Third hour. The processing yard. Early Pulse-light catching the mineral residue in the walls and making the room glow amber and then dim back to grey.
Kervath was on the east trough when they arrived.
He'd been there before them, which was already information. He hadn't been invited and he hadn't announced himself, he had simply found his position in the room and settled into it with the ease of someone who had made a decision about where to be and saw no reason to justify the decision to anyone. Darin had clocked him on entry, run a visible assessment — the shoulder dropping through each piece of it as it sorted, and arrived at the conclusion that addressing the unannounced presence directly wasn't the most useful application of the energy available. Aion had noticed the assessment and the decision at the end of it and said nothing.
"Start with the Still," Kervath said. A suggestion, not an instruction. The tone of someone who had an idea about what they wanted to see and was offering it as a starting point.
Aion ran the Still.
The still is one of Aion's invented techniques it allows him to focus and compress all of his power in his lower parts of the body, the legs giving him a powerful bust of speed as he takes of at his normal speed but more increased because of the still, it is very destructive when he departs breaking the ground and making an impact, he channels down all of his strenght through his legs and feet, all of his momentum and into the stone floor in a single concussive impact.
The tile cracked outward from where he stood in a radiating fracture pattern that Darin had mapped carefully across years of training together.
Kervath leaned forward.
He had a different perception than visual Thread-sight. His Brain-type vein ran as processing density — incoming information sorted and cross-referenced at speeds that went below conscious analysis, structural irregularities in behavior and physics flagged before he could articulate what specifically had been flagged. He didn't see energy signatures in the air the way Nera did.
The radial fractures spreading outward from the impact point were consistent with what he expected. Force in a downward vector, stone responding to sudden significant force, the physics of the thing doing what the physics of the thing did.
The stone at the center of the impact was different.
He sat back slowly. He didn't say anything. He let it sit with him for a moment, he needed to be sure of it before he said it out loud.
Darin was observing him leaning forward. Darin noticed everything in a room he was in. He made a notation of it.
"Your technique is impressive and dangerous," Kervath said during the rest period.
Aion looked at him.
"The fracture pattern — consistent with kinetic force, downward vector, exactly what I would expect from that stop executed at that speed." He pressed his thumb against the edge of the trough.
"The stone at the center of the impact isn't consistent with kinetic force."
"The vein concentrates at the anchor point during a full stop," Aion said. "The pressure differential at maximum deceleration behaves differently than at partial stop. It's a documented technique effect."
"That's not what I mean." The thumb pressing harder into the trough edge. "The surrounding stone fractured , the force acting on stone, stone responding, straightforward. The stone at the center didn't fracture.
"It didn't just break."
(pause)
"It changed."
As if it was briefly something slightly other than stone and then settled back into being stone."
Aion looked at the impact point.
Darin, from the wall, not turning from the crack pattern he was studying: "Changed how."
"I can't be more specific than that without a classification I don't have. My perception reads it as structurally different from what it was before the impact in a way that's outside the range of structural difference that force alone produces." He stopped pressing. Looked at his thumb. "I don't know what it means. I'm telling you I see it."
"It could be a force-routing artifact," Aion said. "Maximum stop produces effects that aren't fully understood in the literature."
"Maybe." "Or it's something else."" Kervath said.
Just that. Nothing added to it. He went back to watching.
The training continued. Darin ran his own projection work, the crack pattern in the base of the post deepening incrementally with each set. Kervath watched from the trough without moving or speaking. Nobody said what was sitting with them.
Then the Lift.
Aion at the east wall, taking the approach run, committing vertical, the motion-domain extending as he ran up the wall's face, the vein active and working, each step pressing into the surface and finding grip where a surface that steep had no business being gripped. He'd been pushing the ceiling through repetition.
The domain extended further than expected and then released faster than expected. The angle was wrong when it let go. He was at height, and the physics of his situation had stopped cooperating.
He came down hard. He managed the landing — he'd taken worse angles in worse places, had landed badly enough in training to know what his body could process and what it couldn't, and he came out of this one with his joints intact, hitting the floor in the controlled collapse of someone who knew how to fall and had experienced it longer. He came up onto one knee automatically and ran through the contact points. Fine. Everything fine.
What he noticed was the stone under his palms.
It had the same thing going on as the Still's impact center. That texture he'd been attributing to force-routing effects and had been believing less every time he felt it. He was kneeling directly on it right now and he could feel it through his palms — stone that had very recently been something slightly other than stone, that was in the process of settling back into being stone, the way water settled after something moved through it. He'd been feeling this for a long time. He'd been explaining it to himself as a training artifact for years. He was not sure he believed that anymore.
He looked up.
Kervath was standing. He'd been sitting on the trough for the past hour and now he was standing, his weight shifted forward, looking at the landing point with the attention that belonged to someone who had been waiting to see something and had just watched it arrive. Not surprise but confirmation.
"Again," Aion said.
"Aion" Darin started from across the room.
"Again," Aion said.
"Aion"
He was already moving.