The golden fire was fast, crossing distance in a heartbeat, before striking Ian.

Golden flame layered on top of blue flame. Two powerful Ascender burns stacked into the same body.

Ian’s body convulsed against the ground, whatever life had been holding on inside him finally extinguishing in a rush of overlapping heat.

He screamed his lungs out in the last moments of his life, but he died before Tom’s flame was extinguished by Klein’s rushing healing water that was too late.

Baaron’s cleaver came down in the same instant.

But Tom, who had already achieved his goal, was on the move.

His body drifted sideways with the same footwork he had been using all fight, and Baaron’s strike hit empty rubble. The impact sent up a spray of stone that clattered around Tom’s boots as he settled into his new position meters away.

Baaron’s eyes were locked on Ian’s smoking corpse.

His face turned dark red.

"YOU BASTARD!"

His voice tore across the arena.

"YOU FUCKING BASTARD, THAT’S NOT—"

"Not what?" Tom’s grin widened.

His golden gloves flared brighter in preparation for whatever Baaron was planning, "Not sporting? Not honorable? Not something a gentlemen would do? Baaron, you do not treat the dishonorable with honor. I’m afraid you’re going to have to be more specific if you want your outrage to land properly."

"YOU KILLED HIM WHILE HE WAS ALREADY DYING!"

"I did." Tom’s laughter spread across the arena in joy. You don’t get to kill an Ascender often, and the rewards were decent to say the least.

"Rather than raging, you should focus on what’s important. Your friend is now very definitely dead, which means one less Ascender on your side of the ledger, which means we’re that much closer to closing this whole affair. Baaron, you’re next."

Baaron’s grip on his cleaver was shaking.

"I will kill you."

"You can try. But you will die." Tom’s eyes suddenly turned colder. He rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck once.

"But we’ve been at this for twenty minutes and you still haven’t landed a proper strike, so forgive me if I don’t lose sleep over it."

Baaron launched himself forward.

Tom’s gloves flared, and the cycle continued.

After Ian’s death, Farid didn’t hesitate.

He turned away from Ian’s smoking body and dashed across the arena toward Baaron’s position.

Klein and Sierra were locked in their own exchange further west, and Sierra was holding her ground well enough that Farid’s intervention would provide marginal value there. Baaron, on the other hand, was fully committed to Tom, and adding a second Ascender to that engagement would collapse Baaron’s defenses much quicker than Klein’s.

Take Baaron down first. Then move as a group to help Sierra finish Klein.

The plan was clean and the execution followed.

Farid arrived at Tom’s side, his staff already channeling his four elements. Baaron’s face twisted as he registered the second Ascender entering his engagement zone.

His options shrank instantly. Tom’s cunning footwork alone had been keeping him locked in a stalemate. Adding Farid’s fire pressure meant Baaron was now fighting on two fronts at Ascender tier with no way to disengage cleanly.

The exchanges intensified.

Baaron’s cleaver moved faster than it had before, his desperation adding rawness to strikes that had been controlled minutes ago. Neither of it was enough. Tom drifted through Baaron’s rushes like water around stone, and Farid’s fire cut off every escape angle Baaron tried to open up.

Baaron was going to die.

He knew it and so did everyone watching.

Ace’s blades met Alaric’s again in the center of the arena. He felt Ian’s death the moment his aura vanished from the battlefield’s landscape. His expression didn’t change by even the smallest fraction. His footwork didn’t stutter and his breathing didn’t change.

Whatever the loss meant to him, he kept it entirely to himself.

His daggers continued to weave through their exchange with Alaric at the same unhurried tempo. The two of them had settled into a rhythm that neither could break, and the death of an ally hadn’t disturbed Ace’s ability to hold that rhythm even by a heartbeat.

Moon watched everything from his position at the edge of the perimeter.

The battle continued to churn around him. His teammates were still cutting down stragglers. The frost pillars still fired at anyone nearby. Yoha was efficiently dismantling former allies across the northern flank.

Moon stopped.

Just for a few seconds. He let the immediate engagement fade from his vision. Let his eyes sweep across the entire battlefield the way a commander might, taking in everything at once.

His timer would keep running. Although every second cost him a moment of Surpasser power, Moon understood that he needed to understand what he was looking at.

The dark organization was losing.

They had lost Ian, an Ascender. They had lost their layered ambush plan and most of their reinforcement waves. Klein was pinned. Baaron was about to be pinned harder. Even Ace, despite matching Alaric evenly, wasn’t gaining ground.

Moon ran the simulations in his mind. For a few brief moments, he was lost in his own thoughts, sifting through the pieces of the bigger picture, and projecting outcomes based on the current state of the field.

Every simulation ended the same way.

The dark organization lost.

Different timelines produced different casualty counts on the Association’s side, different specific fighters going down, different peripheral outcomes. But in every version he could imagine, the organization’s core objective failed. Baaron died or fled with serious injuries. Klein died or was captured. Ace either escaped or was killed. The scattered reinforcements were cleaned up over the following hour.

Every metric he could measure pointed to defeat.

That was the problem.

The organization had committed too many resources to an operation that couldn’t be won under current conditions. Ascenders were priceless assets. Surpasser assassins took years to train. Throwing all of that into a battle that they had to know they would lose by now didn’t fit the pattern of a group like them.

’Just what are they planning to achieve...?!’