The looks on the faces of our enemies when he appeared will forever be engraved upon my mind. The shock, the awe, the rampant disbelief. He was like something out of an ancient myth made real. All the statues of Alexander, all the tales of Heracles, and all the legends of Achilles seemed embodied within him at that moment—and for all that they saw him as such, I saw only a man… the most beautiful one I had ever laid eyes on.

  The moment the battle began, Circe felt a flood of adrenaline fill her body.

  Arthur’s Eidolon exploded into movement before any of the other five could do more than change their stances, the plasma of his thrusters lighting up the night. The Hoplite, painted black and red and emblazoned with a new sword-on-shield design upon his left pauldron that Circe could not identify, surged neither up nor away, but directly towards one of the five identical Aegean-model Eidolons.

  On the screen it was tagged as the machine of Davros, the Strategos of House Onasis.

  Arthur did not seem to particularly care.

  The other four Aegeans automatically scattered backward as if to give Davros space to destroy the foolish training machine. Circe watched as the Aegean lifted its hoplon in preparation to meet what it no doubt assumed was a desperate and ill-fated head-on charge.

  A cursory glance at the crowd told her that they expected the same, and the smirk of satisfaction on Sebastian’s face told the same tale.

  Their hopes were dashed quickly.

  The moment the Hoplite came within range of the Aegean, its left side thrusters abruptly erupted with overcharged exhaust plumes, and its right side thrusters died by the same margin. In tandem with that, the Hoplite dropped low and slammed its left palm and knee against the arena floor.

  Its foot, back, and shoulder thrusters were entirely in use at the same moment.

  The resultant sweeping attack took Arthur smoothly under the unsuspecting Aegean’s guard. With agility and precision no Hoplite should possess, his Eidolon came up behind the superior combat model, and he stole its rifle.

  A shout of surprise erupted from the Onasis table, and Circe turned her eyes briefly to see the Lord Onasis rising to turn furiously toward the high table—just as a flash of light lit the screen and he froze.

  On the feed, the Aegean piloted by House Onasi’s Strategos toppled forward…

  …and revealed a smoking hole drilled through its back by its own plasma rifle.

  The crowd was shocked and silent as the Hoplite lifted the gun and, with an ease that sent chills down Circe’s spine, fired another shot directly into the downed machine’s spine.

  The subsequent explosion of its conversion reactor left no doubt as to the pilot’s fate.

  A glance at the time recording on the bottom right of the screen showed that no more than twelve seconds had passed.

  And already, five of Graecia’s best had become four.

  Arthur’s machine threw aside the gun, and instead of taking out a weapon or claiming one of the fallen Aegean’s, the Hoplite simply exploded forward once again.

  In response, the remaining four Aegeans scattered in earnest.

  Two launched toward the skies.

  Two blazed out toward the flanks.

  Arthur’s Eidolon was already responding before they could properly maneuver.

  The second of the two to go toward the flanks was pursued by the Hoplite with something approaching a single-minded intensity to Circe’s eyes, and even when the other three turned to train their rifles upon the training machine, it was blazing across the arena at breakneck speeds.

  Speeds that no sane pilot would ever risk, due to the chance of critical engine failure.

  Plasma beams lit up the arena in lines of blue fire, and the Hoplite moved through them with a purpose and precision that made it almost look like a pre-planned dance. Micro-adjustments to the power of each engine happened at speeds beyond anything Circe could conceive of, and she refused to blink lest she miss a single moment.

  The way the Hoplite moved through the lancing beams of focused plasma was terrifying and beautiful in a way that Circe couldn’t quite put into words. She could see the rapid changes in thrust vector and thrust power that Arthur engineered with every movement, and his actions held all the decisive confidence of someone predicting what would happen.

  It was a form of battle sense and subconscious spatial awareness that only true elites possessed.

  Pilots far beyond the caliber of anything Graecia had ever been able to boast.

  She had been considered a prodigy in Graecia, and even attempting what Arthur was doing would have killed her at least half the time.

  When it became clear the retreating Aegean couldn’t outrun the Hoplite, the pilot—which the screen identified as the Strategos of House Ulysses—attempted to take to the skies instead with an air of desperation to the action.

  In response, the Hoplite threw itself backward at the exact moment as it launched itself up off its feet.

  Circe watched with disbelief as Arthur routed all of his power to his spinal thrusters, and the Hoplite’s body jerked at the strain inflicted upon its chassis…

  …and smashed into the rising form of the panicked Aegean model with a boom.

  The resulting entanglement forced the remaining three Aegeans to hold their fire and, perhaps at a call from one or a joint call from all of them, they drew their swords and ignited their thrusters toward the entangled pair.

  The contest was over before they made it halfway across the arena.

  Scattering had proven to be the beginning of the end for the Ulysses Strategos, whose Aegean impacted the arena moments later in a blood-curdling screech of metal with Arthur’s hoplite riding it like a makeshift platform.

  Before anyone could react, Arthur retrieved the fallen machine’s xiphos and, with a ruthlessness that seemed designed to make a point, he rammed it down through the Aegean’s spinal column and into its power core.

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  By the time the Ulysses Eidolon exploded, Arthur’s Hoplite was already moving.

  Toward the incoming trio of machines.

  Circe glanced at the timestamp in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen once more, and noticed that it had just reached the thirty-second mark. For a moment, she almost thought she was misreading it, or that her eyes were playing tricks on her.

  Thirty seconds.

  In thirty seconds, Arthur had killed two multi-war veterans among the Eupatridae.

  Veterans in machines that were significantly more advanced than this.

  Her eyes moved from the screen momentarily to the crowd once more, sacrificing her chance to witness the initial clash between Arthur and the remaining trio to instead take note of the reactions of those within the ballroom.

  The watching guests' expressions seemed to be an eclectic mix of shock and naked excitement. They were drinking in the action with the enraptured, transfixed attention of creatures witnessing a true bloodsport—writ large in the form of the Eidolons. At the Onasis and Ulysses tables, the expressions ranged from slack-jawed disbelief to anger and, in the case of a small minority, open weeping.

  The families of the slain Hetairoi, she presumed.

  Hetairoi who had attempted to kill her knight with five-to-one odds.

  For that reason alone, Circe couldn’t find it in herself to care.

  “They forgot their age,” Menelaus observed quietly from beside her.

  “Father?” she asked while giving him her attention.

  “The Strategii. They went into this with the delusions of youthful power, forgetting that they are old men in a young warrior’s world. They saw a chance to embarrass us and inflate their own pride, and they leaped on it like the scavenging vultures they are. These men might have been intimidating once. Now they are beyond their prime.”

  “Then why—?”

  “Because they are legends in their own right,” Menelaus said softly. “Because they represent the prestige and power of their houses. Because they have him outnumbered five to one,” he explained and glanced at her with a smile. “Because they wanted to teach us a lesson, and instead, are being taught one. No matter their age or dulled instincts, these men are veterans of numberless conflicts. They are the embodiment of their Houses’ prestige.”

  Circe nodded slowly at her father’s words.

  “They’re being used as unwitting platforms for Arthur’s own legend.”

  “And the resurgence of our own in kind,” Menelaus said with an approving nod.

  Her eyes returned to the screen again after her father’s words, exactly at the same time as a flash of light filled it.

  Two of the Aegeans were reeling from what appeared to be some sort of mutual impact, their wings damaged and their flight units smoking from some manner of damage inflicted upon their thrusters. The third Aegean, which the screen identified as belonging to House Gataki, was engaged in a frantic duel with the Hoplite on the arena’s floor.

  Arthur’s machine had been damaged, and his left leg appeared to be smoking from some sort of successful strike—and yet it barely seemed to slow him down. He dodged every swing from the Gataki Eidolon with a precision that implied boredom, his Hoplite moving as little as possible to simply dodge away or around the swings of the plasma-sheathed xiphos.

  The Gataki Strategos had activated its energy curtain.

  The crowd's disapproval was audible, and Circe felt herself smiling vindictively when she heard it. It was one thing to fight an opponent who chose to remain unarmed by using your weapons; it was another to harness a shipkiller capability in a blatant demonstration of desperation and cowardice.

  Even while she observed the other two Aegeans stabilizing themselves and turning with readiness to reinforce their ally, Arthur’s Hoplite abruptly stepped forward at an opening she could not spy.

  His machine’s shoulder thrusters rotated to face the thrust cone upward within its housing and burned with ferocity to push his Eidolon into a forced crouch, which allowed Arthur to come in under a particularly wide and desperate swing from the Gataki machine. Before the enemy pilot could think to recover, Arthur’s Hoplite locked its mechanical fists together and—with a blaze of his spinal thrusters—delivered a momentum-filled double-fisted blow to the bottom of the Aegean’s cockpit.

  The moment it impacted, the enemy machine spasmed.

  The moment it impacted, every Eidolon pilot in the crowd winced.

  Circe was among them, for she well knew the jarring shock such an impact created.

  Before the Gataki Strategos could recover, Arthur threw himself to the right to dodge an incoming beam of blue plasma and hooked his left hand on the edge of his frantic opponent’s Hoplon. He lifted his feet and fired a burst from his left side thrusters and vernier engines to push him further into a horizontal lift, seemingly routing power to his right foot engine and overcharging the thruster.

  It exploded in a wave of black smoke a second before the Hoplite’s reinforced knee smashed directly into the center of the enemy Eidolon’s spine, and sent a spasm of movement across the machine’s body.

  Arthur wasn’t done.

  His smoking Hoplite rode the machine downward as it collapsed, and rolled forward to mitigate the damage from the two beams of plasma that chased after him from the remaining two units. They were no longer capable of flight, but both were advancing rapidly across the arena with their rifles trained upon him.

  Circe forced herself to remain calm while she watched.

  When the Hoplite came up a moment later with the Gataki Eidolon’s Hoplon shield in hand, her smile was one of savage approval.

  She wasn’t the only one. Several people in attendance actually cheered, and the shock of that reaction was enough that she nearly missed when Arthur danced forward through the following barrage of plasma fire and—with one foot thruster destroyed—launched his Hoplite into a daring forward maneuver with his remaining foot engine.

  The Eidolon was sent into a horizontal spin, and the hoplon was released with brutal intention.

  The disc of metal, designed as a shield to withstand plasma blasts and defend against plasma-sheathed blades designed to kill starships, flew across the arena with a whine of air resistance.

  After which it smashed into the torso of the House Cimmeria machine with a scream of twisting metal and a shower of sparks as steel eviscerated steel.

  The entire ballroom went silent following the impact.

  Circe stared in breathless disbelief, and her heart swelled with savage pride.

  Even Arenicos seemed frozen in shock, his Eidolon unmoving as it looked toward its suddenly-wounded compatriot and its frozen body.

  The camera zoomed in toward the point of impact.

  Blood steadily pumped from the destroyed cockpit and stained the blue machine red.

  The House Cimmeria Eidolon collapsed to the arena floor and went silent.

  Arthur’s Hoplite straightened from where it had landed in an awkward crouch and turned to walk steadily toward the still-recovering Gataki machine. At his approach, the damaged Aegean managed to roll itself over and, with a sudden presentation of its plasma rifle, opened up at near point-blank range at the training Eidolon.

  Arthur’s machine was already moving.

  The plasma shot pierced the top of the Hoplite’s left shoulder, detonating the armor and sending an explosion outward from the wounded limb.

  In response, Arthur drove his ducking Eidolon forward and simply slammed a brutal kick into the vulnerable side of the Aegean’s cockpit.

  The gun hand spasmed.

  The Hoplite kicked the cockpit again.

  The rifle dropped.

  Arthur’s Eidolon kicked again.

  The metal crumpled under the third blow, and the Aegean’s subroutines activated.

  The cockpit hatch burst open as the emergency release was forced to trigger.

  Arthur’s machine took hold of the Gataki Strategos’ discarded sword.

  A flash of two small human arms rising into the air from the open cockpit filled the screen, and the Hoplite responded by plunging the xiphos down into the same open cockpit with a decisive brutality. A moment later, the Eidolon sagged with ominous indication.

  Blood coated the Hoplite’s impassive face.

  A scream echoed from the Gataki table, and Circe, along with many others, turned to see the woman she recognized as the Gataki Strategos’ wife collapse unconscious in her chair, with someone Circe loosely recognized as the now-dead Strategos’ son desperately fanning his bereaved mother’s face. For his part, the young man had a look of stunned disbelief on his features, and seemed entirely unaware of the eyes on him.

  Eyes that were already turning back to the screen, and dismissing the woman’s grief with the callous impassivity of a thoroughly engaged audience.

  Arthur had left the blade impaled in the cockpit of the downed Aegean, and his machine had turned toward Arenicos’ own. The Hoplite took a step, staggered, and then quickly corrected. It looked as if one of its leg servos had given out, and it created the effect of the training machine—blackened from smoke and reddened from idle blood and viscera—limping steadily toward the still-standing Aegean.

  The Drakos Eidolon was the last enemy left on the field, and the Hoplite was damaged. Arenicos’ Eidolon was the last machine standing of five that everyone had assumed would emerge victorious with ease.

  Five that should have emerged victorious with ease.

  It was impossible. Riotously, gloriously, insanely impossible.

  And yet it had happened.

  They had been defeated.