The crowd was on its feet.
All of it—not the Aurelius sections, not the neutral sections, all of it—every person in every tier standing because the fight had reached the place fights reach when both fighters have spent everything and what's left is just the question of who wants it more. The noise was enormous and sustained and had a quality to it that the earlier noise hadn't had—this was the sound of an arena that had been earned, that had been built over three minutes of genuine competition and was now paying out at the moment that deserved it most. People who had arrived supporting different academies were standing beside each other producing the same sound for the same reason, allegiance temporarily dissolved by something that had asked more of both fighters than anyone had expected when the fight began.
The announcer let it run.
