23. The First Tests (Not that test)

The first XP notification appeared during morning sparring.

I’d drawn a Barracks 12 transfer — a D-Grade with a kinetic deviation and enough Ether enhancement that pushed me to the ropes. We traded combinations for thirty seconds, his strikes landing heavier than his frame suggested. The kinetic deviation added a deep vibration to every impact that rattled up through my guard and into my shoulders.

A gap opened in his guard transition — his right shoulder dropping a fraction early, weight committed forward. I slipped through and tagged him clean.

His follow-up grazed my guard — I’d been staring at the number instead of watching his hands. Nine XP. A small number in the corner of my vision where nothing had ever been — unremarkable, the kind of notification everyone else in this yard had been seeing since week one.

We reset. The same gap opened on the same transition. I tagged him again.

The same angle, the same read. Whatever the system was measuring, it seemed that novelty mattered.

“Point. Round to Tiernan.”

I stepped out of the ring. My heart was beating faster than the fight warranted. Six months of silence, and now numbers.

The yard was loud around me. Miller three rings down, drilling with Briggs, every impact audible throughout the training ground. Osei’s group ran a coordinated spar in formation, eight bodies shifting direction simultaneously without a word or a glance. Everyone moving, growing, and levelling.

Tomás appeared at my shoulder with water.

“You’ve got a look,” he said.

“Hmm? What look?”

“The look of a man who just found money between sofa cushions.”

I turned to look at him and wiggled my eyebrows. “I just got my first taste of XP”

His whole face lit up. “Seriously? That’s huge! What level are you now?”

“One.”

“No, I mean your overall level, not your combat skill.”

“Tomás.”

“What?”

“Level one.”

The grin froze.

“One,” he repeated.

“Yep, the entire time you’ve known me. Every spar, every Gauntlet, every fight including the one where I knocked Miller out. I had zero XP, zero progression.”

He sat down on the ground.

“You beat Miller at Level zero,” Tomás said.

“Technically I didn’t have levels at—”

“He was what, Level twenty?”

“Yeah, probably.”

He stared at the dirt between his boots. There wasn’t anything I could say that would make the math feel less insane, and Tomás needed to run it himself.

“I had this whole framework,” he said eventually. “Different progression path, alternative stat growth. I thought you were maybe Level ten or twelve with unusual distribution. I thought the gap was ten levels, which was impressive enough.” He looked up. “The gap was twenty— and you knocked him out.”

“Once.”

“At Level zero.” The laugh came raw and unhinged.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket. “Let’s figure out your system.”

We found a quiet corner of the yard during the free sparring block by a training dummy. Kael was moving between the paired combats. His gaze passed over our corner once, noted it, and moved on.

“Baseline first,” Tomás said. “Hit the dummy.”

I hit it with a clean combination—left hook, right cross, rising knee— the dummy lit up briefly confirming the hits.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Harder.”

So I hit it harder, with everything I had. The sensors registered solid impacts.

We stood looking at the dummy together. It stared back with its featureless sensor face.

“Not about physical output, it seems,” Tomás said, writing. “Nor about hitting things. Hmm, maybe you need something that hits back?”

“Alright, let’s do it. Don’t go easy on me.” I gave a nod and we squared up.

Tomás came with his standard approach — predictive modelling guiding his footwork, placing him where he calculated I’d be weakest. No pulled punches, no telegraphed openings. I slipped his attack, found the counter.

“That’s eight.”

“Eight from thirty seconds of honest sparring,” he noted. “Now same thing, but I let you win.”

We reset. This time Tomás came forward wrong — slow, obvious, openings he’d never leave. He practically offered his jaw.

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I tagged him.

“Nothing that time,” I said flatly.

“It knows,” Tomás said. “It can tell the difference.”

“Yeah, looks like it.”

“That’s not normal, Marcus. Standard XP doesn’t work like that. You get credit for landing hits regardless of context. The system doesn’t evaluate sincerity.”

“Mine does.” I shrugged.

He wrote it down. His handwriting had gotten smaller as he tried to squeeze as many words onto the page as possible.

“One more, let’s try defending,” he said. “I come at you hard. Don’t throw anything back.”

He came at me hard — deviation active. He predicted my guards, attacked gaps with strikes that had his full weight behind them. I blocked, slipped, absorbed. Every instinct screaming to counter.

“Six from pure defence.” I flexed my hands. “Didn’t throw a single strike.”

“But you were under real pressure. You had to work to survive the round.” He was writing fast now. “It’s not about dealing damage. It’s about being in danger and responding to it.”

“Constant pressure huh? I think we can work with that.”

After the spar tests, we ran the Gauntlet.

Full speed, maximum intensity. Every obstacle pushed as hard as my body would allow — lungs burning on the sprint, arms screaming on the climbing wall, the cargo nets navigated with every ounce of speed I had.

I collapsed at the finish line, chest heaving, legs shaking. Yet no notification came, not even something to denote zero XP.

“Nothing?” Tomás asked from the sideline.

“Nothing. Zero.”

“You just ran the Gauntlet harder than I’ve ever seen you run it.”

“And the system doesn’t care.” I sat up, wiping grit from my face. “My body’s used to it, even if I push hard. I think it must require real danger, maybe it’d flag up if I was the rabbit again.”

Tomás tapped his pencil against his teeth. “That could be it, seems like it requires two opposing parties at the very least. Well, at least we have a direction.”

We found a quiet spot behind the training dummies for the last test. I already knew what the result would be, but Tomás needed to see it.

“I tried cultivation last night,” I said, sitting cross-legged. “An hour of Ether cycling. It feeds a separate metric, a connection percentage, but no XP.”

“Show me.”