The fifth year did not dawn. It was a point in the endless now where the grinding exhaustion began to crystallize into something harder: acceptance. We weren't students anymore. We were lab rats in a divine experiment, and the maze was infinite.
The change was most obvious in Anya.
The exercise was simple. K had drawn a circle of faint, silver light on the platform. "Still it," he commanded. "Not contain. Not suppress. Still it. The energy within this mark is in constant motion. Make it stop."
It was an impossible request. Energy was motion. To still it was to invoke death.
I tried for what felt like months. I pushed at the silver light with my will, a hammer against a diamond. The mark flared violently, spitting sparks of rebellious power. Failure. Again. And again.
« Energy manipulation attempt #34,112. Result: Catastrophic feedback. Suggestion: Recalibrate »
"I'm trying!" I snarled at the voice in my head, sweat beading on my brow.
Anya watched me for a time, her expression unreadable. Then she sat opposite me. "You're fighting it," she said, not unkindly.
"It's a fight," I grunted, my shoulders tense. "Everything in this place is a fight."
"Maybe it doesn't have to be."
She closed her eyes. Her breathing slowed. She didn't push. She just… extended her awareness. I could feel it, a gentle probe, not a battering ram. The frantic light of the mark seemed to calm under her attention. Its vibrations slowed, its glow softening from a frantic shimmer to a steady pulse.
It wasn't still. But it was listening to her in a way it never did for me.
K, who had been observing from the shadows, made a sound of approval. "Hmph. The civilian gets it. She listens. You…" He looked at me. "You just shout."
Frustration boiled over. "I'm not shouting! I'm doing what you said! Dominate it!"
"Domination is not noise," K said, his voice flat. "True domination is an absolute, unassailable silence. You are very, very noisy, Deo."
He turned his back and walked away, leaving me with my failure.
Anya held the stabilized mark for a full hour before it gently winked out, its energy spent. She opened her eyes, looking tired but serene. She'd done in one sitting what I couldn't do in months.
"That was… amazing," I said, the words tasting like grit.
She shrugged, a new, unsettling confidence in the gesture. "It just made sense. The energy… it wants to be understood, not conquered." She stood up, brushing off her pants. "You'll get it. You just have to get out of your own way."
She walked away to practice her forms, her movements already taking on a fluid, martial grace I couldn't match. She was no longer just holding energy; she was weaving it into her strikes, her blocks. She was becoming the weapon K wanted her to be.
I was still trying to figure out how to hold the hilt.
The chasm between us yawned wider each day. K started giving us different lessons.
For Anya, it was about application. He'd summon a training still dummy's . "Shatter its core. Use Enhancement. Focus the force into a point no larger than a needle."
She'd focus, that fierce grin touching her lips the one that loved the fight. Her fist would glow a brilliant, concentrated green. A punch, faster than I could track. A sound like a bell cracking. The dummy's core would be dust.
For me, it was about theory. Maddening, abstract theory.
"Feel the seventh harmonic of the chamber's resonance," K would say. "Not the sixth. Not the eighth. The seventh. Isolate it."
I'd sit for days, my mind straining against the cosmic noise. It was like trying to hear a single violin in a hurricane.
« Sensory overload. Cognitive filters failing. Suggested »
"Shut up," I'd mutter, pressing the heels of my palms into my eyes.
I'd catch glimpses of Anya. She wasn't isolating harmonics; she was sparring with K's summoned demions, moving with a preternatural efficiency, her Enhanced fists cracking stone and dispersing shadow. She was learning to kill. I was learning to listen to cosmic static.
Later, during a rare moment of rest, I confronted him. "Why? Why is she learning how to fight and I'm learning how to… meditate?"
K didn't even look at me. "Because a scalpel must be sharp. A nuclear reactor must be stable. You are not a scalpel, Deo. You are a reactor on the verge of meltdown. She is progressing in a straight line. You… are not. Your path is different. More tedious. Infinitely more dangerous."
He finally turned his glacial eyes on me. "Something is holding you back. A block in your spirit. Until you break it, any real application of your power will destroy you. And probably her. So you will sit. You will listen. You will learn silence. Or you will die screaming. The choice is yours."
The words should have filled me with despair. Instead, they ignited a cold fire.
A block. Something was holding me back. Not just my own ineptitude. Something.
I looked over at Anya. She was practicing a new kata, her body a blur of motion and light, utterly in her element. She was blooming in this hell, becoming something fierce and beautiful.
And I was stuck in the mud, with only a cryptic System and a growing, cold fury for company.
The fifth year ended not with a breakthrough, but with a realization. We were on the same path, but she was sprinting ahead while I was chained to a weight I couldn't see.
I just had to find out what or who had chained me.