Chapter 322: First Win 2

The silence lasted exactly long enough to become unbearable.

Three seconds of an arena full of people saying absolutely nothing, the specific silence of several hundred minds all arriving at the same question at the same time and none of them having an answer for it.

Then the questions started coming all at once.

"What just happened." Flat. Genuinely asking.

"Did he." Someone else, not finishing the sentence because the sentence did not have a comfortable ending.

"Is he." Another unfinished one, from a different section.

"Wait." Just that. One word. From somewhere near the front. The specific wait of a person whose brain had received information and was requesting more time to process it before committing to a reaction.

"Someone tell me what I just watched." The analytical voice from the upper section, and this was the first time all night that voice had lost its composure entirely.

"Marcus is on the floor." Said slowly, carefully, like naming it would help make it real. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"I can see that."

"He’s not moving."

"I can see that too."

"So."

"Yeah."

Another beat of shared incomprehension moving through the crowd like weather.

Then from somewhere in the middle section, a man stood up.

He stood up and he grabbed the person sitting beside him by the collar of their shirt and he shook them once, not aggressively, in the specific way of someone who needed physical confirmation that another human being was witnessing the same reality they were witnessing.

"I’M RICH," he yelled.

The person he was shaking had their mouth open and their eyes on the floor of the cage and had clearly not yet returned from wherever their brain had gone when Marcus went down and was not in a position to respond to being shaken.

"HEY." The man shook them again. "I’M RICH RIGHT NOW. ARE YOU SEEING THIS."

The person’s mouth stayed open.

"I BET ON THE ROOKIE." He released them and turned to the other side. "I BET ON THE ROOKIE AND I AM CURRENTLY THE SMARTEST PERSON IN THIS BUILDING."

Someone nearby who had clearly bet differently said something under their breath that did not make it through the speakers but communicated its general meaning through the expression on the face of the person who said it.

"How." A voice from behind him, not to him specifically, just to the air.

"HOW." A different person, same word, three rows up, directed at nothing.

"Someone explain this to me using small words." The woman’s voice from before, which had survived the entire night and was now fully deployed.

The commentator’s voice came back.

It came back slowly.

Like even the commentator needed a moment.

"I." He stopped. Started again. "Ladies and gentlemen I have been standing at this microphone for eleven years. Eleven years. I have watched things happen on that floor that I did not believe were possible when I woke up that morning. I have watched Number Five fight for forty minutes with a broken arm. I have watched a man get hit so hard his shoes came off." A pause. "I have never." Another pause, longer. "In eleven years. Watched Marcus Vell go to that floor."

The arena absorbed that.

"And yet."

He let it sit.

"AND YET."

The crowd found itself.

The noise that came out of several hundred people simultaneously deciding to have a reaction was not describable as any single sound. It was everything at once, cheering and shouting and the specific chaos of a room that had been holding its breath and had just released it all at the same time.

"I TOLD YOU." The coaching voice, vindicated, apparently standing on something now.

"You told us nothing you were booing him twenty minutes ago." Immediate correction from nearby.

"I believed in him the WHOLE TIME."

"You called him a coward."

"I called him strategically patient."

"You said coward."

"I said what I said."

Liam stood on the stone floor and looked down at Marcus.

Marcus Vell. Number Eight. Thirty-nine wins. The man who had stood in this corridor and stopped his fist an inch from Liam’s face and smiled about it. The man who had called him pathetic from across the cage with his arms folded and his feet planted like the outcome of this had already been decided before it started.

He was on the stone floor and he was not getting up.

Liam looked at him.

"That was for pissing me off," he said quietly. "You bitch."

The words landed in the space between him and the floor with nobody else hearing them, just Liam and whatever remained of Marcus Vell’s awareness of the room around him.

Then the commentator found his full register again.

"LADIES. AND GENTLEMEN."

The crowd responded before he had finished.

"THE WINNER."

More noise.

"MAKING HIS FIRST APPEARANCE ON THIS FLOOR."

The noise kept building.

"IN HIS VERY FIRST MATCH IN THIS ARENA."

People were on their feet. Sections of them, then more sections, then most of the room standing and the standing spreading through the crowd the way things spread when the energy behind them was genuine rather than performed.

"THE REAPER."

The sound hit him differently now from how it had hit him when he walked in. When he walked in it had been pressure, weight, something sitting on him from every direction.

Now it was just sound. Loud and present and directed at him and entirely manageable.

He stood on the stone floor and let it happen around him.

---

Elena was on her feet when he came through.

She was standing in the space they had designated for her, removed from the main crowd, and she was looking at him with an expression that had lost every piece of its composure and was not trying to recover any of it.

Her eyes were bright and her jaw was set with something that was pride and relief arriving at the same time and producing a specific combination that she did not wear often and did not wear for many people.

He walked to her.

She closed the distance first, closing her arms around him briefly, her head against his shoulder for a moment, just a moment, and then she pulled back and looked at him directly.

"You," she said, and did not finish the sentence because she had apparently decided the sentence did not need finishing.

"Me," he said.

Wrath was standing to the side.

He looked at Liam with the expression that was Wrath’s version of several large emotions arriving at the same time and being managed into something that fit in the face of a man who did not produce large emotions publicly.

He nodded once.

Liam nodded back.

"Well done, sir," Wrath said.

That was all.

It was enough.

Elena put her hand on Liam’s arm and said "let me take you somewhere, we should celebrate" and Liam looked at her and then at Wrath and then at the arena behind him where people were still making noise and still being confused and still being rich or not rich depending on which side of the bet they had been on.

"I have somewhere to be," he said.

Elena looked at him.

"Real quick," he said. "I’ll be back."

She held the look for a moment. Then she released his arm.

"Do not be long," she said.

"I won’t," he said.

He was walking through the corridor toward the exit when he saw Stiles.

Stiles was standing to the side of the corridor in his green suit, his hands clasped loosely in front of him, his two-toned hair exactly as it always was, his expression carrying the specific warmth of someone who had watched something they had invested in pay off and was entirely comfortable with how they felt about that.

Liam stopped walking.

"Congratulations," Stiles said.

Liam looked at him.

"Are you happy now," he said. His voice was level but the level was doing work. "You got what you wanted. You turned me into a killer."

Stiles looked at him for a moment.

Then he laughed. Not cruelly. Just genuinely, the specific laugh of someone who had heard something that landed exactly where they expected it to land.

"I knew it was in you," Stiles said. "I knew the first time I sat across from you. Some people have it and some people don’t and there is no training in the world that puts it in a person who was not born with it." He looked at Liam with the calm eyes behind the glasses. "You were born with it. Tonight just confirmed it for everyone else."

"Great," Liam said. "I’m glad we got that sorted."

"You should be happy," Stiles said. "You performed extraordinarily well tonight. More importantly you got the attention of people in that room who had not planned on paying attention to you."

"Which people," Liam said.

"Your next challenger," Stiles said simply.

Liam looked at him.

His jaw tightened.

"You bastard," he said.

Stiles exhaled the exhale of someone who had been called worse and had made peace with the general category of thing people called him when they were in this specific emotional state.

He turned.

He started walking away down the corridor, his shoes finding the floor at their usual unhurried pace, his hands moving to his sides.

He raised one hand in the air without looking back, a loose wave, the gesture of someone leaving a room they had already mentally exited.

"Congratulations," he said again. "Once more. Sincerely."

The corridor swallowed him and he was gone.

Liam stood where he was.

He looked at the empty corridor for a moment.

Then he turned and kept walking.

He had somewhere to be.