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The training ground of the Knight of Justice Guild was a wide outdoor courtyard, stone-flagged, with suppression arrays set into the walls to keep collateral damage from reaching the residential wing. At the far end, Sienna stood with her staff raised.
Armand was sixty meters away.
"Begin when you're ready," he said.
She did not hesitate.
"Sun Commandment: Crown of the Burning Saint."
The halo appeared above her head like a second sunrise, a disc of white-gold light that pressed heat outward in every direction. Her body wrapped in golden fire, not burning her but burning around her, and when she spoke again the words carried weight.
"Sun Commandment: No Shadow Shall Remain."
The domain expanded. The shadows at the edge of the courtyard shrank and flattened. The suppression arrays flickered once as the solar field swept through them.
She moved.
She covered the sixty meters in four seconds, her staff already in motion, chanting as she ran. The words came fast under Crown of the Burning Saint, shorter and harder than they would be normally.
"Sun Commandment: Mercy Is Denied."
The mark landed on Armand. The air around him shimmered briefly with the seal.
She was already at his guard. He raised one arm to deflect the staff and she went low, redirecting the strike into the joint at his elbow, driving her shoulder into his chest to displace his footing.
He did not move.
She stepped back and went high, bringing the staff in a full arc at the side of his head, and he caught it with one hand and held it.
She let go.
Both hands free, she pressed both palms flat toward him from two feet away.
"Sun Commandment: Kneel Beneath the Dawn."
The crushing pressure poured down from the halo directly onto him. Every gram of guilt and killing intent she could extract from the domain went into it. She pushed until her vision blurred at the edges, until the fire around her body flickered and steadied and flickered again.
Armand's knee touched the ground.
For exactly one second.
Then he rose.
She was already pulling breath for the final cast, the staff back in her hands, repositioned, driving forward with everything she had remaining.
"Sun Commandment: Burn to Ash. The Goddess commands. Let her enemies be reduced to nothing."
The white-gold pillar came down from directly above. It came down hard, focused, aimed not at the general space but at the exact point his chest occupied, and she held the cast open, feeding mana into it, holding it sustained rather than releasing it as a burst because a sustained burn under the full stack of her setup was the highest output she was capable of.
The tiles beneath her cracked from the heat. The suppression arrays on the near wall went dark, overpowered. The temperature in the courtyard climbed sharply enough that the air above the stone surface shimmered.
She held it for six seconds before her body gave out.
The fire died.
She dropped to one knee, breathing in ragged pulls, her hands on the courtyard floor. The halo above her had dimmed to a faint ring and the golden fire was gone from her body entirely.
When she looked up, Armand was standing exactly where he had been.
His armor had a scorch mark on the left pauldron. Nothing else. No damage to the chestpiece, no damage to the tabard, not even a visible temperature change in the rest of the metal.
The scorch mark was roughly the size of her palm.
She got back to her feet. Her legs shook once. She set her stance again, staff up.
She had nothing left in that particular direction. She switched approach.
She drove toward him and went for the joint at his knee, using the staff as a lever. He shifted his weight and her strike met nothing. She overextended and he had her wrist, controlling the arm, and she used that to pull herself in and drove her elbow toward the side of his helmet.
He turned his head slightly and her elbow glanced off.
She tried three more exchanges in quick succession, each one different, each one targeting a structural weakness in the armor or a joint or a line of movement that should have been difficult to defend against. He redirected each one with minimal motion, the minimum necessary, the adjustment precise and unhurried.
The gap between them was not a gap in technique. It was a gap in scale.
She was hitting a mountain and hoping the mountain would notice.
She stepped back and raised the staff one more time. Her mana was nearly empty and her body was burning with exertion and she had six months to live and the scorch mark on his pauldron was the size of her palm.
"Scripture of the Sun, Section Three."
Armand moved.
He raised one hand. The divine pressure of a Mythical-rank Paladin settled over the courtyard like a physical weight, and when he spoke his voice carried something older than the words.
"Paladin Oath of the Sun. If I stand before Heaven, no wicked shall pass."
His fist connected with her sternum.
She flew.
The distance was several hundred meters. She cleared the training ground entirely, crossed the adjacent courtyard, and came to rest against the far wall, which cracked behind her and held. She slid down it and sat on the ground with her back against the stone, breathing in long uneven pulls.
The halo above her head had gone out.
Armand walked across both courtyards unhurried and looked down at her.
"You've improved significantly, Sienna."
She looked up at him. The praise was accurate. She did not feel it.
The scorch mark on his pauldron was the size of her palm. That was the full result of every skill, maximum output, six seconds of sustained Burn to Ash, and close combat until her body refused.
I can't even wound him. Six months left and I can't wound my teacher.
She got up. Her legs shook once and then steadied.
"It's all thanks to Teacher," she said.
Armand's weathered face creased into something genuinely warm. "Rest now. Overtraining damages more than it builds."
He turned. "Doctor."
Ren stepped out from the edge of the courtyard. "Sure."
He walked Sienna out.
. . .
They were two buildings away when he asked.
"This is the third day now. Have you made up your mind?"
Sienna kept walking for a few steps. Then she stopped.
"Doctor." Her voice was flat, something pressing from behind it. "Yes. I can't go on like this."
She started crying. Not quietly, not with any particular composure, just fully.
"I try my best. I don't sleep more than three hours. I train until I can't stand. And I still can't win. I can't win no matter what I do."
She pressed her hands over her face, her shoulders shaking.
Ren put his arm around her and pulled her in.
She went still for a second, surprised. Then she pressed her face against his chest and cried harder.
"I know," he said. His voice had shifted into something quieter. "I know how hard you've been working. You can rest now. Let Father take it from here."
Sienna's hands curled into his shirt.
"Yes, Father," she said.
. . .
Sienna's room was simple. A bed, a desk, a window facing west that let in the afternoon light. She was asleep within five minutes of lying down, fully clothed, her breathing evening out quickly.
Ren sat in the chair beside the bed.
Needle stood near the door.
"Good work," Ren said, without looking up. "Your ability continues to surprise me."
"It originates from the memory manipulation you gave me, Father. I developed the application myself."
Ren thought about this. He had given Needle the raw material and Needle had built something from it that Ren himself would not have thought to construct.
Then he thought about his own abilities. The tentacles. The grafting. The diagnostic tongue. The fear point system. The Outer God set. He had been running all of them at face value since the beginning, using each one for its stated function and nothing beyond.
Pearl before swine, the System said.
"Excuse me."
You have held abilities with undiscovered applications for years and never once tried to modify them. Needle had his for five months.
"That's different. His ability lends itself to—"
Pearl, the System said. Swine.
"Your mother is a swine. Your entire bloodline is a swine."
Your Majesty, the System said, with great poise, is a swine.
It ended there, because both of them had their dignity to maintain.
Ren stared at the ceiling.
Needle built a new application from existing material. What applications have I missed with my own abilities? He had been using his skills directly at their stated function: tentacles hold instruments, anesthesia paralyzes, CPR regenerates. Needle had taken memory manipulation and built a passive ambient field that made him invisible to an entire room of Mythical and Legendary-rank hunters. Ren had twenty tentacles and had mostly used them to pull ribs out.
What else.
"Father?"
He looked at Needle, who had noted the silence.
"Nothing," Ren said. "Preparation."
He stood up.
"Have you ever been a surgical assistant?"
"No, Father."
"You're about to be."
He reached into himself, and the tentacles came. Ten from his back, each one taking an instrument from the Outer God Surgical Set as it materialized. Then ten more emerging from the crown of his head, spreading outward like a bloom, each one locating its position in the space around the bed.
Twenty blood-red tentacles, fully deployed, the set complete.
One of them moved to Sienna's neck and pressed the Awakened Anesthesia in.
Her eyes snapped open.
She looked at Ren, at the twenty tentacles, at the instruments, and at Needle standing by the door.
"Yes, my child," Ren said. "Relax. And make sure to give me generous fear while you're at it."
He turned to Needle. "Take a towel and put it in her mouth. We're in enemy territory. Someone hearing her is inconvenient."
"Yes, Father."
Needle scanned the room. He found a rag near the cleaning bucket beside the door and used it.
Sienna's eyes went wide. She tried to move her arms. The anesthesia held everything in place.
She made a sound that was not quite a word.
Ren glanced at the rag.
"You're ruthless, Needle. She's a woman. How could you use that."
"You used a child as bait in Victoria, Father," Needle said.
"Point taken."
Ren turned back to Sienna, who was looking up at him with an expression he would have described as deeply sincere terror.
"Now then," he said. "Time to strip some skin."