The third fight under Rennick's arrangement was different from the first two.
The first two had been skill differentials — opponents who were capable but whose specific weaknesses aligned with Kael's specific strengths in ways that made the outcomes, if not certain, then legible. He had walked into both fights knowing approximately what he was dealing with and having a reasonable tactical approach prepared. The first two fights had been work.
The third fight, three weeks into the arrangement, was presented to him the morning of with a one-hour notice and an element classification: Rhythmist.
Kael had not fought another Rhythmist in the Pit. He had fought Melodists, one Harmonist, four Dissonants of varying quality, and one Dynamist who had been exceptional and had beaten him in two movements out of three. He had not fought a Rhythmist because Rhythmist-vs-Rhythmist bouts were less common — the tactical problem of two tempo-based fighters establishing competing rhythms in the same space tended toward either a very long fight or a very quick one, depending on the relative mastery levels, and neither outcome was particularly attractive to a venue operator trying to calibrate a program.
He had, however, been thinking about the problem for two years.
The Rhythmist's name was Orav. He was twenty-two, came from Tier Five originally — which meant he'd come down, which was unusual and worth noting — and had been fighting on the Three-Four circuit for about eighteen months. His record, which Kael had pulled from the Pit's public fight registry on his way over, was twenty-three wins, four losses, with a fighting style characterized by sustained tempo dominance: he established early, built wide, and ground opponents down by forcing them to operate inside his rhythm for long enough that they lost their own.
The tactic was sound against most opponents. Against a Rhythmist who also prioritized establishing first, it was the setup for what was technically called a resonance conflict and practically called a headache — two competing tempos fighting for primacy in the same space, neither one able to resolve until one fighter broke the other's concentration or found a way to disrupt the base pattern.
Kael's counter was theoretical. He had worked it out over several months of solo practice, testing it against his own secondary rhythm in the training space — using both rods to establish competing patterns simultaneously, an internal dissonance that trained his baseline to remain stable even when it was being contested. He had never used it in an actual fight.
Today he was going to use it in an actual fight.
The chamber was different from Slot Seven's — rectangular rather than circular, twelve meters by eight, with flat walls and a lower ceiling. The resonance baffles were the same grade but positioned differently, creating a more directional acoustic environment. Good for his purposes. Directional acoustics meant a tempo established at one end of the room would face natural interference before it reached the other end, which meant neither fighter would be able to fill the space immediately.
Orav was already on his side of the ring when Kael entered. He was built along the same lines as Kael — similar height, similar economy of movement — and he held his instrument with the ease of long practice: a single rod, longer than Kael's pair, wrapped in active grip material that lit faintly when he adjusted his hold. One rod was unusual. Most Rhythmists used pairs for balance and coverage. One-rod technique required exceptional control on a single axis and sacrificed some of the polyrhythmic capability that pairs allowed.
But a single rod, handled well, produced a cleaner tempo. Less interference from the secondary axis. More precise.
Kael looked at the rod and filed the information.
The bell rang.
Neither of them moved immediately.
This was the specific strangeness of Rhythmist-vs-Rhythmist — the patience of it, the way both fighters understood that the first to establish was the first to be countered, and so both waited, listening to the space, feeling for the vibration baseline, deciding where the tempo was going to live.
Orav was better at waiting than Kael had expected. Ten seconds. Twelve. The room held its breath.
On fifteen, Orav moved — not to establish tempo but to change the space. He crossed the ring's centerline at a diagonal, not a fighting approach but a positioning move, and on his fourth step he brought the rod down against the floor in a single beat that was not the tempo itself but the announcement of where the tempo would be: I'm here. This is my side.
It was a territorial beat. Establishing the space before the rhythm.
Interesting.
Kael responded by not responding. He stayed at his end of the ring and set his internal baseline — not through his rods, not through external discharge, but internally. The rhythm he carried in his body, the one that existed before the instrument. He let his feet find it, his weight distribution find it, his breathing find it, until his whole physical presence was the tempo rather than just one part of it.
He had been practicing this for three years. He had never needed it as much as he needed it now.
Orav tried the territorial beat again, harder this time, the rod's resonance cell adding charge to the floor contact. The beat spread outward from the impact point, a widening circle of rhythmic energy, and when it reached Kael's end of the ring it met his baseline.
Not a clash. A question.
Kael answered it by maintaining his baseline exactly as it was, not fighting the incoming rhythm but not absorbing it either — holding his own tempo with enough precision that the interaction point between the two frequencies created a third pattern, a combination that was neither of them, that existed in the space between them as evidence that both were present and neither was giving way.
He watched Orav recalibrate. The repositioning, the slight adjustment of grip on the single rod, the reassessment in his posture of someone who had expected a simpler resistance and was now working with new data.
They fought for twelve minutes. It was the longest Kael had been in a ring. By the end, both of them had taken resonance impacts — Kael had a ringing left ear from a frequency strike that had gotten inside his tempo-shield on the second movement, and Orav had a bruised forearm from a rod strike that Kael had landed on a disruption gap. Neither injury was serious. Both were informative.
The win came not from tempo dominance — neither of them achieved complete dominance — but from an error in Orav's fourth-movement adjustment. He tried to shift from his territorial establishment tactic to something more mobile, more disruption-based, and the transition cost him a beat. One beat. Kael was already inside it.
It was inelegant, for a Rhythmist-vs-Rhythmist fight. Not the beautiful collision Kael had theorized. Messy. Human. Won on error rather than superiority.
He would take it.
Standing at the ring's center afterward, both of them breathing, Orav looked at him with the expression of someone who was genuinely interested in what had just happened.
"Your baseline is internal," he said. "You don't establish externally first."
"No."
"Where did you learn that?"
"Worked it out," Kael said.
Orav was quiet for a moment. "That's not a Lower Tier technique," he said. It wasn't an accusation. More like a puzzle piece. "The internal baseline is Academy methodology. Intermediate curriculum, second year." He looked at Kael. "You've never been to the Academy."
"No."
He nodded slowly. The expression of someone re-cataloguing. "Good fight," he said, and walked to his exit.
Kael collected his sixty credits and went to look for the exit that led to the cool air outside. He needed to think, and thinking required space, and space in the Lower Tiers was always a resource you had to find rather than a condition you could assume.
Academy methodology. Second-year curriculum. He'd worked it out alone, from fragments and recordings and three years of solo practice in corners and on rooftops.
He wondered what the second year of the Academy curriculum actually contained, and what the third year taught, and whether any of it was documented somewhere he might eventually find.