The tournament was already deep into its stride, the kind of phase where the crowd stopped treating it like a spectacle and started taking it seriously.
The number of participants had been shrinking steadily, round after round, until the chaos from the earlier matches had thinned out. At this point, every fight mattered. We were inching closer to the semi-finals, and everyone could feel it in the air.
I was standing off to the side, watching one of the platforms where two competitors were locked in combat.
It was a hard fight. Not flashy in the exaggerated sense, but exhausting, gritty, and relentless. It was the kind that slowly ground one side down rather than ending in a single dramatic moment.
