"Ugh!"
WHACK.
Even against a punching bag, my fists weren't doing much. The moves were uncontrolled, the form was whatever the opposite of form was, and the only measurable result so far was a hand that had graduated from sore to genuinely bruised. And I'd been standing here telling myself my intrusive thoughts were just lies.
They weren't lies. I was just weak.
Ember. She'd fought me the way you'd deal with an insect that had somehow gotten past the screen door. Not with urgency or effort, just with enough attention to confirm that the problem wasn't serious.
She hadn't moved from her spot. Not once. The whole fight had come to her, and she'd responded to each attempt with the minimum required investment. One hand to meet both of mine. One focused expulsion to send me into a wall.
And the force behind it. That was the part that kept replaying. She'd channelled it into a single arm without any visible effort, no wind-up, no shift in expression, no sign that what she was doing required anything from her. It had come out of nowhere and arrived like something much larger than one person's fist.
WHACK. WHACK.
"You should be thankful she spared you." Amelia had materialised somewhere to the left, doing the thing where she watched me with the expression of someone who has run out of charitable interpretations. "I told you about the difficulty rating before you accepted."
"If this is going to be a conversation about my decision-making, then we're done." I kept my eyes on the bag. "I'm going to fight her again."
Because that was what Ember had said. Grow stronger and find me. The delivery had been the specific variety of final-boss dialogue that came packaged with enough ego to fill the building. I could still picture her walking away from the temple, silver hair, purple eyes, saying it like she'd already written the next scene and was just giving me my cue.
And somehow, underneath the embarrassment of what had actually happened during that fight, it didn't read like a threat. It read like an invitation from someone who had genuinely meant it.
Which was its own separate problem, because I'd just lost a fight against a girl who had described her objective as finding a playmate.
You lost to someone who wanted to play tag, Ren. Fuck!
The more I turned that over, the more it functioned as fuel. How long had I been hitting this bag? I'd stopped tracking. However long it was, the bag wasn't moving any differently and my stats weren't doing anything visibly impressive in response.
Speaking of which.
"Stats."
[Player's Info]
[Name: Ren Mora | Ability: ?? | Rank: D]
[Statistics]
[Force: 25 | Agility: 35 | Stamina: 40 | Fortitude: 2.3]
I stopped hitting the bag.
My mouth opened on its own.
D rank. And those numbers. Force at 25, Agility at 35, Stamina at 40. They were not the numbers that had been sitting in that screen the last time I looked. And the Fortitude. 2.3. Against the 0.0001 that had started all of this, 2.3 was a different category entirely.
"Amelia. What did I miss?"
"I'm not entirely certain." She was already looking at something on the system screen, her expression more focused than usual. "Your rank moved during the fight with Ember. And if that affected your fortitude the way it appears to have, it's connected to your ability somehow."
I looked back at the screen. The ability slot. Where it used to read None (Late Bloomer), there were now two question marks.
"It's not reading as none anymore."
"No." She paused. "Ren, it's possible you awakened."
I thought about it for a second.
Awakened. During that fight. The iconic ass-whooping of my life. I was barely able to land a hit, sent into walls, held up by the collar while someone smiled at me, and somewhere in the middle of that, my ability had apparently decided this was the right moment.
There was no beacon. No surge. No dramatic light or power announcement. Nothing that indicated a character was finally becoming useful. Just quietly, without telling me that something had shifted.
"Then why is it reading as a question mark?"
"That's what I don't understand." Amelia's brow was doing something complicated. "The system should be reading your ability the moment it activates. The question marks mean it's there, that something registered, but the system can't identify what it is. It can't categorise it." She paused. "Which is why your fortitude only reflects your physical stats. If the ability were readable, your rank would be higher."
That made a specific kind of sense when I held it together.
The D rank was pure physical calculation, the aggregate of everything I'd built through the tournament. Force, Agility, Stamina. Which, honestly, when I thought about it in those terms, was actually an impressive record. I was probably carrying more physical ability than most high-tier students would expect from someone who'd started this process as an unranked cripple.
But it also meant the ability wasn't being counted. Whatever I'd awakened was sitting in the system as an unknown quantity, which meant the real number — whatever rank I'd actually be if it were readable — was something else.
And yet even with all of that, I still wasn't strong enough.
A girl deflected both your fists with one of hers. Without trying.
That was the number that mattered right now. Not the screen. Not the rank. The physical reality of standing across from someone and realising that the gap between your force and theirs was wide enough that strategy alone couldn't close it.
I needed to learn how to hit. Not the analytical read-and-respond approach. Not the flow state instinct. Real, structural force, the kind that arrived before the opponent had finished deciding to defend. The kind Aria had used to put Tyler through a wall in a karaoke parlour without breaking conversation.
Like Aria's—
"What are you doing here?"
I turned around.
She was walking into the arena like she'd been summoned, which was an accurate description of how Aria tended to arrive places. School hours were over, so she wasn't in uniform. Black tank top, grey camo cargo pants. Moving through the dojo with the loose, unhurried energy of someone whose default setting was comfortable in spaces other people found intimidating.
"I could ask you the same thing," I said. The arena was King's territory. And Aria's relationship with King was — complicated. "I'm sure you'd have a reason for dropping by somewhere this particular."
"Revenge." She said it like she was answering a different question, simultaneously looking around the space with the wide-eyed expression of someone seeing something for the first time. Which, apparently, she was. "Okay, I'll give it to him. This is actually a good space." She did a slow turn, taking it in. "And this is the whole reason he had me suspended. Unbelievable."
She didn't elaborate on the revenge part. I decided to let that sit and see if it explained itself, because with Aria, it generally did.
Her eyes came back to me.
"Were you punching that bag?"
"No. I was romancing it." At her expression I kept going. "Whispering compliments. Very therapeutic." She lowered her eyes. "And you, were you admiring the lair of your greatest enemy?"
"Zael is not my enemy." She said it the exact way someone says something they've said enough times that they've stopped entirely convincing themselves. "We just keep ending up in each other's way. That's different."
Zael. The King of Silvic High. The person who had built this arena while she wasn't looking and arranged her suspension before she could find out about it.
"So what's the plan?" I turned back to the bag and grabbed it. "Tear the place down?"
"Why would I do that? Do you know what a reimbursement costs?"
WHACK. "So what then?"
"I haven't decided." The smile that appeared was the slow, curling kind that meant she'd actually decided and was enjoying the moment before she said it. "Maybe I'll just beat him in front of the whole school. Publicly. With witnesses."
She said it with absolute casualness. Like she was describing a reasonable weekend plan.
I didn't argue. Not because it was far-fetched. It might have been far-fetched coming from anyone else. But the Order feared Aria. That wasn't school gossip, it was observable fact with consistent evidence.
No one had actually seen her fight, no one had a clear read on her abilities or her rank, but it lived in everyone's instincts like something pre-installed. The King had gotten her suspended not because she'd done something wrong but because her presence made his structure feel less permanent.
And suspended or not, here she was. In his arena. Planning the next move.
"You call that a punch?" Her attention had drifted back to me, and her tone had made the specific shift into mockery that I was starting to recognise as one of her resting modes. "I've seen low-tiers with better mechanics."
"Go work with them then." I threw harder just to have a response.
She went quiet.
For a stretch, the only sound in the arena was my fists against the bag. Uneven, exhausted, not particularly impressive. Then, from somewhere behind me:
"Why are you doing this?"
"Training force. If I'm going to beat—" I stopped. Caught myself. "Never mind."
A pause from her end.
"If it's force you want to build, hitting a stationary bag past your limit isn't going to get you there. You need something that pushes past your ceiling. Resistance that responds." She said it like a conclusion she'd already reached before I'd asked. "Come with me."
"I'm not leaving until I've made progress." I kept my back to her and threw another punch.
I actually thought, for one moment, that she was going to respect that. Step back, acknowledge the decision, and leave me to it.
Instead I felt a hand close around my collar and pull.
"Just come." She was already moving toward the exit. "I don't bite."
Hopefully, she wouldn't.