The match was still young suffocatingly so.
Inside the Veiled Forest, neither Albert Newton nor Gyro Regardo had fired another bullet.
Both men drifted through a sensory void, trapped in a world stripped of color, texture, and sound. The silence wasn't merely quiet. It was alive, pressing against the skull like unseen fingers, waiting to see which of them would break first.
You don't need live sensory input to think. Your brain can run on memory, logic, and mental models if you already know what the world looked like. Everything you've ever sensed is stored as mental representations.
Once learned, you can manipulate these internally without re-sensing them.
To the audience, only their faint outlines flickered on the holographic projection. To them, though, there was nothing.
Gyro Regardo steadied himself, his mind cutting through the panic that always came when the senses were gone. He knew fear. He'd lived his whole life learning to function in chaos.
"Breathe. Feel nothing, but remember everything." he thought.
He recalled the way air usually felt. The subtle drag against his skin, the whisper of movement when someone passed close by. He couldn't feel any of it now, but he could reconstruct it. The mind was stronger than flesh. Slowly, Gyro began to walk in patterns, each step a measured design like drafting blueprints for invisible architecture.
He bent his fingers slightly, calculating where he last stood when the announcer said commence. He had taken six steps forward, maybe seven. If the field was symmetrical, his opponent was likely moving too.
He formed a map in his head, an imagined grid of space.
If he could keep the illusion steady long enough, he might predict Albert's location.
Meanwhile, Albert stood still. His hand gripped the revolver tight, his heart a muted rhythm he could barely sense. The void wanted him to lose himself to stop thinking, stop being.
But he was used to silence. The kind that came from years of guilt, wandering alone in places that barely remembered him.
"This is nothing compared to that night," he murmured in thought, recalling Durkan, the eclipse, the endless screams. "Silence is what I can handle."
He tried to see without eyes. The Face within him, the being that once connected him to the Transparent Realm was still sealed, yet a faint pulse of its presence stirred in his mind.
"You can still perceive." the whisper resounded faintly in him by understanding.
Tom focused inwardly. He remembered the sensation of people's shadows he'd once seen, the way emotion shaped movement.
Even without sight, perhaps intent left a mark.
He slowed his breathing, imagining ripples moving out from his body. Awareness.
And something faint brushed against that awareness. A tremor in the nothingness, like a drop in still water. Someone else was moving.
Up in the viewing dome, Harriet squinted at the projected screen. "What are you doing, you lunatic?" He muttered, slamming his scarf on floor. "Don't tell me you're meditating in the middle of a death match."
The announcer's voice came aloud,
"Both contestants maintaining non-aggressive stance. Unusual! Perhaps testing mental resilience, a battle of patience, not bullets!"
Gyro took another step, slow and sure, forming geometric shapes in his mind. Every motion had ratio, distance, structure. His training as an architect wasn't about buildings. It was about balance.
Tom, by contrast was chaos. His pattern was irregular, instinct-driven but instinct sharpened by trauma.
And in the invisible darkness, chaos and design began to move toward each other. As each drawn by forces neither could fully explain.
Tom exhaled. He couldn't hear it, but he felt the shape of that silence distort slightly.
There. Something was off to his right.
Gyro froze. He'd sensed a shift in his imagined geometry. A disruption in his perfect balance. Someone was near.
Both men turned toward each other, guns half-raised, utterly blind.
The audience held its breath, the entire hall suspended in stillness.
They were both near eachother.
This was no longer just a gamble.
It was the quiet before the audience dared to blink.
They had both reached the same clearing, though neither could know it. Their steps were slow and blind. The forest—illusionary or real, felt like an endless dream made of static, a place where direction no longer existed.
Gyro stopped. He imagined he was somewhere near the centre of the arena. His boots pressed softly against unseen dirt.
"If I were him," he thought, "I'd be circling, calculating, waiting for motion."
So, he did something counterintuitive—he crouched low, one hand on the ground, and began to draw invisible lines with his fingers. He imagined architecture again. The way structures formed rhythm through repetition. If he could predict the rhythm of his opponent, maybe he could disrupt it.
Albert stood still as always, only a few paces away. His revolver hung loose in his right hand. He trusted patterns.
He took three silent steps, each one angled to form a triangle, like tracing an old ritual of movement.
His hand met resistance, something human.
He pressed biso hand forward but the air stiffened, pushing back like a wall. He couldn't see Gyro, couldn't feel texture, yet his body knew. The structure is obviously not a tree. The pressure in the space between them was wrong, bending like glass about to crack.
Gyro reacted first. His instincts screamed though his nerves were silent. He twisted his body, the revolver swinging in a short arc toward where his architecture told him something existed.
Tom ducked purely by impulse, feeling an unnatural drag in the air above his head. His body rolled forward, shoulder first. The revolver in his hand brushed cloth—Gyro's coat and he swung his elbow to follow.
The two collided in silence with sudden imbalance.
Tom's arm hooked under Gyro's. He shoved, but Gyro countered with a backward kick. His boot striked empty space where Tom's knee should have been. Both stumbled, striking shadows of where they imagined the other was.
Tom's revolver fell. He didn't hear it. He didn't see it. But his instinct told him it hit the ground, rolling slightly to the left. He lunged for it but his fingers brushed something sharp instead.
Gyro had tripped backward onto a fallen branch, jagged and thin as a blade. It pierced through his back and out his side and though he couldn't feel pain, he knew something catastrophic had happened.
He tried to move. His limbs responded. His breathing rhythm faltered, but even that he couldn't feel. Just the hollow realization barked that his body was breaking down.
"Don't stop." he thought, dragging himself up. "Not until the design is complete."
Albert, unaware of Gyro's wound, turned sharply. Trying to sense his opponent again. He felt distortion behind him.
They were close again. So close that if their senses hadn't been sealed, they could've heard each other breathing.
The announcer's distant voice amazed across unseen skies,
"Both contestants remain active…. no successful hits yet recorded. Combat continues under null-sense restriction."
Albert crouched low, gripping his revolver with a trembling precision. His mind wasn't frantic; it was mathematical. The moment his hand had brushed Gyro's chest earlier, he had mapped out distance, proportion, and trajectory not through touch, but through absence. The place where pressure bent meant Gyro's torso was exactly three and a half feet from his own. The recoil tension in the void had given him one precious clue: orientation.
He calculated it again in his head.
A right-handed grip. An upward recoil from mid-height. Meaning Gyro shoots from the lower left quadrant of my perspective. If I were him.… I'd rotate counterclockwise, take five steps and flank my blind side.
Albert began moving the opposite way slowly making sure not to make any noise. He stopped every two steps, tapping the barrel against his own wrist in rhythm. Each tap helped him measure where he was relative to the void's recall. It wasn't sound, it was feedback. The nothingness pushed back if you disturbed it long enough.
Somewhere beyond the veil, Gyro was doing the same.
But not through logic. Through geometry.
He thought in blueprints. In shapes. Every time his feet touched earth, he imagined tiles forming underneath, tessellating outward like a cathedral floor. His world was not dark.
It was covered in invisible lines, structures that only his mind could build. And when one of those invisible tiles clicked, he knew his opponent had stepped on it.
He raised his gun but didn't shoot.
He moved again. Four steps, pause, three steps, pause. Counted angles, adjusting invisible scaffolds.
Something rippled near him, faint but certain. His mind reconstructed it instantly.
Heis probably right there. Exactly thirty degrees right of my former position.
Gyro exhaled soundlessly.
The world vibrated in mysteries.
The first bullet sliced through the sealed reality, connecting with Albert's side. He didn't scream; he didn't even register pain. But his body staggered, weightless for half a heartbeat before his equilibrium returned. He caught himself barely.
He adjusted his stance.
He has found me once. That means he's expecting me to shift away.
Albert did the opposite. He lunged forward, not away, diving into Gyro's next shot.
The second bullet scraped his arm, tearing through fabric. Another hit recorded by the system, unseen and silent. Gyro couldn't tell he had landed it; Albert couldn't tell he'd been struck but somewhere, the arena kept count.
Now Gyro was confident. Two. One more and this might end.
He positioned himself behind what felt like a large tree trunk, aiming toward the last tremor he felt.
Albert steadied his gun, chest still raw from unseen wounds.
He remembered the earlier touch. The barrier when his hand hit something human.
If I fired then, my shot would've gone through him at shoulder level.
He raised his gun to that same height. No more math. Time for waiting. A memory, and pulled the trigger.
The recoil shook the air.
Gyro flinched not in pain, but in comprehension.
A mark appeared on his back. A direct hit.
One bullet for Albert. Two for Gyro.
Both men's minds blazed brighter than ever.
Neither celebrated, could not.
They knew this was far from over.