Lucent's stomach dropped. They didn't want a winner.

They wanted a showman.

The Pit thrummed like a dying engine.

Underground arena—illegal circuits where coders and street mages pushed their Conduits to the limit, gambling on glitch battles and raw Aether surges. But seeing it was something else.

The air smelled of burnt air and sweat. The walls were lined with jury-rigged dampeners to keep corporate scanners from picking up the illegal glyphwork. And at the center of it all, the Ring—a sunken concrete basin where two Conduits faced off, their AetherPhones casting jagged shadows across the crowd.

One fighter was corporate. Clean-cut, with a licensed Nimbrix battle-rig strapped to his forearm, its approved glyphs flickering in precise, military patterns.

The other was wild.

She moved like her bones were liquid, her Conduit—a scavenged WhiteRoot prototype—spitting corrupted glyphs that twisted in the air like snakes. The crowd roared as her latest cast hit the corporate fighter's defenses. His glyphs shattered, and for a heartbeat, the arena lights dimmed as raw Aether surged.

The corporate fighter dropped.

"That's Vesper," Raker muttered, steering Lucent through the crowd. "No license. No training. Just instinct." He grinned. "And she's not even the best here."

Lucent's throat went dry. The fight hadn't been about credits or territory. It had been about the glyphs themselves—about seeing how far they could bend before they broke.

And the crowd loved it.

Raker shoved a drink into his hand. "You're not here to watch, code-rat." He nodded toward a rusted terminal at the edge of the ring. "C'mon, you're here to play."

Lucent stared at the screen in his hand. The glyphs pulsed, impatient.

Somewhere in the crowd, a voice shouted: "Who's next?"

The AetherPhone hummed in response.

The first rule of the Pit?

No rules.

Lucent's opponent was a GhostKey runner, his Conduit a Frankenstein mess of stolen corporate tech and jailbroken glyphware. The crowd jeered as Lucent stepped into the ring, his scavenged AetherPhone looking laughably primitive next to the hacker's rig.

Then the glyphs flared to life.

Lucent's fingers twitched as the GhostKey runner's glyphs sliced through the air—jagged, aggressive lines of stolen corporate code repurposed for street warfare. The crowd roared as the attack nearly breached his makeshift defenses, but Lucent wasn't watching the impact.

He was watching the patterns.

The way the hacker's thumb jerked left before each strike. The microsecond delay between glyph activation and execution. The faint shimmer of unstable Aether where the code had been poorly optimized.

The second attack came faster—a volley of disintegration glyphs that cost more credits than Lucent made in a month. He dodged, but not before catching the exact sequence of runes as they flashed on his opponent's screen. His own scavenged AetherPhone burned in his grip, its cracked display struggling to render what his mind had already absorbed.

Too much corporate bloat in the initialization sequence.Redundant failsafes slowing the core response.A hesitation—just 0.3 seconds—between glyph chains.

Weaknesses.

Lucent exhaled. Let the hacker think he was retreating. Let the crowd jeer. His fingers moved without conscious thought, reconstructing the attack's framework in his mind even as he pretended to fumble with his phone.

Then—

He struck.

The glyph that flared to life above his palm wasn't a copy. It was something leaner, stripped of corporate redundancies, its edges honed by street-level efficiency. Where the hacker's version had wasted energy on flashy visual effects, Lucent's was a scalpel.

The arena's dampeners screamed as the glyph connected.

For a heartbeat, the entire Pit held its breath.

The GhostKey runner's rig imploded—not with fireworks, but with a sound like a sigh. His stolen AetherPhone crumbled to dust between his fingers, its circuits unraveling at the code level.

Silence.

Then the crowd erupted—in disappointment.

The fight had ended too cleanly. Too quickly. No flashing lights, no heart-stopping near misses—just efficient, brutal victory.

Management wouldn't be happy.

A heavy hand clapped his shoulder. "That's three pay cuts in a row, code-rat." The Pit's overseer, a hulking man with a Myriad enforcement glyph glowing faintly under his collar, leaned in. His breath reeked of synth-whiskey. "Entertainment sells. You? You're making people yawn."

Lucent swallowed the retort on his tongue. Last time he'd argued, they'd "accidentally" fried his primary Conduit mid-match. Now he was stuck with this piece-of-shit backup phone—an old Aetherion model with a cracked core and a battery that overheated if he so much as glanced at a complex glyph.

The overseer jerked his chin toward the betting stands, where disappointed gamblers were cashing out early. "Next fight, you give them a show. Or you're working off your debt in the scrap yards."

The next opponent stepped into the ring, and Lucent's stomach dropped.

Vesper.

Her modified WhiteRoot Conduit gleamed under the arena lights, its exposed Aether veins pulsing with barely contained energy. The crowd erupted—she was a fan favorite, all flash and fury, her matches ending in spectacular, screen-melting finales.

Lucent's phone chose that moment to stutter, the display flickering like a dying pulse.

"You look like you're about to piss yourself," Vesper called over the noise, rolling her shoulders. Glyphs danced at her fingertips, lazy and effortless. "Don't worry. I'll make it quick."

Lucent forced a grin. "Quick's bad for business." He held up his phone, letting the crowd see the ancient model, the duct-taped casing. "But this? This is gonna be a train wreck."

The crowd ate it up.

The first glyph Vesper threw should have ended it.

A Nimbrix-tier disruption wave, sharp enough to fry unshielded circuits. Lucent barely dodged, his phone screeching in protest as it scrambled to adapt. The glyph grazed his shoulder, and pain lanced down his arm—real pain, not the simulated kind from licensed arenas.

The crowd roared.

Lucent's fingers flew across the screen, not to counter, but to imitate. He couldn't replicate Vesper's raw power, but he could borrow her style. His next glyph unfurled in a cascade of light, all showy spirals and unnecessary flourishes—a perfect mirror of her opening move, just weaker. Slower.

Deliberately flawed.

Vesper's eyes narrowed. She recognized the play immediately.

So did the crowd.

"Oh, you little shit—" She lunged, her Conduit spitting glyphs like gunfire. Lucent let them chase him, dancing just out of reach, his phone overheating in his grip. He took a hit to the ribs—staggered dramatically—then "accidentally" backflipped into the arena's dampener array, sending up a shower of sparks.

The audience lost their minds.

His phone was cooking itself alive, warnings flashing:

[CORE TEMP CRITICAL] [AETHER INTEGRITY FAILING].

But the bets were rolling in now, the odds shifting as the fight stretched past the three-minute mark.

Vesper wasn't holding back anymore. She was pissed.

Perfect.

Lucent grinned through the pain, tasting blood. "Hey Vesper," he gasped, dodging another glyph. "Bet you can't melt this piece of junk in under ten seconds."

He held up his phone like a challenge.

The crowd screamed.

Vesper obliged.

The explosion was beautiful.

Lucent's phone died in a blaze of glory, its last act a perfectly timed glyph that sent Vesper's finishing blow ricocheting into the overhead lights.

The arena plunged into darkness—then erupted in strobes of rogue Aether as the dampeners failed.

When the smoke cleared, Lucent was on his knees, his hands empty.

Vesper stood over him, her Conduit smoking. "...That was the dumbest fucking thing I've ever seen."

The crowd was chanting his name.

The overseer tossed him a new Conduit—a decent one, this time. "Don't get used to it," he growled. But the smirk said otherwise.

Lucent coughed, grinning. "Worth it."

Lucent's ribs screamed as he dragged himself to the edge of the Pit, the taste of copper thick on his tongue. The crowd was still roaring, drunk on the spectacle he and Vesper had given them—lights shattering, dampeners overloading, the raw, unfiltered chaos of Aether spilling like blood across the arena floor. His hands trembled, not from exhaustion, but from the aftershocks of channeling glyphs through a dying Conduit. The skin of his fingertips was cracked and blistered, the telltale burns of a rig pushed far past its limits.

The overseer tossed him the new Conduit, and Lucent barely caught it before it hit the ground. It was sleek, military-grade, the kind of hardware GhostKey runners would kill for. The casing was cold against his palm, but there were scratches along the edges—deep, jagged marks, like someone had pried it open in a hurry. And if he looked close enough, he could see the faintest rust-colored stain near the charging port.

Blood.

Lucent didn't ask where it came from. In the Pit, you learned not to.

Vesper loomed over him, her shadow cutting through the neon haze of the underground arena. Her WhiteRoot Conduit was still humming, the exposed Aether veins pulsing with residual energy. She didn't look impressed. She looked pissed.

"You're gonna get yourself killed," she said, voice low enough that only he could hear.

Lucent wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing blood across his skin. "Yeah," he admitted, grinning. "But what a way to go."

She didn't laugh.

The crowd was already moving on, their attention shifting to the next fighters stepping into the Ring. Lucent pushed himself up, wincing as his ribs protested. The new Conduit weighed heavy in his grip, too polished, too corporate for the grime of the Pit. He turned it over, thumb brushing the activation glyph. The screen flickered to life, pristine and untouched—no cracks, no lag, no desperate jury-rigged patches holding it together.

It was beautiful.

And it was dangerous.

Because nothing in the underground came free.

The backrooms of the Pit were never quiet, but tonight, the hum of illicit Aether trades and hushed credit transfers was louder than usual. Lucent sat on a rusted metal crate, the new Conduit resting in his lap as a street doc patched up the worst of his burns. The doc's hands were steady, her tools sharp—another favor he'd have to pay back later.

Raker leaned against the wall nearby, chewing on another stim-stick, his augmented eye flickering as he scanned the room. "You got lucky," he muttered. "Vesper could've turned you into a stain on the floor."

Lucent flexed his bandaged fingers. "She didn't."

"Because you're useful." Raker exhaled smoke, the scent of synthetic cherries filling the cramped space. "And because management likes you. For now."

Lucent knew what that meant. For now was the closest thing to safety you got in the underground. It wasn't loyalty. It wasn't trust. It was just the cold calculating of profit—and as long as he kept the crowds screaming, he'd keep breathing.

He thumbed the Conduit's screen again, watching the glyphs dance under his touch. It responded faster than anything he'd ever used, no lag, no stutter. It was like holding lightning.

And yet—

He couldn't shake the feeling that it was watching him back.

Vesper found him an hour later, when the Pit had emptied out and the only sounds were the distant hum of the city above and the occasional drip of water from cracked pipes. She didn't speak at first. Just stood there, arms crossed, her Conduit dark at her side.

Then—

"You're good," she said. "Not great. Not yet. But good."

Lucent raised an eyebrow. "Is that a compliment?"

"It's an observation." Her gaze flicked to the new Conduit in his hands. "That thing's gonna get you dead faster than your last one."

He knew she was right. But he also knew he didn't have a choice. "Got any better ideas?"

Vesper smirked. "Maybe."

She tossed him a data chip. Lucent caught it, turning it over in his palm. It was unmarked, the kind of thing that could've come from anywhere—or anyone.

"Meet me at the old Nimbrix warehouse tomorrow," she said, already turning to leave. "Midnight. And don't bring that corporate tracker with you."

Then she was gone, swallowed by the shadows of the Pit.

Lucent stared at the chip, his pulse kicking up. This was it—the kind of offer that either got you rich or got you buried.

And with the way his luck was going?

It was probably both.