The next day I logged in to the sound of waves and the voices of players around me.

  Oakenlight's morning had a different kind of gold than Carpa's. The light came from the water: broken into a thousand splinters that chased each other across the bay and climbed the stone cliffs. Flags and ropes were strung between poles, swaying in the breeze.

  The western beach had transformed overnight. The Adventurer's Association had gone all in; rope-fenced lanes, numbered placards staked into the sand from Arena 1 all the way down to Arena 64, with wide walking corridors in between so spectators didn't spill into the fights. A pair of wooden scaffolds rose near the center with windsheltered awnings for the casters, each scaffold crowned with a handpainted sign: CAST. Association scribes moved like ants, tallying signups, checking brackets and handing out slips. It was professional, cleaner than most of the official events I had seen in other games.

  I made my way toward the crowd collecting around a raised pallet not far from the bell tower. Shieldbreaker stood on it with a parchment roll in one hand and a grin big enough to split his beard. Thorax and Virtune flanked him with clipboards. Shieldbreaker raised a hand and all the chatter died down.

  "Good morning, Oakenlight!" he boomed, voice cutting through gull cries. "Thank you for showing up early. We will start with a short briefing and then we start as soon as possible."

  He gestured toward the scaffold.

  "As we have said before, the format is single elimination, and due to increased interest, it is going to be 128 players, meaning seven rounds to the finals. Matches begin immediately after this briefing. If you are not sure where you're fighting, look for your arena number on the bracket sheet and head to the sign posted in the sand. Arenas run from one to sixty four. Each ring has a lane referee from the Association, you have to follow their instructions to avoid DQ."

  A wave rolled in, hissing across the lower boundary ropes. A scribe jogged out to push a marker pole a bit higher on the beach; the crowd chuckled.

  "Second thing, prizing. The pool is 640 gold coins, 600 of which are going to be distributed between the top 8 as per your votes. This means 200 gold for the winner, 140 for the runner up, 80 for third place, 60 for fourth place and 30 each for places 5th-8th.

  200 gold, I thought. I would be set for quite a while. I still owed 14 gold to Danzaburou's crew and one gold to Stone, but even if I placed 8th, I could comfortably pay them in the future. I was getting more thrilled by the second.

  "The third thing is broadcasting," Shieldbreaker tapped the scaffold with a parchment he was holding. "The three of us will stream and commentate three matches per round. That's one from each scaffold, and one roving pick if something spicy breaks out. Recordings go to the forums ASAP and public video sites once the devs open the gates for it. Remember: both players must consent before a match is recorded. If you are camera shy or just don't want your build seen, say so. We will pick another arena, no hard feelings."

  "Our friend will also join us later in the day, and help out with the casting as well," Virtune added.

  Murmurs. A couple people immediately raised hands. Shieldbreaker nodded, and the scribes took notes. I didn't mind getting recorded at this point. I was already getting a lot of attention, but being a good archer didn't automatically mean I was Zephyr in incognito.

  "Lastly, huge thanks to the Adventurer's Association," he gestured broadly. "This layout, the refs, the ropes and dyes? Association handiwork. Treat them right."

  The crowd applauded politely, the Association representatives bowed like they had already won the grand prize.

  "Now, etiquiette. No griefing between rings. No pulling mobs into arenas. If you break the rope you break the match, resulting in DQ. We have a limited time, so our aim is to finish at 4 pm at the latest."

  He unrolled the parchment, eyes skimming.

  "Alright. Round one: find your arenas, step in, salute and good luck. We will be doing photos with the winners after each round up by the bell for anyone who wants it," he lifted his chin and found me in the crowd. He gave me a blink and I nodded.

  "That's it!" Shieldbreaker clapped once. "Go, check the brackets and find your arenas! Make it clean and make it loud."

  The crowd applauded, then broke apart into bright ribbons of color; armor, cloth, polished wood and layered leather moved in unison, like the sea behind us.

  I quickly checked the brackets, then moved.

  Arena 17 was a rectangle of firm sand tamped flat and bordered by rope. The lane ref, a woman with a sunburnt nose and an Association pin raised her flag as I stepped in. On the other side, my opponent vaulted the rope in a single exuberant hop and threw his hands wide like the beach was his stage.

  Bare-chested under a leather harness, greaves scuffed, a two-handed axe with a chipped bevel. Berserker. He had the look all over: that forward-leaning, cut-me-and-I-get-stronger kind of swagger. According to the brackets his name was Stigma and he was from the village of Shadowreach.

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  "Oh, a ranger," he called across the sand, grinning. "Don't worry, I'll make this quick for you."

  As per the duel notification, he was level 15, so a level below me. Although his level almost matched mine, from the looks of it his gear didn't. Medium armor pieces, mismatched.

  The ref lifted her voice.

  "By tournament rules: no consumables, no outside interference. Fight ends when your 'duel system' deems it finished. Step past the rope during combat and it's an immediate loss. Ready?"

  At first it was a bit funny how she referred to the duel mechanics as 'your duel system', but I quickly realized that the NPCs of this world didn't know that this was all a game, and everything us adventurers could do, they saw as a weird magical system.

  Stigma rolled his shoulders, shook out his hands then pounded the axe haft against his palm like a drummer.

  "I was born ready."

  I set my stance, bow low, the Threadweaver's grip warm to the touch. Wind at my back. Good.

  I nodded.

  "Begin!"

  Stigma came like a thrown boulder.

  "Burning Arrow!" The skill primed with a familiar heat coiling up the shaft; I exhaled through the shot. The arrow left with a clean, flat whip of string and smashed into his shoulder just as he was running towrads me. His health bar dropped by almost 30% immediately.

  "Engage!" He activated the Berserker skill in panic, lunging, but another one of my arrows staggered him mid-motion. The burst of speed that would have carried him into my chest disappeared as he stopped mid-rush.

  I used Leap Attack to close the distance, hitting him from the air as I sailed past his shoulder. His axe tore the air where I had been just a moment ago, the wind of it slapped my cloak. I landed behind him, already drawing, already loosing a follow-up shot into the scorched seam under his arm. He snarled. Another chunk of his health blew away.

  "Cute," he spat, breath ragged. "Let's see you dodge this."

  His pupils dilated. The veins at his temples bulged. Sand hissed under his boots as heat rolled off him like a forge. "Bloodlust!"

  His offense would spike. But his defense would crater.

  He charged again, face twisted into something feral. I didn't give him the chance to make it into a trade.

  I closed the distance with Quick Step; a skill usually used to dodge attacks. We met at the center, and he was surprised I was not moving away from him. He reared the axe up for a muderous strike, with all his weight behind it. I slid inside the arc, boot heel digging into the sand, and brought the bow horizontal at my hip.

  "Fan of Arrows."

  At point blank, the spread wasn't much of a spread. It was a cannonball.

  The shafts erupted, blooming from the riser in a half-circle. Two lodged high into the shoulder line, one punched under the sternum, the rest stitched across the ribs. His health sheared away to nothing in the time between his shout and the thud of his axe in the sand. Stigma's momentum still carried him half a step, then he folded around the arrows and hit the beach on his knees, steam rising from the wounds.

  The ref's flag snapped up. "Winner: Orion!"

  The whole thing had taken the length of a breath held too long, maybe fifteen seconds. Stigma blinked up at me, confusion cooling into a defeated smile.

  "That was... not even close," he muttered.

  "Good fight," I said.

  He huffed out a laugh anyway, and when he stood he offered a knuckle tap over the rope. I met it. The crowd lining our lane gave that polite ripple of approval reserved for early-round executions. I stepped out, cloak settling against the breeze, heart rate already back to even.

  The beach was a living bracket. Every dozen paces was a different story. Steel-on-steel in one circle, spells blooming in another.

  I drifted toward the scaffolds. The casters were casting different matches around the beach. Shieldbreaker was leaning forward on his elbows, talking quick over the wind, Virtune was commentating about clean counters, Thorax was laughing too loudly when a duel ripped the rope and one of the participants had to be DQ'd. A pair of scribes relayed arena numbers to them like stage managers.

  "Arena 12's Oakenlight mirror is a huge treat to the eyes. Two swordsmen, both with similar builds from the looks of it," Virtune quickly checked his arcane microphone lended to him by the Association.

  "Clear as the tide. Deadsteel and LukeStrike, ladies and gentlemen!" His tone smoothed.

  Both swordsmen were clean. No wasted motion. Deadsteel cut first, a measured diagonal that Luke barely turned with a compact parry. Their footwork drew mirrored chevrons in the sand as they circled, testing timing with short cuts and shoulder feints. No big gamble skills, no early over-commits. It was the kind of duel most players skip past on their feed but most pros watch at least twice.

  "That is a perfect distance check from Deadsteel," Virtune narrated. "He is waiting for Luke to move."

  Luke indeed did move, stepping half a shoe too deep. Deadsteel's riposte was textbook: big step, edge kisses the guard, then a short thrust that slid under the pauldron. Luke hissed as his health dipped; he recovered with the uncommon skill Guard Break that rattled Deadsteel's teeth and bought space. He managed to reset.

  Virtune laughed under his breath. "You love to see that kind of restraint. Nobody is panic popping any cooldowns. It's clear as day they had sparred a lot against each other."

  A shout to my right pulled my attention to another arena. A mage in simple brown and red robes stood there with one palm lifted, firelight turning the air liquid above it. It was none other than Cyrus, the mage whose group had saved me from Lorrando's ambush a couple days earlier.

  His opponent, a lancer had already eaten way too many hits. I watched Cyrus end it without much flourish; Arcane Bolt to interrupt his Spear Rush, Fireball to cut him from any recovery, then a second Arcane Bolt threaded for the clear center mass. Efficient and clinical, no overkill. He didn't even look winded. He nodded towards his opponent as the referee raised his flag, then moved off the sand with that quiet, unreadable posture he wore when he left the last time we met.

  I filed the cadence in my head. Cyrus was strong enough to save reveals such as his Flame Hydra for later rounds. That made two of us.

  Back at Arena 12, Deadsteel finally committed to a line, stepping left while his blade went right, crossing LukeStrike's guard in a clean way. Luke sniffed it out and answered with a low cut at the lead leg, and Deadsteel's boot slid, sand sprayed and for a blink both men were off-balance at once. Luke tried to cash it in with a shoulder bash, but Deadsteel let it pass, turned on a toe like a dancer and bit on the exposed ribs with a Horizontal Strike. The ref's flag went up as Luke's health bled to zero.

  "Deadsteel advances," Virtune confirmed. "Pure control, no ego. Nice job!"

  The crowd cheered; Oakenlight was proud of its own.

  A gull shrieked and dove for a discarded crust near the ropes. I checked the time. It was almost time.

  I turned from the scaffold to the forest of arena stakes shimmering in the sea light and the long day waiting in them like a maze. I flexed my fingers, felt the bowstring's itch to be used again, and let the wind push the cloak flat along my back.

  Alright, Oakenlight. Let's see Tidemark's finest.