The secluded courtyard became their private training ground. The first few sessions were a study in controlled chaos. Their individual strengths were undeniable, but they clashed as often as they complemented.
Li, true to his nature, favored high-speed, disruptive maneuvers. He would dart around Kael's immovable defenses, his wind blades sometimes skittering off the larger youth's earthen Qi. "Hey, Mountain! A little warning before you turn into a fortress!" he'd shout, flipping backward to avoid a shockwave.
Kael, for his part, struggled to account for Li's unpredictability. "If you would maintain a formation," he would grumble, his voice a low rumble of frustration.
Jian was the greatest challenge. Her path was one of solitary precision. In their first simulated skirmish, she identified the "weakest" point in a training dummy array—a point only she could see—and struck with blinding speed, ending the exercise before Li or Kael had even fully engaged. It was brutally efficient, but it left the rest of the team exposed and irrelevant.
Wang Chen watched it all, his Spirit Sense analyzing the flows and fractures in their coordination. The problem was clear: they were four master soloists trying to play a quartet without a score.
"We are thinking about this wrong," Wang Chen announced, calling a halt after Jian's latest lightning-fast "victory" left the rest of them as spectators. "We are not a formation. We are not a wall. We are an organism."
He looked at each of them. "Li, you are not a scout. You are the nervous system—fast, perceptive, disrupting the enemy's signals. Kael, you are not a shield. You are the skeleton—the unshakable core that gives the body its structure. Jian, you are not a lone blade. You are the precise, surgical strike—the immune system that eliminates the single greatest threat."
He placed a hand on his own chest. "And I... I am the fluid that connects it all. The adaptable tissue, the circulatory system that can become whatever the body needs in any given moment."
The metaphor settled over them, a new framework for their cooperation.
Their training transformed. They stopped trying to fight in sync and started learning to think as one entity. Wang Chen, with his unparalleled perception and adaptability, became the nexus.
In one drill, as Kael anchored their position against a barrage of spiritual projectiles, Wang Chen's sphere flowed into a wide, shimmering canopy, deflecting attacks that Kael's more linear defense couldn't cover.
In another, Li identified a flaw in a complex defensive array. Instead of calling it out, he simply created a specific sonic frequency with his fans. Wang Chen, sensing the ripple, instantly understood. His sphere elongated into a narrow drill, guided by Li's sound waves, and pierced the exact weak point, allowing Jian's killing intent to lance through the opening without her ever having to speak.
They were learning a silent language of combat, one orchestrated by Wang Chen's adaptive core.