The pole was still crooked when Yui reached him.
Elias slapped at the incoming arm with more panic than technique. The contact jarred his wrist up to the elbow, but it knocked the strike off line. Yui's fist passed close enough for Elias to feel air move across his cheek.
Yui's attention sharpened.
Elias wasted the opening.
He twisted into a kick, aiming for the ribs because that was where people aimed when they had watched fights and learned nothing useful from them. Yui dipped under it, stepped inside, and drove his heel up into the side of Elias's helmet.
The stadium lights smeared sideways.
Elias hit the dirt hard enough for the suit to chirp another reserve warning. The pole came apart in his hands, fading into flecks of dull metal before it ever became useful. One piece stuck to his palm, cold and gritty, then broke down into dust.
Yui stopped a few steps away. "That was not full force from me."
"Comforting enough to put on a pillow," Elias said.
"Seventy percent output is authorized now," Yui said, then came in faster.
Speed was only the obvious part. Elias could see pieces of the attack and still fail to put his body in the right place. His feet dragged through the dirt. His hands lifted late. Every correction arrived after pain had already explained the mistake.
The first palm strike caught him across the mouth. The suit softened the force too late to save his lip. The second hit his shoulder and sent numbness down to his fingers. The third came for the center of his chest.
Dot screamed and shoved both hands against the shard. A jagged metal block appeared between Elias and Yui.
Yui struck it instead.
Spikes scraped his glove. He pulled back before they caught, then knocked the block away with a short backhand that sent it tumbling across the dirt. It broke apart before it stopped moving.
Elias kicked from the ground because the rest of him had no better suggestion.
Yui caught his ankle.
The throw was almost casual. Elias turned in the air badly and landed on his side. Dirt got into his mouth. The suit absorbed enough to keep bones from breaking, but it did not make the landing pleasant. Pain spread across his hip, back, and shoulder in separate complaints.
The collar voice spoke near his ear. "Impact disruption active, reserve at forty-one percent."
Forty-one sounded like a number with an expiration date. The same number appeared on the nearest overhead display, large enough for every technician behind the glass to see from their stations. Nobody moved. Nobody called the test. That told Elias more about the rules than Oliver had.
Yui glanced at the number and adjusted his stance. He was not reckless. That almost made it worse. Reckless men could be baited. Yui was measuring each hit, watching how much the suit took, how much Elias took, and where Dot tried to wedge herself between them.
Dot hovered in front of him, shaking hard enough that her edges blurred.
"I do not know how to open the vision again. I pressed the shard before, and it happened, but now I keep reaching and there is nothing."
Elias spat dirt from his mouth. "Dot, breathe if you can manage it."
"I do not breathe like humans," she said, and her hands pressed uselessly against her own chest.
"Then do the emotional version instead."
Yui walked toward them without hurrying. That made it worse. Fast attacks demanded panic. Slow walking gave Elias time to understand what was coming.
He forced himself to one knee.
The memory from the road fight came in broken pieces. Pressure. Darkness. A shape forming from possibility. A phrase that had felt less spoken than uncovered under his skin.
Break the cage before transforming.
He did not understand it. He also had no idea left that hurt less.
Yui stepped in and drove an elbow into his chest. The suit locked, but the force still shoved Elias backward. A follow up punch snapped his head to the side. He staggered, caught himself with one hand, and nearly fell anyway.
"Most bearers surrender around this point," Yui said. "There is no shame in admitting the gap."
"I am not worried about shame right now."
"Then worry about injury instead of shame." Yui raised his hand again, and Elias brought his palms together before he could talk himself out of it.
The clap cracked across the stadium. It did nothing to Yui, but it did something to Elias.
The pain in his chest gathered around the shard. Not sharper, not worse, more focused. The contact points in the suit pulsed against his skin. Dot flinched with the sound, her hands snapping closer to the shard.
Elias closed his eyes because sight was only giving him failure.
"Show me the way and open the path," he said.
The words were rough in his mouth. They did not feel noble. They felt stolen from a place that had been waiting for him to get desperate enough to use them.
The field dropped into gray.
Sound thinned until the stadium became pressure and lines. Yui's body flattened into moving force. His shoulders carried one direction. His hips carried another. The dirt showed the path of his next step before the foot moved.
At the center of it all, Elias saw metal springs stacked in an impossible shape.
Each coil held force.
Each gap showed a direction.
The shape was not a weapon yet. It was a question about release, pressure, and timing. Elias reached for it and felt Dot reach with him from the other side of the shard.
Her fear was still there.
So was her stubbornness.
The springs turned in the gray space, answering both of them at once.
Dot's voice reached him from far away.
"I see it too, Elias, and I can see it clearly."
Yui's next step entered the path Elias had already seen.