Lucas Drake moved like the personification of every nightmare Aiden had ever had about being completely outclassed. His energy gauntlets blazed with power that made the platform's surface crack under his feet, and his smile held the promise of educational violence.
"Let me show you," Lucas said, his voice carrying easily over the crowd's roar, "what happens when someone with real talent stops playing with their food."
The first strike came faster than thought. Aiden's desperate block met air as Lucas flowed around it like water, his fist connecting with Aiden's ribs with a sound like breaking wood. The second strike followed before the first had even registered as pain, catching him in the shoulder and spinning him like a top.
The third strike never came. Instead, Lucas was already behind him, delivering an elbow to the base of his skull that sent stars exploding across his vision.
Neural shock detected. Motor function declining. Maintain consciousness.
"Not happening," Aiden gasped, staggering forward as Lucas casually repositioned for another combination.
Your stubbornness is statistically fascinating. Most humans would be unconscious by now.
The crowd was on its feet, three thousand voices creating a wall of sound that pressed against Aiden's skull like a physical weight. In the elite section, he caught a glimpse of academy instructors leaning forward with professional interest, cataloging his failures in real time.
"Beautiful technique," one of them said to another. "Drake's Counter-Resonance is even more refined than his father's was at that age."
"The Cross boy is lasting longer than expected," the other replied. "Though I suppose even a punching bag needs time to properly break."
Jay's voice cut through the general noise from somewhere in the stands: "Betting pool update! Aiden's medical bills have now exceeded the GDP of three small countries! Also, I'm pretty sure he just violated several laws of physics by not being unconscious yet!"
Your friend's commentary is distressingly on point.
Lucas launched into another combination, this one so fast and complex that Aiden's Adaptive Resonance couldn't even begin to process it. He tried anyway, his nervous system screaming as conflicting movement patterns crashed together in his brain like opposing waves.
The copied technique came out as a broken, stuttering thing that looked nothing like what Lucas had demonstrated. But it wasn't supposed to. Somewhere in the chaos of failing synapses and overloaded neural pathways, Aiden had stopped trying to replicate and started trying to survive.
He took Marcus Webb's defensive stance, added Kade's footwork, threw in a counter-strike he'd seen in an old tournament recording, and topped it off with pure, desperate improvisation. The result was ugly, unrefined, and completely unpredictable.
Lucas's perfectly executed combination met Aiden's chaotic improvisation and, for one impossible moment, found nothing to counter.
The crowd went silent as Aiden's desperate haymaker clipped Lucas's temple, staggering the heir for the first time in the entire fight.
"Impossible," someone breathed from the elite section.
Mira's knuckles were white where she gripped the railing. "He's not copying anymore," she whispered. "He's synthesizing—taking fragments and creating something new."
"It shouldn't work," her companion protested. "Combat systems aren't modular. You can't just mix and match techniques from different schools."
"Tell him that," Mira said, watching as Aiden absorbed another devastating combination from Lucas and somehow remained standing. "Because he's doing it anyway."
Lucas wiped blood from his temple, looking at it with the kind of fascination usually reserved for rare lab specimens. "Fascinating. You're actually evolving in real time."
"'Evolving' is a strong word," Aiden wheezed, tasting copper and trying not to notice that his left arm wasn't responding properly anymore. "I prefer 'catastrophically improvising.'"
Accurate assessment. Current style resembles a dozen martial arts having a drunken brawl in your subconscious.
Lucas's next attack was different—not the overwhelming force he'd used before, but something more thoughtful. Testing. He threw combinations designed not to end the fight quickly, but to see what Aiden would do with them.
What Aiden did was break them apart and rebuild them into something that shouldn't have worked but somehow did. A throw borrowed from Mira, powered by Marcus's straightforward aggression, finished with a strike that came from pure desperation and three years of accumulated humiliation.
It didn't land cleanly. Lucas was too good for that. But it forced him to actually work for his counter, to think instead of just reacting.
And Lucas Drake was beginning to smile like Christmas morning.
"This is what I wanted," he said, deflecting another of Aiden's improvised combinations with casual expertise. "Not some pale imitation pretending to be competent. This. Someone actually fighting back."
The platform's medical monitors were screaming warnings. Aiden's vitals had entered territory usually reserved for major trauma patients, and his neural activity looked like a seismograph during an earthquake. The automated systems kept requesting permission to stop the fight.
Lucas kept denying them.
"Having fun yet?" he asked, landing a combination that should have shattered Aiden's ribs but somehow only cracked them.
"The time of my life," Aiden replied, spitting blood and launching into another impossible technique that combined Kade's precision with something he'd invented three seconds ago out of necessity.
Jay's voice echoed from the stands: "Ladies and gentlemen, what we're witnessing is either the greatest underdog story in academy history, or the most expensive medical emergency ever documented! Possibly both!"
Your friend's analysis grows more accurate with each observation.
Lucas was no longer holding back, but he wasn't trying to end the fight quickly either. He was experimenting, testing the limits of what Aiden could absorb and adapt to. Each combination was more complex than the last, each counter more punishing.
And somehow, impossibly, Aiden kept getting back up.
Not because he was stronger than Lucas—that would be laughable. Not because his technique was better—his improvised style looked like someone fed a dozen combat manuals into a blender and hit "frappe." But because he refused to accept that the fight was over.
Every time Lucas put him down, he found a new way to get back up. Every time his improvised counters failed, he invented new ones. His body was breaking in real time, but his mind was learning faster than it was falling apart.
"Remarkable," Mira breathed, watching Aiden absorb a strike that should have ended his involvement in combat sports permanently. "His adaptation rate is accelerating."
In the stands, instructors were taking notes. This wasn't supposed to happen. Students didn't evolve mid-fight. They didn't develop entirely new combat styles while being systematically destroyed by superior opponents.
But Aiden Cross, the academy's designated failure, was doing exactly that.
Lucas caught him with a perfectly executed throw that sent him sliding across the platform. Aiden rolled with the impact, came up in a stance that borrowed from three different schools, and launched a counterattack that combined everything he'd learned in the past fifteen minutes.
It was still sloppy. Still desperate. Still the kind of technique that would make any instructor wince.
But it forced Lucas Drake to actually dodge.
The heir's smile widened. "Better. Much better. You're finally starting to understand."
"Understand what?" Aiden gasped, his vision splitting into doubles as his nervous system continued its controlled breakdown.
"That copying will only ever make you second-best," Lucas replied, his energy gauntlets flaring with renewed power. "But creating… that's how you become something worth fighting."
He moved then, not with the crushing force from earlier, but with something else—respect. This wasn't an execution anymore. It was a test.
And somehow, despite every law of physics and common sense, Aiden was passing.
His next technique was pure madness—a combination of movements that had no business working together, powered by desperation and held together by nothing but stubborn refusal to quit. It shouldn't have been effective.
It landed square on Lucas's solar plexus.
The heir doubled over, actually winded for the first time in the entire fight. Around them, the arena went completely silent.
"Now that," Lucas said, straightening with obvious effort, "is what I've been waiting for."
His energy gauntlets blazed brighter, power crackling through the air with enough force to make nearby spectators step back. The platform's surface began to smoke under his feet.
Warning: Opponent's power output has increased beyond measurable parameters. Survival probability has decreased to… figures currently non-useful.
Aiden wiped blood from his eyes, trying to focus through the pain and exhaustion and the growing certainty that his body was about to give out entirely. "System?"
Yes?
"If I don't make it through this, tell Jay his commentary was surprisingly insightful."
I'll make a note. Though under current conditions, consider telling him yourself—if you survive the next thirty seconds.
Lucas settled into a new stance, one that seemed to bend reality around him. Power rolled off him in visible waves, and his smile held promises of violence that would redraw the boundaries of what Aiden thought was possible.
"Ready for the real fight to begin?" he asked.
Aiden looked at his broken body, felt his consciousness flickering like a candle in a hurricane, and somehow managed to smile back.
"Bring it on."
The platform's displays flickered as they registered power levels that shouldn't have been possible for academy students. Medical teams moved into emergency positions. In the stands, betting pools crashed as odds shifted beyond calculation.
And Lucas Drake, heir to one of the most powerful families in the known systems, stopped holding back entirely.
The arena held its breath as two impossibly mismatched opponents prepared for a conclusion that would either be legendary… or fatal.