Constructs don't flinch.
The thought arrived between the forty-third and forty-fourth drum of the morning shift, while Shin's arms performed the theater of carrying sixty pounds with visible effort and his brain replayed every second of what he'd witnessed in the basement beneath the noodle restaurant.
The woman who'd won the first bout — the bare-handed fighter who'd dismantled the baton-wielder with a wrist-catch and a redirect — had opened with a feint. A shoulder dip, right side, suggesting a right-hand strike. The baton-wielder had read the feint and adjusted, dropping his guard left to protect against the real attack from that side. Except the real attack came from neither side. The shoulder dip was misdirection layered on misdirection — the woman had closed the distance during the half-second that the baton-wielder's attention was sorting through options, and by the time he'd committed to a defensive position she was already inside his guard, wrist on his weapon arm, leverage applied, fight functionally over.
Feints. Misdirection. Psychological manipulation at combat speed.
Constructs didn't do any of that.
In the Foundry, combat had been physics. The constructs advanced, swung, advanced again. Their patterns were readable because they were patterns — mechanical sequences that repeated with crystalline precision, exploitable once you'd mapped the timing. Dead-spots existed because the constructs' joint architecture created them, fixed vulnerabilities in a fixed system. Shin's entire combat vocabulary — the chisel-hammer strikes, the angular approaches, the patience of waiting for a cycle to complete — was built for opponents that were predictable, powerful, and stupid.
Humans were none of those things.
He set the forty-fourth drum on the truck bed. Manufactured thud. Pham was working the adjacent stack, his forty-pound drums handled with the honest labor of a man whose muscles had no secrets to keep. Cho supervised from the truck's shadow, his eyes doing their usual inventory of the workforce — bodies assessed, capabilities filed, problems anticipated.
Shin picked up the forty-fifth drum. The fight was tonight. He'd made the decision on the bus home from the Circuit, somewhere between Block 3 and Block 7, while his ears were still ringing and his skin still prickled with the residual mana of two hundred awakened humans in an enclosed space. The Circuit ran every other night. Tonight was a fight night. Fifty credits to the winner of a bottom-tier bout.
Fifty credits would buy a weapon. A real one.
The broken sword shaft sat in his belt like a fossil — evidence of a previous era, a Level 0 relic that a Level 1 body had no use for except as a reminder that tools mattered. The Foundry constructs had been killable with construct cores because the cores exploited a material vulnerability, a resonance between the crystal in the cores and the crystal in the constructs' bodies. Human fighters in the Circuit didn't have material vulnerabilities. They had chins and livers and knee joints and all the other targets that centuries of martial knowledge had catalogued, and hitting those targets effectively required either extraordinary technique or extraordinary force.
Shin had force. Seventeen Strength and seventeen Agility, packed into a body that looked like a Tier 5 porter and hit like something the docks had never produced. What he didn't have was technique — not against humans. His combat training was fifty-three construct kills in an amber-crystal dungeon, against enemies that telegraphed every swing and died in the same spots every time.
The difference was going to hurt.
---
The noodle restaurant looked different the second time. The first visit, arriving at 10 PM after weeks of dungeon-grinding solitude, the restaurant had been a portal — ordinary surface concealing extraordinary depth. Now it was just a restaurant. Scratched tables. Fluorescent lighting. The owner wiping the counter with a rag that had stopped being clean sometime during the previous administration.
Shin went past the counter and through the storage room door without stopping. The owner glanced up. Their eyes met for a fraction of a second — long enough for a mutual transaction to complete. The owner saw a young man heading downstairs. The young man saw a middle-aged woman whose counter-wiping rhythm didn't break. No acknowledgment. No permission requested or granted. The door was there. People went through it. The restaurant's books balanced because of what happened below, and the owner's rag went in circles because that was easier than thinking about it.
Down. Through the corridor's industrial lighting. The bass pulse rose through the concrete, a vibration that registered in Shin's teeth before his ears caught the frequency. The fire door. The wall of sound and smell beyond.
The Circuit was smaller tonight. A hundred and fifty people, not two hundred — weeknight crowd, the handler at the door explained when Shin approached. Fewer spectators meant fewer bets meant smaller purses, but the bouts ran faster and the lineup was shorter. Good for new fighters.
"New fighter?" the handler asked. She was short, built like a fire hydrant, with cropped hair and a data pad that she held the way a surgeon holds a scalpel — as an extension of professional identity. Not the scarred man. His subordinate, apparently, positioned at a folding table near the arena entrance to process the evening's combatants.
"First time."
"Alias."
Shin hadn't planned one. The pause stretched a beat too long — the handler's eyes flicked up from her pad, measuring the gap between question and answer the way a customs agent measures the gap between passport photo and face.
"Dock," Shin said.
"Dock." She typed it without inflection. "Estimated level range."
"Eight."
"Fighting style."
"No preference."
"Weapon or open."
"Open."
The handler's stylus paused. She looked at him — not with interest, but with the clinical assessment of someone who processed thirty fighters a night and had developed an unconscious algorithm for sorting them into categories. Her category for Shin was visible in the way her mouth thinned: another broke kid from the lower blocks who thought stats compensated for skill. Two fights, maybe three, before the Circuit educated him otherwise.
"Med waiver." She slid a tablet across the table. "Sign at the bottom. Circuit provides field healing for fight injuries. Anything requiring hospital care is your problem."
Shin signed. The alias field said DOCK. The level field said 8. The weapon field said NONE. The form had a box labeled GUILD AFFILIATION that Shin left blank, and a box labeled BUREAU REGISTRATION that Shin left blank, and neither absence generated a follow-up question because the Circuit's entire business model was built on blank boxes.
"Stand by the east wall. You'll be called."
---
The east wall was where the bottom-tier fighters waited. Six of them, including Shin. A woman with taped hands and the tight, corded forearms of a grappler. A teenager who couldn't have been older than seventeen, bouncing on his toes with the nervous energy of someone who'd never been hit by an awakened fist. Two men who might have been brothers, both thick-necked, both silent. And a wiry veteran whose posture said everything — leaning against the wall with the studied nonchalance of a man who'd been in this exact spot enough times to have worn a groove in the concrete with his shoulder.
The veteran was watching Shin.
Not aggressively. Not with challenge. With the evaluative patience of a professional sizing up new inventory. His eyes moved from Shin's hands to his shoulders to his feet — the three-point assessment of a fighter who'd learned to read bodies the way Shin had learned to read construct patrol patterns.
The veteran was his opponent. Shin knew it before the handler called the names — the weight class matched, the level class was adjacent, and the veteran's particular brand of attention was the attention of a man who'd already decided how this fight would go and was confirming the choreography.
"Dock versus Hound. Arena two."
Two arenas tonight. The main arena for the mid-tier bouts, and a smaller ring — ten-foot square, mana barriers dimmer, crowd thinner — for the bottom feeders. Arena two. Nobody was watching except the six fighters on the east wall and a scattering of low-stakes bettors who drifted between the arenas like gulls between trawlers.
The veteran — Hound — peeled off the wall and walked toward the smaller ring with the unhurried pace of a man walking to work. Shin followed.
Inside the barriers, the compacted earth was harder than it looked. Packed down by hundreds of bouts, stained with substances that the Circuit's maintenance crew had stopped trying to fully remove. The mana dampeners hummed at a lower frequency here — economy barriers, adequate for containing Level 5-through-15 output, not the full-spectrum walls that the main arena used.
Hound took the far side. He was Shin's height, maybe two inches shorter, with the lean build of a distance runner repurposed for close combat. His hands came up in a guard that Shin recognized from the fights he'd watched — orthodox, southpaw lead foot, chin tucked behind his front shoulder. Practiced. Automatic. The product of drilling a position so many times that the body defaulted to it without instruction.
Shin's hands came up. The position was wrong. Not objectively wrong, but wrong in the way that a construct-killer's guard was wrong for human combat. His hands were too wide, positioned to block the sweeping lateral strikes that constructs favored. His weight was too far forward, balanced for the aggressive closing distance that dead-spot exploitation required. His chin was exposed because constructs didn't target chins — they targeted center mass, and defending against center-mass strikes meant a wider guard, not a tighter one.
A handler at ringside slapped a metal plate. The sound was the starting signal.
Hound moved first. Forward, closing the distance with a shuffling step that kept his base stable, his guard intact, and his weight balanced over his center. A jab — left hand, straight, aimed at Shin's exposed face. Fast. Level 7 fast, which meant faster than any construct in the Foundry had ever moved, because Level 7 Agility was concentrated in trained muscle memory rather than distributed across a crystal body's generalized motion.
Shin slipped right. The jab grazed his cheek — not a miss, a partial connection, the knuckles dragging across his skin with enough force to turn his head two inches. His seventeen Endurance registered the impact as information rather than damage: angle, force, speed, intention. The data processed. His body catalogued the jab's trajectory for future reference.
He countered. His right hand drove forward in a straight punch aimed at Hound's ribcage — a construct-killer's targeting, going for the center mass where a crystal dead-spot would be, where the chisel-hammer technique opened fracture lines in mineral bodies.
Hound wasn't a mineral body. Hound rotated his torso, letting the punch skate across his obliques rather than connect flush, and fired a cross over Shin's extended arm that landed on his temple.
Stars. Not a figure of speech — literal visual artifacts, seventeen Perception translating the sudden neural disruption into sharp white points across Shin's field of vision. His head snapped sideways. His feet staggered — one step, two — and his balance, the forward-leaning construct-killer balance, nearly sent him to the compacted earth.
He caught himself. Set his feet. The white points faded. Hound was already resetting, hands up, chin tucked, the cross delivered and the recovery executed with the seamless economy of a fighter who'd thrown that exact combination a thousand times.
Two exchanges. Two hits received. Zero hits landed clean. The stat advantage was irrelevant if the stats couldn't find a target.
Shin reset his guard. Tighter. Chin lower — a conscious adjustment, his intelligence processing the cross's success and generating a structural correction in real time. His hands moved inward, narrowing the guard from construct-wide to human-appropriate.
Hound advanced again. Another jab — same hand, same angle, same shuffling approach. Shin read it this time. The jab was a probe, not an attack. Hound was measuring distance, testing reaction speed, gathering data for the real combination that would follow.
The jab came. Shin caught it on his forearm — seventeen Endurance turning the impact into a dull thud that his arm absorbed without yielding. The cross followed. Same angle as before, over the extended arm, aimed at the temple that had worked thirty seconds ago.
Shin ducked. Not gracefully — his duck was a whole-body motion, knees bending too deep, head dropping too low, the movement of a body that hadn't drilled the specific mechanics of slipping a cross and was improvising from first principles. But seventeen Agility made the improvisation fast enough, and the cross sailed over his head by an inch, Hound's knuckles cutting the air where Shin's temple had been half a second prior.
Inside Hound's guard. Close range. The construct-killer's territory.
Shin's instincts fired. Close range was where dead-spots lived. Close range was where the chisel-hammer worked. His right hand drove forward — not a punch, a grab. His fingers closed on Hound's lead forearm with seventeen Strength, and the grip was a vise.
Hound's expression changed. The studied nonchalance dissolved. His arm was caught, and the thing holding it was stronger than a Level 8 should be, stronger than the registered alias suggested, a grip force that his Level 7 musculature could not simply shrug free of. He pulled. The arm didn't move. He twisted. Shin's fingers adjusted, maintaining pressure, the tendons in his forearm standing out with a definition that his porter's body hadn't displayed three days ago.
Hound's free hand came around — a hook, aimed at Shin's kidney, thrown with the desperate acceleration of a fighter who'd just realized that the comfortable script of a bottom-tier bout had been rewritten. The hook landed. Shin's kidney absorbed it through seventeen Endurance — the impact registered, the pain existed, but the damage was surface-level, a bruise where a lighter body would have folded.
Shin pulled. The grip on Hound's forearm became a lever. Seventeen Strength hauled Hound off-balance, dragging his center of mass forward past his lead foot, and Shin's other arm wrapped around Hound's neck in a clinch that construct-killing had never taught him but that the physics of two bodies at close range made obvious.
Hound fought the clinch. Elbows in, chin tucked, the defensive protocols of a fighter who'd been grabbed before and knew the exits. He drove his knee upward — Level 7 power behind a targeted strike to Shin's midsection. The knee connected. Shin's core tightened. Seventeen Endurance held. He took the knee and maintained the clinch and Hound's second knee strike was weaker because the first had failed to create space and the energy spent without return was energy Hound didn't have to spend twice.
Shin dragged him down.
Not a technique. Not a throw from a martial discipline's catalogue. A drag — seventeen Strength applied to a body with twelve Strength resistance, the differential of five points becoming, in practical terms, the difference between a man trying to remain standing and a man who couldn't. Hound's feet left the ground's authority. His back hit the compacted earth with a sound that the scattered spectators barely registered, their attention on the main arena where a mid-tier bout was generating real noise.
Shin followed him down. Knee on Hound's chest. Forearm across his throat. The pin was crude — no hooks, no guard control, no understanding of ground-fighting positions beyond the fundamental reality that a heavier, stronger body on top of a lighter, weaker body produced an outcome that had been decided since the grip.
Hound bucked. His hips drove upward with the trained desperation of a fighter who knew that being pinned by a stronger opponent was an ending, not a pause. His hands pushed against Shin's forearm, his Level 7 Strength working the leverage that technique provided where raw force couldn't compete.
The forearm didn't move. Seventeen against twelve, applied through bone-to-bone contact, and the three seconds that Hound spent trying to bridge were three seconds that his lungs couldn't fully expand, his airway compressed not to unconsciousness but to the precise degree of restriction that made continuation inadvisable.
The handler's metal plate slapped. Two beats. The signal for cessation.
Hound stopped fighting. His hands dropped from Shin's forearm. His body went slack — not unconscious, not injured. Finished. The calculation complete: the stats didn't work, the technique differential was insufficient, and the remaining options all ended with the same forearm across the same throat.
Shin stood. His hands were shaking — not from exertion, from adrenaline. Seventeen stats in six categories and none of them regulated the chemical cascade that combat produced, the post-fight tremor that his construct-killing sessions had never generated because constructs didn't look at you before they died. Hound had looked at him. Had read him, adapted, fought intelligently, and lost not because he was bad at fighting but because his numbers were smaller.
The compacted earth had his sweat on it. His and Hound's, mingled in the spot where the pin had ended, two bodies' chemical evidence soaking into the same dirt that had absorbed a thousand other fighters' leavings.
The crowd — the sparse, distracted bottom-tier audience — offered a few scattered claps. Polite. Obligatory. The sound of people acknowledging that a thing had happened without being moved by it.
Hound got up. Rolled his shoulder, the one that Shin's grip had stressed, testing the joint with the clinical assessment of a professional checking his tools after a shift. His eyes found Shin's.
"Dock." He said the alias the way people said *sure*. "You fight like you've never fought a person before."
Shin wiped his hands on his pants. The shaking was subsiding. "First time in the Circuit."
"Not what I said." Hound rolled his shoulder again. Something in the joint clicked — audible at this distance, through this noise, because seventeen Perception didn't stop processing just because the fight was over. "Fought a lot of new guys. They're sloppy all over. You're sloppy in specific spots. Like you trained against something that doesn't move the way people move."
A careful man would have said nothing. A careful man would have collected his fifty credits and walked, because every word exchanged was a data point and every data point was a thread that someone could pull.
"Constructs," Shin said.
He didn't know why. The word left his mouth before the calculation completed — an honest answer to an honest observation, offered to a man who'd just lost a fight and had no reason to receive the truth and every reason to be handled with a comfortable lie.
Hound's eyes changed. Not wider — sharper. The way a lens adjusts. "Constructs. Dungeon constructs?"
"Done here?"
Shin walked toward the handler's table. Behind him, Hound said nothing else. But the silence had the specific texture of a man who'd filed something.
---
The handler counted fifty credits from a lockbox — physical bills, not digital transfer, because the Circuit's financial infrastructure existed in the space between paper and pretense. Shin took the money. Folded it. Put it in the pocket opposite the disc.
The disc was warm. Not Foundry-warm, not proximity-resonance warm, but the steady pilot-light temperature that had become its baseline since Level 1. Present. Processing. Doing its inscrutable work in the pocket of a man who'd just pinned another man to the ground for the price of a weapon.
He left through the corridor, the fire door, the storage room. The noodle restaurant was closing — the owner stacking chairs, the last customers paying tabs, the fluorescent lights yellowing with the particular fatigue of fixtures that had been on since morning. The street outside was Tier 5 at midnight: dark, populated by the people who couldn't afford to sleep and the people who chose not to, moving between pools of streetlight with the purposeful drift of an economy that never fully stopped.
Block 3's night market was six blocks south. Shin walked. The fifty credits in his pocket were the first money he'd earned that didn't come from carrying someone else's load, and the distinction registered in a way that his analytical mind catalogued but couldn't fully articulate — something about agency, about choosing to enter a ring and walking out with compensation for what his body could do rather than what his body could carry.
The night market was a permanent temporary installation — stalls and carts arranged in the same positions they'd occupied for years, the vendors' territorial claims enforced by precedent and the occasional fistfight rather than any formal lease. The crowd was thin at midnight but present — late-shift workers, insomniacs, and nocturnal entrepreneurs who constituted Tier 5's secondary economy.
The weapon vendor was at the market's south end, operating from a converted shipping container whose interior walls were lined with racks. Bladed weapons, blunt weapons, reinforced gloves, tactical harnesses — the detritus of the hunter economy, equipment that had been used, damaged, discarded, and recovered by the supply chain that connected Tier 1's waste to Tier 5's necessity.
The vendor was a woman in her fifties with the arms of a blacksmith and the appraisal stare of an antiques dealer. She watched Shin browse without commentary, her silence the professional courtesy of someone who understood that touching merchandise was part of the sales process and interrupting it was counterproductive.
Shin's hands moved along the racks. Swords — too expensive, the cheapest reclaimed short sword priced at two hundred credits, the kind of money that required four Circuit wins at minimum. Maces, flails, exotic implements that Shin couldn't name and wouldn't know how to hold. He moved past them to the smaller weapons. Daggers. Utility knives. Combat knives.
His fingers stopped on a blade. Seven inches. Single-edged. The handle was wrapped in cord that had been replaced at least once — the wrapping pattern mismatched at the join, two different hands' work overlapping. The blade itself was chipped near the base, re-ground to a functional edge, the original profile altered by the regrinding into something slightly asymmetric. Not pretty. Functional.
He picked it up. The balance was handle-heavy, the blade thinner than the original design intended because regrinding had removed material. His seventeen Perception read the steel's texture: tempered, decent quality underneath the cosmetic damage. And along the edge — a faint shimmer. Visible only because seventeen Perception operated in the enhanced spectrum that Level 1 had opened. A mana-conductive trace. The ghost of an enchantment that had been applied to the blade when it was new and expensive and in the hands of a real hunter, degraded now to a fraction of its original potency but still present.
"That's Tier 3 steel," the vendor said. Her voice was lower than he'd expected — a smoker's register, worn at the edges. "Kang Armory stamp on the tang, if you check. The enchantment's at maybe eight percent. Enough to cut mana-dense material. Not enough to actually channel anything."
"How much."
"Forty."
He had fifty. Forty for the knife left ten for food, transit, and the emergency fund that living in Tier 5 required the way breathing required oxygen.
"Thirty-five."
The vendor's mouth did something that wasn't a smile — a professional acknowledgment that negotiation had commenced, offered and accepted in the same gesture. "Thirty-eight. The enchantment trace is worth more than the steel. You won't find conductive edge under fifty anywhere else on this market."
She was right. Shin knew the night market's pricing from years of porter wages spent at these stalls, buying tape and ration bars and the expendable supplies that Tier 5 life consumed. A mana-conductive blade — even at eight percent — was premium inventory at the bottom of the market.
"Thirty-eight."
He paid. The vendor wrapped the knife in a strip of oiled cloth and handed it across with the transactional efficiency of a woman who'd sold ten thousand knives and felt nothing about any of them. Shin took it. The wrapped blade went into his belt alongside the broken sword shaft, and for a moment both weapons occupied the same space — the dead relic and the cheap replacement, overlapping like geological strata.
He left the sword shaft on the vendor's counter. She glanced at it. Said nothing. It joined the pile of trade-ins that accumulated daily, broken things left by people who'd found better things, the market's circulatory system processing one more exchange.
---
The walk back to the barracks took forty minutes at a pace that Shin deliberately kept below Level 1 normal. The knife sat against his hip, its weight negligible but its presence significant — the first real weapon he'd owned since the broken sword, the first tool purpose-built for the work that the Level 2 grind demanded.
The fight replayed. Not the victory — the failures. The two clean hits that Hound had landed. The jab that grazed his cheek because his guard was construct-wide. The cross that connected with his temple because his duck was a whole-body flail rather than a trained slip. The grab that won the fight was not a technique — it was a stat check, a brute-force solution to a skill problem, and brute force scaled poorly. A Level 10 fighter with Hound's technique would read the grab, counter it, and exploit the gap that stat advantage couldn't cover.
The Circuit could teach him. Every bout was a lesson — a live-fire classroom where the curriculum was human combat and the tuition was the damage he'd absorb while learning. His seventeen Intelligence processed fight data faster than Hound had expected, faster than a Level 8 brain should, and the learning curve would steepen if he survived the early sessions.
Two days. The next fight night. Another bout. Another fifty credits if he won, another data set if he lost, another step on a path that had replaced the Foundry's amber corridors with the Circuit's compacted earth and sweat-stained concrete.
He reached the barracks at 1:15 AM. The container was dark. The other porters were asleep — shapes under thin blankets, breathing in the irregular chorus of men whose bodies worked all day and shut down the moment horizontal surfaces became available. Cho's schedule had the dawn shift at 5:30, which gave Shin four hours of rest that his Level 1 body would convert into full recovery with an efficiency that the pre-Level-1 version could never have managed.
He lay on the bent cot. The knife under his pillow — handle accessible, blade angled away, a sleeping arrangement that porter instinct had taught him years ago when keeping your things close was the difference between having things and having nothing.
The disc in his pocket. Warm. Patient. Calibrating whatever it calibrated in the pocket of a man whose life now divided into segments that didn't touch: mornings at the docks, carrying drums and pretending to be baseline. Nights at the Circuit, trading punches for credits and pretending to be Level 8. And somewhere between those pretenses, the actual work — the grind toward 10,000 experience that required dungeons he couldn't access and monsters he couldn't find and a weapon that he'd bought with another man's bruises.
The knife's eight-percent enchantment hummed against his hip, a frequency too low for unaided ears but clear as a tuning fork through seventeen Perception. Residual magic in reclaimed steel, fading but not gone, holding on the way everything in Tier 5 held on — through stubbornness, through necessity, through the refusal to be fully spent.
Shin closed his eyes. Sleep came faster than it used to. The body's systems cycled down with the same clean responsiveness that they cycled up — Level 1 efficiency applied to rest, recovering what the fight and the walk and the day's theatrical drum-carrying had spent.
Tomorrow, the docks. The day after, the Circuit. The knife in his belt. The disc in his pocket. The alias on a data pad in a basement six blocks south, typed by a woman with cropped hair who'd already forgotten the face attached to it.
Not everyone had forgotten.
---
Six blocks south, in the concrete basement that smelled like old sweat and older blood, the scarred man sat at a desk that hadn't been there when the spectators occupied the space. The folding table, the data pad, the clipboard with its paper log — his post-event station, occupied after every fight night while the maintenance crew hosed the arena and the handlers counted the take.
He was reviewing the evening's bouts. The data pad held the digital records — fighter aliases, outcomes, time-to-finish, notable techniques. The clipboard held the other notes. The ones that didn't enter the system. Observations that lived in ink on paper because paper didn't transmit and paper didn't sync and paper stayed exactly where you put it.
Tonight's page had eleven entries. Bout seven — Dock versus Hound, arena two, bottom tier — carried more ink than the other ten combined.
The scarred man picked up a phone. Not a smart phone — a burner, disposable, the kind that Tier 5's economy sold in packs of three for twenty credits. He dialed from memory. Two rings.
"New entry tonight. Bottom-tier, arena two. Alias: Dock. Registered Level 8, open-hand." His voice was flat, professional, the vocal equivalent of his clipboard — precise data delivered without editorial. "Stats don't match the registration. Grab strength reads Level 10 minimum. Endurance is above the bracket. And the movement pattern — he fights like a dungeon runner, not a Circuit scrapper. Construct-trained. He's been killing things that don't think."
A pause. The voice on the other end said something short.
"No. Nothing confirmed." The scarred man turned the clipboard page, reviewing his own handwriting with the critical eye of a man who trusted his observations but verified them anyway. "But the registry flagged a zero-to-one anomaly in Tier 5 three days ago. Unregistered. No guild. Twenty years old. If this is the same kid—"
The voice cut him off. Said something longer. The scarred man listened. His pen tapped the clipboard twice — a habit, a metronome, the tick of a man whose patience was professional rather than natural.
"Understood. I'll match him again Thursday. Put him against someone with real technique, see if the stat read holds." A pause. "And Kase? If this is the anomaly — if this kid is the one the Bureau flagged — then he walked into my ring on his own legs and gave us a fake name and thought nobody would notice."
He hung up. Set the burner on the desk. Looked at the clipboard entry for bout seven, the word DOCK written in capitals, the notes beneath it that described a fighter whose body didn't match his alias and whose instincts didn't match his species.
The maintenance crew's hose sprayed the arena floor. Water sluiced across the compacted earth, carrying the evening's residue toward a drain that emptied into the same sewage system that ran beneath all of Tier 5 — the same pipes where a mana sensor, installed six days ago, was recording everything that moved above it.
"Construct-trained," the scarred man said to the empty room. His pen drew a circle around the word DOCK. "Who the hell trains on constructs?"
