For two minutes, we exchanged strikes at a pace that would have looked unremarkable to a casual observer — two students sparring, testing each other, the standard introductory dance of unfamiliar fighters. But beneath the surface, a different kind of combat was happening. She probed my technique for weaknesses. I let her find the ones I wanted her to find and protected the ones I didn't. She tested my Aether output. I maintained the D-rank-adjacent level I'd used in the exam. She varied her tempo, looking for the point where my responses degraded.
I kept that point hidden.
At the two-minute mark, she changed.
The half-throttle came off. Her signature blazed — not fully, not the 100% output that had cracked a practice sword, but maybe 70%. The increase was instantaneous, a gear-shift that took her from "controlled assessment" to "serious engagement" in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
Her next strike was twice as fast as anything she'd thrown before.
I parried. Barely. The impact numbed my wrist through the glove, and the pain in my healing ribs sent a warning signal that the bone-knitting salve could only do so much against repeated lateral stress.
She struck again. And again. A barrage of attacks that abandoned the analytical pattern and switched to pure pressure — overwhelming, relentless, the fighting style of someone who'd learned that superior aggression could compensate for technical gaps.
I gave ground. One step. Two. Three. Parrying, deflecting, reading her patterns through the noise of speed and power and the growing burn in my meridians as the Void reinforcement worked to keep up with demands that were exceeding its capacity.
Minute three. The wall.
I felt it hit — the tremor in my forearms, the sluggishness in my wrists, the half-second delay between intent and action that signaled the meridian system reaching its limit. The same wall that had ended my plan against Aiden. The point where the mask slipped and the real rank showed through.
Liora saw it.
Her eyes — those forge-copper eyes that read fights the way scholars read texts — caught the moment my parry was a fraction too slow, my footwork a degree too wide, the microexpressions of a body that was beginning to fail its operator.
She could have pressed. At 70% power against my fading output, she could have ended the match in seconds. A clean victory. A demonstration of dominance.
She pulled back.
Not retreated — pulled back. Reduced her output by half. Dropped from 70% to 40%. Matched her pressure to my declining capacity with the precision of a training partner who'd decided that winning was less valuable than understanding.
The exchange continued for another thirty seconds at the reduced intensity. I matched her. She matched me. Two fighters locked in a rhythm that looked like combat and felt like conversation.
Then Veylan called time.
"Stop."
We stopped. Simultaneously. Practice swords lowered in the same motion, at the same angle, with the same controlled precision.
Liora was breathing hard. So was I. The gap was that she was breathing hard from exertion. I was breathing hard from the ribs.
She looked at me. The hostility from the corridor — the territorial challenge, the ideological conflict between commoner and noble — was still there. But it had been joined by something new.
Respect. Not for my rank. Not for my name. For the fight itself — for the technique she'd probed and found genuine, for the tactical mind she'd tested and found sharp, for the gap she'd discovered and chosen not to exploit.
"You're good," she said.
"You're better."
"Obviously. But that's not what I mean." She twirled the practice sword once, a nervous habit or a thinking habit, I couldn't tell. "You're good the way people are good when they've been fighting with a handicap so long that the handicap became style. Like a left-handed swordsman who learned on right-handed forms and made the awkwardness into an advantage."
Perceptive. Dangerously perceptive. She'd identified the gap and extrapolated its nature in three minutes of sparring.
"Everyone has limitations," I said.
"Everyone has limitations," she agreed. "Most people aren't Valdrakes who should have none."
The implication hung between us — not hostile, not probing, just present. She was letting me know she'd seen it. She was also letting me know she wasn't going to push.
Not yet.
"Ashveil."
"Valdrake."
"You pulled back. At minute three."
She shrugged. One shoulder. The casual gesture of someone who didn't want to admit they'd done something kind and was going to play it off as pragmatic.
"Veylan said no pretending. Beating you while you're running on fumes doesn't tell me anything useful. I'll beat you at your best and then it'll count."
She walked toward the weapons rack. Over her shoulder, without turning: "Get better. Then we'll have a real fight."
A challenge. Not the hostile kind from the corridor — the competitive kind. The kind that said: I want you to be worth fighting.
I watched her go. The forge-fire signature was dimming to its resting state — warm, steady, waiting.
The other pairs had finished. Draven had apparently given the earth-user a tutorial in efficient violence — the larger boy was sitting on the stone, breathing heavily but grinning, which suggested he'd enjoyed being beaten. Caelen and the fire girl had fought to something resembling a draw, though Caelen's expression suggested he didn't consider draws acceptable outcomes.
Veylan gathered us at the center.
"Assessment complete," he said. "I now know what each of you can do, what you can't do, and approximately how far the gap between those two things extends. I'm not going to share specifics. That's your business. What I will share is this."
He looked at each of us.
"You're all Gold-tier talented, minimum. Some of you are Zenith. But your bodies, your cores, or your circumstances are holding you below your potential. Standard training will close the gap slowly — years, for most of you. My seminar will close it faster. Not through shortcuts. Through efficiency. Training designed for your specific gaps, not for the average student's average problems."
He sheathed his practice sword.
"Three sessions per week. Sixth bell. This platform. You'll train in pairs, and I'll rotate the pairings weekly. You'll learn to fight each other's strengths and cover each other's weaknesses. By the end of the semester, you'll be the most unpredictable fighters in the first year. Not the strongest. The most unpredictable. Because predictable fighters lose to stronger opponents, but unpredictable fighters lose to no one."
He turned to leave. Stopped at the stairwell entrance.
"One more thing. You were all selected for this seminar because you're broken. But broken swords can be reforged. Broken people can be rebuilt. The ones who don't survive are the ones who try to rebuild alone."
He descended into the stairwell. His footsteps faded. The platform was quiet except for the wind and the Aether storms and the breathing of six students who'd been told they were broken and offered a forge to fix it.
I stood on the edge of the platform. The thousand-foot drop yawned below — the Eastern Spires' mountain peaks visible as black silhouettes against the storm-lit sky. The wind was cold. My ribs were aching. My meridians were strained from the spar.
But something had shifted. Not in my body — in my understanding.
For three weeks at the Valdrake estate and one week at the academy, I'd been operating alone. The Sole Survivor approach — one player, one avatar, grinding solo content because the difficulty was set to impossible and party members couldn't be trusted. Every plan, every analysis, every decision had been mine alone, filtered through 4,127 hours of game knowledge and the particular loneliness of a dead man who'd spent his last years in a room with no one but a screen for company.
Veylan was offering something different. Not a party — not yet. But a training ground where being broken wasn't a secret to hide. Where weakness was the admission price and improvement was the currency.
Six broken things learning to fight together.
---
[ STATUS UPDATED ]
Training Environment: Veylan's Seminar
(Unmonitored)
Sparring Assessment: Liora Ashveil
> Duration: 3 minutes, 30 seconds
> Outcome: Mutual assessment (no victor)
> Observation: Heroine #2 identified the MC's
power output limitation within 120 seconds.
She chose not to exploit it. Reason: unclear.
Possibly competitive respect. Possibly something
the system refuses to categorize.
New Training Opportunities:
> Unmonitored combat practice (no rank exposure)
> Paired sparring with diverse fighting styles
> Access to Instructor Veylan's combat expertise
Note: The subject now trains three nights per
week on an unmonitored platform with Heroine #2,
Protagonist #2, and three unscripted characters.
The system would like to point out that this
arrangement was not in any version of the
original script and the system has no predictive
model for its outcomes.
The system is learning to be comfortable with
uncertainty.
The system is not comfortable with uncertainty.
The system was being optimistic. The system
apologizes for the deception.
---
I walked back to the Iron Wing. The corridors were dark. My ribs ached. My hands burned. My meridians hummed with the residual strain of a sparring match that had tested limits I hadn't fully mapped.
Room Seven. The door opened quietly. Ren was at his desk, three books open simultaneously, a pen moving across his notebook with the focused speed of someone who'd found a research thread and was pulling it before it could slip away.
He looked up. Read my face — or Cedric's face — with the particular attention he'd developed over the past week.
"How was it?"
I sat on my bed. Pulled off the gloves. Looked at the scarred hands that had held a practice sword against a girl who burned like a forge and chose to pull back instead of push through.
"There are other broken people," I said.
Ren's pen stopped. He studied me for a long moment.
"Is that good?"
I thought about Liora's eyes when she pulled back. About Veylan's voice when he said he was tired of funerals. About six students standing on a platform above a thousand-foot drop, each one carrying a gap they couldn't close alone.
"I think it might be," I said.
Ren nodded. Turned back to his research. His pen resumed its rhythm.
I lay back on the cotton sheets. Stared at the ceiling. The ribs protested. I ignored them. The hands burned. I ignored them.
Forty-six death flags remaining.
One conditionally disarmed.
And for the first time since waking in this world, the faintest suspicion that I might not have to cross them all off alone.