28. The End of Phase One

The squad walked into Arena Two without speaking.

Park was in the stands with bruised ribs and a medic’s instruction to stay seated. We were down a man, five against six. And the six we were facing had just dismantled the strongest individual fighters in the barracks.

Osei’s network entered through the opposite gate, and the difference from every previous opponent was immediate. They didn’t hesitate on the terrain, they didn’t scan the walls or study the elevation, they flowed into the arena. Each member arrived at their position through coordination with no visible mechanism.

The crowd was already quieter. They’d watched Osei’s network dismantle Miller’s squad in round two. The murmur that had accompanied our first two matches — surprise, excitement, the energy of an underdog story — had thinned into something more careful.

“Positions,” I said.

The squad moved. Ren was already sliding toward a ground-level sightline before I’d finished the word — he’d read the arena on entry. Hsu settled behind a partial wall, mapping out where to position herself to achieve the best coverage. Jin didn’t need direction; she was always forward. I drifted to the western approach while Tomás took a flanking position near the depression’s southern rim.

The horn sounded.

The opening was a probe — and it felt wrong before I could name why.

Osei’s fighters advanced in pairs, testing approaches, retreating before contact. Each retreat happened a half-second before our response could connect, the kind of anticipation that shouldn’t exist without lines of sight. The skin on the back of my neck prickled — the hyperawareness of being watched from angles I couldn’t identify.

“South pair rotating to the east wall,” Ren called. “Third pair holding centre — screening.”

“The screening pair is bait,” Tomás said. “They want you to engage the centre so the south pair flanks through the—”

He stopped mid-sentence.

I looked at him. He was staring at the arena with an odd expression, as the central pair began to fall out of their previous position.

“I think they can hear me,” he said quietly. “Every call I make, every pattern I identify — they adjust before we can exploit it.”

Silence.

“Then stop calling patterns,” I said. “Positions only. Nothing interpretive.”

Tomás closed his mouth. He pulled back toward the depression’s southern wall and shifted to a holding position. Guarding an approach with his body.

Jin found the first real engagement in the northern corridor.

She burst through a wall gap — the same approach that had produced eliminations in both previous matches. The Osei fighter saw her coming. He retreated three steps, his guard high, buying time.

The second fighter arrived from behind the adjacent wall. The timing was seamless; he’d been moving into position before Jin committed, the coordination deciding her opponent’s response before the opponent himself had reacted. Two on one, both knowing exactly where the other stood without exchanging a word or a glance.

Jin adjusted. She shortened her movements, tightened her transitions.

The first Osei fighter pressed from the front. Nothing reckless — measured combinations that kept Jin’s guard occupied. The second circled to her left, restricting her lateral movement, compressing the space she needed to generate acceleration. The corridor shrank around her. Every step they took tightened the cage.

She found an angle. A gap between the front fighter’s combination and the flanker’s positioning, where neither had coverage. She burst through it and tagged the front fighter clean. Hard enough that he staggered into the wall.

But the burst had opened her left side. The flanker’s strike landed on her ribs before she could reset. Not a finishing blow, Jin was too fast for that, even mid-transition, but the impact was real.

Jin fought for about half a minute as we watched, unable to cross the open ground to assist. Eventually, she brought one down before slinking off through a gap in the terrain, moving around to rendezvous with us in the depression.

One elimination for one injury, not a bad trade if we had a full team.

Osei’s network adjusted and reorganised in seconds. They regrouped and reformed, three in the front forming a pincer and two in the back for support. Enough distance to exploit.

Five remaining.

I grinned and called out an order, “Hsu intercept their back line, Par—.” I paused, realising we were a man down. “You’ll have to harass them, break up their rhythm while we can dismantle their centre.”

They came for Hsu before she even had time to engage.

Two fighters advanced toward her position behind the partial wall. A third cut across the depression blocking Ren’s sightline to the western approach. Isolating the squad’s eyes from each other.

“Ren — they’re cutting you off,” I called. “Fall back to the south wall.”

“Can’t,” He shouted back, “Main element approaching south. ”

Shit, they’re predicting our moves.

One of Osei’s group had partitioned from the main three and positioned themselves on Ren’s retreat path. The advancement on Hsu was the visible ploy. The trap on Ren was the real one.

The Osei fighter came through the south approach. Bigger, stronger, twenty levels above Ren in every physical stat. Ren didn’t try to match him. He shifted to the narrow space between two partial walls — the gap where the drainage channel ran underneath the arena floor. The surface there was different — looser gravel over a hollow space that changed the acoustics. Ren heard the fighter’s weight shift before the strike came.

He used it. Three transitions, each one triggered by sound rather than sight — the specific crunch of gravel over hollow space telling him which direction the force was coming from. The fighter overcommitted twice, expecting the static target of a spotter caught out of position. Instead, he found someone who’d been listening to this arena for three matches and knew its voice better than anyone in it.

The fourth transition. The Osei fighter adjusted — stopped committing, started controlling. Methodical pressure that didn’t rely on rushes that Ren could hear coming. The gap closed around Ren like a fist. A combination he read correctly but couldn’t physically stop.

He went down. Hand up.

The squad’s spatial awareness went dark.

Without Ren covering Hsu’s position, the two Osei fighters converged. Hsu retreated in a performance of her life. She moved through escape routes she’d mapped from observation, ducking through a gap between two panels that the Osei fighters hadn’t identified, reversing through the depression’s eastern rim where the partial walls created a chicane that forced single-file pursuit. The chasers had to adjust twice.

We tried moving as a unit to catch the outnumbered foe in a typical divide-and-conquer strategy, but as we did so, they immediately responded. Rotating across our front lines, they switched who was targeting whom like a patrol shift change. We were constantly having to skirmish across the open terrain to keep the pressure off Hsu, and we were being ground down slowly.

Tomás appeared to my left as we began our next pursuit.

“We can’t keep this up; we have to retreat back to a favourable position. We can use the open terrain, but they’re too coordinated to make a real difference. We need to draw them in.”

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I nodded. It was a sound play, but it meant leaving Hsu and hoping she’d make it out on her own. So we moved, I called for a general retreat, and to regroup. Jin and Tomás both acknowledged as we pulled away.

We caught it just in time, as Osei himself was already making a move onto the depression with his number two. A smaller woman with dark hair, she was quick like Jin but hit almost as hard as Miller.

Our retreat caught Osei off guard as he began to pull back, realising he was outnumbered and out of position. We pressed the advantage, Jin launching herself towards Ripley—Osei’s number two. The opening strikes were something to behold; the two moved in a blur of punches, kicks, and blocks. Jin had the upper hand in the opening barrage, but Osei continued his retreat backwards with Ripley. Jin must have caught that something was wrong as she pulled back on the retreat.

Hsu was unfortunately cornered in a dead-end corridor. She turned, raised her guard, and blocked the first strike, her form textbook-correct. The second broke through.

Within moments, her hand was up.

“Two at the south corridor, four metres apart—” Her voice as she went down.

Three of us left. Jin at seventy per cent, and Tomás. All against four Osei fighters with psychic coordination. What’s the winning play, Marcus? Think.

The voice infrastructure that had driven our first two matches was gone. We couldn’t audibly call out our movements due to an auditory deviation on the opposing side, which was able to track what we were saying.

They finally decided to come and finish the job,

“Jin — east approach, one incoming. Tomás — hold west, space.” I shouted, everything running on maximum.

I used the dead zones.

Osei’s network ran on perception — his fighters transmitted what they saw and heard. If they couldn’t perceive me, the link had nothing to carry. The terrain’s blind spots — where walls blocked all sightlines, where sound bounced wrong — became my weapon.

I disappeared behind the eastern wall. Three seconds of invisibility to the network. Emerged behind an Osei fighter advancing on Jin’s position. He didn’t know I was there until the impact.

The crowd noise spiked — a roar of surprise at the exhibition’s favoured squad losing a member to someone who hadn’t been there a second ago.

[XP GAINED: 48]