YT crouched over him, blade low, a drop of poison suspended at the tip. Close enough to Damien's neck that breathing wrong would've been enough.
"Did you think of your last words?"
Damien's eyes moved. Barely — just enough to find her across the arena floor. Cecelia. Still standing. Whatever was left in her tank, she was pulling it forward.
"I'm waiting."
Damien's voice came out in pieces, just above nothing.
"Think of all your problems..."
YT leaned in. "What?"
"Burning away."
The beam of black flame hit from the side.
YT's speed was the only reason he still had a hand. He cleared the blast — a half-second late. Two fingers stayed behind.
Cecelia lowered her arm, breathing hard.
Damien was already moving.
The water came up fast, walls closing in around YT before he could reset — then the temperature dropped all at once, the water locking solid. A glacier. YT suspended at the center of it, still mid-motion.
The arena went quiet.
Damien exhaled and looked at Cecelia. He didn't have much breath to spare, but he used some of it.
Across the floor, Alex was already beside Wayne, shaking his shoulder.
Then she looked up at the glacier.
Her eyes fixed on the shape inside the ice. The percentages visible to her — and only to her — were moving. YT's negative energy ticked upward by one. His positive shifted down to match.
Her mouth opened.
Before she could speak, the sound started.
A low crack, somewhere deep in the ice. Then another.
Then the spines shot through — blue needles punching through the surface from the inside, the glacier fracturing in lines outward from his back.
YT's voice came through the ice, flat and unbothered.
"Bondfire."
A flame bloomed inside the glacier. Black at the core, eating the ice from within, slow and deliberate and growing.