Six 3rd forms activated simultaneously.
The plaza changed. Heat from Sylvia. Electricity from Levi — the Absolute Current arriving with the total, everywhere-at-once quality of his 3rd form, the static patterns blazing white across his light-blue skin, sparks moving across his eyes, the world sharpening to the fine-point clarity that only the 3rd form brought. Silver from Priscilla, rising two feet off the ground without deciding to. Earth and stone from Kevin, the ground shifting in response to his presence. Water from Vanessa, the air around her taking on the weight of incoming rain. Dwayne simply grew — not dramatically, just enough to shift his weight class into something that read differently on a battlefield.
James, beside them, had no 3rd form to activate. He stood in the transformed air of six simultaneous Flux expressions and looked at the dragons descending from the portal with the expression of someone who was aware of the gap and had decided to close it by other means.
He pocketed the dagger and put his fingers to his lips.
Not yet. But soon.
The dragons hit the plaza with the particular impact of creatures that had never learned to land gently because they'd never needed to. Fire and wind dropped together — the combination intentional, the fire dragon's breath mixing with the wind dragon's downdraft into a rolling wave of superheated air that crossed the plaza in under a second.
The group scattered.
✦ ✦ ✦
Kevin took the fire dragon because fire was the natural match for earth — not because earth beat fire, but because stone absorbed it better than anything else, and Kevin was currently made of stone in ways that were more than metaphorical.
He moved toward it while everyone else moved away, which was either brave or tactically sound depending on your perspective.
"Earthly Bounds," he said.
Multiple stone hands erupted from the plaza floor — large, shaped from the compressed earth below the simulated streets — and closed around the fire dragon's legs and wings, locking it in place with the weight of several tonnes of rock. The dragon thrashed, flame erupting from every surface, and the hands began to crack at the joints.
"Vanessa," Kevin said. "Now would be good."
Vanessa had been building since the moment the dragons appeared.
She stood with her hands raised, the air above her palms carrying a density that bent the light slightly, water pulled from the humidity of the simulation's air and shaped into something that wasn't quite a projectile and wasn't quite a force — an arrow drawn back in a bow that existed entirely as accumulated potential, waiting for the moment she chose to release it.
The fire dragon burned through Kevin's stone hands. The Earthly Bounds shattered.
"Kevin — buy me ten more seconds," she said, without looking away from her target.
Kevin summoned the Colossal Golem.
It arrived with less force than before — the reserves were diminished, the 3rd form not fully recovered — but it arrived. Forty feet of packed earth and will, Kevin at the core of it, looking down at the fire dragon with the particular calm of someone who had stopped being afraid of the thing they were fighting.
He grabbed the dragon with both Golem hands and held it.
The dragon burned him. He held it anyway.
"Now," he said.
Vanessa released.
The Hydro Maximus left her hands with enough force to send her stumbling backward three steps, the recoil of an attack that had been building for two full minutes finally expressing itself all at once. The water arrow didn't splash or disperse — it drilled, a compressed column of force that hit the fire dragon in the chest and kept going, the pressure punching through scale and bone and exiting the other side.
The dragon dropped.
Kevin released the Golem before it could cost him the rest of what he had. Landed on the plaza stone, knees absorbing the impact. His watch read 38%. Conscious. Standing.
Vanessa was already at his side. "You good?"
"Good enough," he said.
✦ ✦ ✦
The wind dragon was fast, which was the problem. Not just flight-fast — the speed of something that used wind as a medium rather than moving through it, the displacement field around it deflecting anything that came close. Sylvia's fire moved faster than most things but the wind dragon kept redirecting it, the gusts turning her attacks back on themselves or dispersing them before they landed.
It was, she decided, annoying.
The dragon gathered wind at its mouth — the specific compression of an incoming breath attack — and released it as a concentrated horizontal blast aimed directly at her. She activated her Rocket Thruster and went straight into it.
Not around it. Into it.
The collision of fire and compressed wind produced a sustained screaming sound and a wall of turbulent superheated air that she pushed through by sheer expenditure of Flux, the thruster output competing directly with the dragon's breath, neither of them yielding. She was burning through energy at a rate that made her watch tick down in visible increments but she kept pushing, kept forward, because the moment she stopped the dragon's breath would win.
She came through the other side moving at full speed and hit the wind dragon with both fists.
The impact drove it backward and downward, wings folding under the force, and they went into the plaza together — Sylvia on top, both fists still active, the fiery fist energy discharging on contact in rapid succession. Hit after hit after hit, each one faster than the last, the dragon's attempts to redirect wind failing at this range because she wasn't giving it the space to build a current. Close enough that her fire was the only weather that mattered.
The wind dragon stopped moving.
Sylvia stood up. Checked her watch. 41%.
She was going to need to have a conversation with herself about energy management.
Later.
✦ ✦ ✦
The crystal dragon was a fundamentally different problem from the others.
It didn't use heat or wind. It used geometry — launching volleys of razor-edged crystal shards in patterns that covered angles, forcing evasion into paths that set up the next volley. Fighting it required either absorbing the pattern or breaking it.
Priscilla broke it.
She extended her awareness across the entire attack radius — felt each shard as it launched, its trajectory, its velocity, the relationship between it and every other shard in the volley — and held them. All of them. Simultaneously. The crystal shards hung in the air thirty metres out, suspended in a moment that the dragon hadn't expected and couldn't immediately process.
Then she sent them back.
Not all of them — that would have been excessive, and she'd already decided this was a precision problem, not a force problem. She selected a third of the volley, reversed their trajectories, and accelerated them. The dragon had approximately half a second to register what was happening before its own attack reached it.
It stumbled. Wounded, not finished.
Priscilla pulled it toward her.
The Gravitate spell caught the dragon mid-recovery and dragged it across the plaza floor, momentum building, and when it was close enough she infused the Repulse force into her fist and punched it in the sternum with everything she had.
The dragon folded.
Dwayne, who had been watching this sequence unfold, looked at the dragon and then at Priscilla. "You didn't leave me anything," he said.
"You didn't make an opening," she said.
He looked at the dragon again. Then he crouched down, placed one hand on it, and activated his ability — size manipulation running through the contact, the dragon's mass compressing inward, scale and bone and everything that made it a dragon reducing steadily until he was holding something the size of a large insect in his palm.
He closed his fist.
"There," he said. "I did something."
Priscilla considered this. "Fair enough."
✦ ✦ ✦
The ice dragon was playing a game that Levi understood immediately.
Distance. It wanted distance — staying at range, using its freezing breath as a denial tool, preventing approach while wearing down whatever came at it. Every time he moved forward, the breath redirected. The ice spread across the plaza in expanding sheets, forcing footwork, making the ground unreliable.
He telestrided.
The breath followed him left. He reappeared right. The breath redirected. He reappeared behind the dragon entirely, already moving, and wrapped electron chains around its neck.
What happened next was less graceful than he'd planned. The dragon, to its credit, didn't panic — it used the chain as leverage, wings driving downward, and launched itself skyward with enough force to take Levi off his feet and into the air with it. He held the chain rather than releasing it, which was either commitment to the plan or stubbornness, and the dragon whipped him in a wide arc above the plaza.
He used the arc.
At the top of the swing, he released the chain, twisted in the air, and let the momentum carry him into a full horizontal spin. The Electric Vortex formed around him as he turned — the same motion as every time he'd used it, but with the full Absolute Current behind it rather than the 2nd Form, the electricity running at a completely different magnitude.
He drilled into the ice dragon from above.
The vortex drove through its defences the way a current drives through a conductor: completely, finding every path simultaneously. The dragon hit the plaza hard and didn't get up.
Levi landed beside it, breathing hard, the vortex dispersing.
The plaza was quiet.
Four dragons. Four down.
He looked around at his classmates — Kevin on his knees but upright, Vanessa beside him, Sylvia standing over the wind dragon with her hair still flickering, Priscilla descending slowly from three feet above the crystal dragon's remains, Dwayne brushing something off his palm.
James was sitting on the edge of the plaza, watching, Levi's dagger across his knees.
"Good?" Levi called.
James held up a thumb. "Good."
—
The wave seven signal ran through the simulation and the environment began to dissolve — the city of Olympicõ pulling apart at its edges, the buildings fading, the stone streets going transparent and then gone until there was nothing left but the arena floor and seven contestants standing on it.
The crowd noise hit them like a wall.
Not the sustained roar of the earlier waves — something more complex than that. The sound of several hundred people processing what they'd watched and expressing it all at the same time, overlapping cheers and voices and the specific quality of an audience that had seen something they hadn't expected.
Levi stood in the middle of the arena floor and let it wash over him.
He was at 58% health. The Absolute Current had taken the rest of his magic energy. His legs were telling him things he was choosing not to listen to yet. But he was standing, and all seven of them were standing, and the trial was over.
In the VIP section, the three colonels sat with their notepads closed.
They'd stopped writing somewhere around wave six.
✦ ✦ ✦
Melissa was already on the arena floor when the contestants came off it.
She didn't say anything immediately — just looked at them, the same inventory she'd done in the lobby that morning, moving from face to face with the focused attention of someone who needed to see that everyone was accounted for.
They were.
"Well," she said.
"Well," said Sylvia.
"The dragons," Melissa said. "Four of them. Simultaneously." A pause. "I didn't design this trial."
"Was it harder than usual?" Levi asked.
Melissa looked at him. "Let's say the officials wanted to see something specific." She looked at all three of them — Levi, Sylvia, Priscilla — and then at the others: Kevin still on his feet through what appeared to be determination alone, James who had found a way to be useful in every wave without a 3rd form, Vanessa who had built a single attack for two minutes and delivered it at exactly the right moment, Dwayne who had made space and then used it.
"All seven of you made wave seven," she said. "That hasn't happened before. Not in the twelve years I've been watching this trial."
The seven of them absorbed this in their various ways — Kevin quietly, James with visible surprise, the others settling into it like something they'd worked toward and were only now allowing themselves to believe.
"What happens now?" Priscilla asked.
"Now the colonels make their decisions." Melissa glanced toward the VIP section, where the three officials were already in conversation with Veronica. "Give them an hour."
She looked at Levi one more time — just for a moment, the careful look, the open-door quality. Something in it had changed from the lobby this morning. Not the door being more open exactly. More like she'd confirmed something she'd been watching for.
She turned and walked toward the VIP section.
Levi watched her go and thought about Ivel's voice in the oak tree: *the ceiling is higher than you currently believe.*
He thought about the four dragons. About the Absolute Current running at full output for the first time in a real situation. About the way it had felt — not effortful, not straining, but like something expressing itself at the scale it was meant for.
He thought about how much higher the ceiling still was.
An hour. Then the colonels.
He sat down on the arena floor and waited.