"You're leaving your left side open again."
"I'm not-"Baro claimed.
"You are."
"No I'm -". Baro sighed. "It's fine."
"Every time you throw right, your left just—" Arie gestured vaguely, "—drops. Like four inches. Stays there."
Baro stared at him. Then he looked at Rosh. "Is that true?"
Rosh didn't look up from tightening his gauntlet strap. "It's true."
"Why has nobody told me this?"
"We have," Demi said without looking up. "You just don't listen."
"That is not—"
"It is."
Baro turned back to Arie with the wounded expression of someone assembling a counterargument and failing to find one. Then he pointed at him. "You have an observant eye. Like you're always calculating something."
"I'm calculating how to obliterate your left side."
Rosh laughed. Spectre, sitting against the wall with his arms crossed and his eyes half closed, made a sound that might have been amusement. With Spectre it was always hard to tell.
Baro shook his head and raised his hands again. "Aghhh fine then. Let me show you what I'm really made of."
They sparred until the grey morning light turned gold and the yard got warm enough to be uncomfortable. Arie moved at about sixty percent of his strength, enough to be useful, enough to push Baro without showing anything he wasn't ready to show yet. Baro was genuinely good, with a natural aggression that could be brilliant when he controlled it and a liability when he didn't.
He controlled it maybe sixty percent of the time.
"You're getting better," Arie said, after Baro blocked a combination cleanly and countered well. "The left is still dropping but less."
"Ayy it's progress," Baro said, breathing hard and grinning. "By trial ten I'll be invincible."
"By trial ten we'll be in Babilon."
"Then I'll be perfect in Babilon." He grabbed his water and took a long drink. "Hey, do you ever actually get tired? Like genuinely tired?"
Arie considered this. "Only when a conversation gets boring."
Baro threw a cloth at him.
Rosh was working the heavy post nearby, each strike landing with that specific crack of kinetic force that went beyond what raw strength should produce. The air around his gauntlets did something strange when he really committed. It produced a shimmer, almost invisible, like heat haze around something very cold. Each impact sent shockwaves through the post that had nothing to do with the weight behind the hit.
"You're overextending on the follow through," Demi said, appearing beside Rosh with her notebook. She'd been observing for the last twenty minutes without anyone noticing. That was a Demi thing.
Rosh looked at the post. Then he looked at his hands and then at Demi. "The hit lands just fine."
"Yeah, it lands," Demi said, stepping in. "And then you're just—open."
She tapped her notebook. "Third hit. Every time."
Rosh frowned. "Every time?"
"Every time."
Rosh was quiet for a moment. "How long have you been tracking that?"
"Since the first trial."
He stared at her. "And you're telling me now?"
"I wanted to be sure about the pattern first." She said it completely without apology. "Now I'm sure." Demi smirked.
Arie watched this exchange from across the yard and said nothing.
Demi's mind worked like that. It was constantly gathering information quietly, processing it thoroughly, deploying it only when she was certain. In his first life he'd thought of it as patience. Now he understood it was something more precise than that. She didn't just read people. She read the patterns underneath people, the consistent structures that repeated regardless of circumstance.
He made a note to be more inconsistent around her going forward.
Spectre trained alone and always had. He drifted through the shadow exercises with a quietness that drew the eye without giving it anything to hold onto. His power moved through darkness the way smoke moved through a cracked door. It was present, purposeful, gone before you could define its shape. He never sparred with the group and nobody seemed to push it.
Arie watched him for exactly as long as he watched everyone else and then looked away.
"Trial two opens in four days," Demi said. Papers already spread out.
"From what I've heard—" she tapped one page, "—you get split the second you enter. No regrouping."
"So we're on our own from the start," Baro said.
"From the second the gate closes."
"Awesome." He leaned back. "I just love being alone in an unknown hostile environment full of things trying to kill me."
"You won't be alone for long," Rosh said. "The plan is simple. We find the palace, find the turtle and get out."
"You're making it sound very simple."
"It is simple."
"Rosh." Baro gestured broadly at the world. "Nothing here is simple, buddy."
Arie ate his food and listened to them talk and laughed at the right moments and watched Baro gesturing dramatically across the table and thought about four days from now with the specific clarity that came from having no heart to make the thinking difficult.
Simple was exactly the right word actually.
He just wasn't going to say it out loud.
Arie was coming back from an early walk, a habit always useful to know the city's patterns at different hours and that is when he spotted a silver haired woman across the market. Moving through the crowd with relaxed confidence, modest gear, no group insignia. Early twenties. Nothing that would make anyone look twice.
He immediately stopped.
He knew that face. Years from now, harder and sharper, carrying the specific gravity of someone who had become something significant. A name that made people recalculate. A power that had started as almost nothing and grown into something that redefined what support abilities could mean.
Keisha.
She disappeared into the crowd without ever knowing he existed.
Arie stood in the market for a moment longer than necessary. Then he turned and walked back to the inn.
Four days until trial two.
He had to clear up a spot first and he knew the perfect candidate.