"I've been reviewing your real training assessments," he said, quietly. Not the official ones — Vasir's fabrications — but whatever data he'd been pulling from sources I hadn't identified. "Your growth rate doesn't fit any model in Tower records. I've been watching for days, trying to understand what I was looking at."
He paused.
"I think I understand now."
I waited.
"I had a brother," Akhtar said. "Younger. He was the one who actually believed in things — justice, the Tower's original mandate, the old texts about what this institution was built to do before the Council decided what it was built to do." He wasn't looking at me; he was looking at the wall. "He filed a formal complaint against the colonization program eleven years ago. Went through proper channels. Three months later he was dead in what the official report called a training accident."
He looked at me.
"I stayed. Filed nothing. Continued my career." His voice was flat in the way voices get when a person has made peace with something that doesn't actually deserve peace. "I've spent eleven years telling myself I made the right choice. That you can't change systems from inside a grave."
"You were right," I said.
"But is it good?" He almost smiled — not with warmth, with the exhausted recognition of someone who had asked himself the same question too many times to expect a different answer. "Show me what you need."
We spent six hours going through everything.
His knowledge was the difference between a plan and a strategy. Fifteen years supervising expeditions meant he'd memorized creature populations, seasonal migrations, hunting ground conditions in a sixty-mile radius. He pulled up database access on his authorization crystal — the first rule he was breaking, and we both knew it.
The schedule that emerged was still insane. The neat columns were still doing most of the heavy lifting. But now it was insane with good logistics, which is a meaningful upgrade.
"Time and Space will be your major obstacles," he said, his finger tracing those entries at the bottom of the list. "Foundation tiers don't exist in any wild population within range. The only viable specimens are imprisoned."
"Sub-levels 27 and 28."
"Yes. Both maximum security. Both have killed multiple researchers." He paused. "Both are Tier 3 or higher. You'd be going in as—"
"Whatever tier I am by Day 100."
"Which we estimate at Tier 3 with significant gaps."
"I know." I looked at the two entries. Time and Space would be incomplete acquisitions — power without comprehension, capability without understanding. I'd be using elements I didn't fully grasp in a situation where partial understanding could be terminal. The Architect's tier theory was very clear on this: skip the foundation, pay the efficiency cost. In practical terms, Time and Space would burn mana at three to four times the efficient rate.
"The math is bad," I said.
"Catastrophically."
"But if I don't have them, the synthesis framework is incomplete. The whole system requires eight elements. Five won't unlock what I need it to unlock."
He nodded slowly. "Then we work with catastrophic math."
He stood, folded the schedule with the care of someone who understood they were handling a document that might get him killed, and put it in his interior pocket.
"First hunt is tomorrow morning," he said. "Twin-Tail Fox. Ashen Wastes, fifty miles north. I'll have you there at dawn."
He moved toward the door, then stopped with his hand on the frame.
"If we're caught—"
"You were coerced," I said. "I acquired a crude influence technique during unsupervised research and used it without your knowledge. You're a victim. They'll believe it — everyone already thinks I'm an uncontrolled anomaly."
"That's a thin cover."
"I know."
He was quiet for a moment.
"My brother's name was Rael," he said. And then he left.
I sat alone with the schedule. Fifteen days. Twenty-two cores minimum. Foundations to fill, power tiers to acquire, two maximum-security heists to execute.
I thought about the letter I'd written on Day 35 and stored in the Library. *I'm becoming something that can save you. Even if you wouldn't recognize what I've become.*
I looked at what I was becoming.
Then I started reviewing creature weaknesses and went to sleep at three in the morning with maps printed on the inside of my eyelids.
Avulum : Day 89
The Ashen Wastes at dawn looked exactly like the name suggested. Flat grey plains of volcanic mineral dust extending to a horizon that the early sun turned the color of a bruise. Nothing grew. The air smelled of sulfur and, faintly, of something electrical — the ambient charge that Fire-aspect creatures left in the soil around their territories.
Akhtar deposited me three miles from the Fox's recorded range, gave me a look that communicated *don't die in a way that implicates me*, and blinked out.
I started walking.
The Fox itself appeared eleven minutes later, cresting a low rise two hundred meters ahead. Twin-Tail was an accurate description: two long, flame-trailing appendages sweeping behind it, leaving sinuous patterns of scorched earth. Fire Tier 2. Combat rating equivalent to a mid-tier Tower apprentice. In Avulum's general magical ecosystem, it was not considered a significant threat.
I watched it move for three minutes before engaging.
This was the part that Vasir's workshop training hadn't prepared me for, not really. The workshop was controlled variables. This was a living creature with behavioral patterns and threat responses and some form of internal logic, however simple. It had a life. It was just the wrong life to have near someone running a fifteen-day core acquisition schedule.
I didn't let myself sit with that thought for long. The equation was set. I just had to solve it cleanly.