Chapter 3. One Last Time

The eastern training hall was the largest room in my wing, high-ceilinged and stone-floored, with racks of practice weapons along the far wall and a row of narrow windows near the top that let in thin columns of afternoon light. I’d spent more hours in this room than in any other part of the estate, and I knew every scratch on the floor, every dent in the wooden training posts, every place where the stone had been worn smooth by years of footwork drills.

Instructor Bellos was standing at the far end with his back to the door, running a cloth down the length of a sword. It was not a practice blade. Real steel, slim and well-balanced, and he worked the cloth along it in slow even strokes.

“Instructor Bellos.” I bowed, even though he wasn’t looking. “You summoned me.”

“I heard you’re leaving today.” He didn’t turn around. The cloth moved up the blade, then back down again.

“Yes, Instructor.”

“Your decision?”

“Yes.”

He kept polishing. The steel caught the light from the windows in a thin bright line that shifted as he turned the blade.

“Good. Means you wanted it.”

He set the cloth down on the bench beside him but still didn’t turn.

“You will pass the entrance examination tomorrow. I want that understood between us before you go. The examination requires Ninth Seal. You are at Sixth, and have been for a while now, so there is no version of tomorrow in which they do not admit you.”

“…Yes, Instructor.”

“Good. Once they do, I will no longer be your instructor. The arrangement under which I was kept in this estate ended on the day your grandfather agreed to send you to Sartheon. I shall leave shortly after you do.”

He picked up the scabbard and sheathed the blade with a single clean motion, and then he turned around and looked at me for the first time.

Bellos had a face that didn’t move much. Deep lines around the mouth, dark eyes, a short grey beard trimmed so precisely it looked painted on. He’d been my combat instructor for six years, and in all that time I had never once seen him smile, or frown, or look surprised, or look anything other than exactly the way he looked right now, which was like a man waiting for you to make a mistake so he could correct it.

He had also, in those six years, been the only adult on this estate who looked me in the face when he spoke to me. The servants did not. The instructors who’d handled my theory work had addressed the air to one side of my shoulder but Bellos had always looked at me.

“Therefore,” he said, “one last assessment.”

“…Yes, Instructor.”

“Take a staff.”

I crossed to the rack and pulled a practice staff off the wall: ash wood, weighted at both ends. He watched the way I caught it. The grip, the angle, the way I shifted my feet when the weight settled in my hands. He was always watching things like that.

The golden text bloomed at the edge of my vision the moment I turned back.

[Quest Issued]

Objective: Touch Instructor Bellos once in combat.

Reward: ??? (S-Class)

Failure: No reward.

I blinked, but the text held steady, waiting for me to acknowledge it the way it always did. It had been months since the last one. I’d almost started to think it was done with me.

I didn’t fully understand what it was. I never had. It had been with me for as long as I could remember. I’d started calling it the System when I was young, because that was what it was, too many moving parts, all connected, all feeding into each other, to call it anything else.

Nana Serre was the only person I’d ever mentioned the System to. She’d listened without interrupting, put her hand on my head, and told me it sounded like a blessing from the heavens, and that I should accept what it offered and not ask too many questions about where it came from, so I had taken her advice.

I had ground my way to here because of it. Whatever this thing was, it wanted me to grow, and it had its own ideas about how.

S-Class, though. That was new. I’d never seen that designation before.

I moved to the centre of the hall and dropped into first stance, left foot forward, staff held low across my hip, and let the mana flow. It came the way it always came for me, as easy as breathing — what I could reach of it, anyway — filling my channels from the core outward until I could feel it humming under my skin and pooling in my hands and running down the length of the staff like water finding a groove.

I fed a thin layer of reinforcement into the wood and felt it harden under my fingers.

Bellos didn’t take a stance. He walked toward me, unarmed, hands open at his sides, and that was all the warning I got before the floor beneath my front foot erupted.

I jumped. A jagged column of stone punched up where I had been standing, and I was already spinning in the air before it finished, pulling mana into my right palm and shaping it into a compression bolt that I fired at his chest before my boots touched the ground. He swatted it aside with a backhand wreathed in green warding light. The bolt detonated against the far wall hard enough to crack two of the stones in the weapon rack behind him.

“Geomancy. Counter.”

I landed, drove the butt of the staff into the stone, and sent my will down through the wood into the floor. The ground rippled outward from the contact point in a concentric wave meant to buckle the earth under his feet. It never touched him. He was already moving — a half-turn to the left that barely looked like effort — and the ripple crumbled the floor behind him while he closed the distance to me.

He threw a punch wreathed in compressed air from three feet away, the fist never meant to connect, the pressure wave doing the work instead. It hit like a collapsed wall. I crossed my arms and layered a barrier in front of my chest, and the impact still drove me back three feet, my heels carving twin grooves into the stone.

“Wind form. Switch.”

Most mages couldn’t do this. Most spent their entire lives inside a single discipline, the one their house had passed down through their bloodline, refined behind closed doors over generations and guarded the way a house guards its name. Bellos worked in all of them.

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Nana Serre had told me about him once, in that conspiratorial whisper she used when she was sharing something she’d overheard from the elders. She said they called him the Copy Mage, because he could watch a technique performed once, understand its structure, and replicate it as though he’d been drilling it for years. She said he was considered a prodigy, one of the most dangerous men in the kingdom, and that the only reason he was here teaching a boy in a sealed wing instead of out doing the things that geniuses did was because my grandfather had asked him to be, and when Oserys Aridis asked, people said yes.

What made Bellos exceptional was his mana reserves, vast enough to sustain techniques across multiple schools without burning out.

What made me exceptional, allegedly, was that my reserves were borderline inexhaustible. The catch was that I could only reach a sliver of them. The rest of my pool lived behind a wall, and the wall never came down all at once, but in fractions.

The cause was an incident that happened when I was three. Nana Serre had told me the northern wing of our estate had come down in a single afternoon. Stone, glass, the gardens around it, all of it. Nobody had died, she had been very firm about that part, and she had repeated it to me more than once over the years to make sure it stayed in my head, but the wing was gone, and afterward, my grandfather moved me into the eastern wing and ordered the northern one left as it was.

From the day after, I had not manifested such power again. The elders said it was still there. I just could not feel it.

The System would assign me a quest I had no business clearing, I would grind through it for weeks, and when I finished, the reward would arrive in a small golden number. Plus one to strength. Plus two to mana pool. Plus one to agility. Every number was a fraction of the wall dissolving, and the sliver I fought with today was the stacked result of years of those quests.

A lot of mana by any normal measure, but still a sliver.

Bellos switched schools between one breath and the next. A glyph burned orange in his fingertips and a lance of fire came at my face — a Vashren technique, or close enough that a Vashren would have asked where he had learned it.

I pulled the air around me into a tight vortex on instinct, and the fire hit it and spun out in a shower of embers across the floor.

Bellos was through the embers before they landed.