The survivors gathered in the center of the debris field.

Fourteen of them. That was the final count.

Arisha had moved through the rubble herself to confirm it, calling names and waiting for responses. Some had answered from beneath broken slabs and been pulled free. Others had already found their way to the group on their own.

Lyria was one of the last to emerge. Two of the surviving tankers had spotted movement beneath a collapsed section of the outer wall and dug her out.

She was in bad shape, a deep gash across her thigh and another along her ribs, her breathing shallow and controlled in the way that meant she was managing pain rather than free of it. Her spear was still in her hand.

She had somehow remained here. Not getting eliminated.

Ophelia had made it out as well. Her katana was sheathed and she was pressing her forearm against a wound on her side, but she was standing and her eyes were clear.

Leonard was not among them.

No one said anything about it. There was no time.

"Potions. Drink healing and mana revovery potions," Damien said.

They drank what they had. The worst of the bleeding slowed. The sharper pains dulled. It wasn’t enough to fully restore anyone, but it pushed them back from the edge.

Then Damien and Lyria moved through the group.

Light gathered at Damien’s palm, soft and steady, and he pressed it briefly to the worst injuries he could reach.

Though they were injured doesn’t mean they were out of mana. So performing spells was possible.

Kaelan’s shoulder, one of the tanker’s broken ribs, a gash on a younger student’s leg that had been bleeding badly.

Nothing dramatic. Just enough. His reserves were low after the fight inside the mall and he rationed what he had carefully.

He had used most mana to protect himself from falling building.

Lyria worked from where she stood, extending the same kind of quiet, concentrated light from the tip of her spear. She was paler than she should have been but her hands were steady.

The process took four minutes.

After all they didn’t have luxury to take five minutes.

---

The B-1 students had finished regrouping.

Around forty of them formed up at the far end of the rubble field, weapons drawn, and began moving forward in a wide line. They picked their way through the broken ground carefully, spreading out to cover more ground as they advanced.

"Weapons out everyone. We won’t fall back. We are still going to win this," Damien said in loud voice.

No one needed to be told twice.

The fourteen of them stood together in the debris field, battered and uneven, and watched the line come toward them.

---

They met in the rubble.

The ground was broken and uneven, chunks of concrete and twisted metal making clean movement nearly impossible, and both sides felt that equally.

The wide formations B-1 had tried to maintain collapsed almost immediately as students picked their way around obstacles, and the fight broke into a dense tangle of small engagements spread across the debris.

Damien moved into the middle of it.

His sword flared with golden light as he brought it up to meet the first student who reached him. The clash rang out sharp and clear above the noise.

He turned the blade aside, stepped through the gap, and drove an elbow into the student’s guard before following with a short, angled cut that forced the opponent back.

Another came at him from the left. He pivoted and let light flare out from the blade in a short burst, not enough to eliminate anyone but enough to blind at close range.

The student recoiled and Damien pressed forward, keeping his movements compact and controlled, not overextending on the broken ground.

He was tired. He could feel it in his arms and the back of his legs. He kept moving anyway.

Kaelan was harder to track. He didn’t hold ground, he moved constantly, staying low and changing direction through the debris, using the terrain instead of fighting it.

His dark-coated daggers left thin trails in the air as he worked, striking fast at joints and exposed areas and retreating before opponents could respond properly. Shadows clung to him in patches, blurring his outline just enough to make him difficult to read.

He was not fighting clean. He was fighting smart, picking his moments, never spending more than he needed to.

Arisha had taken a position on a raised slab of collapsed flooring, elevated just enough to give her angles the others didn’t have. Her bow was in her hands and she was firing in short controlled bursts, picking targets that were pressuring the group’s flanks.

Between shots she would use her wand and water surged up from the cracks in the broken ground in thin cutting streams, not powerful enough to eliminate on its own but enough to disrupt footwork and break attacks mid-sequence.

A wind current curved one of her arrows around a raised chunk of concrete and took a student off balance at thirty meters. She was already nocking the next.

Ophelia cut through the right side of the fight like a clean line through noise.

Her katana moved in short, precise arcs, each strike placed.

The lightning that ran along the blade was not constant, she called it in bursts, sharp discharges on contact that numbed arms and broke grips and sent students staggering.

She didn’t waste it. She used it exactly when it would count and spent the rest of the time on clean swordsmanship alone. Her long midnight hair swaying with her movements.

She moved through the broken ground without hesitating, her footing certain even on the uneven surface.

Lyria stood near the back of the group.

She was too injured for the front. She knew it and didn’t argue with herself about it. She kept her spear raised and her eyes moving, watching for anyone who broke through the forward line, covering the students near her who had already taken too much damage to fight hard.

When someone reached her she fought with full intensity for exactly as long as she needed to, and the golden light that burst from the spear’s tip at close range was as bright and sharp as it had ever been.

But the numbers told a clear story.

Fourteen against forty did not improve with time. For every student B-1 lost, A-1 felt the pressure increase somewhere else. The gaps in their line widened. The tankers were being ground down.

Two more students flickered out of the simulation in the space of a few minutes, and every loss made the next one more likely.

They were being pushed back.

---

The arrow came from nowhere.

A B-1 student at the edge of the fight stumbled suddenly and was gone, eliminated before anyone around him understood what had happened.

Then another.

Damien caught the angle between attacks and looked toward the buildings at the edge of the debris field.

A figure stood on the nearest rooftop with a bow in hand, already drawing again.

"Noah" Damien muttered.

The arrow flew. Another B-1 student went down.

Damien held his gaze for a half second and gave a single nod.

Noah saw it and nocked the next arrow.

The effect was immediate. B-1’s outer edge began folding inward, students moving away from the open angles without realizing they were doing it, and the pressure on A-1’s flanks loosened just slightly.

Just slightly was enough.

Noah fired twice more from the roof, picking targets at the perimeter who were exposed and focused on the close fight. Then he paused, scanned the surrounding buildings and streets quickly.

’There’s no Travis or Michael anywhere in sight. They are still hiding.’ Noah thought.

He stored the bow in his ring and dropped from the edge of the roof.

He hit the ground in a controlled fall, absorbed it, and came up already moving.

His spear came free from the storage ring as he ran, the weapon extending to full length in his hand as he crossed the open ground toward the debris field at a full sprint.

He hit the edge of the fight without slowing down.

The spear covered with blue mana drove forward and the nearest B-1 student barely managed to deflect it, stumbling back hard into the student behind them.

Noah pulled the weapon back and moved into the gap, using the spear’s reach to keep two opponents occupied at once, pushing aggression and not letting either of them settle.

The numbers were still bad.

And everything was going according how Noah wanted.