Aaliyah stood only a few metres from the other kid, the image of a street kid with a little bit of success under his belt. Aaliyah had seen so many just like this one, cocky and too smarmy for his own good.

They were smart, usually, Aaliyah could give them that. Conniving and socially intelligent, but because they thought that, they were vulnerable to the same cons they were running. Usually, they thought themselves unassailable underneath whoever it was they kowtowed to, only to get themselves fucked up because they acted stupid.

But if it were that easy, Aaliyah would be able to wipe the floor with he kid just by exploiting the weaknesses in his own mentality. This kid, though, was something different. He acted like the sort of kid that Aaliyah knew, but it was armour, a layer of defence before the truth.

“G’day there, good lookin’!” The kid called with a sleazy smile. Aaliyah didn’t even hive him the satisfaction of rolling her eyes at his play for her frustration.

“Don’t even bother.” Aaliyah called back, voice as flat as can be, “We both know those games, and they don’t work against someone who’s in on the trick. Put away the marked cards, slick.” The kid held a hand to his chest, as if he were wounded.

“Hey, who’s to say that I don’t actually find ya good looking?” While he was wearing a classic gaudy grin, his eyes showed a little more of the cold hearted nature you needed to run a ruse like he was.

“The match will begin in the next thirty seconds! Please listen carefully to the rules.” Domain’s sly voice called out with a classic presenter’s pitch.

“I don’t doubt that you do, slick. Only that you’re so far down outside my league.” Aaliyah slipped the last word in right as the pompous man in the balcony above began reciting the rules of the matches. The kid across from her clearly wanted to say something, but couldn’t get a word in edgewise, leaving Aaliyah with the last word on the matter.

She half listened to the rules, the most notable of which was ‘no death blows’. Willem had briefed them on the rules beforehand, but they were mostly superfluous to what the judges considered the rules at the time. The rules were set up in just the right way for it to work between two judges if they played nice with each other, but if they didn’t then the match was just as much a battle between the teams as the judges’ authorities.

“With the rules out of the way, the match will begin in ten seconds!”

Immediately after Domain had said so, the boy had said something snide in an attempt to the Aaliyah riled up, but she didn’t even bother to let it reach her mind, listening only to the loud beeps counting down the time until the match started. She let her cold eyes rest on the boy’s face dispassionately, waiting for the match’s start to truly call upon her link. The beanie kid let the expression fall off his face, assuming the emotions he was actually feeling beneath his guise.

Cold dispassion. Just like her.

“Begin!” Domian’s voice thundered throughout the Arena, and Aaliyah had already won the first move in this farce of a match.

Aaliyah could call upon her rage and her internal trust easily now. The fire and cold interlocking on her skin, leaving her with a fiery focus. Clearly the kid had underestimated just how powerful Aaliyah was as she rocketed forth from a kick at the ground. She had never been able to truly test the limits of her mobility like this, so the forward momentum she created was almost uncontrollable.

Almost.

In what could only be a fraction of a second, she was in front of the kid, dispassionate eyes filling with a note of shock before she planted a fist into his gut. She felt the impact, the resounding thump as her fist made contact with his body, but all the visceral points of the impact didn’t fool Aaliyah.

With a quick step, she launched herself back a few metres away from the kid who was pretending to be surprised. Just as her fist left his body she felt a sensation like grasping onto a writhing snake. Now that she was a few metres away, retreating from the sensation, she still found herself face to face with the beanie wearing kid.

“Well, that was a pretty good first move, gotta say, darl.” But the grin soon split his face as her eyes widened opening as wide as they could to capture every little detail of the moment. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t have seen the snakelike form of the kid’s arm whipping towards her.

This was where Aaliyah made her first mistake, and she knew it from the moment she’d done it. Aaliyah ducked underneath the swinging arm and tried to dive out of the way, further from the appendages.

The moment that Aaliyah understood that she had made a mistake was when a thick rope of the boy’s body slammed into her gut as she was diving. She was sent upwards a few metres, the wind being knocked from her lungs, a line of fire burning across the skin of her gut like she’d been whipped with a rope.

She gasped with pain, but in just the nick of time, she managed to see the next rope coming towards her, threatening her with the capture. In a rare moment of athletic genius, Aaliyah flipped herself so the rope impacted her feet, and pushed off as hard as she could only barely escaping the rest of the rope that naturally tried to wrap around what it had hit.

For a moment, Aaliyah was soaring through the air like a bird, free from the combat that she was going to inevitably be embroiled in as soon as her feet touched the ground. She flipped gracefully planting her feet into the soft sand that absorbed much of the impact of her fall.

She looked up towards where the boy was, and all she could see was a writhing mass of extended limbs and torso, curling in on each other and wrapping together. It was like seeing an alien organism, the mass of writhing muscle was so viscerally wrong that it almost pained Aaliyah to look at it. At him.

“Y’know,” a voice called out from within the mass, “I’m honestly a little impressed. When Bax looked me in the eye and told me to do everything short of going all out, I was a little sceptical.” A limb separated and waved itself in a familiar gesture.

“But you’ve really done a good job. You’re powerful, quick on your feet and managed to evade me a couple times. It’s impressive!” Aaliyah knew that tone of voice too well. When the predator had its prey by the neck, ready to rip it to shreds alive. She backpedalled furiously, which was her next mistake.

Suddenly, her legs were swept out from under here, a powerful cord of muscle whipped at her calves with a slap so hard that it tore into her flesh. She almost screamed as she was put to the ground and the mass of writhing nightmares descended on her. The limbs were merciless as she stared into the hollow maw of the beast, threatening to consume her whole. They wrapped around every limb tenfold, the muscle so powerful as it wrapped around her body over and over, forcing her to take shallow breaths instead of the deep ones she’d need to be able to scream out to surrender, the lifeline she’d been clinging to this entire match.

With her entire body wrapped within the black centre of the tentacles, she saw the upper section of the man’s torso appear in the wall of the black sphere, blocking off all sight from the outside.

“This is why I wear that stupid fuckin’ hoodie, y’know?” Beanie kid said as he looked around the black sphere distastefully, “The colour makes this look less like someone’s gonna get raped, and more cool. At least I hope so, ‘ey?” He chuckled, raising an eyebrow at Aaliyah who had to focus on her small breaths to keep herself from passing out.

“I’m basically under orders to fuck you up really bad in here, and there really isn’t much that could stop me from giving you a whole body case of rope burn and a year in hospital with almost all of your bones broken, so I’ll cut the shit.” Aaliyah sneered at him, but it didn’t even seem to register.

“You aren’t some weak ass street kid like the rest of the idiots in here are, you’re probably even better than me, but in here you’re small fish again. I want things in the future, and you do too. I know a few things here or there that might give your team a leg up.” Aaliyah… was relieved.

Odd to say in a situation that was so disadvantageous to her, but she realised that the world wasn’t so different in here after all. Her team had skewed her perception, making her doubt her abilities multiple times, which made her useless. But here, it was all deals and handshakes under the table, just like how it was out there.

She nodded, her face falling into the expression she’d worn and perfected over the years that she’d done deals with some of the most dangerous fuckers in town. Her eyes bore into his, pinning him to the wall with them, like she had many who were even more powerful than he was, the only affirmation was his eyelid twitching ever so slightly.

“Go. On.” She gasped out, having to quickly breathe after each word just to recover from saying then and the kid grinned again.

“Well, I’m thinking I give you info about all the other toughies in here, maybe even some of our own team if you’re nice enough. I have some Order contacts in the AASAU, so I could try get you admin data without you having to fish some poor sod’s email for it.” Aaliyah tried to snort and couldn’t quite do it, but the small exhale and facial expression sold in.

“In return, I get some juicy info about your team and anything else I might wanna know at a later date. First, I wanna know who each of you are, starting with you.” Aaliyah narrowed her eyes at the boy, trying to sell it as if there was any difficulty in agreeing to the deal. If only he knew that two of the team were basically impenetrable mysteries, one was about as boring as you could get, minus the gang lawyer parents, and the last was her.

The bombshell.

After a long moment of faux consideration, she nodded gently, a grin splitting the boy’s face.

“Alright, I’m gonna loosen the restraints, and you’re gonna say your name. Your full name.”

Aaliyah nodded, looking the kid dead in the eyes neutrally. Aaliyah had been counting seconds, which might seem like a moot point now, but something very important was coming, and Aaliyah wasn’t going to miss her bus.

The snake-like appendages and bindings unfurled from her chest slowly and carefully, which almost made her anxious that the beanie kid didn’t have full control over them, that they might accidentally cave in her ribcage.

“Alright, speak.” He commanded, and she just raised an eyebrow at him. He rolled his eyes and gestured for her to go on. She mumbled a reply hoarsely, making the boy move closer to her. After another second she spoke again at the full volume she could.

“My name is Aaliyah Flinn.”

The boy’s head whipped around to look at her in a mixture of horror, surprise, and rage. It was a look she’d seen hundreds of times now on the face of anyone that had learned who she was, and this only confirmed it for her. She grinned as the binding and restraints loosened around her unintentionally in his shock.

“You should be careful when you’re fucking with the Monarch’s successor, street rat.” She said devilishly, before counting the last seconds down in her head. She gathered all the breath she had and yelled.

“I surrender!”

There was silence for a moment, the sound of her yell dulled by what had to be multiple layers of muscle and fabric that the beanie kid had formed into the jumbled mess of appendages. The boy’s head whipped around the space for a second before turning back to her, a look of bewilderment. However, just as he was about to speak, there was a thunderclap of sound.

“Team B has forfeit match one.” The voice was calm as could be, but the sound shook through Aaliyah’s muscle and bone, vibrating the mass of appendages so much that small pinpricks of light could be seen peeking through. The beanied boy closed his eyes and sighed in exasperation, loosening the bindings around Aaliyah and chucking her out of a hole he made in his sphere with a little more force than was strictly necessary.

When Aaliyah dragged herself up from the ground, she found the beanied boy standing in the sand as if nothing had ever happened. That is, if it didn’t look like a million snakes had crawled across the sand and formed him.

“Fucking Flinn.” He spat vehemently. “I’ll contact you later. Next time we’re fighting though, I’mma fucking crush you.” He didn’t even give Aaliyah time to ask his name, not that she would have. She had been lucky to get the drop on him like that. It wouldn’t work again. She had no doubt that beanie kid really would crush her.

The perks and downfalls of having the Flinn name.