Morrigan stood frozen in the center of the circle like a statue carved from stone.
For a brief, glorious moment, the entire arena forgot how to breathe. Faces in the stands were painted with disbelief, mouths hanging open, eyes wide. Up in the Guardian seats, Orgack leaned forward so far his massive frame threatened to topple the railing. Pazuzu's calm expression had cracked for the first time, his black-sclera eyes betraying genuine shock but lacked a sign of worry.
Nobody dared let their bodies move or mouth speak. The only sound was the slow drip of water falling from Morrigan's basin onto the arena floor.
Grub didn't waste the moment.
He channeled anima reinforcement into his legs and launched himself forward causing the ground below to shatter lightly, and crossed the distance to the circle in three explosive strides. His feet hit the chalk line and then he swiftly drove both hands into Morrigan's shoulders, throwing his entire body weight into the shove.
Her body suddenly jolted back to life.
Her eyes snapped back to focus and her hands shot forward, catching both of his wrists before the push could land. Their fingers locked together and their arms trembled as and pressed against each other, two bodies locked in a raw contest of strength.
From the stands it looked absurd. A battered, bleeding boy pushing against a hunched old turtle woman in the middle of a chalk circle. Two bulls locking horns, neither willing to give an inch.
Horror rippled through the crowd. Villagers who had been laughing minutes ago now gripped their seats. This Sky-Fallen trash was matching the Great Sage in a test of raw power. Some couldn't process it. Others simply refused to.
Pazuzu especially had a look of disbelief on his face.
Morrigan smiled through the strain, her beak curling upward even as her feet scraped against the dirt.
"Your plan was smart, cutie. Waste my Anima, then knock my basin over." She pushed harder. "I'm guessing my cute little daughter told you about me, huh?"
Grub said nothing. His face remained blank, his blackish-green eyes locked onto hers without a shred of readable emotion.
Then he spoke. "Yeah. She did. I wouldn't have stood a chance otherwise."
For a moment Morrigan simply looked at him. Then her brow furrowed.
"Were your eyes always filled with such shadow?"
The question hung between them for half a second before the struggle consumed it. Morrigan's superior technique began telling. Despite their equalized power, her footwork was better, her leverage was sharper, and she started driving Grub backward. His heels scraped grooves into the arena floor as she pressed him step by step toward the edge of the circle.
I can't be overpowered now. Not when I'm this close.
Grub reached deeper. Past the anima and warmth. Into something colder and far more familiar.
The darkness he had painstakingly restored during the night.
Black residue crawled across his forearms. The intrusive weight surged to life in his chest, cold and heavy and intoxicating after days of emptiness. The Nihil he had gathered in the forest the previous night — hunting creatures in the dark while the village slept — flooded into his muscles. His veins swelled with borrowed power.
Grub stepped forward as Morrigan's eyes widened. Her feet, which had been advancing steadily, suddenly stopped. Then they started sliding backward.
"What the—"
The old kappa gritted her teeth and dug in, her sandals burying into the dirt as Grub pressed her toward the far edge of the circle. She wasn't making it easy however. Every inch she gave cost him tremendous effort, her resistance fierce and stubborn despite the shifting momentum.
Then Grub released one of her hands and reared his arm back. In a flash, he punched the Great Sage Equal to Heaven across the face.
Immediately, the crowd erupted. Screams and boos thundered through the stands like a wave crashing against rock. Villagers who had never seen anyone lay a hand on Morrigan in combat were on their feet, shouting, pointing, some covering their mouths in horror.
Morrigan, however, simply laughed and threw her own punch.
Grub's head snapped sideways and stars burst across his vision. Blood sprayed from his already damaged lip. Yet all he did was smile and focus Nihil into his knuckles, then swung back.
And suddenly they were trading blows.
Fists flew between them in a savage rhythm. Grub punched, Morrigan punched, Grub punched again. Blocking was an art foreign to the two fighters in the arena. Neither of them retreated. They stood in the center of the circle and traded blows, they were just two fighters who had decided that defense was an insult.
The crowd watched in disbelief. The outsider and vile criminal was now trrading punches with their glorious Morrigan, who was Equal-to-Heaven. But Grub barely noticed the spectators anymore.
Through every collision, he tracked two things simultaneously. The first was a faint urge to kill building in the back of his skull — a quiet hunger that whispered more, you must finish her — but the voice was weak, easily ignored beneath the roar of his focus.
The second thing he tracked was the ground behind Morrigan.
Approximately four paces behind her left heel was a shallow depression he had carved into the arena floor the night before using rocks and his bare hands, then covered with a thin layer of loose dirt. It was entirely invisible to anyone who wasn't looking for it.
He just needed to get her there.
Blow after blow rocked both of their heads. Morrigan's face was starting to show damage — a cut above her eye, swelling along her cheek, a trickle of blood from her beak. Grub's own face was a mess of bruises and dried blood, his nose crooked and his jaw throbbing.
Then Grub attempted something he had practiced all night in his cell. Something he still couldn't maintain for more than a single strike.
He caught Morrigan's incoming fist with one hand, absorbing the impact through his palm. With his other hand, he drew his Anima forward — the warm green shimmer gathering around his knuckles — and then layered Nihil on top of it.
The two powers collided inside his fist. They didn't want to coexist. The warmth of anima resisted the cold of Nihil. The green fought the black. Grub forced them together anyway as his arm shook violently.Maintaining the combination was agonizing. Sweat burst across his brow as he fought to hold the conflicting energies together in a single motion.
His teeth ground against each other. He couldn't maintain it for long. Seconds at most.
The crowd went quiet for a different reason now. Across the arena, faces shifted from anger to unease. Something was radiating from the boy's fist that made the air feel heavy and wrong. Even from the stands, the energy pouring off his hand felt suffocating — a sinister pressure that made skin crawl and instincts scream. The strange aura surrounding Grub's arm felt suffocating.
Luthiel's golden eyes had gone wide with pure terror. Orobas gripped the railing so hard his claws left marks. Even the Guardians looked disturbed.
Morrigan stared at his fist. For the first time in the entire match, real concern crossed her face.
"What the hell? Why is your Anima so wrong and sinister all of a sudden?"
Grub blinked. Why was she reacting like this now? He had been hitting her with Nihil-enhanced punches for the last minute and she hadn't flinched. Was it the combination? The Anima and Nihil merged together — did that create something different? Something worse? .He filed the question away and threw the punch and the impact split the air.
A shockwave rippled outward from the point of contact, kicking up dust across the arena floor. The sound that accompanied it was deep and percussive, echoing off the arena walls like a drumbeat from somewhere underground.
Morrigan's head cracked backward. Blood burst from her nose in a thin arc. Her feet skidded back three inches in the dirt.
The Nihil inside Grub's body faded. The black residue evaporated from his arms like smoke in wind, leaving his skin pale and bare and the weight in his chest vanished. He hadn't collected a lot of Nihil and was empty once again. Completely, utterly empty.
Morrigan was still standing. Bloodied, beaten, her flower crown askew, her basin dangerously low — but standing. Through ragged breaths, the old kappa wiped the blood from her beak with the back of her hand and looked up at him.
Grub looked at her with a blank expression before frowning
"I..."
His chest rose and fell heavily. "I didn't mean to take it that far." Grub spoke with a troubled expression on his face.
"I don't know what happened."
Morrigan shook her head and raised her fists.
"Don't apologize. You're fighting for your life." She spat blood onto the chalk. "Besides, it's not over. I'm not out of the ring yet."
Grub glanced at the ground behind her. The divot sat roughly two paces from her heels.
"You're right." A smile crept across his battered face. "Get ready for my special move."
Morrigan raised her guard, her eyes sharpening. "Bring it, kid."
Grub raised both hands high above his head. Morrigan tensed, shifting her weight forward, ready to catch whatever devastating technique the boy had been hiding. Then Grub brought his hands down to his waistband and unbuckled his belt.
And pulled his pants down.
The arena went silent. Very different from the shocked silence of the basin spill. A different kind of silence entirely. The kind of silence that could only be produced by hundreds of people simultaneously failing to understand what they were looking at.
Morrigan gawked at him in utter shocked. Her mouth hung open like a trapdoor. Then her face twitched and her head tipped backward and she howled.
The laughter that erupted from the old kappa was volcanic. It burst out of her with a force that shook her entire body, rattling the flowers in her crown and sending the water in her basin sloshing violently. She doubled over, clutching her stomach, cackling so hard that tears streamed down her beaked face. And as she laughed, she stumbled.
One step backward, then another. Her body convulsing with each roar of laughter, her feet moving without purpose or awareness, carrying her away from the boy who had just done the single most ridiculous thing she had ever witnessed in years of combat.
Without realizing it her left heel caught the divot. The shallow depression grabbed her foot like a trap. Her ankle twisted, her balance vanished, and the Great Sage Equal to Heaven toppled backward with a graceless thud — landing squarely on her backside outside the chalk line.
Out of bounds.
The arena remained frozen. The silence was so complete that Grub could hear birds chirping in the trees beyond the walls. Hundreds of faces stared at the scene before them — a boy standing in the middle of the ring with his pants around his ankles, and their legendary chief sitting in the dirt outside the circle, still laughing.
Nobody had begun to process what just happened. The mood had whiplashed from terror at the sinister Anima to bewilderment at the dropped pants to stunned paralysis at the result. The confusion caused every brain in the audience to be several steps behind reality.
Grub calmly reached down and pulled his pants back up with a calm face, for this too had been part of the plan.
He knew how easily Morrigan laughed. He had watched her basin slosh every time she cackled during their conversations. During the interrogation, during training, during every casual exchange. The old kappa loved to laugh, and when she did, her whole body committed to it.
The divot had been carved the night before and he used the laughter as the vehicle to get her there.
He had planned to either fight her toward the divot through sustained pressure or find a way to make her move toward it herself. After emptying his Nihil reserves with that final punch, he realized brute force was no longer an option. So he chose the other path.
The path that nobody — not Morrigan, not the Guardians, not a single soul in the arena — could have predicted. Because predicting it would require imagining that someone fighting for their life against the strongest person in the village would pull down their pants. And nobody imagines that.
Morrigan finally stopped laughing. She sat in the dirt for a moment, wiping her eyes, her shoulders still shaking with residual chuckles. Then she looked up at Grub with an expression that mixed genuine admiration with absolute disbelief.
"Wow." She shook her head. "That was so out of character for you."
Grub shrugged. "That's how I knew it would work. Because you wouldn't expect it."
Morrigan chuckled. "Even that was planned, huh? You really came into this match with a full strategy."
"Every part of it."
"Welp." She pushed herself to her feet and dusted off her robe. "I guess you won, you little cheater."
A Guardian finally rose from his seat. The poor man looked utterly uncertain. Like nobody had prepared him for this possibility.
"I... suppose that the match has been decided."
He cleared his throat and raised his voice, though it cracked slightly on the delivery.
"The winner is..."
He looked down at Grub.
"The outsider."
"GRUB!"
No applause followed his name. The crowd still hadn't recovered from the strange events. Most of them looked confused. Some looked offended and a few looked traumatized. The crowd sat in stunned, bewildered, slightly traumatized silence.
Except for one person.
Luthiel stood up in the stands, her golden eyes shining, and clapped. A loud, enthusiastic, solitary applause that echoed across the quiet arena like a bell.
Grub caught her eye and gave her a thumbs up and her smile widened so much it looked like it might split her face.
Morrigan walked to his side, rolling her neck and wincing at the bruises. The water in her basin was refilling slowly, the level rising as her Anima restored what had been lost. The Guardian in the high seat looked profoundly uneasy but continued with his duty.
"As the victor, you now hold the title of overseer for one trial. You may choose the verdict."
Grub knew his answer. He had known it before the match started.
He looked around at the crowd. At the villagers who had laughed at him and jeered and thrown food and the Guardians who had beaten him and dragged him through the streets. He focused on Pazuzu, whose bandaged face was contorted with something between fury and disbelief.
Then he turned to the Guardian and spoke clearly.
"I would like to declare myself a free man."