Soren felt the jolt in his arm but ignored it. He popped back up in time to see Seren slam the flat of her blade into Aria's knee, an ugly, effective move. The resulting yelp drew attention from the twins, who, having been written off as chaff, were now driving the Blue rear guard into the far wall.

Instructors looked on from the ruined apse, nobody interfered.

Soren let the next thirty seconds happen at half-speed in his brain. Blue company was splintered, Cassian and Aria together but exposed, and the rest scattered, lured out of position by the basic wish to win quickly.

Soren's forearm ached from the lock, but he could move it. More importantly, Cassian had expected Soren to fold.

He circled left, keeping low, and watched for the moment Cassian would shift back to offense. It came as a flash: Cassian's chin up, eyes slicing the mist, blade set in a stance that telegraphed 'gambit' to anyone watching in the right light.

Soren closed distance, let his own blade hang low, and waited. The strike came as expected, fast, high, overreached. Soren slid inside it, caught Cassian's hilt and pivoted, using Cassian's own locked shoulders as leverage. It wasn't elegant. But it landed, and Cassian's blade fell with a clang that stopped all other motion for a beat.

"CLEAR!" Soren yelled, voice echoing off the arches.

Twins advanced, the transfer right behind, and Seren took position at the nave, blade up, waiting for anyone to challenge. No one did.

Soren stood, hand throbbing, and watched as the bell was rung, a sharp, tinny sound that meant the round was finished.

He waited for Dane's voice, or for a reprimand, but there was only the thick, rain-sheltered silence of Edge Hollow as the teams stood, catching breath.

Cassian stared at him, eyes cold. "We'll run it again."

Soren shrugged, feeling every cut and bruise already setting in. "If you want to lose twice."

Kale whooped, the twins hugged and then immediately pretended they hadn't, and the transfer just sat down and breathed, looking up at the sky as if expecting it to open and rain something other than water.

Seren leaned on her blade and gave Soren a look, part question, part answer.

He knew they would run it again, and again after that. The game was not to win, but to prove it wasn't an accident.

On the far side of the broken nave, Dane sketched something on a notepad and then, if Soren wasn't mistaken, smiled.

It didn't get better with repetition. Four runs, then five, each recalibrated so that Blue held an advantage then lost it, then vice versa.

The mist never lifted. Nobody scored a clean round after the first. By the end of the morning, the two squads were more or less indistinguishable, all mud, sweat, and the haunted look of people who did not, in fact, enjoy being watched fail in public.

Soren eventually stopped feeling the pain in his wrist.

He listened to the critiques, let the instructors pick at his strategy, then reassembled the team with the same calm surface. Inside, the equation ran differently now; it was less about the math and more about how much pressure each mind could tolerate before reverting to animal or ghost.

On the walk back to the Academy, Cassian closed in behind Soren, matching pace. His voice, when it came, sounded tired rather than superior.

"Why do you fight like that?"

Soren kept his eyes ahead. "Like what?"

Cassian shrugged, brushing a sheet of mud from his sleeve. "Like you want to end it as soon as possible, but never for yourself."

Soren was caught off-guard, just briefly. He felt Seren's eyes on him as she jogged up to the right, but she said nothing. She kept pace, shadow-tight, both of them moving with a kind of muscle memory that felt older than lesson plans or even the bruises still wet on Soren's ribs.

Through the haze, he caught a slice of Cassian's posture, how it oscillated between bladed arrogance and something so tightly wound it might snap either way.

They moved as one: twins bracketed left, Kale and border-province right. He signaled, barely a twitch of the forearm, and Kale's grin vanished, replaced by the calm focus of someone who'd already figured out how the day would end.

The Blue Company sent out scouts, a pair, then another, each time feinting and drawing short-lived pursuit. Soren didn't chase. Not yet. Instead, he let the approach close until the rhythm of bodies and weapons beat together, turning the grass slicker and the air three degrees warmer just from the friction of effort and anxious sweat.

First contact was the transfer, who Soren thought might be called Jannek, but wasn't entirely sure: Jannek spooling round the left with a half-crouch, trying for the leg hook on Cassian's second. The move failed, but it bought time. The twins hit next, not to wound but to force the Blue Company to slow, tempo change, not triumph.

Soren watched the first three exchanges from two paces beyond the melee, then stepped in as Cassian tried to box one of the twins against the nave wall.

Soren took the clash at full force: steel, then steel, then the abrupt shudder of real bone through Cassian's forearm as the blades tangled and Soren twisted out, using the leverage of Cassian's own posture to break contact and reset the line.

They traded blows, the clack and ring of it echoing up the nave, and Soren felt the old battle-lust creep up through his boots, settle as a feral smile in his mind. This time, Cassian didn't try to talk, only bore down with increasing aggression, as if every failed attack could be fixed by doubling the pressure.

It almost worked, until the twins circled back and clipped Cassian at the shoulder, hard enough to stagger but not quite unseat him. Soren took the opening, feinted for the head, and then, when Cassian's defense came up, dropped low, catching the other boy's knee with the flat of his blade. Controlled, but not gentle.

Cassian grunted and backpedaled, pride stuttering along with his footwork, but even so his riposte came quick: a slash to Soren's outer thigh, close enough to sheer threads from the uniform and slice a shallow welt in skin.

The blood surprised Soren more than it should have. The pain was a clean, cold thing, a boundary, not a warning. He reset, watched the angles, and braced for the next contact.

Behind them, the cohort pressed: grunts and shouts, bursts of coordinated violence, all of it cycling through the choreography of near-misses and makeshift alliances among a group that had, until recently, been convinced of its own irrelevance.

Seren fought as Soren expected, staying just behind the tempo, only intervening when the risk of chaos outweighed the cost of standing aside. Twice she caught a misdirected strike meant for Soren; neither time did she break rhythm or return the favor, but both times she met his eyes, as if in silent contract to finish this on the same beat.

The instructors didn't interfere, but their voices rolled over the field at intervals, calibrating expectations and noting each escalation. Verrin's voice, flat and bone-heavy: "Watch the hands, don't overextend." Hest chimed in, more clipped: "Reset pattern. DO NOT RUSH THE LINE." Soren half-suspected these instructions were more for the crowd than the fighters.

For five minutes, time collapsed. Every muscle turn, every slip of boot, every eye-tracked feint blended into one conviction: Soren was not playing for points, not anymore. He wanted to see how far Cassian would go. And Cassian seemed to want the same.

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