Ashen knew pces like this.

  He had raided them once, back when he wore the Eternal Sun's colors and followed orders without asking where they led. Underground fighting rings — illegal, brutal, completely unreguted, existing in the spaces between ws that the powerful wrote for themselves. He had shut several down in his years of service, dragging out the organizers and delivering them to people who would decide their fates behind closed doors.

  Now he descended into one himself.

  The entrance was beneath a rundown tavern, hidden behind a door that looked like part of the wall if you didn't know what you were looking for. Ashen kept his hood drawn low, moving through the crowd of drunken patrons with the practiced ease of someone accustomed to not being noticed. The smell hit him before anything else — sweat and blood and cheap alcohol and the particur staleness of air that had been breathed too many times by too many desperate people.

  He descended the stairs.

  The roar came up to meet him like something alive.

  The pit opened below — a rough circle of packed earth surrounded by tiered stands. Torches lined the walls, throwing unsteady light across the fighters and the gamblers and the men making deals in corners they thought were dark enough. The sound was raw and chaotic and completely honest in the way that pces without rules tend to be.

  Ashen stood at the edge and observed.

  Mercenaries. Criminals. Men with nothing left to lose and nothing left to protect. He categorized them automatically, the habit of years — assessing threat levels, identifying patterns, noting who moved like they knew what they were doing and who moved like they were pretending. Most of them were pretending.

  A rge man in a stained cloak materialized at his shoulder. "New face." He looked Ashen over with the particur assessment of someone whose job it was to sort the useful from the useless. "Are you here to watch or fight?"

  "Fight," Ashen said, meeting his eyes without moving.

  The man's mouth curved into something that wasn't quite a smile. "Rules are simple. Win, you get paid. Lose…You crawl out. If you're lucky."

  Ashen held his gaze for a moment longer than necessary. "Then let's begin."

  The first opponent was a broad-shouldered veteran whose body was a record of violence — scars yered over older scars, the particur thickness of muscle that comes not from training but from years of being hit and choosing to stand back up. He looked at Ashen the way experienced fighters look at young ones. Measuring. Dismissing.

  The bell rang.

  The man came forward with the confidence of someone who had ended fights quickly for a long time. His first swing was heavy and direct — the kind of strike that finishes things if it nds.

  Ashen slipped it. Barely. His body was still learning to obey him and the movement was a fraction slower than it should have been, close enough that he felt the dispced air against his cheek. He countered with a strike to the ribs, sharp and precise, targeting the exact point where he knew it would hurt.

  The man barely flinched.

  "That's all?" he sneered. Before he could react the next fist came faster than expected and caught Ashen in the stomach. Pain detonated through him — real pain, the kind that steals breath and buckles knees, the kind his body wasn't yet conditioned enough to simply absorb. The crowd roared its approval.

  He steadied himself. Breathed through it. Pain had never stopped him before and it wasn't going to start now.

  The man wound up again, weight shifting in exactly the pattern Ashen had been watching since the first exchange. Heavy striker. Committed to each blow. Relied on power over precision, throwing his full weight behind every swing in a way that was devastating when it nded and left him momentarily open when it didn't.

  The next strike came. Predictable.

  Ashen moved inside it, elbow driving into the jaw with the compact efficiency of a man who had learned long ago that a well-pced strike from close range is worth more than a powerful one from distance. His foot swept simultaneously, catching the leg at the moment the man's weight was committed forward.

  The veteran crashed to the ground.

  Ashen followed before he could recover — a controlled strike to the throat, precise, measured. Enough to keep him down. Not enough to do permanent damage.

  He straightened and stepped back.

  The announcer's voice cut through the noise. “The Sylo has been DEFEATED by the Newcomer .”The crowd erupted.

  Ashen turned and walked away before the sound could fully register. His stomach still ached where he'd been hit. His hands were steady.

  “It wasn't good, I need more fights”