Chapter 171: Ironfist wins

That’s iron, Jelo told himself.

He used Wing Burst to relocate — burning another burst, feeling his calves ache on the landing, a specific heaviness settling behind his eyes. He was spending resources. The returns weren’t good enough.

He watched Iron Fist track him slowly across the space — a full iron body rotating with the patience of something geological — and felt the shape of the fight harden into something uncomfortable.

He’s going to run out of time before Iron Fist runs out of iron.

He pushed the thought down.

Iron Fist shed the full-body iron when he got close — let it recede from his legs and torso, keeping it only on his arms. Faster now. Still devastating, but moving again.

He came in low, grabbed Jelo’s lead arm and pulled — ugly, effective, closing every inch of remaining distance and making Wing Burst impossible without going through him first.

Jelo didn’t try to escape it. He brought Skilled Guard up instead — a last hard deployment, pushing everything remaining in the ability into his torso and arms — and let Iron Fist drive him backward while he fired short Dragon Claw bursts at point-blank range, almost like shotgun blasts, burning through Iron Fist’s grip and chest and elbows.

Iron Fist took them all and squeezed harder.

The Guard failed blow by blow — each successive hit hurting more than the previous one, the protection degrading until the last iron-weighted punch to Jelo’s ribs landed with something close to full force and drove the air out of him in one hard gasp.

He wrenched free. Put twenty feet between them. Stood bent forward with hands on knees for two full seconds, pulling air back in.

Iron Fist waited. Again. The patience of this man was its own kind of weapon.

Jelo straightened. Ribs cracked. Jaw throbbing. Legs wrapped in wet sand. Skilled Guard spent entirely. Wing Burst had maybe one clean use left in him. Maybe.

He had Dragon Claw. He had whatever was still burning in him that hadn’t gone out.

He looked at Iron Fist standing forty feet away — arms loose, shoulder grooves still smoking — and made a decision.

One shot. Everything.

He planted wide. Dropped into a low stance. Brought both hands up and together and opened the valve all the way — not the quick snap of a standard throw but a sustained draw, pulling from somewhere deep, building the claw up past anything he’d thrown before. His eyes blazed up from ember to something that actually lit the ground around his feet in shifting orange.

The claw that formed between his palms was enormous. Twice his usual wingspan. The air around it distorted with heat and the sound it made wasn’t a crack — it was a sustained tearing, low and vast, like something splitting along a seam never meant to open.

He threw it.

It crossed the distance in under a second and hit Iron Fist dead in the center of his iron-plated chest.

The detonation turned stone black in a three-foot radius. Iron Fist left the ground — inches only — came back down and slid eight full feet backward before stopping, boots dragging through cracked stone. Smoke swallowed the arena.

Jelo stood at the other end. Arms hanging. Empty. Waiting.

The smoke shifted.

Iron Fist was still standing.

His chest plate had a deep crater warped into it, iron deformed inward at the point of impact. His cracked arm had a new fracture running its length, glowing red-hot at the seam. He was breathing visibly now in a way he hadn’t been before.

But he was standing.

He looked down at the crater. Looked at the glowing crack. Looked across at Jelo.

He rolled his neck.

Jelo’s hands were shaking. Not fear — emptiness. The Dragon Claw had taken everything left in that ability. His legs felt filled with concrete. His enhanced vision flickered at the edges, struggling to maintain itself when everything else was running on nothing.

One Wing Burst. Maybe.

He tried it.

The burst stuttered.

He got halfway — felt the displacement begin, felt his body starting to move at the speed that had saved him all night — and then his legs refused entirely. Every burst across the whole fight caught up to him at once, a total muscular veto, and the skip died and deposited him stumbling in open ground instead of behind his target.

He caught himself on one hand. Knee hit stone. He looked up.

Iron Fist was five feet away.

He’d shed the remaining iron off his legs and torso the instant he saw the burst stutter — moved the second Jelo’s momentum died, crossed the distance in seconds with his body freed from weight. Only his arms stayed armored. The cracked one and the whole one. Both grey. Both raised.

Up close, the damage was visible in a way it hadn’t been at range. The grooves burned into his back. The crater in his chest piece. The fractured arm glowing at the seam. His breathing was labored and deliberate. He was genuinely hurt.

None of it had stopped him.

Jelo got his feet back under himself and stood up fully. He didn’t raise his hands into a guard he had nothing left to back up. He just stood — feet planted, eyes open — and looked at Iron Fist directly.

Iron Fist looked back. Something passed between them that couldn’t be named from the outside — a mutual acknowledgment of what this had cost both of them, and what was about to happen next.

Then Iron Fist drew the cracked arm back.

The fractured seam blazed brighter as he loaded the strike. Even broken, the iron held. The whole arm went behind it — his version of everything-left, his answer to the enormous Dragon Claw, his closing statement.

He threw it.

It hit Jelo in the chest and the sound it made bypassed the concept of impact entirely. Not a crack. Not a boom. A transfer — every joule of iron and mass and will moving directly through Jelo’s body and letting physics sort out the rest.

Jelo left the ground.

He traveled in a slow arc — up, tilting, falling — and crossed twenty feet before the far wall received him. He slumped from it and landed sitting against the base, legs out, head dropped forward.

His fingers moved once on the stone beside him. A slow curl. Automatic. The body still trying.

The ember glow in his eyes was low. Not gone. Still burning somewhere underneath everything — stubborn, patient, refusing. But low.

He didn’t get up.

Iron Fist stood in the settling dust. The iron left him plate by plate, revealing bruised skin and the swollen crack of the forearm he’d closed the fight with. His chest ached deep where the warped plate had transmitted force inward. His back still burned.

He’d feel this for two weeks.

He turned and looked across at Jelo — at the ember still faintly lit in those eyes, at the hand still slightly curled against the stone. At a fighter who had spent everything and been standing at the end of it.

He gave him one slow nod.

Not pity. Recognition.

Then he turned and walked away.

Behind him, in the ember-lit dark at the base of the shattered wall, Jelo breathed.

IRON FIST WINS — by everything he had, against everything Jelo had. It was enough. Barely.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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