Tolok took a step back, blades still humming faintly in the air beside him.
Jackal didn't move. Impaled. Upright. Still holding his sword.
The crowd said nothing. No chants, no rhythm, just silence. Thousands of Yuxians waited for confirmation, waited for him to drop.
He didn't.
Tolok exhaled once through his nose. Brief. Controlled. He began to turn.
That's when his hand twitched.
Just a little. Then again.
A tremble, subtle at first. Then his wrist spasmed, like something inside him had skipped a beat.
Fear was starting to creep in.
Jackal moved.
No warning. No buildup.
One moment he was still.
The next, he was rushing forward.
Even after all that, after being stabbed through the chest and skull, he was faster. Sharper. Like the damage had only carved away hesitation.
His face was warped, mana distorting his features like heat haze. The scarecrow grin was wider now, his face almost cracked, eyes blackened with a flickering light of sorts.
He charged, sword already mid-swing.
It arced wide, too wide. So wide it looked foolish, almost desperate.
Tolok blocked it easily.
But the moment the blades met, I felt it.
Pressure.
More than before. A lot more.
The impact rang through the air like a bell struck wrong. Tolok's stance shifted half a step, his arms tensing harder than they should have needed to.
He had blocked it, but it wasn't clean.
Jackal didn't stop.
He stepped in, blade dragging, grin still stretched too wide.
And Tolok blinked, just once, but that was new.
The fear was real now. I could feel it from here.
Jackal swung again, a wide horizontal slash, sloppy on purpose. But the pressure behind it wasn't.
Tolok didn't risk it. He brought up both blades, crossing them in his arms to block it.
The clash rang out sharp.
Jackal pulled back, then struck again.
Another spark. Then another. And another.
He kept swinging, relentless. No fancy footwork. No setup. Just brute, grinding pressure. Like he was trying to break through Tolok's arms by force.
Each blow landed harder than the last. The steel screamed with every collision, and the vibration rippled through the stone beneath them.
And still, Jackal grinned. Like he wasn't swinging to win. He was swinging to make him feel it.
To make him afraid.
Tolok's unmasked face showed hesitation for the first time. But it wasn't enough to crack someone like him. Yuxian warriors were trained for this. He just had to finish it fast—Jackal wasn't in good shape anyway.
So Tolok made his move. He let Jackal's blade run through his shoulder, concentrating his armor in that single spot. The sword pierced clean, spilling blood. Green. Yuxian.
But it was a trade. And Tolok took it. He gripped his other blade and drove it forward, straight toward Jackal.
At least, that was what was supposed to happen.
But everyone in the arena felt it.
The pressure shifted. A change in the atmosphere, subtle but undeniable. The air itself seemed to pull back, as if recoiling from something it couldn't see.
Jackal uttered a single word.
"Mindsplit."
The moment it left his mouth, everything turned.
Tolok's blade froze mid-thrust, still aimed for Jackal's chest. His whole body stopped moving, not like he was resisting, but like he'd forgotten what he was doing.
His head turned slowly, eyes losing focus.
And then, he whispered, voice trembling, carrying across the entire arena:
"Mother…? A-are you alive?"
A ripple passed through the crowd.
Confusion. Uncertainty.
Fear.
Jackal didn't say a word. He just stood there, cracked and mangled, face still warping with flickering strands of leaking mana. His grin was wide enough to split bone.
Tolok wasn't looking at him anymore.
He was looking at something else.
Something that wasn't there.
What a fearsome ability...
Jackal didn't wait.
While Tolok stood frozen, eyes wide with hallucinated memory, Jackal grabbed the hilt of his embedded sword and pulled it downward, hard.
The blade tore through Tolok's shoulder like it was sawing wood. Not a clean slice, not the elegant finish of a refined technique. It was ragged. Brutal. Like a serrated edge grinding through flesh and bark and bone.
Tolok screamed.
That brought him back.
But it was too late.
His entire arm fell to the ground, twitching. Not severed cleanly, but ripped apart, fibers of twisted bark and muscle still hanging in shredded strands from the torn stump.
Tolok screamed. Such a primal scream that the energy was felt throughout the city.
Everyone in the crowd was feeling anxious. They had no words to utter.
Jackal stepped forward, ready to rush him, to finish it.
But Tolok wasn't thinking clearly anymore. He wasn't thinking at all.
In sheer panic, he slammed his palm to the ground.
The entire arena floor cracked.
Then it shattered.
A wave of pressure burst outward, splitting the stone like glass. The center of the arena collapsed in on itself, turning into a sinkhole of broken slabs and dust.
The mana needed for that kind of destruction... it was immense.
I saw it the moment it happened. A single stream of blood rolled down from Tolok's right eye, trailing along his cheekbone.
He had pushed too far. Even for a Yuxian, it seemed that kind of output required a cost.
And Jackal just stood there, right on the edge of the collapse, staring down at the crater forming between them.
Tolok was still inside it, one arm missing, blood dripping from his eye, breath sharp and ragged. But more than anything, he looked... afraid.
"I won't die, I won't die," he started repeating, under his breath at first, then louder. "I have to use it. After all, there are no rules."
He reached into his belt and pulled out a small, jagged tube, metallic, bone-like. A primitive syringe. No mark, no seal. Forbidden.
As soon as Jackal saw it, he jumped.
Blade already raised, body lunging down into the pit.
But it was too late.
Tolok jammed the syringe into the side of his neck.
The effect was instant.
His veins pulsed, bulging against his skin. The bark along his body cracked and split open as something beneath forced its way out. It wasn't healing, he wasn't regenerating. He was changing.
Growing.
Rapidly.
His form expanded, muscles thickening, armor shifting and spreading like living wood twisting over flesh. His mana surged upward, wild and unstable, pressing against the walls of the arena like a living storm.
The crowd gasped in unison, a wave of voices washing through the silence.
Tolok's voice was no longer calm.
It growled. Low. Animal.
"You won't break me, beast," he said.
And he rose from the pit.
Taller. Broader. Bark now layered with sharp, spiked ridges. His missing arm was still gone, but he didn't seem to care anymore.
He didn't need balance.
He was wrath made flesh.
And Jackal had just landed across from him.