As the Fallen Delvers Tournament entered its second round, the atmosphere around the glass pyramid changed. It was subtle at first, but I could feel it. So could Jessie; she and Stephen had come after school, as much for the vendor tents as to watch Ellen fight her striker opponent.

  But while the first round’s two days of fights had felt like a carnival—high-energy, celebratory, and full of life—this round’s single day felt…subdued. It wasn’t the fights, either. Ophelia had put on an incredible show in her battle, and none of the others had disappointed, either.

  It was the news.

  The attack on the Guardians’ wall around the green triangle had made all the headlines, plus the ticker tape at the bottom of the big news channels. So had some fighting to the east of Phoenix that even Jessie hadn’t known about, and reports that the Light of Dawn was going all-out didn’t help, either. Everyone knew that the Carlsbad portal was acting up, and everyone knew that even though Phoenix was days away by truck, we were still in the crosshairs.

  Sure, the news was downplaying everything, but downplaying only worked so well.

  The end result of this was that, as Ellen stepped onto the battlefield and stared at the man across from her—who was dressed in camouflage, with minimal armor and a single, thin blade the size of his forearm—the energy everyone had been feeding on was being slowly replaced with anxiety. Rumors were spreading across Phoenix.

  “Think she’ll win?” Stephen asked.

  He had a hand in Jessie’s—she was still in her chair, and was squeezing Stephen’s in one hand and one of mine in the other—and he was only half-watching the fight. My eyes were glued to the screen, though. I’d thought hard about this fight in the twenty-nine hours we had between the bracket’s announcement and the fight itself.

  If I was right, Ellen’s new strategy would beat the striker handily.

  The fight started, and the striker disappeared in a blur. He moved quickly—even with the E-Rank neutralization the portal world forced on him, he was fast. Ellen reacted almost as quickly. She disappeared in a cloud of black shadow as she cast Darkness on herself.

  I grinned ferally. I’d forced her to re-learn the spell last night. She hadn’t wanted to, but building her spell list for team-based delving didn’t make sense in a one-on-one duel. She couldn’t rely on Jeff, Raul, and me to front-line for her, so she’d have to be able to protect herself.

  The striker vanished into the cloud. It swirled around him like a hurricane for a moment. His skill activated, and a silver-gray blur surged through the entire cloud.

  “Holy crap,” Jessie said quietly.

  I nodded. “Yeah, he’s serious business. But look.”

  Jessie watched as Ellen stepped out of the shadows at the far end of the room, under a stalactite that almost touched the sparring chamber’s floor. They were dueling in a cavern, but I couldn’t tell the portal archetype. It was almost nondescript, except for one thing.

  Shadows. Everywhere.

  It was the perfect environment for Ellen, and she took advantage of it.

  “Ellen’s tough for a mage,” I said as she threw an Orb of Darkness, dropped Darkness on herself, and Shadestuttered away again, “but her real strength isn’t defense, and if she gets hit, she’s got a good chance of panicking. When we set up her final build, we didn’t worry as much about her survivability as we should have. All the publicly available information on her fighting style shows that she’s a glass cannon. Even her fight with Sennie didn’t show her playing a ton of defense, and she didn’t use her full kit.”

  “So?” Stephen asked.

  Jessie, though, nodded thoughtfully. “You set her up with a different strategy for this fight. I bet Pepperoni’s hiding somewhere in the stalactites, too, huh?”

  “You see it?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I see what you’re doing. Ellen’s casting way more than a mage should be able to sustain. She’s running Shadowstorm Battery, even though there shouldn’t be anything to siphon off of. That means Pepperoni’s out. And you adjusted Ellen’s entire spell list, right?”

  “Wrong. We added Darkness, but the Darkness to Shadestutter to Orb of Darkness pattern’s there to exploit a weakness we saw.”

  “And what’s that?” Jessie asked.

  “Watch closely.” I pointed at the striker. He stood still for a second, and the E-Rank Orb of Darkness bonked into him. It hardly looked like it hurt. At this rate, it’d take Ellen ten or fifteen more minutes to win.

  But it disrupted his attack. When he Flash-Dashed, he was a little off-target, and Ellen slipped away in another cloud of Darkness before his blade could cut through the shadow.

  “Paolo’s built on speed-stacking. The whirl attack can cover the whole room; that’s what happened to his first-round opponent. But he’s got to get moving to make it happen, and Ellen’s disrupting that with her spells. She’s not trying to win,” I said smugly. “She’s trying to break his strategy apart and wear him down.”

  “Can that work?” Stephen asked.

  Another set of trades. Another stall-out in a cloud of Darkness.

  “No,” I said. “Paolo will change strategies. He’s not an idiot, and this only counters his preferred fighting style. What happens next is a gamb—now!”

  Paolo blurred. He charged. Ellen dropped another Darkness, but this time, there was no whirl of blades. Had she seen it?

  She had. The Darkness didn’t vanish. It stuck around. And Ellen didn’t rematerialize somewhere else after a Shadestutter. She’d called Paolo’s bluff—and she’d won.

  Shadow Shapes. Shadow Box. A second Darkness. Ellen dropped everything onto the spot where Paolo stood. The sheer volume of spellcasting warped the TV screen for a moment, covering it with static.

  “Match,” Sarah Cullman said.

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  Ellen cut off her magic and dropped to a knee, panting. The camera zoomed in on the two combatants, but as it did, I caught Sarah’s lips moving.

  The sound didn’t come through, but Stephen filled in for the Spark of Life, echoing her silent statement. “Holy shit.”

  “Nice fight,” Ellen,” I said.

  She smelled like she’d been working out. A lot. Sweat and body odor. I didn’t care, though. I hugged her and let her sweat all over me as she leaned in. “Thanks. Summoning Pepperoni in the Darkness by the stalactites was a brilliant call. Good strategy. I didn’t think it’d work, but…how did you know?”

  “Because Paolo’s build makes sense to me. He’s less flexible than a mage or spellblade, though. He’s locked in as an assassin—the area damage is just a bonus. So, since we can flex our builds a little, I didn’t see any reason not to.” I let go, then slipped a hand around hers. “Now, will that work against Harold or Deborah? Absolutely not. They’re smarter than that.”

  “I thought you said Paolo wasn’t an idiot,” Jessie interrupted.

  I nodded, a smile on my face. “If he’d been an idiot about his plan, Ellen would have lost. Any deviation from the plan would have ended with her being cut almost in two.”

  Ellen’s face went a little white. I winced. She might be B-Rank, but that didn’t mean she wanted pain when she could avoid it. It was something we’d worked on in the past, but it was still a weakness of hers.

  “Anyway, someone like Deborah or Harold’s already looking at that fight and developing counters for it. In fact, I bet Deborah’s training right now—getting in a few last-minute reps against what she expects Harold to bring to the fight. She’s a perfectionist,” Ellen said quietly.

  “Her weakness is her ego. So is Harold’s. They’re both at the peak of their powers—both about to hit S-Rank. That’s how you’ll have to attack them,” I said quietly.

  It wasn’t just me, actually. It was the whole crowd. Everyone had gotten quiet. I took a quick look at the screen and understood.

  Attention Spectators:

  Due to an off-tournament injury, the following match has been postponed until tomorrow: Deborah Callahan vs. Harold the Herald. The next match will take place at 2:00 this afternoon and feature Jeffrey Carlton vs. Eddie Nolan. Thank you for your understanding.

  “Which one’s hurt?” Jessie asked.

  I shrugged. “Probably Deborah. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. She’s a perfectionist, but she’s also reckless.”

  That was a lie, though. If either fighter was hurt, it was almost certainly Harold. Deborah would definitely try something underhanded and shady to get an advantage, especially if she could get away with it.

  The speculation stormed around us as Phoenix’s citizens asked the same questions we were, and after a few minutes of it, I waved toward the parking garage. “Come on. If we hurry, we can beat the lunch rush out of here and be back in time for Jeff’s match-up.”

  Angelo Lawrence, the Light of Dawn, had run out of patience long ago—around the time he’d started running out of Mana.

  Even his build—his Power Plant, Fission, Demon Core build—was running on fumes. He and the other S-Rankers were in the field, between Mesa and Globe, and for the first time since his ascension to S-Rank, he felt truly outgunned. Not outmaneuvered. Not out-strategied. Outgunned.

  “The problem,” he muttered to Bernard the Wall and Terrel Young, “Is that of catastrophic functionality and graceful degradation.”

  The Carlsbad portal break was proving to be a nightmare. It wasn’t just that its enemies didn’t die to radiation, and that he was relying on the explosions and shock waves from Fission and Fusion. It was that the monsters themselves were…evolving. No, evolution was the wrong phrase. Clockwork-and-silk abominations didn’t evolve. They upgraded.

  No one had ever been inside the Carlsbad portal break and survived, so no one knew exactly what the boss or the world was like. Angelo had a theory that it was a factory, and that the boss was the creator and engineer who ran it. Other people thought it was actually Arboreal. Either way, the brass monsters were changing.

  This most recent batch had kept fighting until they were over ninety percent destroyed. Then they’d exploded like shaped charges.

  “Catastrophic functionality, huh?” Terrel asked.

  “Yes. The monsters are designed to take incredible punishment without complete failure. Look at this one. Its weapons system, hip pivot, and forward motion were the last things to fail—even after we shattered its armor, broke its onboard computing system, and thought we had eliminated it as a threat, it continued to attack.” It hadn’t just continued to attack; it had, in fact, blown massive holes in the side of an abandoned fast-food joint with its death throes when Bernard and Terrel took it down.

  “So, we’re outgunned, outnumbered, and the enemy is adapting to our fighting style?” Bernard asked.

  “Correct. It is only a matter of time until we lose this rest stop, and from there, Mesa.” Angelo pushed himself to his feet. “Phoenix will be under siege within three to four days—or perhaps faster.”

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket. The model was outdated—something from a company that didn’t exist anymore, since the Traynor Corporation had purchased it. A text was waiting for him.

  Councilwoman Myers: Delver Deborah Callahan is waking up. We have no idea what she did, but her lungs were over ninety percent compromised. The healers got to her quickly enough, though, and Sarah’s on her way. She’s in the GC’s facility and should be recovered in a few hours. No permanent damage. Notably, she did not push to S-Rank like you thought she would.

  Angelo Lawrence: Thank you. I will work toward understanding what happened. She is too tenacious to end her own life, so something feels very off here.

  Councilwoman Myers: Agreed. Could this be the actions of the Carlsbad portal?

  Angelo Lawrence: No. There is no sign that anything in that portal world has this kind of reach, nor that water is its preferred means of combat.

  Councilwoman Myers: Hmmm.

  Councilwoman Myers: I’ll keep you posted. Update us if anything changes in the field. Try to hold for six more days. The defenses to the west are only just now getting started.

  The Light of Dawn didn’t respond. Instead, he snorted. “They want six days. Let us see if we can make it four.”

  Jeff’s fight was simple.

  We hadn’t had to adjust too much of his strategy, for the simple reason that Kim Newcomb wasn’t someone who could change hers. She was a nuker mage similar to Angelo Lawrence, with a combo that she spent most of the fight trying to put together.

  Jeff spent the entire time slamming his shield into her face, forcing her to dodge his sword, and not letting her set up the four-skill, three-spell combination that could allow her—for a moment, at least—punch as hard as an A-Ranker even in this restricted environment. The terrain wasn’t in her favor, either; the narrow hallways and acid-pit rooms of the stitcher’s world didn’t lend themselves to evading Jeff. Without any ability to combo off, the fight was a foregone conclusion.

  I nodded at Ellen. “See, now, that’s an example of a mage who’s too locked in to her build. She’s going to be terrifying in a portal world in a year or two, but one-on-one, she’s too specialized.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?” Ellen asked.

  “Absolutely not.” I watched Jeff hit her in the face with the edge of his shield hard enough to draw blood and knock her to her knees. Sarah called the match, and I kept talking. “These fights don’t matter. Not for delving. And delving is the job. I think we’re doing the right thing, in terms of the team, with the two of us specializing in different tasks. Your wide-area attacks and my single-target focus give the team flexibility. But in a duel setting like this, that specialization is a weakness.”

  She nodded and leaned against me. “So, since you’re the least specialized—“

  “Wrong.”

  “Sorry, most flexible build out there, you should be fine with this next round, right?”

  I stared at the screen. My fight wasn’t until tomorrow morning, and it was against Andrew. The last time I’d seen him fight, he’d been D-Rank, and I doubted he’d gotten too many portal attempts in prison. He couldn’t be that strong, and in the E-Rank-enforcing portal, I’d be fine against him. The real concern wasn’t that he’d beat me. It was that I’d be revealing too much more of what I could do.

  Ellen had been right, and I’d only truly realized it when I helped her prep for her fight. I’d given away too much information when I’d beaten Logan. Everyone would know about my Polarity Shift combo, and they’d be looking out for it.

  But I couldn’t have done anything differently against the Traynor guild’s tank. He had to lose quickly, and beating a tank fast required overwhelming power.

  And I could take advantage of what people knew about me. After all, there was still a lot they were missing.

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