowed armor that didn't fit her and the way she stood in the pit with the stance of someone who had been standing like this in rooms like this for a very long time.

  "De Carvaine," he said.

  His voice, which had been even and unhurried since the first word he'd said to Aris, had something different in it now. Not defeat. Something closer to recognition, the specific recognition of someone who has been in enough guilds and enough dungeons to know a name that means something when they encounter what the name belongs to.

  He looked at her for one more second.

  Then his legs made their decision and he went down, slowly, the way large things go down when they've decided to, onto his back on the pit floor with his arms at his sides and his eyes on the ceiling of the Underbowl far above.

  The crowd erupted.

  It came down from every tier simultaneously, the sound of the Underbowl fully committed, people on their feet in the sections that had seats and pressed forward in the sections that didn't, the collective release of a crowd that had watched a bout extend past everything they'd expected and had arrived somewhere they couldn't have predicted.

  Above them on his platform, Corven Ash stood with his mouth open.

  This was, by any available evidence, a first.

  He closed it. Found the room. Found his voice with the professionalism of thirty years behind it.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, and his voice had a quality in it that all his training and experience and professional composure could not entirely contain, the quality of a man genuinely moved by something in a pit he had seen everything in. "The champion has fallen."

  He paused.

  "I have been calling fights in this Underbowl for four years." Another pause. "I have never said those words before tonight."

  In the third tier, Lord Vael Drent sat back in his seat.

  He turned the spell tracker in his fingers, the gold casing catching the light from below, and looked at the pit with the expression of a man who had received a great deal more than he'd purchased and was taking a moment to fully appreciate the accounting.

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  "De Carvaine," he said quietly, to himself, with the tone of someone confirming something they'd suspected. A slight smile. "Expected nothing less."

  Aris was still on the pit floor.

  He had been on the pit floor when the light appeared and he was on the pit floor when it ended and the intervening time had not produced any strong arguments for changing this. He was propped on one arm, facing the direction the light had come from, and he was looking at Elysse with the expression of someone whose processing capacity had been allocated entirely to one thing and had nothing left for anything else.

  He had seen Void in the clinic mirror. Had seen Marionette's green threads over a patient's skin. Had seen Reaper's dark form with the grey mist at its edges in the Undercourse.

  He had not seen anything like what he had just seen.

  The light was receding now, Aerial settling back into the closeness of an Eido between actions, the silver form pressing back to Elysse's skin, the sword dissolving into the air it had been made from. The pit was returning to ordinary lamp light and ordinary air, the extraordinary quality of the last three seconds beginning to be something that had happened rather than something that was happening.

  Elysse turned from Crux.

  She found Aris on the pit floor and crossed to him in the careful way she moved, the management of the ribs, the borrowed armor, the body that was cooperating under protest, and she crouched in front of him and looked at his face with the grey eyes that were very close again and doing their reading.

  She extended her hand.

  He looked at it.

  He looked at the hand and then at her face and then at the place where Aerial had been a moment ago and then at her face again and his own face was doing something that it was doing without his input or consent and that he had no immediate means of addressing.

  "Are you alright," she said.

  Her free hand came up and found the side of his face, the direct unhesitating movement of someone checking for damage with the practical attention of a person who had been doing field assessments her whole life. Her fingers found the place along his jaw where the shockwave had introduced him to the pit floor and she tilted his head slightly to look at it, her thumb at his cheekbone, her grey eyes two inches from his.

  Aris said nothing.

  This was because saying nothing was what was available. His mind, which was usually a reliable source of at least minimal verbal output, had looked at the current situation and the distance involved and the fingers at his jaw and the grey eyes and had decided that its resources were needed elsewhere and language could wait.

  "You hit the floor hard," she said. "Can you track my finger."

  He tracked her finger.

  "Good," she said. "Nothing's broken on the face. The shoulder is a different question." She looked at the shoulder with the clinical quality she brought to assessments and then back at his face. "You're going to have a remarkable bruise."

  "Yes," Aris said.

  It was one word and it had taken significant effort and he was not proud of the effort but he was prepared to defend the output as reasonable given the circumstances.

  Elysse looked at him for a moment.

  Something in the grey eyes that wasn't quite the reading quality and wasn't quite the composed quality and wasn't quite the almost-smile quality but lived in the territory between all three.

  "Take my hand," she said.

  He took her hand.

  She pulled him up with the steady strength of someone who had been pulling people up from worse floors in worse conditions, her grip certain, and he came to his feet and stood in the pit with the Underbowl's noise coming down from the tiers and Kai somewhere behind him making sounds of someone conducting a damage assessment and Colette somewhere to the left and Crux on his back on the cracked pit floor.

  He was still holding her hand.

  She looked at their hands.

  He became aware of this at approximately the same time she did and the awareness arrived with the specific quality of awareness that made the situation it was aware of suddenly much more present than it had been.

  He let go.

  "Right," he said.

  "Right," she said.

  They stood in the pit in the Underbowl's light with the crowd still going above them and neither of them looked at the other for a moment, which was the kind of not looking that involved a great deal of awareness of the thing not being looked at.

  From the tier above, Lord Drent watched with the expression of a man who had come here for one kind of entertainment and received several.

  He produced the spell tracker from his coat pocket and turned it in his fingers.

  Colette crossed the pit floor at a pace that had nothing patient in it.

  She covered the distance between the pit's edge and Elysse in the time it took the crowd's noise to reach its second peak, and when she arrived she looked at Elysse with the expression of someone who had been managing several competing emotional states for the last thirty seconds and had not yet determined which one was going to win.

  "That," she said, "was completely reckless."

  "It worked," Elysse said.

  "It worked because you are a level five fighter with a fully developed Eido and cracked ribs," Colette said, "which is precisely why it was reckless. Those two things are not compatible with each other and you know it."

  "Kai and Aris were about to—"

  "I know what they were about to," Colette said. "I was watching. I was watching and I was working and if you had given me four more seconds I would have—" She stopped. The expression did the thing it did when multiple things were true simultaneously and she was deciding which one to lead with. "You could have reopened the ribs. You could have triggered the sigil. You could have taken a hit from Avalanche's full expansion with a body that is currently being held together by Edric's threads and whatever stubbornness you were born with."

  "I didn't," Elysse said.

  "You didn't," Colette said. "Which is the only reason this is a scolding and not something else." She looked at Elysse's face, at the grey eyes receiving the scolding with the composed attention of someone who had decided to accept it. The competing states resolved themselves into something that wasn't quite the expression she'd been wearing and wasn't quite not. "Without you we lose that fight."

  She said it plainly, the way she said things that were true and needed saying without decoration.

  "Thank you," she said.

  Elysse held her gaze for a moment.

  "You're welcome," she said.