Yuna Park stood in the middle of a thinning battlefield, forty strangers waiting on her word, and gave them the worst recruitment speech in guild history.

"We don’t catch her. Nobody in this hall catches her. Every wave we send in is going to end up flat on the padding."

The halberd woman lowered her weapon an inch. "Inspiring so far."

"Shush. I’m not done." Yuna kept her eyes on the far half of the arena, where Luna had just returned three more optimists to the floor without taking her hands out of her pockets. "Watch her feet. She never lands in the same place twice, but she always lands somewhere."

"Of course. She’s moving, not teleporting."

"Exactly." Yuna nodded, as if her point was proven. "And anything that moves follows rules."

"So we lose," the stocky man said slowly, flexing his bracers.

"Everyone who engages her most likely loses, so I need you to hear it from me now instead of discovering it mid-air." She turned to face the group and gave it to them straight, because these people were about to donate their bodies to her gamble, and they’d earned the truth.

"But if you lose standing in the right spot, we can win. Every dodge we force tells me where she can’t go next. You’re not attackers but walls. Lanes. You’re the shape of a box she doesn’t know we’re building."

The group went quiet. Across the hall, another coordinated squad came apart against Calypso to the sound of her delighted laughter.

"Losing with a plan." The halberd woman rolled the idea around her mouth, then grinned. "Beats getting farmed at random by a bratty girl half my age who called me a pussy."

"Why do you even have that thing?" the stocky man asked her, nodding at the halberd.

"Nobody said I couldn’t bring it." She shrugged. "I always have them on me."

"I brought my lucky socks," a ranged caster said, with quiet grief.

Yuna raised her voice a notch. "If you can summon your own weapon, now’s the time."

"...We’re no S-tiers," people grumbled at her.

Roughly one twentieth of them could summon a weapon of sorts. Mana flared here and there, a broadsword condensing out of amber light, a chain whip sliding from a woman’s sleeve, a bow assembling itself out of woven green threads.

Yuna brought her fist to her lips and whispered into it, an assassin’s habit.

"I’m no S-tier either, but thankfully... [Frostfang.]"

Cold snapped inward from the air around her wrists, and twin daggers built themselves into her grip, blue-white and steaming frost.

The Sinners cast without a single word, all of them, like the rules were a subscription they’d canceled. The rest of humanity still had to ask.

"We have one chance," Yuna said. "Let’s go."

The first wave lost in eleven seconds, four seconds longer than any squad before them, and every one of them hit the floor without a single broken bone. Luna dismantled them with her feet alone, spinning through the pack like a bored figure skater.

"Finally some of you organized..." she yawned theatrically.

The second wave went in before the first had finished groaning, and behind them Yuna’s ranged line opened up, bolts and arrows and thin lances of fire streaking across the arena to land where nobody stood. They were shooting the spaces. The comfortable gaps Luna liked to flicker into began arriving pre-occupied, and her landings shortened.

And the numbers kept coming. Every squad Calypso wrecked on the far side shed dazed stragglers who drifted toward the only voice in the hall with a plan attached to it, until Yuna was placing sixty people around the arena like furniture.

"Definitely-Not-Yuna says the second line HOLDS!" the stocky man bellowed somewhere to her left.

"Copy! Tell Definitely-Not-Yuna the left lane is closed!"

The name had escaped containment. She would grieve later.

Yuna herself worked the edges of the box, low and quiet. Wherever Luna’s boots touched down twice, she skated past and pressed a palm to the floor, leaving a skin of ice thin enough to be invisible and slick enough to matter. The trick was stolen from hours of watching a silver-haired mage on stream deny monsters their escape routes one placed shot at a time.

By the third wave, she stopped directing from the back and went in herself.

She came in low on Luna’s blind side with both daggers reversed, a probing pass, and lasted four full seconds in melee range before the counter-kick arrived. She read it early, rode the impact into a backward roll, and came up on her feet with her cap still on.

The hall noticed. Four seconds was a record by roughly four seconds.

"Oh?" Luna rolled her neck, and her attention snapped into focus for the first time. "Okay, cap girl. Try me again."

Yuna didn’t bite, however, electing to work with her allies instead of playing hero.

By the fourth wave, Luna’s grin had stalled. She flickered out of a collapsing ring of bodies, hopped backward, and her boot slid a full inch.

"Okay," she announced to the arena in general, recovering with insulting ease. "Maybe there’s hope for you still."

Yuna answered by throwing her right-hand dagger at Luna’s face, and while it was still in the air she whispered the summon again, the blade dissolving mid-flight and rebuilding itself in her palm behind her back, mid-spin, already cutting for Luna’s hamstring.

A kick stopped the cut cold, but the boredom was gone from Luna’s face. "Hold up. Are you actually pretty cool?"

"What a terrible pun...!" Yuna wheezed, airborne again.

The fifth wave was the good one, and Yuna led it from the front, shattering a fan of thrown daggers into white mist across Luna’s sightline. The chain whip took the favorite exit lane behind it, the broadsword and the bracers came in staggered instead of together, and the ranged line sealed the long diagonal. For the first time, the Storm Valkyrie ran out of comfortable places to be.

She hopped back toward a clear patch of padding that wasn’t clear anymore. Her boot slid again, her balance dipped a centimeter, and her left hand started to leave her pocket.

The hall saw it. Sixty strangers with an afternoon’s acquaintance and one borrowed plan had just forced the storm gremlin to consider using a hand, and every single one of them would be telling this story for the rest of their lives.

But the wrist never cleared the fabric, for the floor bucked hard enough to stagger the entire formation, and a shadow the size of a building fell over the box.

Pebble had opinions.

He crossed the arena in two strides that knocked half the ranged line off its feet, six amber eyes sweeping the formation once, and then the confiscations began.

Teeth the length of forearms closed on the back of the halberd woman’s jacket with the delicacy of a mother cat, and she was suddenly twelve meters in the air, halberd and all.

"Fuck!! It got me!"

He put her down. On top of the stocky man, who had been flattened under one enormous paw two seconds earlier. The chain whip woman landed on both of them a moment later, gently, like folded laundry being added to a stack.

The pile grew. Pebble worked with terrifying efficiency, plucking fighters out of formation faster than they could scatter, playtime over as far as he was concerned. A low growl rolled under everything, the kind of sound you felt through the floor before you heard it.

"I had it," Luna muttered up at him.

Pebble answered by shoving her sideways two full steps with a nose bigger than her torso, six eyes running over her for damage, huffing hot air that blasted her ponytail apart.

"I HAD it!" She slapped the nose. The nose was unmoved. "You paranoid overgrown puppy, we were about to get to the good part! Evil Queen Luna was facing down the hero and her party!"

The first badge hit the padding somewhere near the pile.

Then it rained plastic. Candidates sat down right where they stood, badges held overhead like white flags, and the ones still on their feet were walking toward the open doors with the specific speed of people pretending they weren’t running.

"I’m out. I am SO out."

"The dog folds people, man. Hell naw!"

Yuna stood at the edge of the collapse with a dagger in each hand and watched her army become a heap.

The plan was dead. The box had caught exactly one thing, a wrist that never finished leaving its pocket, and every soul still conscious in this hall was now spectating a dog stack humans.

But nobody had called the test.

She went very still under her cap, and the part of her that Skyline had kept on a leash for three years did one slow, cold lap of the room.

The doors were open, the clock still running. Calypso stood on the far floor, admiring Pebble’s work. Luna was arguing with a nose. All eyes pointed at the pile, and not a single one pointed at the observation deck where the man who had started all of this with one word stood alone at the railing.

She’d said it herself. Winning meant making Kaiden Grey feel like he lost.

Yuna was already backing away, emptying her lungs the long slow way she did before every infiltration, and the whisper she’d been saving all afternoon left her lips.

"[Winter’s Hush.]"

Every sound in the hall thinned to a distant hum, like her ears had been packed with snow. Cold flooded her from crown to heels, frost feathered up her sleeves, and her mana emptied like a tipped bucket, every drop of it converted into speed.

Then she moved.