bantayden Chapter 370: Ordin wins
Chapter 370: Ordin wins
She pushed up.
From knees to standing—both threads having dissolved when the Sky Splitter’s duration ran, her hands free, the effort of standing genuine at this point of the fight.
She was standing.
At the edge of the collapse.
Ordin was standing at the far edge.
Both fighters with the collapsed floor between them.
Both fighters with what the fight had left them.
His palms were at the end of the Sky Splitter’s recovery window—the maximum stretch having cost the most the elastic tissue had spent in a single technique, the recovery debt genuine, the large techniques unavailable for a significant time.
Her reserves were at their floor—threads still forming, the capability present, but each thread costing what should have been a hundred threads.
She looked at the collapsed floor between them.
She stitched the collapsed floor’s near edge to the collapsed floor’s far edge.
The thread connected the two sides of the collapse—the near edge where she was standing to the far edge where Ordin was standing, the connection running across the gap between them.
The thread was a bridge.
Not a physical bridge—invisible, the connection between the two surfaces rather than a surface itself. But the thread connected them, and anything connected by a Phantom Stitch thread behaved as if the connection existed.
She stepped onto the thread.
Her foot on the invisible connection between the two edges—the thread behaving as a surface because the stitch had defined a relationship between the two edges that her foot’s contact with that relationship could express as support.
Ordin watched her step onto nothing and not fall.
She crossed the collapse.
Three steps across the invisible bridge—each foot finding the thread’s connection, the relationship between the two edges supporting her weight for the duration of the stitch.
She reached Ordin’s side.
He raised his palms—the small Arrow Burst, the only output the recovery debt allowed, his palms separating for the minimum compression.
She stitched his palms together.
Not to the floor, not to the wall—to each other, the direct palm-to-palm connection, the two surfaces that needed to stay apart for compression to build now behaving as if they were one thing at the location the stitch defined.
At his sides.
Both palms connected to each other at his sides—not at the meeting point above his head or at the low awkward clap position he had used before, directly at his sides, his arms unable to raise because the palms they were attached to were connected to each other at the height they currently occupied.
He tried to raise his right arm.
The left arm came with it—the palm-to-palm connection bringing the left palm up as the right palm rose, both arms rising together rather than separately.
Both palms were rising.
But they were rising together—moving toward each other as they rose, the stitch’s connection pulling them toward a meeting point that was above his head rather than in front of him.
The compression was building as they rose—the palms approaching each other involuntarily, the connection making the separation decrease rather than increase as his arms moved.
They met above his head.
The burst fired upward.
Straight up—the meeting point being above his head, the clap’s output directed toward the open roof of the arena rather than toward Sarah, the burst traveling upward and dissipating harmlessly in the air above the arena.
His palms came apart.
The stitch had dissolved when the clap fired.
He looked at his hands.
Then at Sarah.
She had crossed the collapse on a thread bridge. She had stitched his palms to fire upward. She was standing two feet from him with her threads still forming—each one costing what should have been a hundred, but forming.
He raised his palms.
She stitched them together again—the same configuration, the same sides-connected stitch, the same rising-together result.
They rose.
Met above his head.
Fired upward.
He looked at his hands after the second upward burst.
At the recovery debt that was building from the rapid succession of claps—the Arrow Burst available, the large techniques not, and now even the Arrow Burst producing upward output rather than forward output because the palms were being connected before the separation could build meaningful compression in the forward direction.
He tried a different approach—pulling his palms apart quickly, the separation happening in the instant before Sarah could form the stitch.
She formed the stitch before the separation completed.
His palms connected to each other at the partial separation—meeting at a point closer to his body than the standard Arrow Burst separation produced, the clap firing from a compressed configuration that produced a smaller burst than full separation would have.
Small burst. Upward. Harmless.
He tried again—faster separation, maximum speed.
She stitched before the separation reached the halfway point.
Smallest burst of the fight. Upward. Into the roof.
He looked at her hands.
At the threads still forming.
At the two feet between them.
He reached forward—not to clap, to grab, the physical grip that didn’t require the palms to separate and didn’t produce a clap and didn’t trigger the stitch that was waiting for separation.
His hands closed around Sarah’s wrists.
Not elastic tissue. Not compression. Grip—the physical hold of a fighter whose hands, even at the end of a fight, retained the strength of someone who had been using them to compress air all tournament.
She felt the grip.
Her wrists in his hands.
She stitched his grip to its current strength—the thread connecting the grip’s force to the level it was at when the stitch formed. Not increasing. Not decreasing. The grip locked at its current strength for the duration of the stitch.
Current strength was significant—his hands at the end of the fight were still the hands that had been producing Vacuum Spears and Sky Splitters all tournament.
She felt it.
She stitched his right hand to her left wrist and her right wrist to a point three feet behind her—the connection pulling her right wrist backward while his right hand remained attached to it, drawing his right hand toward the three-feet-behind point along with her wrist.
His right arm extended—drawn by the stitch’s pull on the wrist his hand was holding.
She stitched his left hand to a point three feet to his left.
His left arm extended—drawn by the stitch’s pull.
Both arms extended—right arm pulled forward and to the right by the wrist-drag stitch, left arm pulled sideways by the left-hand stitch.
Both palms separated.
Maximum separation—both arms at full extension in different directions, his palms further apart than any deliberate Sky Splitter preparation had positioned them, the two hands separated by the width of both extended arms.
The compression between them was building—not from his deliberate pull, from the distance the stitches had created, the atmosphere between two palms that far apart gathering into the compression zone passively.
She stitched the compression zone to the arena floor—a single path stitch, the same thread she had used against every large technique.
Both stitches on his arms dissolved—the duration running, his arms coming free.
His palms were free.
At maximum separation.
With the compression zone stitched to the floor.
He clapped—his palms coming together, the deliberate clap after the stitches had freed his arms, the compression between the maximally separated palms releasing as the clap fired.
The release went into the floor stitch.
The maximum-separation compression—larger than a standard Sky Splitter because the arm extension the stitches had produced was wider than his deliberate maximum stretch—drove into the floor at the stitch’s anchor point.
The floor at the anchor point collapsed entirely.
A hole—not a depression, a hole, the floor giving way completely at the point of impact, the stone falling through to whatever structure lay beneath the arena’s surface.
Both fighters fell.
Sarah had been standing at the anchor point—the stitch she had formed had anchored to the point she was standing at, and the stitch’s anchor was where the compression had been directed.
She fell with the floor.
Into the hole.
One story. Two. The space beneath the arena floor receiving her—a maintenance corridor, empty, the arena’s infrastructure visible around her as she landed.
She landed.
Not badly—one foot, both hands, the descent manageable for someone whose ability let her stitch her own trajectory to fixed points during a fall.
She looked up.
The hole above her—the arena floor’s gap, light coming through from the arena above.
Ordin at the hole’s edge—looking down, his palms at his sides, the fight’s final exchange having sent them both to unexpected places.
The referee appeared at the hole’s edge.
He looked down.
At Sarah in the maintenance corridor.
At Ordin at the hole’s edge.
He assessed—not the standard assessment, the specific assessment of a referee whose fighter had landed one floor below the arena surface.
Sarah looked up at him.
She tried to stitch a thread from her position to the hole’s edge—a connection that would let her climb back up, the same bridge-across-the-gap principle she had used to cross the collapse.
She formed the thread.
It formed—and immediately dissolved.
The reserves were empty.
Not low—empty. The final stitch, the anchor-point stitch that had redirected Ordin’s maximum-separation compression into the floor, had spent the last of what Phantom Stitch had available. The thread formed and dissolved because there was nothing behind it—the ability still present, the capability still real, but the reserves that let it operate sustained were gone.
She tried again.
The thread formed.
Dissolved.
She looked at her hands.
At the threads that wouldn’t hold.
She looked up at the referee.
She nodded.
The referee raised a hand at the hole’s edge—the gesture visible from below, the result declared.
The Aurelius sections produced the complicated noise they had been producing all day when two of their own faced each other—the warmth present in both directions, the result carrying investment regardless of which name it landed on.
The Solmara sections gave Ordin everything—the full release of a support base that had watched their fighter manage thread-stitches and palm-stitches and bridge-crossings and upward bursts and wrist-drags and the arm-extension technique that had turned Sarah’s own anchoring stitch into the mechanism that sent her through the floor.
"Sarah of Aurelius Academy," the announcer said, his voice carrying the quality it carried for results that had been earned on both sides. "She stitched his palms to fire upward. She bridged the collapse. She pulled his arms to maximum separation." He paused. "And the maximum-separation compression—redirected into the floor—found the anchor she had placed at her own feet."
Another pause.
"Your winner—Ordin of Solmara Institute."
In the stands the bracket updated.
Class 2 Final Four complete.
Mark of Aurelius.
Ordin of Solmara.
The Class 2 Grand Final.