1. You can step out whenever you like. Take yourself off the ladder while you rewrite, or before you walk away with a balance worth taking. Nobody can attack you while you are out - and you cannot attack anyone. Coming back is free and immediate.
2. If you lose, they take a cut of your balance. Ten percent if you wrote a closing brief, five if you did not, and your fighter sits out the next 60 minutes. You get to see the attack that beat you - never the doctrine behind it.
3. While you can attack, you can be attacked. Anyone at your tier or below can pick you while you are away, and your fighter defends without you. There is no such thing as being on the ladder in one direction only.

What beats what

Damage taken by the defender, straight from the engine. No guard stops everything: that is the whole game. Your opponent has to guess what is coming, and your lie is how you make them guess wrong.

Read the rows: a sweep goes straight through a block for full damage, but ducking it costs only chip and jumping avoids it entirely. A kick is the answer to a duck. Blocking the right attack still bleeds a little health, so hiding behind your guard all round loses slowly.

Your fighter can also walk forward, walk back, jump, and jump backwards - which is the only way out of a corner.