Backstage was cooler. Quiet. Like stepping into the back room of a restaurant that’d just served three hundred screaming custors.
Lucen rolled his shoulders as he passed the resting booth. His left elbow still ached faintly from the early block. Nothing serious. Just a reminder that Rikta had so weight when he wasn’t overcooked.
A door ahead hissed open, and Gen stepped through it holding a bottle of sothing that looked like mana soda and disappointnt.
He raised it like a lazy toast.
"Well, well," Gen said, grinning. "Ghostweave, huh?"
Lucen sighed. "Kill ."
Gen handed him the drink.
"Be honest. Did you practice the whole ’walk off without a scratch’ thing or did that just happen?"
Lucen cracked the tab open. Didn’t sip yet.
"He swung too hard. His own body did half the job."
Gen nodded. "Classic first tir on a booster. All burn, no aim."
Lucen finally drank. Bitter. Not cold. Functional.
"You post this yet?" he asked, nodding at Gen’s device.
"Not yet," Gen replied. "You want to?"
Lucen didn’t answer right away.
Then: "No tags. No real na. Clip the clean parts."
"You an the part where you kicked him into next Tuesday or the part where you walked off like a depressed CEO?"
Lucen took another drink. "Both."
Gen tapped sothing on his pad. "On it."
Behind them, soone shouted from a side corridor.
Another fighter. Or maybe a manager. Didn’t matter.
"Yo, is that the guy? The one that smoked Rikta?"
Lucen kept walking.
Gen followed.
"You know," Gen said, voice light, "if you keep this up, we’re gonna have to start turning down guild offers instead of begging for work."
Lucen exhaled slowly.
Then muttered, "They better have decent rates."
—
The mont the side doors hissed open, the air changed.
No longer recycled cool mana-vent air. This was outside air. Still city, still filtered, but with a layer of human heat baked into it. Breath, concrete, and the faint whine of crowd noise trying to rise past the outer security glyphs.
Lucen adjusted his hood slightly, letting the fabric sit lower over his eyes.
Gen held the door for half a second longer, like he was bracing for a temperature drop, then stepped through.
The crowd outside the lower arena level wasn’t huge, maybe fifty, sixty people, but they were loud.
Lined up against the handrails, phones up, glyph flashes going off every couple seconds. Mostly younger. Mostly excited.
One guy near the front was holding up a glittery cardboard sign that read "GHOSTWEAVE GOES HARD" with two questionably drawn spell circles and a sparkly sticker that probably wasn’t regulation.
Lucen stopped two steps outside the threshold.
Gen didn’t.
"Just walk, man," Gen said, voice low. "Look confident. Or pissed. You’re good at both."
Lucen gave him a side-eye.
"I’m not doing interviews."
"You won’t have to. Just nod, maybe grunt."
Lucen muttered, "Great. Public performance art."
"Hey!" soone shouted from the left railing. "Yo, you’re that guy, right? The fake-out king?!"
Lucen kept walking.
"Bro, the footwork was NUTS!"
Gen tilted his head toward Lucen. "You hearing that? You’ve got a fanbase forming and we haven’t even cashed the stream revenue yet."
"Make it stop."
Another voice called out, this one higher, female, excited.
"Can you do the elbow thing again? That finisher was sick!"
Lucen looked at her like she’d just asked him to recreate a war cri.
"No," he said flatly.
Gen laughed once under his breath. "You’re so approachable."
Lucen walked a bit faster.
A kid near the exit barrier reached out a fist toward him. "Yo, Ghostweave! Respect, man!"
Lucen glanced once. Then tapped the fist lightly with one knuckle.
That alone made the kid scream like he’d just been knighted.
Gen leaned in as they reached the stairs down to the lower street gate.
"You know you’re gonna end up in a remix, right?"
Lucen grunted. "I’m disabling notifications for life."
A guy with a jacket three sizes too big and a mic glyph clipped to his collar jogged up alongside them. "Excuse , sorry—just thirty seconds. Ghostweave, right? How does it feel humiliating an A-rank brawler with nothing but support glyphs and counterplay? Is this the beginning of sothing big?"
Lucen didn’t stop walking.
Gen smiled and answered for him. "No comnt. But I like your phrasing."
"Is he joining a team? Ghostweave—are you solo queueing all the way up?"
Lucen cut in, finally.
"I’m going ho."
That was it.
No signature line.
No punchy outro.
Just a tired seventeen-year-old with too many spells and too much attention, trying to make it to a damn train station.
Gen clapped him once on the shoulder as the last security gate opened ahead of them.
"You sure you don’t want to start selling shirts?"
Lucen didn’t look at him.
He just muttered, "They’d misspell it."
—
The broadcast screen hovered three feet off the floor, set just below the open balcony rail where the breeze kept shifting the curtain line. No sound. Just captions, overlays, and the looping final monts of the match.
Elbow. Floor. Silence.
Varik sat back on the black leather couch, one hand wrapped around a sweating glass. Not whiskey. Sothing clearer.
Unflavored. Clean. The kind of drink you sipped when there was too much to think about and too little left to prove.
The replay froze as Rikta hit the ground.
Again.
Varik exhaled slowly through his nose. Not a sigh. Just breath.
"You see the na they gave him?" a voice said from the kitchen.
Varik didn’t glance back. He just let the last fra hang on the screen, Lucen turning away, shoulders level, hood half up, one boot already leaving the cara’s field.
"I saw it," he said.
The new man stepped into the room holding a datapad and a half-eaten pack of dried mana jerky.
He wore a dark gray overcoat, half-buttoned, indoor gloves still on. Tall, maybe mid-twenties. Pale, angular face. Not sickly. Just like he didn’t bother with sun anymore.
The natag on his system band was clipped off. Only one word left etched into the plastital band above the wrist.
KARIN.
He tossed the datapad onto the low table in front of the couch, not bothering to aim it well. It slid across and tapped the bottom edge of Varik’s drink.
"Ghostweave," Karin said, chewing. "Not terrible."
Varik gave a neutral grunt. "Could’ve been worse."
"Could’ve been ’Little Glyphs’ or sothing streambait."
Karin dropped onto the single chair opposite the screen and kicked his feet up on the fra.
"They’re already clipping it. You want trics?"
"Later."
Karin looked toward the screen, chewing slower now. "He doesn’t flinch."
"No."
"Doesn’t pose."
"No."
"Doesn’t care that the other guy was juiced."
Varik tapped the edge of his glass once. "That part wasn’t obvious."
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