The descent into the underworld of The Gutter's Glory was a journey through the shard's compressed strata of lawlessness. Jaxxon led Kai down a series of rusted ladders and throbbing service corridors, the air growing thicker, hotter, and louder with each level. The hum of the main markets faded, replaced by a subterranean roar that vibrated in Kai's teeth. They passed through a final security scan—a hulking brute with a Jagged Tusk Constellation flickering around his shoulders who took a hefty percentage of their potential winnings as a "venue fee"—and pushed through a heavy curtain of chain links.
The Pit hit Kai like a physical force.
It was a cavernous space carved from a natural asteroid cavity, its walls sweating condensed humidity that dripped onto the packed dirt floor. The air was a solid mass of scents: the sharp ozone of active Pneuma, the sour tang of sweat from a hundred species, and the overwhelming spice of cheap, burning narcotics smoked in communal pipes. In the center, illuminated by stark, floating lumen-orbs, was a raised octagonal platform of scarred, dark metal—the ring.
Around it, pressed against barriers of welded scrap, was a crowd of such vicious diversity it made Ash-Heap look homogeneous. Hulking miners from rock-shards rubbed shoulders with spindly data-thieves. Finely-dressed merchants from the upper levels placed bets through discreet wrist-comms, while ragged spectators screamed themselves hoarse. The noise was a constant, deafening wall.
On the periphery, fighters warmed up. Kai saw a woman with skin like polished amethyst, a Constellation of interlocking Crystalline Scorpions skittering over her arms. A lean man shadow-boxed, his movements leaving after-images of a Spectral Wolf that howled silently. Another fighter breathed plumes of superheated steam, the vague shape of a Furnace Salamander coiling in the haze. This was where power was raw, unvarnished by the Orthodoxy's pageantry, and often brutal.
Jaxxon shoved a token into Kai's hand. "You're in the third bout. Name's 'Keros.' Remember it. Format's simple: yield or exit the ring. No killing—bad for repeat business. But 'accidents' happen." He pointed to a hulking figure being anointed with oily fluid by handlers on the far side of the pit. "That's your problem. 'Tecton.' Earns his credits as a bodyguard for gem-smugglers in the silicate belts. Don't try to out-muscle him. You don't have the architecture for it."
Kai stared. Tecton wasn't just big; he was dense. Over seven feet tall, his proportions seemed hewn from bedrock, with shoulders wider than Kai was tall. His skin wasn't just tanned; it had a distinct, rough, grey texture, like unfinished granite. As Kai watched, Tecton performed a slow, deep squat, and the air around him thickened. A pillar of shimmering, earth-toned energy, striated like sedimentary rock, solidified behind him—a Granite Pillar Constellation. It wasn't flashy. It didn't move much. It simply existed, an immovable object made manifest. Tecton's handlers tapped his skin, and it emitted a low, solid thunk, like a hammer on stone.
"Defensive powerhouse," Jaxxon muttered. "His Sigils are all about density, inertia, and kinetic redistribution. Hitting him is like hitting a mountain. A very angry mountain."
A scrawny announcer with a vocal-amplifier grafted to his throat scurried to the ring's edge. "NEXT BLOOD! FRESH MEAT VERSUS THE LIVING BASTION! PUT YOUR CHITS ON THE LINE! 'KEROS' VERSUS 'TECTON'!"
The crowd's roar crescendoed. Kai's mouth was dry as vacuum-baked clay. The five hundred credit chips were a phantom weight. His mother's face, the medicine, the skiff—it all tunneled down to this metal ring and the mountain of a man stepping onto it.
Tecton didn't look at Kai. He looked at the crowd, raising his stony fists, drinking in the jeers and cheers. He was a fixture here. Kai was temporary.
Kai climbed into the ring. The metal felt cold through his thin boots. A gong sounded, a deep, resonant note that cut through the noise.
Chaos met order.
Kai moved first, a quick, darting feint followed by a burst of neon energy from his palm—a testing shot, a splash of violent magenta aimed at Tecton's chest. It struck with a sizzle… and did nothing. The paint spread, glowing for a second against the stony skin, then flaked away like chalk on slate. Tecton didn't even flinch.
He advanced. Each step was deliberate, heavy, making the reinforced platform groan. Kai circled, unleashing more bursts—a whip of electric blue, a cloud of sparkling yellow dots. They were beautiful. They were useless. They decorated Tecton's advancing form like party streamers on a bulldozer.
The crowd began to turn. "Get him, Tecton!" "Smash the glow-fly!" "Boring!"
Tecton's first attack was a simple, straight punch. Kai slipped to the side, but the sheer force of the passing fist pulled at his clothes. The air pressure stung his cheek. The second was a wide backhand. Kai ducked, feeling the wind of it ruffle his hair. The third was a stomp.
Kai jumped back. Tecton's foot slammed down.
The entire ring shuddered. A visible shockwave of concussive, earth-tinted energy rippled out from the impact point. Kai's balance, already precarious, vanished. He hit the metal on his side, pain lancing through his ribs. Before he could roll, Tecton was there, his foot raised for a crushing stomp. Kai scrambled, a burst of panic-fueled green energy spraying upwards. It hit Tecton's raised leg, not hurting it, but obscuring it in a glowing cloud.
Tecton hesitated for a half-second, blinded. Kai rolled away, barely avoiding the foot that came down like a falling monolith, denting the metal where his head had been.
He gained his feet, panting. His energy reserves, already taxed from the earlier training, were dipping. His strikes were literal graffiti—superficial, temporary. Tecton was a fortress, and Kai was armed with spray paint.
Jaxxon's voice, amplified by a roar of frustration, cut through the din from the sidelines. "STOP HITTING THE WALL, YOU IDIOT! YOU'RE NOT A WRECKING BALL! YOU'RE A PAINTER! SO PAINT! CHANGE THE CANVAS!"
The words sliced through Kai's panic. Change the canvas. He looked at Tecton, an immovable object. He looked at the ring, the fixed environment. A desperate, crazy idea flickered.
As Tecton advanced again, Kai stopped backpedaling. He dropped to one knee and slammed both palms onto the metal floor of the ring. Instead of directing his Pneuma at Tecton, he pushed it into the platform.
A wave of shimmering, liquid neon—a mix of fluorescent orange and slick cyan—erupted from his hands and spread across the metal in a rapidly expanding pool, directly in Tecton's path. It wasn't an attack. It was a spill. Glowing, sizzling, impossibly vibrant paint.
Tecton's next step landed squarely in the middle of it.
His granite-like foot, tuned for perfect traction and unshakeable stability, met a surface that had the frictionless quality of melting glass. His leg shot out from under him. With a grunt of profound surprise, the massive fighter performed a clumsy, one-legged stagger, his arms windmilling wildly to regain balance. The crowd's jeers turned to gasps and howls of laughter.
Kai didn't let up. He sprinted perpendicular to Tecton's stumble, his hands now painting the air. He created no solid constructs—he lacked the control. Instead, he flung out bursts of pure, strobing light and color—a spinning disc of blinding white, a series of flashing, discordant symbols that hung in the air like violent holograms. He wasn't attacking Tecton's body; he was assaulting his senses, disrupting the stable, predictable world the living bastion relied upon.
Tecton, now disoriented and furious, roared. He stabilized himself, but his movements became cautious, his eyes squinting against the visual noise. He tried to charge, but Kai was already moving, laying down another path of slick, glowing color, turning the ring into a treacherous, abstract art installation.
"He's turning the floor into a slick-ice rink!" someone in the crowd yelled, equal parts disgust and awe.
"It's cheap!" another shouted.
"It's working!" Jaxxon bellowed back, a fierce grin on his face.
Tecton adapted, trying to shatter the painted patches with stomps, but the energy was more stain than substance, redistributing under force. The real damage was to his focus. The unflappable mountain was now visibly frustrated, his attacks growing wilder. He lunged, a massive, stone-hard fist aiming to end it. Kai dove sideways, the fist grazing his side with enough force to send a spike of agony through his torso. He landed, rolled, and came up facing Tecton's broad back.
This was it. His energy was a guttering flame. He had one shot.
He didn't gather his power for a blast. He compressed it. He thought of the cocoon of crates in Jaxxon's den, of containment, of a quick-drying shell. He poured every last spark of his chaotic Pneuma into a single, dense sphere between his palms—a swirling, contained nebula of every color he'd ever produced.
Tecton, sensing the buildup, began to turn, his Pillar Constellation glowing with defensive intent.
Kai didn't throw the sphere at him. He threw it at the floor behind Tecton's heels.
It struck and exploded—not with force, but with a rapid, silent expansion of solidified light. A neon-bright, rubbery resin bloomed instantaneously, enveloping Tecton's feet and ankles, then surging up his legs in a wave of hardening color. It was a paint bomb, a trap made of pure, chaotic will.
Tecton stumbled, tried to pull free, but the substance held with shocking tensile strength. He was anchored. He roared, bending to smash the resin with his fists, but in doing so, he overbalanced. His monumental top-half weight, now with a fixed lower base, became a liability. With a final, graceless teeter, the Living Bastion tipped. He fell like a toppled statue, crashing through the chain-link barrier and onto the packed dirt below, encased from the waist down in a glowing, tag-covered cocoon.
Silence, for a heartbeat.
Then, bedlam.
The announcer scurried forward, wide-eyed. "RING-OUT! VICTORY TO… 'KEROS'!"
The crowd's reaction was violently mixed. A section roared approval, thrilled by the upset and the bizarre method. Purists booed and threw drink containers into the ring. Credit chits changed hands in a furious storm of shouted arguments.
Kai stood in the center of his glowing, messed-up battlefield, chest heaving, his whole body trembling with exhaustion and residual adrenaline. He'd won. He'd actually won.
As he staggered out of the ring, Jaxxon was there to meet him, shoving the hefty credit chit into his hand. "Ugly. Unorthodox. Perfect." He began to steer Kai toward the exit, away from the thinning crowd.
But not all eyes had left him.
Near a private, elevated booth shrouded in faint shimmer-field, a young woman leaned on the railing. She had vibrant blue hair tied in knotted tails and wore large, crystalline discs that glowed with a soft inner pulse at her ears. Lyra watched Kai's retreating back, a calculating, intrigued smile on her lips. "Now that," she murmured to herself, "is a interesting new frequency." Her fingers tapped a rhythm on the railing, and the discs hummed in harmony.
Across the pit, near the fighters' entrance, a man stood with immaculate posture. He wore simple but fine grey tunics, and his hands were clasped behind his back. Two attendants flanked him. His expression was one of detached, analytical disapproval. He observed the neon stains on the ring, then Kai's form disappearing into the tunnel. He didn't speak, but one of his attendants nodded, recording something on a data-slate. This was Selas, a scout for a serious competitor. He'd seen nothing of martial worth, only a disturbing lack of discipline. He would report as much.
And moving through the dispersing crowd with quiet, unsettling purpose were two figures in worn, hooded cloaks. Their gait was too synchronized, their observation too methodical to be mere spectators. One paused by the ring, running a gloved finger through a still-sizzling patch of Kai's cyan paint on the floor. He examined the glowing residue on his fingertip, then looked toward the exit. The pursuit from Ash-Heap had not ended; it had only changed venues.
Back at the docking bay, the Gutter's Glory sat silent. As Jaxxon and Kai approached, a figure detached itself from the shadows beside the landing gear.
"Took you long enough," Lyra said, stepping into the light from a flickering lumen-strip. She'd changed from her pit-side clothes into practical, tech-webbed gear, a heavy pack slung over one shoulder. Her crystalline ear-discs pulsed gently.
Jaxxon's hand went to the weapon at his belt. "Scram, kid. No autographs."
"Not a fan," Lyra said, her eyes fixed on Kai. "I'm a connoisseur. That little performance wasn't fighting. It was a remix. You took the stable, boring baseline of that rock-man and dropped a chaotic, discordant beat over it. I appreciate that." She grinned. "I'm Lyra. Pneuma-DJ, freelance info-broker, and the only person in this sector who can get you past the qualifier's security scans and net-dragnets with that juicy 'Unsanctioned' tag you're both sporting."
Kai, still buzzing with post-fight tremor, was wary. "What do you want?"
"A ride," she said simply. "And a front-row seat. The Gutter's Glory is a backwater. The real qualifier, the one that feeds into the Gauntlet proper, is on the Starlit Arena Shard, two skips away. You need a navigator who knows the unstable currents. You need someone who can hack the registration to give 'Keros' here a halfway-decent fake Sigil-read. And let's be honest—" she gestured to Jaxxon's mechanical limb and weathered face, "—your vibe is more 'gritty veteran' than 'tech-savvy.' You need me."
Jaxxon studied her. "The Orthodoxy is looking for him. Traveling with an anomaly is a good way to get erased yourself."
Lyra's grin didn't fade. "I've been erasing my tracks since I could crawl. The Orthodoxy's nets are built for catching big, dumb, sanctioned fish. They don't know what to do with static." She tapped one of her discs, and it emitted a brief, localized shriek of sound that made the air waver. "I make static. So, what's it going to be? Try to make it on your own and get bagged before the first bell, or add some sonic support to your… whatever that is?" She nodded at Kai.
Kai looked at Jaxxon. The older man's face was a battle between suspicion and pragmatism. They were flying blind. They needed the credits, but they also needed to get to the qualifier without being intercepted.
"She gets a quarter-share of any winnings until the qualifier entry is paid off," Jaxxon said finally, his voice gruff. "After that, we renegotiate. You touch my engine without asking, I toss you out the airlock."
Lyra's smile turned triumphant. "Deal." She slung her pack into the open hatch of the Gutter's Glory. "Welcome to the crew, gentlemen. Let's go make some beautiful, illegal noise."