A straight punch snapped toward Chase’s face, then became a backfist midway through the line. A knee came up toward Jace’s ribs. An elbow shot backward without warning. He pivoted, dipped, lunged, and swung again in a storm of violent improvisation. Every strike came from a bad angle, a strange angle, an angle that should not have flowed into the next attack and somehow still did.

Chase slipped the first punch and nearly took the next across the jaw.

Jace blocked the knee, but Jagger’s hand was already on her forearm, shoving it aside as a second fist drove toward Chase’s throat.

Chase ducked, swore, and brought his guard up higher.

Jace tried to reset the distance.

Jagger gave her none.

He was on them like a rabid animal and a trained hunter had been stitched together inside the same body. Fists flew. Elbows cut across space. Kicks came low, then high, then not at all, turning instead into lunging shoulder feints that forced reactions and opened room for the next wild strike. Even Frenzy seemed amplified by King of the Hunt, every movement carrying the suffocating certainty that he had chosen them.

Chase’s grin disappeared.

Jace’s composure cracked into something tighter and far more serious.

"He has no pattern," Chase snapped, blocking high and getting clipped across the cheek anyway.

"I noticed," Jace said, just before she had to jerk her head aside to avoid a savage hook that would have broken her nose.

Jagger kept coming.

He did not even seem to fully settle his feet before the next strike launched. His attacks were raw, violent, and impossible to read cleanly because there was no reassuring logic beneath them. Chase and Jace were fast, but for the first time in the court, they were not controlling the pace. They were surviving it.

Then Leo moved.

He appeared between them so abruptly that it looked wrong.

One moment, Chase and Jace were getting drowned under Jagger’s Frenzy of attacks. The next, Leo had slipped into the gap, both black daggers already in hand. With frightening calm, he shoved Chase off-line with his shoulder and flicked his other arm outward, pushing Jace back a half-step to clear them both from the center.

Then he faced Jagger alone.

Jagger’s next punch came straight at his face.

Leo caught it on the flat of a dagger and angled it away.

A second strike followed immediately, wild and hammering.

The other dagger met it.

A third came from lower than expected, whipping toward his ribs. Leo turned his wrist and redirected it. A fourth attack followed with almost no pause, then a fifth, then a sixth, each one violent and ugly, each one arriving from a line that should have been difficult to parse.

Leo matched them anyway.

Not with force.

With exactness.

His daggers moved like extensions of pure timing, intercepting every strike at precisely the point where it could do the most to spoil its momentum. The flats knocked fists off-line. The spines caught wrists. The smallest turns of his hands ruined the structure of punches before they could cause damage.

Jagger hit faster. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

Leo adjusted faster.

For one tense, breathless stretch of seconds, it looked like the entire court had narrowed to the space between Jagger’s furious, patternless offense and Leo’s unnervingly clean defense.

’He sees the line before you finish it,’ Ophilia warned.

’Then break the line and crush him anyway,’ Zumthor snarled.

Jagger shifted to do exactly that.

He dropped lower, ready to lunge through Leo’s guard with brute force and chaos together.

Grace returned.

Recovered now, and furious in the silent, disciplined way that suited her, she came in from Jagger’s blind rear flank with the tower shield discarded and both hands free. She hit him like a collapsing wall.

Her arms wrapped around his upper body and locked.

Jagger had half a second to tense.

Then Grace hauled him backward, twisted, and drove him straight down into the mat.

The slam thundered through the court.

The impact ripped the breath from Jagger’s lungs and cracked pain through every bruise, every half-healed injury, every place Corrupted Surge and Frenzy had forced his body past good sense. Before he could roll, Grace was on top of him, her weight anchored, one forearm crushing across his chest while the other trapped his shoulder and pinned his arm line.

Jagger bucked hard beneath her.

Grace held.

He twisted, snarled, tried to tear free with raw force and leverage.

Grace held.

The woman was a fortress even without the shield.

Leo stepped in immediately.

He crouched beside them, chest rising harder now than before, and brought one of the black daggers to Jagger’s neck. The blade did not cut. It rested there, cool and perfectly placed.

"Please calm down," Leo said, voice tight but steady. "I don’t want to kill you."

Jagger glared up at him, chest heaving, black-red veins still pulsing under his skin. He strained again against Grace’s pin, and the pressure only increased.

Chase and Jace stood a few steps back, breathing harder than they had at the start of the match.

Chase wiped blood from his mouth and let out a breathless laugh. "Well. That escalated."

Jace ignored him, eyes fixed on Jagger. "He was overwhelming us."

Grace kept Jagger pinned, scarred face set and unreadable except for the hard line in her jaw.

Leo’s blade remained at Jagger’s throat, though his hand trembled just faintly.

Adriana’s voice cut across the court like a blade.

"Stop."

The word hit everyone at once.

Grace froze.

Leo stilled.

Chase straightened.

Jace stepped back.

For one second, the entire court locked in place.

Then Adriana walked forward.

"Release him."

Grace obeyed first, rising smoothly and stepping off him. Leo drew the dagger away a moment later, the black blade vanishing from his hand in a flash of dim light.

Jagger stayed on the mat for a breath, chest rising hard, pulse pounding. Then he pushed himself up, first to one knee, then higher, blood at the corner of his mouth, bruised and battered but still held together by stubbornness, regeneration, and whatever ugly thing inside him refused to quit.

A hand entered his view.

Adriana’s.

Jagger looked up at her.

She stood over him in full command of the space, expression unreadable as ever. No mockery. No pity. No softness. Only that cold, deliberate steadiness that made even silence feel like part of her strategy.

For a moment, he just stared at the offered hand.

Then he took it.

Her grip was firm and controlled as she pulled him to his feet.

"Welcome to Sector Zero," she said. Her voice carried cleanly across the court. "Come with me, we have much to discuss."

Jagger stood there, breathing hard, bruised and bloodied and still healing beneath the skin. Around him stood Chase with his sharpened grin, Jace with her stillness drawn tight as wire, Grace with the posture of a living stronghold, and Leo with his daggers gone but his eyes still fixed on Jagger, as though he had only just begun to wonder what exactly had stepped onto the court with them.

Adriana released his hand.

The court remained silent.