## **The Back Door**

Eikken Pójsiedysz never used the front entrance.

He came through the service side of the Hoshihara Crucible instead, pink fur shifting across a broad shoulders, diamond-encrusted chains glittering against his chest, gold flashing at one cuff, the unlit cigar caught loosely between two fingers with diamond-studded rings. At six-foot-four he was already difficult to lose in a crowd. The two women behind him made that impossible.

Reika and Shion were six-foot-seven.

They moved several paces back and slightly apart, enough room between them to see Eikken clearly and enough to close around him in less than a second. Reika wore her black hair in a severe bob; Shion's was drawn into a long immaculate ponytail. Both wore fitted jet-black tops cut above the abdomen and tight black skirts, black chrome finding its way into shoulders, collars and forearms as though metal simply belonged there. Their long sculpted legs looked human down to the pristine toes exposed by thin-strapped heels. Their faces completely contradicted that.

Those were long, smooth things, beautiful only after the eye had abandoned conventional human standards of beauty: polished synthetic planes, narrow mouths, cheekbones shaped rather than grown, and slanted dark eyes that seemed permanently halfway through deciding whether whatever stood in front of them mattered.

Nobody mistook them for human.

They certainly ticked every box for what we think of as female.

The graceful curves hit the brain first. Then the way they seemed to glide across the hall.

Something else caught the attention - they looked powerful, in the very technical sense of the word. Beneath the grace was unmistakable toughness. One look at their hands and you just knew they could crush a human skull if provoked.

Nobody mistook them for anything less.

The reporters had stopped being surprised by them months ago.

Unfortunately, the reporters had also learned about the back door.

They were already packed behind a temporary barrier beside the loading entrance, some of them having arrived more than an hour early. Cameras lifted as soon as the pink coat appeared. The sound came next—names, questions, shutters, overlapping voices. Hungry hyenas who had finally scented the route their prey preferred.

"Mr. Pójs—Mr. Puss—Mr. Eikken! There are rumors you're developing a next-generation android called Nekomancer. Will it have retractable claws like the Molly character?"

"Mr. Eikken! Are the Cliff Pussycats using an enhanced EK4U architecture? Will that be available for domestic androids?"

"Eikken! Is STARKPower officially dead?"

"Mr. Eikken, are the Crucible recruiters approaching active special-forces personnel?"

"Mr. Eikken! Are your androids lesbians?"

That one made him turn his head.

"Which androids?"

"The Pussycats!"

"Ask them."

He kept walking.

A reporter leaned too far across the barrier and thrust a microphone toward Eikken's face. Reika moved half a step.

That's all it took.

The clear line between microphone and billionaire was immediately replaced with six feet seven inches of black fabric, warm synthetic flesh and black chrome.

Eikken's grip loosened around the cigar.

"Mr. Eikken, how much does one of your personal gynoids cost?"

"Not for sale."

"Can one be commissioned?"

Eikken looked over his shoulder at the reporter.

"Not by you."

Someone laughed.

Someone else shouted, "Is EK4U CombatCore real?"

Eikken walked on.

"Mr. Eikken, was that a yes?"

"That was me walking."

More laughter.

The crowd surged against the barrier as he reached the internal corridor. Shion changed position without looking at him, slipping closer to his exposed side. Reika remained behind his other shoulder. To the reporters it looked like security choreography.

To Eikken it was something older.

He could face crowds. He had faced worse things than crowds. He had bought companies in rooms full of people who wanted him gone, given testimony before governments and stared down men who had arrived expecting his obedience.

But there were sensations the body learned before wealth and power taught it better ones.

Too many faces turning toward him at once.

Too many voices saying his name.

The old impression of becoming smaller while everybody else became enormous.

Reika and Shion balanced the scale.

They were taller than he was. Stronger than anyone in the corridor had any reasonable need to be. If Eikken gave the word, there was no meaningful way for the crowd to reach him without going through them first.

He never needed to give the word.

Knowing that he could was enough.

"Mr. Eikken!" another reporter called. "Critics say Tailbreakers disguises weapons research as entertainment!"

Eikken slowed just enough to answer.

"Poorly disguised."

Then the lift doors opened.

There had been a time when engineers built autonomous machines around increasingly powerful language models, connecting them to cameras, sensors, and sophisticated motor-control systems.

The results were remarkable. But the machines had learned to describe the world long before they had learned what it meant to inhabit one.

Language models remained extraordinarily useful. But they could describe a falling glass without possessing the reflexes to catch it. Early robotic systems separated language-based reasoning from physical control, assigning movement, balance and motor coordination to specialized systems. Eventually, developmental androids took that separation much further.

A machine intended to inhabit a body could not learn the world exclusively through descriptions of one.

So the first true developmental androids were born mute.

Not blank. Not mindless.

Mute.

Dedicated firmware supplied the things evolution had once supplied humans: balance, proprioception, sensor fusion, tactile response, locomotion, collision avoidance, pain and damage signaling. These functions operated at near-reflexive speeds, independent of conscious deliberation, with safeguards against commands exceeding the body's physical limits.

Above that foundation, the brain arrived unfinished but ravenous—an advanced cognitive architecture built for causal inference, memory, prediction, association and continuous restructuring. Its powerful processors could simulate physical outcomes, learn from mistakes and revise behavior almost immediately.

An android understood that an object continued to exist behind a door before it knew what _door_ meant.

It could watch something fall, predict where it would land, reach, miss, correct and try again without possessing a word for gravity.

Language came afterward.

Someone pointed.

"Door."

A sound attached itself to something the machine already knew.

"Open the door."

Sound acquired action.

"Could you get the door?"

Sound acquired the far stranger problem of humans rarely saying precisely what they meant.

The machines learned quickly.

Frighteningly quickly.

Their mature speech did not come off a production line because meaning did not come off one either. Language accumulated around experience. Heat was not ten million examples of the word _hot_. Heat was sun on synthetic skin, thermal warnings from an overloaded joint, a metal railing touched at noon, a human wiping sweat from his face and saying, Jesus Christ.

Their minds retained something close to early-childhood plasticity throughout operational life: machine-scale recall married to relentless curiosity, adult reasoning growing around a learner that never quite stopped being three years old in its willingness to ask the world what something was.

Reika and Shion had been learning for years.
They had learned Eikken particularly well.
Neither asked whether he was all right.
Reika touched the lift panel.

Shion turned once toward the reporters disappearing behind them.

A laser grid flashed across all three occupants. Once. Twice. Three times.

Eikken stood still for it.

He had written the protocol that way.

Ownership was not an exemption.

The doors sealed.

Silence.

## A Velvet Horizons Legacy Brand

The lift opened onto another advertisement.

A pleasant male voice drifted from recessed speakers while a wall display showed a smiling family beneath warm household lighting.

STILL USING STARKPOWER? GOOD NEWS.

Eikken stopped.

The voice continued.

"Velvet Horizons is proud to announce that STARKPower remains available for legacy systems, low-demand equipment and budget-conscious households."

The family vanished.

A black EK4U cell rotated slowly against white.

"For everything else—EK4U."

Eikken stared at the screen.

Reika waited.

Shion waited.

"Mean," Eikken said.

"Your marketing department approved the language," Reika replied.

"I know."

He resumed walking.

A smaller line appeared beneath the STARKPower logo as he passed.

A VELVET HORIZONS LEGACY BRAND.

Eikken smiled.

"Still mean."

The corridor beyond was saturated with his empire. EK4U HomeCore. RoadCore. GridCore. PocketCore. Animated demonstrations promised power for houses, vehicles, industrial equipment and personal electronics.

One battered Hoshihara-style poster abandoned refinement entirely:

YOUR OLD BATTERY SUCKS.

BUY EK4U.

That one had been Eikken's idea.

## The Man Above the Sand

The owner’s box occupied the highest useful section of the Crucible, suspended above the arena behind panoramic smartglass.

The temperature dropped the moment the doors opened.

Filtered air.

Muted machinery.

Cold polished surfaces.

Below, Hoshihara baked.

Eikken crossed to the glass and looked down without removing the pink coat. Reika took position to his right, Shion to his left, both silent unless needed.

The Crucible sprawled beneath them like a sun-baked wound deliberately prevented from healing. At its bones, it had the broad rectangular logic of a rugby field—if somebody had taken a rugby field, removed the grass, filled it with sand and rocks, then handed the landscaping contract to a scrapyard with anger-management issues. Rusted towers rose from the sun-bleached ground. Scrap walls cut the field into channels and dead ends. Sections of old factory framing leaned at angles calculated to look accidental. Cable bundles ran between structures, some inert, some carrying arena systems. Jagged steel, broken concrete and wrecked machinery turned the terrain itself into something competitors had to fight.

And more sand.

There was always more sand.

At each end of the Crucible stood a colossal Daylight Holo-Mesh display, suspended high enough to dominate the arena without interfering with play. They burned through the heat haze with impossible clarity, showing close-ups, telemetry, score data and instant replays, because the management understood a basic truth: if somebody lost an arm on the far side of the arena, the whole crowd still deserved to see it clearly.

Beyond the glass, the crowd had already begun to roar.

Eikken placed the cigar between his lips but did not light it.

“The tech’s come far,” he said, watching the arena below. “But not far enough.”

## Three Against Six

Six Dobermans entered first.

They came through the western gate under a wall of noise, augmented men in personalized combat gear rather than standardized armor. One wore heavy shoulder and torso protection, prioritizing survival over agility. Another had stripped his configuration down to reinforced joints and a light chest plate. A third carried visible cybernetics along his right arm and temple.

A fourth was six-foot-five and close to three hundred pounds, built less like a runner than something intended to move furniture without asking for help. Reinforcement ran through his spine, pelvis and knees, enough augmentation to make an already massive human frame particularly suited to carrying NOMAD-07. He was the courier. When the orb needed to go somewhere, his job was to make sure it got there.

A fifth had reinforced shoulders and forearms, built for grappling and clearing lanes around the courier. The last was lighter, quicker, his augmentation concentrated around reflexes and visual tracking—the one expected to intercept loose plays.

The temperature on the arena floor was already vicious. Sweat darkened fabric beneath armor. Helmet interiors trapped wet breath. Dust worked beneath padding and ground against skin.

Then the opposite gate opened.

Ryet walked out first.

Five-foot-ten, blonde, broad through the shoulders and hips, power-athlete muscle carried beneath soft synthetic flesh. She was voluptuous without looking ornamental; thighs built to drive force through the ground, a waist pulled tight between powerful upper and lower structure, breasts full enough to move and bounce when she walked—and spectator eyes along with them. Her mouth always seemed one fraction away from a contemptuous smile.

The crowd screamed RYET anyway.

She let them.

Vixyn followed.

Six feet even. Brunette. Long everywhere.

Long legs, long arms, long torso, lean sinewy synthetic musculature built for fast-twitch acceleration, dense in the right places, and complementing the already powerful machinery underneath. Nothing about Vixyn suggested fragility; she simply looked like someone had stretched athleticism forward. A cheetah translated into a woman’s geometry.

She bounced once on the balls of her feet.

Reyvin came last.

Five-seven.

Dark hair. Compact. Balanced. Cool.

Too cool. The serial-killer kind of cool.

She looked like a woman who ran before breakfast, went to the gym afterward, and might decide the afternoon required another run. Defined shoulders, narrow waist, strong proportional hips and legs, a feminine chest that belonged naturally to the rest of her athletic frame without advertising itself.

Nothing about Reyvin's physique demanded attention individually.

Taken together, it simply looked right.

Her eyes were the problem.

They never seemed idle.

Even walking into an arena full of people eager to see pieces torn off her, Reyvin looked as though she were midway through solving something.

Eikken watched her longer than the others.

Below them, the NOMAD-07 waited in the dust.

Solid metal.

Heavy enough that Vixyn visibly disliked carrying it.

Heavy enough that Ryet considered that funny.

Three women.

Six men.

The announcers screamed over the speakers.

"Eyes high, motherfuckers! Three on six!"

## The Best of the Best

Eikken did not look away from the arena.

"Recruitment."

Reika answered immediately. "Current pool is international."

"Expand it."

She pulled out her PDA and gave its screen some quick taps with her thumb.

"Military?"

"Military. Special operations. Intelligence programs if they'll admit they exist. Contractors. Black units. Anyone worth testing."

Shion turned slightly toward him. "Eligibility restrictions?"

"Alive."

She waited.

"And good."

Reika's eyes narrowed by a degree. "Compensation?"

"High."

"How high?"

Eikken finally looked at her.

"High enough saying no makes them feel stupid."

Reika nodded.

He returned his attention to the sand.

"I don't want bodies. I want opposition. If the humans can't stress the system, the telemetry means nothing."

Below, one Doberman rolled his shoulders beneath heavy armor.

“Dead men can’t sign the next contract,” Eikken remarked. “And death discourages prospects.”

## Play Ball

The broadcast booth smelled like somebody had hotboxed a storage container and then forgotten there were electronics inside.

Sweet skunk. Resin. Sweat. Dust carried in every time someone opened the door.

The ventilation fan was off because it rattled into the microphones.

This had been judged preferable.

One commentator stared quietly through red-rimmed eyes at the old padded ceiling, while the other attempted to locate a lighter currently resting beneath his own hand. The game was about to start.

“Yo… where the lighter at?”

“Bruh, it’s right there.”

“Where?”

“Under yo’ fuckin’ hand, nigga.”

A pause.

He lifted his hand and looked down.

“Man, I knew that shit.”

“Man, shut yo’ high ass up.”

“Hahahaha… fuck you.”

The arena horn sounded.

Both men snapped toward the glass.

"OH SHIT. WE LIVE."

"Tailbreakers, baby! Brought to you by Velvet Horizon—Horizons? They got an S now?"

"They always had an S."

"Man, don't fuck with me while I'm high."

"You're always high."

"Exactly. Consistency."

The NOMAD-07 launched into play.

"Eyes high! Three on six! P.U.S.S.Y. Inc. in the building! Ay, what's them heavy-ass orbs called again?"

"NOMAD-07."

"I call 'em Pussycat balls."

"You call everything Pussycat balls."

"Brand recognition."

Below them, Vixyn accelerated.

The second commentator leaned toward the glass.

"Ohhh, that's Track. Watch this fool chase her."

He wasn't wrong.

## Reyvin, Please

“Reyvin’s POV feed, please.”

A corner of the spectator box window dimmed, and Reyvin’s POV appeared over the arena view.

Depth mapping.

Range markers.

Motion vectors.

Structural assessment.

Power reserve.

Actuator load.

Core temperature.

Damage state.

Threat weighting. Six human bodies became overlapping fields of probabilities.

Beside the feed, the team telemetry continued to run.

Ryet burned energy like somebody had insulted electricity personally.

Vixyn's telemetry was almost elegant: efficient acceleration, regenerative recovery, astonishingly clean power distribution.

Reyvin's was quieter.

Constant adjustment.

Tiny reallocations.

Prediction feeding action feeding new prediction.

A Doberman turned toward her.

The system recognized reinforced cervical structure, augmentation beneath the right shoulder, metallic interface seated against the temple.

Reyvin was already moving.

## The Scalpel

Right shoulder rotation. Hip loading. Probable hook: 82%.

He threw it.

She moved before his fist completed the decision.

Duck. Left.

Sweep leading foot.

His balance broke exactly where predicted.

Reyvin’s right hand came up as he fell. Nail beneath the lower edge of the temple implant. Find purchase. Pull.

**`STRUCTURAL SEPARATION: 11%—`**

Sudden pain exploded through her calf.

The knife had entered before the threat model finished reprioritizing.

**`CALF ACTUATOR OUTPUT 73%`**

The Doberman had compensated faster than forecast.

Reyvin’s prediction had been wrong.

Update.

A second Doberman hit her from behind and locked both her arms against her torso. The first regained his knees and drove a charged fist into her face.

Vision strobed.

**`OPTIC DESYNC—`**

The world doubled.

**`PACKET LOSS`**

Reconstruct.

He raised his hand again.

Reyvin kicked him in the balls.

Assessment: human augmentation remained disappointingly selective.

He folded.

The grip behind her loosened.

Head back.

Impact nose.

Turn.

Drop weight.

Free right arm.

Her damaged calf slipped in the dust.

New balance solution followed quickly.

She drove her elbow backward into his throat.

**`THREAT THREE DISENGAGED.`**

The live feed in the PiP window fractured once and restitched itself.

Shion glanced at the diagnostics.

"Left optic bus instability."

"I see it."

Reyvin's feed found Ryet.

Three Dobermans were pinning her to the ground.

Eikken smiled faintly.

## Bomb, Blur, Scalpel

Ryet had one man across her shoulders, another locking her right arm and a third using both knees and most of his bodyweight to keep her hips against the ground.

One Doberman, apparently committed to quality assurance even under lethal working conditions, couldn't resist the urge and shakily freed one hand, carefully reaching out to squeeze one of Ryet’s breasts.

“Man, she feels real!” he said, genuinely surprised.

She was still trying to stand.

"THREE!" one commentator screamed through a lungful of smoke. "They got three motherfuckers on Ryet!"

"That's not strategy anymore, that's furniture moving!"

Ryet got one foot under herself.

“Oh shit,” the breast guy said.

She rose six inches.

Vixyn flashed past them, dragging another Doberman behind her.

"Catch me if you can, big boy" she called over one shoulder.

He swung.

She wasn't there.

Her foot hit a slanted steel panel, two steps up something most fighters treated as debris, and she changed direction almost horizontally. The Doberman turned too slowly. Vixyn's heel struck the side of his helmet and redirected his entire body into a rusted barrier.

"OOOOOOH!"

"THAT'S TRACK! That's what I'm tellin' you! Don't chase the skinny one!"

"She ain't skinny, man."

"You know what the fuck I mean!"

"Long."

"Yeah. Long-ass murder pussy…cat."

Reyvin limped toward Ryet, compensating every third step.

A fourth Doberman saw her coming and moved to intercept.

Wrong angle.

Reyvin changed course before he understood she had noticed him.

She didn't overpower him. She didn't need to.

A damaged knee brace. Right side.

Weak rotation point.

One strike.

He dropped hard enough to fill his mouth with dust.

Ryet finally got an arm free.

That became everybody else's problem.

She caught the man across her shoulders and threw him into the one on her hips.

The third attempted to back away.

Ryet grabbed breast guy in the crotch, hard enough to make him let out a lady squeal.

"Nope."

She pulled.

## That One

Eikken leaned closer to the smartglass.

Not because Reyvin was winning.

Because she had been wrong.

Her first combat prediction had failed. She had committed to removing the implant, missed the knife response, taken damage, suffered a secondary restraint and lost partial visual integrity.

There had been no hesitation afterward. No attempt to force reality back into the original plan. She simply discarded the failed model and built another.

"That one."

Reika followed his gaze.

"Reyvin?"

"Separate her."

"From team telemetry?"

"All of it."

Below, Reyvin shifted weight away from the damaged calf and intercepted another approach.

Eikken watched the decision happen before the movement.

"Raw data. Don't clean anything."

## Specimen Nine

Reika brought up a private interface on her PDA.

"What do you want retained?"

"Everything cognitive."

"Define everything."

"Motor decisions. Tactical inference. Threat weighting. Predictive-state history. Failed predictions. Correction latency. Damage adaptation. Resource allocation. Anything anomalous."

Reika entered the parameters.

"Private research archive?"

"Yes."

She looked at him.

"Restricted branch. Mainframe only. Keep it off the general index."

"Project designation?"

Eikken watched Reyvin choose not to finish one opponent because Vixyn needed the lane more than the man needed another concussion.

A tiny decision. Correct for reasons the combat scoreboard wouldn't record.

"Specimen Nine."

Reika's interface changed.

**`SPECIMEN_09`**

**`INGEST ENABLED`**

From then on, the restricted branch would be receiving Reyvin’s cognitive telemetry in real time.

## Things Come Off

The Crucible stopped pretending to be civilized.

Heat had climbed into everything.

Human armor smelled of sweat and cooked padding. Sand stuck to blood. Every breath inside a helmet came back warm and wet. Dust ground between plates and gathered in open wounds.

Then Ryet's arm came off.

Not cleanly.

A Doberman caught it against a piece of industrial framing while another drove his weight the opposite direction. Synthetic skin stretched first, disturbingly human in the moment before it failed.

Then came the machinery beneath.

The arm hit the sand. Ryet screamed, “MOTHERFUCKER!”

Her scream broke into a ragged laugh as she clutched the ruined shoulder. She looked at the arm. “Oh, come on!”

The commentators lost whatever remained of their professionalism.

"EWW - THERE IT GOES!"

"AGAIN!"

"That pussycat just can't keep an arm!"

Ryet grabbed the nearest Doberman with the remaining one and head-butted him.

Vixyn lasted another forty seconds before the Crucible took her leg.

She came off a wall at full speed. A Doberman changed position unexpectedly and her landing foot caught between two sections of wrecked steel.

Momentum finished the argument.

The synthetic knee failed sideways.

Vixyn went down hard on the ground. She leanded on her elbows.

Her telemetry spiked across Eikken's glass.

**`RIGHT LEG STRUCTURAL FAILURE`**

**`PROPULSION LOSS`**

**`BALANCE MODEL INVALID`**

For less than half a second she stayed still.

The Doberman who had cut across her landing path approached and snarled through clenched teeth, “How does that feel, bitch?!”

Vixyn's hand shot up and caught him by the back of his helmet. She yanked him violently toward a twisted steel rod jutting from the wreckage beside her. Its jagged end stopped barely an inch from his eye.

**`PRIME DIRECTIVE: HUMAN FATALITY PROHIBITED`**

Vixyn smirked.

She pulled him sideways instead and smashed her forehead into his face. He dropped unconscious beside her.

Vixyn wrenched herself free. Her ruined lower leg remained trapped between the steel plates.

Then:

**`REBUILDING GAIT`**

She rolled, kicked with the remaining leg, caught herself on one hand and began moving again on three usable limbs.

The commentator stared.

"Man."

"What?"

"She still fast."

"Of course she still fast."

"She missing a fuckin' leg."

"Bruh, tactical weight reduction. She got THREE MORE! Quit bein’ negative!"

They both dissolved into laughter.

Meanwhile, Reyvin wasn't laughing.

Her damaged calf had deteriorated to forty-one percent useful output. The skin had torn around the knife wound and exposed contracting artificial muscle beneath, fibers adjusting around a damaged actuator every time she placed weight on it.

Organic blood lay in the dust beside synthetic coolant.

Reyvin looked across the battlefield.

Ryet: one arm.

Vixyn: one leg.

Six Dobermans: still breathing.

Three standing.

Two trying.

One reconsidering his career.

The NOMAD-07 lay twenty meters away.

Reyvin calculated.

## **Still Standing**

Vixyn saw her look.

No words.

She moved.

Three limbs, then a hand against steel, then airborne again—ugly now, improvised, but still faster than the exhausted Doberman trying to track her.

He committed.

She wanted him to.

Ryet charged from the other side. One arm or not, Ryet remained Ryet.

The Doberman turned toward the larger threat.

Reyvin took the lane he abandoned. The NOMAD-07 was brutally heavy. She lifted it anyway. Her damaged leg buckled.

Correction.

Shift load.

Ryet hit one man hard enough to put both of them through a scrap barrier.

Vixyn swept another from an angle no normal running pattern should have produced.

Reyvin threw.

The orb crossed the arena like a piece of industrial equipment briefly forgetting its purpose.

Impact.

Magnetic rebound.

Goal.

For one second the Crucible seemed to inhale.

Then Hoshihara detonated.

People stood on seats. Drinks went airborne. Somebody ignited a flare despite at least four signs forbidding exactly that. The broadcast booth disappeared behind its own smoke as both commentators shouted over each other.

"THREE ON SIX!"

"PUSSY CATS, BABY!"

"RYET GOT ONE ARM!"

"VIXYN GOT ONE LEG!"

"REYVIN WALKIN' LIKE SOMEBODY'S GRANDMA!"

"SHE STILL MADE THE FUCKIN' THROW!"

Medical crews entered immediately.

Six Dobermans were removed from the arena.

All six alive.

One gave the crowd a weak middle finger from his stretcher and received the loudest cheer of the night.

Reyvin tried to take another step. Her damaged calf buckled. She attempted to correct, but there was nothing left to work with.

She went down.

The medical crew brought a seventh stretcher.

Eikken nodded, “good.”

Alive meant data.

Alive meant rematches.

Alive meant other men would still take the money.

## **Damn Perfect**

The crowd saw victory.

The commentators saw tits, broken bones and enough material to fill tomorrow's broadcast.

Marketing saw merchandise.

Recruitment saw applications.

Corporate sponsors saw how their implants, armor, prosthetics and exoskeletons held up under punishment.

Military observers studied the same results—and saw things they would pretend not to have enjoyed watching.

Eikken saw telemetry.

Reika stood beside the smartglass while **`SPECIMEN_09`** continued ingesting Reyvin's raw cognitive stream. Shion watched the medical teams below.

On the arena floor, Ryet retrieved her own severed arm and carried it under the remaining one, walking behind the technicians lifting Reyvin’s stretcher.

Vixyn was arguing with another technician who wanted to put her on a stretcher. She eventually settled for a wheelchair.

Reyvin was already being moved on the stretcher along the service lane of the Crucible, her eyes still alert, observing, analyzing, as though the match had ended without convincing her that problems had.

Eikken removed the cigar from his mouth.

Still unlit.

"Look at them."

Reika followed his gaze.

Three broken women.

Still _alive_.

Still dangerous.

Still learning.

Eikken smiled.

"Damn perfect."