Lymur immediately realized that he knew whose class this was.
The professor arrived not through the door, not from the benches, but on a flare hawk. She came in from above and the bond dropped through the open ceiling of the venue. The hawk — big, rust-colored, its wings shedding small embers with every beat — landed at the center of the floor. It had done this before. It knew exactly how much space it needed.
Vanesy Glory swung off its back and the hawk — Torch, he remembered — folded its wings and stepped to the side.
The students gathered around the floor all turned. Several of them, who had already clocked Lymur in the upper benches after he'd sat down and had been checking on him, now had two things to look at instead of one, which seemed to relieve them.
Lymur looked at the students properly for the first time since sitting down.
He knew more of them than he'd expected.
Claire, obviously. She was near the front with her sword already out, running a thumb along the flat of the blade while cheerfully talking with another student.
Tessia Eralith, this year's Student Council President, was there. Cynthia's student — he'd seen her at the academy before but they'd never had a real talk.
Curtis Glayder, in a black uniform with a military cut, the same style as Claire's and Arthur's, vastly different from the standard student uniform.
So that's Cynthia's new disciplinary committee. He'd heard it mentioned once in a faculty meeting he'd half attended. Where the student council was the administrative face of student governance, the disciplinary committee was apparently the enforcement mechanism.
Three of them were here, all in black.
Arthur Leywin, also in the committee uniform, was standing slightly apart from the main cluster. He had the same unusual vibe to him that he'd always had.
And Lukas Wykes, standing near the student council group, acting like he knew people were watching—and was making sure it was worth it.
He's as delusionally assured of himself as ever, Lymur noted. Some people are genuinely committed to their bit.
He made his way down the tiered benches.
......
Vanesy saw him coming and her face put on a wide grin that had nothing professional about it and didn't try to.
"Well, if it isn't our esteemed Arbiter," she said, loud enough that half the room heard it.
"That'd be 'Professor' on school grounds." He stopped in front of her. "Professor Vanesy."
"Sure, sure." She looked him up and down. "You look — different. Is that blood on your pants—"
"It's not anymore. I showered."
"It was, though."
"It was," he agreed.
She laughed and wrapped both arms around his neck, rising onto her toes to reach him. Then she messed up his hair like she owned the right to, the easy confidence of someone who'd decided early on that his composure would always bounce back.
He stood there with his hands at his sides and an expression of long-suffering patience.
"You're getting worse at this," he said.
"I'm getting better at this!"
"In absolutely no way."
She let go, stepped back, and took a proper look at him. There was something behind the grin. A quick check that people do without turning it into a whole conversation. He let her, and didn't say anything about it.
"How long has it been?" she asked, at a more normal volume.
"Since we actually talked? Three months, maybe."
"You came to my last lecture last semester and fell asleep."
"I wasn't asleep. I was thinking."
"You were snoring."
"I, uh, I don't snore."
"Lymur."
"I was thinking very deeply and my breathing must've reflected that, then."
She pointed at him.
"That's a lie and we both know it!" But she was smiling. She glanced at Torch, who had settled at the edge of the floor and was watching everything calmly. "He misses you, actually. He gets excited when I mention the arena."
"The arena was one time, wasn't it?"
"One time that he has not stopped thinking about." She crossed her arms. "You did blow half the floor apart."
"The floor was simply in the way."
"The floor is always in the way, that's what floors do."
He smiled, which he hadn't been doing much this morning. It surprised him slightly.
She gave him a look that was warm and slightly pointed. "Come watch. You look like you could use something boring to do."
"Hehe, I can't really deny that now."
......
He went back to the benches.
Vanesy turned to the students with the authority of someone who actually liked being in charge, and the room shifted around her. She introduced herself to those who didn't know her, then laid out the plan. There was real skill in how she handled it, Lymur could tell. She'd been doing this long enough to make it look easy.
He watched the students.
Lukas kept glancing at him, his shoulders a little too tight — trying hard to look unbothered and failing spectacularly. Tessia and Curtis looked back and forth between him and Vanesy with open curiosity, not even trying to hide it. Arthur didn't look at him at all, which said its own thing.
Claire caught his eye from across the floor and raised an eyebrow. He gave a small nod. She turned back to the front, the corners of her mouth twitching.
He realized he'd stopped listening to Vanesy.
Instead, he was just watching the students, the room, the light spilling through the high windows of the training hall. The whole scene had started to feel like something he was watching rather than participating in.
And somewhere in that quiet aggravation of details, something settled in him. Not sadness. Not happiness either. Something more like awareness, like how he was aware of time's passage.
When did this become my new normal? he thought. Walking onto campus and knowing half the people here. How long has it been since I started here?
He filed it away and closed his eyes for just a moment, meaning to rest them. He didn't know how much time passed when he was hit in the shoulder.
"You look tired today," Vanesy said, light on the surface but honest underneath. Then she tilted her head slightly. "Didn't know you could even get tired."
"Who do you think I am?" He stretched his neck slightly. "Anyway, what's going on?"
She brightened. "It's a mock battle. 3v3. Student council versus disciplinary committee. A simulation of war and conquest and heated youth rivalry! How awesome is that?" She swept a hand toward the floor. "Lukas volunteered to even the numbers for the council side."
"Lukas, huh."
She gave him a sideways look. "I sure sense history. There are rumors, actually. That you're especially at odds with the Wykes family. Is it a power struggle? Political?"
He considered the ceiling briefly, then smiled. "No. It's just pettiness and wounded pride of men."
"...I see."
"It's not very interesting," he confirmed. "Sorry if you're disappointed."
The duel started.
He gave it his attention for the first ninety seconds. The student council opened with coordination that had clearly been drilled, each covering the other's angle.
While the disciplinary committee responded with the faster, more individualized style of people who trained together but fought as themselves.
Claire cornered her opponent — the student council vice president — with an efficiency that was its own kind of eloquent, the footwork correction from earlier that morning already noticeable.
Lymur noted that and moved on. He leaned forward in his seat, resting his elbow on his leg and his chin in his hand.
There's nothing here that seems particularly interes—
He stopped the thought as he noticed... Arthur.
He'd been watching Arthur with the same little attention he was giving everyone else, but for the past half minute something had been tugging at the edge of his focus. Now he finally let himself look at it directly.
Arthur was fighting Lukas, and he appeared to be losing, and that by itself was unremarkable — Lukas was older and his mana output, as well as the development of his mana core, was significantly higher than Arthur.
What was remarkable was the shape of the loss.
He's restricting himself? Oh, he's limiting his two strongest elements. I see, I see.
He watched Arthur take a hit he should have been able to avoid and absorb it, and press forward with something considerably more limited than what Lymur suspected he was capable of.
Developing the weaker ones by suppressing the stronger ones. It was a legitimate approach. It was also getting him comprehensively beaten by Lukas, who was currently wearing the expression of someone who had decided this was a validation of everything he'd always believed about himself.
Boring, Lymur thought, watching Lukas's expression.
"I sure am glad I didn't join the Disciplinary Committee. If I were on the same team as someone as incompetently useless as you, I might've actually just quit school," Lukas provoked, and Lymur had to be honest with himself — that was a damn good rage bait.
He moved his gaze to Curtis and Tessia.
Hm?
Something was wrong with Tessia's core.
He saw it before he understood it — an irregularity in the atmospheric particles around her that Theosophy flagged without being asked. He let the skill open fully and looked.
Information that would've fried any normal human's brain flooded Lymur's mind, and he immediately noticed the irregularity.
Her mana circulation was wrong. It wasn't the turbulence of someone pushing hard. This was something structural underneath the active layer. And it had nothing to do with the fight, but it was still affecting everything anyway.
He activated Calculation Domain and analyzed deeper.
That's —
Curtis's World Lion bond, Gawder, was gathering mana at the mouth at large quantities, dense and bright, building toward something big. A beam attack — he could see the shape of it forming, the mana compressing into a channel, the direction it was going to go.
Tessia.
He stood up.
At his side, Vanesy was already moving — he could hear her shouting, heard the beat of Torch's wings as she vaulted onto the hawk's back — but the mana was releasing, it was already releasing, and the distance was —
The world slowed... then stopped.
It wasn't his doing. He felt it the moment it happened — someone else's spell, wrapping around the space and pulling time out of it. He moved immediately, without thinking, and found that he could.
Woah, woah, woah, woah! He looked at the static world around him. The mana beam was frozen in the air midway between Gawder's mouth and Tessia, caught in a perfect arrested moment. Dust motes hung. Vanesy and Torch were mid-flight, wings spread, going nowhere.
This isn't a true time stop, is it?
He walked through frozen time effortlessly.
It separates the caster from space-time. Same effect from the outside, different principle entirely. True time stop would require — no, it would be impossible. Nothing that exists here has the energy to freeze the universal arrow of time.
He looked at the frozen mana beam.
Smart workaround, though. Cool, too.
Then he noticed someone else was moving.
Arthur was at the edge of the field with his arms raised and his body transformed — white hair where it had been auburn, golden runes across his forearms and beneath his eyes, the blue of his irises gone over to a deep lavender.
His focus was locked on Tessia, intense and almost desperate. Like someone who'd decided exactly what mattered — and was now putting everything into it.
He hadn't seen Lymur yet.
Lymur walked toward him. He used Ruler's Authority and pulled a narrow tunnel of suspended time around both of them — just to let sound pass between them in this frozen world — and stopped a few steps away.
"What do you think you're doing?" he asked.
Arthur turned around.
Genuine and complete surprise came first on his face.
How, Arthur was thinking. Lymur could see it without needing to be told. How are you moving?!
"You're doing awful," Lymur said. "You're running out of mana. Release it."
"I — " Arthur's voice came out thin. "I can't. Tessia is — "
"Yeah." He looked at the frozen beam. "I can see that. Release it and I'll handle it."
Arthur looked at him. There was something in that look — not quite distrust, but close enough. It was a caution you see in someone who doesn't have much left and is being asked to spend the rest on trust anyway.
Then he nodded anyway.
The world snapped back into motion.
The beam moved.
Lymur activated Flash in the most careful application he'd ever attempted, threading the attractive force through a needle-width of space to arrive at exactly the right coordinate without the recoil that would have turned into a second disaster.
He arrived at Tessia in the same instant the beam would have.
His hand came up, wrapped in the repulsive spectrum of Confluence, and he slapped it forward into the beam's face.
The blazing mana dispersed and unraveled, the energy redistributing outward and away without the catastrophic release it would have had if he'd simply blocked it. The sound it made was a deep, short exhalation, like an enormous beast breathing out.
Tessia hit the ground with a groan.
Curtis pulled Gawder up short, his face gradually becoming more alarmed. Vanesy and Torch landed hard nearby. The students around the edges of the floor had gone very quiet.
"Professor, I didn't know she was — " Curtis started, voice tight.
"It's okay." Vanesy cut across him, her eyes already on Tessia and Lymur. "It's okay, Curtis."
Lymur sat down on the floor next to Tessia.
His eyes were glowing. The redness was deeper now, a sign of his focused analysis. The chatter of the room became white noise, became less than white noise, became nothing at all as Theosophy accelerated and the world slowed to the pace he needed.
Her mana core, he thought. Something in it is —
He found it.
There was a will. Not hers — something that had been given to her, or had entered her, and had its own intent separate from her own. It was a beast will.
The Elderwood Guardian, he thought.
He held that for a moment.
And now it's doing something she can't control.
It was technically just a beast will going rampant, and he already found the solution to that.
He looked at Tessia's face — pale, breathing hard, eyes not fully focused. She was fighting it. She just didn't have the right tools to fight it with, because the tools you used against an S-class mana beast's autonomous will were not tools most people had access to.
Why am I trying so hard, he thought, not for the first time. Well, whatever.
He already had his forefinger at her sternum.
Because she's right here and it's fixable, he thought. That's all.
He released Ruler's Ambition.
Not freely, though. He guided it like water through a narrow pipe, aimed directly at the will inside her instead of the room around them. But Ruler's Ambition wasn't exactly precise. It was a tidal force, and tides always had edges. Those edges swept over everyone nearby, even if they weren't the target.
He felt the ripple spread. People in the room stiffened, breath catching from different directions as part of Lymur's Ruler's Ambition reached them, paralyzing their bodies in place.
"L-Lymur," Vanesy managed. She was the only one who could.
"Bear it a little longer," he said, without looking up. "It won't take long."
The beast will inside Tessia pushed back. It was old and it had its own conviction. He leaned into it, but didn't answer it with force. He used Ruler's Ambition the way it was meant to be used at its core. That instinctive language of hierarchy that didn't overpower so much as remind.
Sit down, beast, he communicated, in no language that had words. You are a guest. Act like one.
Something tried to hit his face.
He caught it with his left hand without looking, the impact landing in his palm. He looked at the source... Arthur. Standing over him, breathing hard, barely steady on his feet.
He had that drained look of someone who'd pushed what was left of himself through a spell he hadn't fully recovered from.
His expression was tangled — many things at once — but the clearest one was protective anger. And Lymur found that, under the circumstances, both understandable and a little... touching.
They seem to know each other.
He held Arthur's fist in his hand and turned back to Tessia.
The beast will already receded. It retreated to somewhere quieter inside her and stayed there.
He released Ruler's Ambition, then Arthur's fist.
Arthur stumbled, then caught himself. He looked at Lymur, still unsettled.
"A simple thank you would be fine," Lymur said as he stood up.
"Thank you? What the hell did you even — "
"Art..."
Tessia's voice called out to him. Arthur turned at once. Whatever was unresolved cleared out, replaced by something more urgent.
She was sitting up.
She looked down at her own sternum with real confusion, pressing a hand there like she was checking something that didn't make sense anymore. Then she looked up and found Lymur.
She stood too quickly, still unsteady, and bowed. The words that came out were sincere, but a little rushed.
"I — thank you, I don't know what happened but I — thank you, Professor Lymur, I don't know what you — "
"All's well that ends well," he said, giving a small wave and a smile. "You're fine. That's what matters."
He glanced around the room — students still pulling themselves together from the aftereffects of the Ambition, Vanesy already issuing sharp instructions, a medic arriving from somewhere.
"Seems I've overstayed. I still have about a hundred things to do, so I'll leave you all in the more than capable hands of Professor Vanesy."
"Is that sarcasm?" Vanesy called. Then she joked, "And these are my students, get out of here!"
She said it with a smile she didn't bother to hide. More than anything else in the room, he thought, she was the most genuinely relieved — it was just that her version of relief came out as noise, which was its own kind of grace.
He turned around and started toward the exit.
Arthur watched him go.
My most secret technique, Arthur thought, still tired. The one that should have been impossible for anyone else to move inside. And Lymur walked through it like it was nothing. How...
He looked at his own hand.
There are genuinely levels to this...
He'd known that, in an abstract way. He was a once-in-a-generation talent, or something close to it. He'd been told that. He'd tested himself against enough to believe it had some truth to it.
But prodigious talent that came once in a century was, apparently, just barely enough to be a footnote in the presence of an unquantifiable entity.
He watched the door where Lymur had gone.
Nobody in the room asked what Lymur had done to Tessia's core. Even he did not ask how he'd moved inside Static Void. Nobody asked what Ruler's Ambition actually was or how it worked or how he'd fixed whatever Tessia's issue was.
The explanation everyone seemed to settle on was simple.
Because he's Lymur, of course.
Arthur found, for the first time, that he had no argument against it.