---
Time ceased to be a river and became an ocean a vast, unchanging expanse we learned to navigate by the stars of our own slow, hard-won progress. The chamber's horrors became routine. Its wonders became our workplace.
Year Six was the year our bodies broke, and were remade.
K's training shifted. The subtle energy work was set aside for something more visceral. More brutal.
"Power is worthless if the vessel shatters," he stated, before casually backhanding me across the platform.
It wasn't about speed. It was about inevitability. His hand didn't seem to move fast, but it carried the weight of a continent. I flew for what felt like miles, crashing through nebulae of energy that felt like solid granite.
« Impact absorbed. Skeletal integrity: 87%. Muscular micro-tears: significant. Initiating repair.»
I learned to fall. To roll. To let the force bleed away into the chamber floor through a desperate, instinctual channeling of spatial energy. My body, constantly flooded by raw potential, had no choice but to adapt. It became harder, denser. My muscles weren't carved by exercise, but by the relentless need to contain the reactor threatening to go critical inside my chest.
Anya was not spared. But where I was the anvil, K taught her to be the water.
"Flow," he'd command, his attacks a relentless barrage. "Do not meet force with force. Redirect it. Vaporize it."
And she did. She learned to read the intent in the twitch of his finger, to be a ghost before the blow landed. Her strength wasn't in endurance, but in evasion. She grew leaner, a coil of efficient motion, her eyes missing nothing. She wasn't just avoiding hits; she was learning the architecture of violence.
I saw her sometimes, after a session, practicing the movements on her own. There was a gleam in her eye, a feral joy in the mastery of her own body that I couldn't fathom. My training was pain management. Hers was becoming an artist.
Year Seven was the year our minds were taken apart.
The physical torture stopped. The mental siege began.
K would flood the platform with chaos. A scream that was also the color purple. A gravity that pulled in six directions while smelling of rotting citrus. Our task was not to block it out, but to find the single, stable frequency beneath the madness.
I raged against it. My mind was a fortress, and I was under attack. I built higher walls, thicker shields. It was exhausting. I'd end sessions on my knees, my head pounding, vomiting frustrated sparks of energy.
« Cognitive overload. Neural pathways approaching burnout. Suggested countermeasure: —»
"Shut up! Just shut up!" I'd scream into the void.
Anya, again, found a different path. I watched her. She didn't build walls. She… danced. She let the chaos wash over her, through her, and she found the gaps. She learned to isolate a single note in the cacophony and follow it home. She became a master of focus in a universe designed to shatter it.
It was after one of my worst failures that K offered his first piece of unsolicited wisdom. He stood over me as I gasped on the floor.
"You keep trying to be a mountain," he said, his head tilted. "Mountains are impressive. They also get worn down to dust by the wind and rain." He paused, his glacial eyes seeing right through me. "Be the wind. Be the rain."
He walked away before I could form a response. The words meant nothing to me. I was a mountain. A mountain that was constantly, painfully, being eroded.
Year Eight was the year the silence between us changed.
The bitterness of our early argument had been scoured away by shared suffering. We no longer needed to speak during the endless drills. A glance was a plan. A shift in posture was a signal. My raw, unstable power became an extension of her precise intent; her hyper-aware senses became my eyes in the storm.
In the rare moments of rest, we actually talked. We spoke of a world that felt like a dream.
"Sunlight," I muttered once, closing my eyes. "I remember it was warm. Not like this place. A real warmth."
"Bread," Anya replied, her voice soft. "My mother used to bake it. The smell would fill the whole house. I think I'd kill for just a crust now."
We were the only two people in all of existence who understood the cost. That shared exile became a quiet, unshakeable bond.
Year Nine was the year we stopped fighting the chamber and started listening to it.
The pulsing hum wasn't random noise. It had tides. Seasons. We learned to time our draws of energy to its "inhalation," making the process smoother. We learned to avoid the drifting "storms" of over-condensed potential that could leave us disoriented for weeks.
It was no longer an alien enemy. It was a partner in our forging relentless, indifferent, and perfect. We were learning to be a part of it.
Year Ten.
The realization didn't come in a flash. It came on a day like any other. We were running a complex kata, K had devised, a flowing series of movements to channel energy in a harmonic pattern.
We moved. And for the first time, it was… easy. My power, the wild inferno, didn't fight me. It flowed through me like a disciplined river, following the contours of the kata. Anya moved with me, her hands not controlling my energy, but shaping the space around it, guiding its path, making it truer, sharper.
We finished the final movement. My hands came together. And between my palms, a sphere of perfectly calm, incandescent white light bloomed. It held for three perfect, silent seconds before dissipating with a soft chime that seemed to quiet the very chamber.
Silence.
We stood there, chests heaving. K just watched, arms crossed, his expression unreadable.
I looked down at my hands. They were the same hands. But they were instruments now, not just flesh. I looked at Anya. Her face was sheened with sweat, her hair long and tied back. There were new lines of concentration around her eyes, but her gaze was steady, clear. Ancient.
A decade.
The thought landed with a quiet, profound weight. We had been here for ten years. We had endured a decade of failure, of pain, of near-madness.
My clothes, the same ones from a forgotten life, were now faintly luminescent at the seams. The cuff of my shirt, once frayed, had been worn smooth.
Anya saw me looking. The same understanding dawned on her face. We weren't the same kids who'd been dragged before a council of terrified elders.
We were something else. Something harder. Something quieter.
We hadn't just survived ten years.
We had built a foundation.
And for the first time, as I looked out into the infinite expanse, I didn't feel dread. I felt a grim, steady readiness for the next ten. The feeling was cold, and hard, and it fit me perfectly.
Little did I know I much things would turn upside down quickly.