Chapter 319: Stage Fright

The corridor was quiet compared to what was on the other side of the door.

Liam stood in it and looked at the door and listened to the crowd through it and took stock of what his body was doing, which was several things simultaneously, none of them fully under his control.

He looked down at himself.

The suit Elena had designed was black, fitted at the shoulders and through the chest, the fabric carrying a specific quality that moved with him rather than against him.

Two white stripes ran from each shoulder downward, clean and deliberate, curving slightly at the sides, meeting nowhere, existing as their own statement.

The material was dark enough to absorb the light rather than reflect it, the white stripes the only thing that caught anything, which made the whole thing look like it had been designed specifically for a dark room with eyes on it.

Which it had been.

A mask covered the upper half of his face, black, fitted close, the eye openings wide enough that nothing of his vision was compromised but enough of his face was covered that the person wearing it was and was not Liam at the same time.

He flexed his hands.

He looked at the door.

Then it opened from the other side and the sound came in like something physical, the crowd noise arriving in his chest before his ears had processed it, and he walked through.

The main floor opened in front of him and the cage was ahead and the lights above it were the only lights that mattered in the room, everything else in relative dark, the crowd a mass of sound and shape on all sides rising upward into the shadow of the ceiling.

He started walking toward the cage.

And then he stopped.

Because standing in the center of the cage already, completely still, with his arms folded across his chest and his feet planted and his eyes already on Liam from across the distance between them, was Marcus Vell.

He looked exactly the same as he had in the corridor. The same size. The same stillness. The same expression that carried no particular tension in it because tension was for people who were uncertain about outcomes.

Liam kept walking.

He reached the cage entrance.

He stepped through it.

And the gravity changed.

That was the only way to describe what happened when he crossed the threshold of the red line and entered the actual space of the arena.

The crowd noise, which had been loud before, became something else entirely when the cage was around him, the sound bouncing off the bars and the stone floor and finding nowhere to go except directly at him from every angle simultaneously.

It hit him like a pressure change, like descending too fast, his ears registering it and his chest registering it and his legs registering it.

He stopped walking.

He could not hear himself breathing.

He tried and the sound of it was gone, swallowed by the crowd, and he was standing in the center of the cage on the stone floor and his legs were doing something he had not asked them to do, a faint tremor running through them from somewhere above his knees, and he was doing the only thing available to him which was standing still and trying to find the inside of his own head.

’This is nothing like my fight with number–ten,’ he thought, and the thought arrived with more weight than he expected it to carry. ’The pressure was not close to this much that I can’t even feel my legs anymore.’

His legs were still trembling.

He could feel it and he could not stop it.

"It seems our challenger is having some difficulties," the announcer’s voice came through the speakers above, carrying the specific warmth of someone who had found something genuinely funny. "Ladies and gentlemen, I believe the young man may be experiencing what the professionals call. An atmosphere."

Laughter rolled through the crowd.

Liam stood on the stone floor and the laughter joined the rest of the noise and the total weight of all of it sitting on him was something he had not prepared for in any session with Wrath or in any conversation with Elena or in any moment alone with his own thoughts about what this was going to feel like.

He was not moving.

Standing was the full extent of what he was managing.

He tried to raise his head and found Marcus still in the same position, arms folded, feet planted, eyes on Liam from across the cage floor with an expression that had not changed since Liam entered the space. He was not warming up. He was not pacing. He was not doing anything that suggested this situation required any kind of preparation from him.

He was just watching.

’How,’ Liam thought. ’How is he just standing there like that. How does a person stand under this like it is nothing. How many times does someone have to do this before the weight of it stops landing on them.’

He watched Marcus standing there.

And the doubt arrived.

Not about the training or the plan or the things Wrath had shown him. Something older than any of that, something that existed underneath preparation and strategy and everything he had built in the weeks leading to this moment. A simple quiet question sitting at the base of everything.

’What if I actually cannot beat him.’

He looked at Marcus from across the cage floor, at the size of him and the stillness of him and the record of him, thirty-nine wins, and the two losses both of them carrying specific conditions that had nothing to do with Liam’s particular situation, and the doubt sat in him and made his legs tremble and made the noise of the crowd feel like it was pressing him into the stone beneath his feet.

Then he noticed Marcus’s mouth moving.

He was saying something.

From across the distance of the cage floor, with the crowd noise making hearing anything at conversational volume completely impossible, Marcus Vell was talking.

Liam watched his mouth.

He tried to read it, the way people read mouths when the sound was gone, watching the shapes the lips made and translating them.

Two words.

He watched it again.

Two words, repeated.

You’re pathetic.

Liam stared at him.

Marcus noticed that he had been read.

Something changed in his expression, the stillness of it cracking open for just a moment, and what came through the crack was a smile.

To a specific smile of someone who had said exactly what they intended to say and had confirmed that it had arrived exactly where they aimed it.

Liam looked at that smile.

And something in him decided.

’Okay,’ he thought. ’Okay. That is enough of this. Get straight. Right now. Get straight because if you stand here one more second with your legs shaking and your ears ringing and your head full of doubt then he is going to walk across this floor and end it before you have moved a single inch and everything, everything that led to this moment will have been for exactly nothing.’

He started moving.

Small at first, his feet finding the stone floor properly, his weight shifting, his body remembering what it was supposed to do when it was in motion rather than standing still taking the weight of the world through the soles of his shoes.

He rolled his shoulders.

He found his breathing.

He let the noise of the crowd be what it was, present and massive and entirely irrelevant to the next sixty seconds.

He moved toward the center.

"Oh," the announcer said, the voice carrying the specific delight of someone watching something go from bad to interesting. "Oh wait. OH WAIT. Ladies and gentlemen is the rookie FINALLY finding his legs? Is he actually? Is this happening right now?"

"YEAH," the crowd responded, the energy of it shifting from laughter into something with more heat in it.

"He’s alive at least." A man somewhere to the left, dry and loud enough to carry.

"Barely." Someone else, closer, which got a laugh from the people around them.

"Come on rookie don’t embarrass yourself out there." A woman’s voice, not unkind, the kind of tone that existed somewhere between encouragement and genuine concern.

"He looked better on paper." A flat voice from somewhere in the upper section.

"He looked better standing still." Another one, which produced more laughter than it probably deserved.

"MOVE YOUR FEET." Someone who had clearly decided coaching from the crowd was their contribution to the evening.

"Let him breathe." A calmer voice, somewhere near the front.

"He doesn’t have time to breathe." The response coming from two rows behind that one immediately.

"Someone get him a chair."

That one got the biggest laugh of all of them.

"You said it folk because I was starting to get comfortable up here," the announcer said. "I had made peace with the idea that tonight was going to be very short. I had planned my evening accordingly."

More laughter.

"Someone in the third row asked me if they should request a refund and I said probably yes but now I am not so sure."

The crowd noise built.

"It might be too late though folks," the announcer said, dropping his voice into the mock-serious register that carried everything he needed it to carry.

Liam was halfway through his next step when he saw it.

Marcus was not across the cage anymore.

Marcus was directly in front of him.

The distance between them had not been covered in any way that Liam had registered with his eyes.

One moment across the cage, the next moment here, his arm already extended, his fist already completing the arc of a punch that had started before Liam had known it was coming, and it was arriving at Liam’s face with the full weight and intention of thirty-nine wins behind it.

’Holy shit.’