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Elira's eyebrows climbed. "The new one? Against him?"

"She's not that new anymore," I said.

Taren arrived next with an actual chair he'd carried from his own garden, set it down with the calm of a man who fully expected to be here a while, and called back over his shoulder for someone to bring the good bread if anyone was making a trip. Caelan didn't bother with the wall at all. He came straight through the gap in the fence that had stopped being a boundary years before I ever lived on this side of it, dropped onto the grass, and asked who had money on the outcome.

Her first week, every one of those arrivals would have earned a full turn of Jade's head, her weight shifting back onto her heels, a hand drifting half an inch toward her belt before she caught herself doing it. Kellan dropping over food without warning. Taren fixing a weapon in the yard without being asked. Caelan treating the gap between two houses as barely worth acknowledging. She used to track each one of them the way she tracked everything new, cataloguing exits, counting bodies, waiting to see what they wanted before she decided how much of herself to put away. The squad never pushed, never made her feel unwelcome, and slowly Jade had relaxed around them too.

Now she didn't look up from her own stretching until Elira's voice cut through, and even then it was just a glance, quick and unbothered, filed away as nothing before she went back to rolling her shoulder. Argentite piling into the yard mid-spar had stopped being an event. It was just Tuesday.

"Nobody's betting," Corian said.

"Yet."

Jade's attention flicked once toward the growing crowd along the wall, and I caught the half second where her jaw tightened, the old instinct rising, too many strangers, too many eyes. Then she exhaled through her nose and rolled her wrist around the blade instead, and the tension didn't disappear so much as get put somewhere she could use it.

Dax didn't wait for an announcement. He just moved.

The first strike came low and fast, aimed at her leading knee, and Jade pivoted off it clean, blade angling to redirect rather than block. Steel scraped steel. He recovered faster than I expected from a man his size, already circling before she'd finished her turn, testing her guard on the other side with two quick strikes that she caught, and answered with a counter that nearly opened his forearm.

Nearly.

He pulled back a half inch too late for comfort, grin widening instead of fading.

She came at him with a combination I recognized from three different Masters stitched together into something faster than any of them had taught her alone, blade low, then high, then a feint that turned into a real strike aimed at his collarbone. Dax read the feint half a second before it landed and twisted clear, but the real strike still caught the edge of his sleeve and split it clean along the seam.

His eyes flicked to the torn fabric, then back to her, weighing something before he adjusted his stance a fraction wider.

He came back harder after that, driving her back three steps with a series of strikes that gave her no room to counter, only defend, blade meeting blade in a rhythm too fast to follow as individual moves anymore. I stopped seeing technique and started seeing two people who'd both spent their whole lives learning how not to die, throwing everything they had at each other because neither one intended to be the reason this ended early.

Jade's back foot caught the edge of the training mat. She used it, rolled her weight onto it and used the give to drop under his next strike entirely, coming up inside his guard with the blade angled at his ribs.

Dax split into two.

Jade stumbled, an actual half step back, guard dropping for the length of one badly timed breath. She hadn't known he could do that. Nobody had warned her, and I watched the information land somewhere behind her eyes half a second too late, the kind of gap that got people killed in a fight that mattered.

The second Dax peeled away from the first mid-motion, no telegraph I could catch even watching for it, and where there had been one man closing the distance there were suddenly two, one high and one low, both already moving.

She caught herself before either reached her, jaw setting hard, but the half step had cost her ground she didn't get back.

"That's cheating," Kellan called from the wall.

Both of them came at her together after that, trading the lead so smoothly I lost track of which body had struck last and which one was already circling for the next opening. A single opponent she read like a book. Two of the same man on separate timing was something else entirely, and it showed in the extra half beat she spent checking both directions instead of trusting either.

She gave ground in short, controlled steps, blade catching one strike and then the other, until the low one drove under her guard and buried a shoulder into her ribs hard enough to fold her forward. The high one used the opening, a boot sweeping her back leg out before she'd finished absorbing the first hit.

She went down.

Not clean. She twisted on the way, took most of the fall on her shoulder instead of her back, and rolled straight through it, coming up already swinging at whichever body stood closer. Steel met air. Both of them had already repositioned.

"Impressive," one of them said. I couldn't tell which.

She caught the low one across the forearm on her next exchange, hard enough to draw a real hiss instead of a taunt, and pressed the advantage before it could recover, blade angling in for what should have been a clean disarm.

The high one closed the last step at the same instant and simply folded into him, one shape collapsing into the other so fast I couldn't have told you which had been real a heartbeat before, and Dax came out the other side already inside her reach, closing his hand around the wrist that had been half a second from disarming him.

Jade's whole body reacted to that instead, one man standing where there should still have been two, and the half beat of confusion was all he needed. He used her own forward momentum to spin her past him, and before she'd fully recovered his arm was locked across her collarbone from behind, blade gone, her own weapon hand pinned uselessly against her side.

"Pin," he said, flat and even, no grin in it. "That's the fight."