The gong rang.
Both of them were already moving before Vorik finished asking if they were ready. The salute they offered him was quick and synchronized, a habit of discipline that neither of them had to think about, and then they were crossing the ground toward each other with the particular kind of heaviness that only the final round of a hard fight produces. The dust kicked up under their boots. Neither of them looked fresh. Both of them were already breathing hard.
What the crowd didn't know, what most people never thought to ask about when it came to Commander Evereth, was that the man had a problem.
He was an exceptional fighter. Nobody who had watched him work disputed that. In the field he was precise, efficient, and brutally effective when he needed to be. He had a talent for reading a situation from behind the front lines, for knowing exactly when to step in and when to let his soldiers handle it, and on the occasions where he did single out a target himself he showed a level of skill that made it look simple. The problem was that almost none of his actual fighting involved sustained effort. He killed quickly, he disengaged cleanly, and then it was done. The kind of long, grinding, two-person fight that demanded a full tank of stamina from start to finish was simply not a regular feature of his life.
His stamina was, charitably speaking, poor.
On a good week, one where he had actually dragged himself out to train instead of finding somewhere comfortable to disappear to, he could push significantly past his usual limits and become a genuinely frightening force. But this was not a good week. This was a week where he had underestimated his opponent badly enough to show up still wearing the face of someone interrupted mid-dream, and the second wind he had found in that previous round had cost him more than it gave back. He knew, with the flat clarity of a man doing honest accounting, that he had roughly half a minute of real fighting left in him. Maybe a little more if he was lucky. Probably not.
He needed to end this now.
Brina, for her part, was not faring easily either. The kick to her abdomen from the second round still made itself known every time she drew a full breath, and her arms were carrying the accumulated weight of every blocked strike across all three rounds. But there was something in her that simply did not stop. It wasn't a technical quality, not refinement or precision or any of the things that made Evereth's skill so recognizable. It was something older and blunter than that. She had guts. She had the particular brand of stubbornness that kept legs moving when they wanted to quit, that kept a sword arm up when it was screaming to drop. She had charged through the start of this final round on sheer willpower alone, and somewhere in that charge she had found her second wind waiting for her like it had been there all along, just needing her to reach for it.
"Raaaghh!" She let it out as she closed the distance between them, and it wasn't performance, it was the sound of someone turning herself all the way on.
They collided in the center and she felt the difference in him immediately.
His attacks were faster. More precise. There was an urgency in his strikes that hadn't been there in the first two rounds, a sharpness that made her immediately shift into a more cautious posture. She didn't know why he had suddenly tightened up this way, she only knew that something had changed and she needed to respect it. So she defended. She parried cleanly, sent her counters when the angles were there, and kept herself from doing anything reckless. His offensive felt frantic to her in a way she couldn't quite name, like something being spent rather than something being controlled. She pushed the thought aside and focused on staying solid.
She just had to hold.
The first thirty seconds of the round were the hardest. He came at her relentlessly, strike after strike, and she absorbed all of it, turned it aside, answered where she could. Her footing held. Her guard held. Each exchange seemed like it should be the one to crack her open and none of them did. She was sturdy in a way that went beyond muscle, the kind of sturdy that comes from having already decided you aren't going down.
Then she felt it.
It was subtle at first, easy to miss if she hadn't been paying close attention to him for three full rounds. His next strike came in slightly late. The one after that landed with noticeably less force than it should have. His breathing, which she could hear clearly enough now that they were fighting close, had started to go ragged in a way that didn't sound like exertion anymore but like a man running out of something he couldn't refill.
She waited. One more exchange, one more parry, and she watched the slight drop in his guard that followed, watched his next attack begin from a slightly wider, slightly slower draw than all the ones before it.
She timed her parry, redirected his blade cleanly, and drove the riposte home.
The strike landed with everything she had left in her, clean and true, and the crack of it through his armor was loud enough to stop the crowd. He went backwards. Not a stumble, not a stagger, but fully backwards, his footing gone, and then he was on the ground and his remaining wind had left him in a single involuntary rush, and for a moment Evereth simply lay there staring up at whatever sky was visible between the edges of his helmet.
He could only curse internally. He had known it was coming, somewhere in the last few seconds he had known it, and it had come anyway.
The training ground went silent.
Not the polite quiet of people waiting for something. The sudden, collective silence of an entire crowd holding its breath at once, the cheers and jeers and murmured side bets all swallowed in a single moment. Then someone saw that he wasn't getting up, that Brina was standing over him with her sword still in hand and her chest heaving, and the silence broke like a dam.
The roar that followed was enormous.
Probie Knight. Brina the Thornrose Knight. She had walked into a sanctioned duel against the company commander on her first real day among them and she had won it, and everyone who had been watching, regardless of which side they had been cheering for, understood that they had just seen something worth remembering. Her former recruit teammates screamed the loudest. Her name went up in the noise again and again. Even some of those who had bet against her seemed caught up in it, swept along by the sheer improbability of what they had just watched.
Brina lowered her sword. She pulled her visor up. Her face was damp and flushed and she was still breathing hard, and she looked out at all of them and said nothing because there was nothing that needed saying.
The terms of the bet were honored. Elena, Mira, Sophia, and Jen would join her as her own retinue, hers to lead and rely on and be responsible for. That part was settled.
The news moved quickly the way news always does when it involves something people didn't expect. It reached the ears of the Knight Order before the dust on the training ground had settled. Their female knight had done something ridiculous again. This seemed to be becoming a pattern.
And so the tale of Brina continued, one chapter at a time, each one a little harder than the last and each one somehow cleared anyway, her journey has began.