Nobody cheered when they got back.
Three thousand soldiers, eight Rank 4 officers, Solomon the Sage King — all of them alive, all of them walking, retreating in formation up the Prussonian mountain road with the controlled discipline of an army that had practiced this exact withdrawal. They moved without speaking. The wind off the mountain filled the silence where celebration would have been if celebration had been appropriate, which it was not, because they had fought the most powerful being any of them had ever encountered and he had walked away from it going south.
Southward. Back toward the capital.
Uninjured.
---
Ervalen reached the command tent ten minutes after Straze. He stopped in the entrance. The senior officers were inside, standing around the tactical table, waiting. Straze was at the window with his back to them, still in full armor, the crimson-gold Soul-Brand cooling from combat-flare to resting-light.
Solomon sat in the corner. His forearms, where the rune-script had burned brightest, were wrapped in cloth. He had rewrapped them himself during the march and had not spoken about it.
Straze turned when Ervalen entered.
He looked at his officers — at the faces holding very careful expressions, the ones working hard to process what three minutes and twenty seconds of being approximately correct about an impossible thing actually meant in practice.
"The wound," one of the officers started.
"The Lance," Straze said.
The officer stopped.
"We are talking about the Lance," Straze said. His voice was the same as it always was — level, precise, built from thirty years of not allowing tone to carry information he hadn't decided to transmit. "Not the wound. The wound is irrelevant. The wound closed. The Lance matters."
He moved to the table.
"Ervalen. Report."
---
Ervalen stepped forward. He had been running his own analysis since the ridge — the specific mental process of filing and ordering data without the disorder of the feelings attached to it, which was a skill he had been practicing since he was seventeen and still hadn't fully mastered. He got there eventually. Usually.
"The fire intercepted at thirty meters," he said. "Full advance. Held contact for four seconds before dissolving the Lance. During the four-second contact window—" He paused. Not for effect. Because the next part required precision. "—I observed the fire's movement pattern. It moved to intercept before his hand came up. Before the deliberate command."
The tent was quiet.
"Reflex," Solomon said, from the corner.
"Reflex," Ervalen confirmed. "The fire operates as an autonomous defensive system. It reads incoming threats and responds before the deliberate choice to respond. Which means—"
"It can be predicted," Straze said. "If the threat pattern is consistent enough, the fire's response becomes consistent. And a consistent response is a readable response."
"We'd need faster delivery. Something the reflex system classifies as lower priority until it's already inside the radius."
"How much faster?"
Ervalen looked at his empty hand. "I don't know yet. But the fire spent four seconds on the Lance before dissolving it. At Rank 4." He closed the hand. "At Rank 5, the fire would need longer. At Rank 6—"
"You're Rank 4," one of the officers said. Flat. Not unkind. Just factual.
"Today," Ervalen said.
Nobody responded to that. Not because they disagreed — because the specific way he said it didn't leave room for productive disagreement.
---
Straze looked at the map. Ran his finger along the ridge line where Ervalen had positioned. "Three hundred meters. Full output. You drove it four meters through the fire at that range."
"Yes."
"At two hundred meters, full output—"
"Seven or eight meters. Maybe more." Ervalen did the calculation as he said it, the projection running in the back of his head where it had been running since he left the ridge. "At one-fifty, with a running approach to increase output—"
"Twelve," Solomon said quietly, from the corner. "At one hundred fifty meters with kinetic approach multiplier, your current soul-force output would drive that Lance approximately twelve meters through a fire operating at its observed suppression-field-depleted state." He looked up. His violet eyes were very clear for a man who had just had a four-minute working structure dissolved from underneath him in ninety seconds. "You almost broke through."
The words landed.
Ervalen looked at him.
"The fire's resistance scales with its current energy state," Solomon continued. "After the suppression collapse, it was rebuilding. Not at full capacity. At that exact moment, with your approach vector and output—" He shook his head slightly. Not defeated. Calibrating. "Twelve meters is not enough. A Lance needs to be sustained contact at close range to complete what it's designed to complete. But twelve meters is close."
"How far would I need?" Ervalen said.
"At Rank 4? Twenty-five. Perhaps thirty for reliable penetration."
"At Rank 5?"
Solomon was quiet for a moment. "At Rank 5, operating in a window of suppression — real suppression, not what I produced today — you might reach it." He looked at Straze. "My field lasted ninety seconds. I need to understand why before I can tell you how to make it last longer."
"Take the time you need," Straze said. "We're not engaging again until—"
"Five days," Solomon said. "Give me five days."
---
Straze nodded. He looked at the assembled officers. "The engagement results are not circulated beyond this tent. What the army knows: we engaged, we survived, we extracted. What this tent knows—" He met each set of eyes. "—is that the model has a gap. We found it. We are building toward it. That is all anyone needs to know." He straightened. "Dismissed."
They filed out. Kane last, pausing long enough to exchange a look with Straze that communicated several things without using words — the specific shorthand of two people who had served together long enough that certain conversations happened entirely in expression.
Solomon stood slowly, favoring his right arm.
He stopped beside Ervalen on his way to the tent's side door. Looked at him directly with those clear violet eyes.
"Not yet," he said quietly.
Ervalen met his gaze. "Not yet," he agreed.
Solomon went out.
Ervalen stood in the empty tent for a moment. Just him and Straze and the tactical map and the wind coming through the canvas walls.
"He was watching the ridge when he turned south," Ervalen said.
"I know," Straze said.
"He'll factor me in now. I'm inside his pattern."
"Yes." Straze began removing his gauntlets. "Which is why you're leaving the Prussonian Pass tomorrow."
Ervalen went still.
"I need three things from you," Straze said, working the second gauntlet's clasp with the practiced efficiency of a man who had put on and removed armor thousands of times. "I need you at Rank 5 within the next six months. I need you to practice the Lance approach at variable distances until you can calculate your own penetration depth in real time during combat. And I need you somewhere that isn't here, because here is now inside his intelligence assessment and I need at least one variable that isn't."
"Where?" Ervalen said.
"North," Straze said. "Hyperborea. There are training grounds in Caledonia that your abilities are suited for. Extreme conditions. High monster density. The kind of environment that either advances a Soul-Brand through pressure or—" He set the gauntlets on the table. "—doesn't."
"It will," Ervalen said.
Not arrogance. Just the same flat certainty he applied to everything.
Straze looked at him for a moment. "I know," he said. "That's why I'm sending you."
---
In Byzantium, at the administrative desk, Mort received Yogiri's return with the specific relief of a man who had spent three hours preparing for the possibility that his employer would not come back and then realizing, when the employer walked in looking identical to how they had left, that he did not know what to do with that relief.
Yogiri sat. Pulled the afternoon's correspondence stack toward him.
"The eastern trade guild sent a representative," Mort offered. "Provincial assessment from the Seraphic Seat came in — three days early, actually. And there is a—" He checked his notes. "—a contingent from the province of Iberia requesting clarification on garrison redeployment authority."
"I'll see the Iberia contingent last," Yogiri said. "Send the trade guild representative in."
He read while Mort arranged it. The provincial assessment from the Seraphic Seat was thorough — Julius had apparently taken the four-day deadline seriously, producing a thirty-page document on provincial religious administration quality, corruption indicators, and resource flow. It was, Yogiri noted, better research than anything the previous imperial intelligence apparatus had produced in the last decade.
Useful, he thought. Julius is useful.
He turned to the trade guild representative, handled that in twenty minutes, approved two route adjustments and denied one, sent for the Iberia contingent, handled that in fifteen, approved a modified garrison deployment that gave the province what it actually needed rather than what it had asked for.
Through all of it, in the part of his mind that processed things in parallel while the front engaged with immediate work, he was thinking about the mountain road.
About the suppression field that had lasted ninety seconds. About the sword that had reached his shoulder. About the Lance that had driven four meters through suppressed fire from three hundred meters.
About the age of the one who threw it.
He set down the Iberia file and pulled a blank document toward him. Wrote three lines. Folded it. Handed it to Mort without looking up.
"Send this to the SCYTHIA reconnaissance division," he said.
Mort looked at the sealed document. "That's — sir, that division operates in the northern territories. Hyperborea, Caledonia—"
"Yes," Yogiri said.
"You want reconnaissance in Hyperborea?"
"I want to know where a specific person goes next," Yogiri said. "The division will understand the assignment."
Mort took the document.
---
At the door he stopped. Turned back. There was something sitting behind his expression that he was clearly deciding whether to say.
"Is it the young one?" Mort asked. "From the ridge."
Yogiri looked up for the first time.
Mort stood his ground, which was, Yogiri had come to understand, the specific courage of a professional who had decided that being genuinely useful required occasionally asking questions that were not administratively necessary.
"Yes," Yogiri said.
"Why?" Mort said. Not challenging. Genuinely asking — the question of a man who had watched extraordinary things for three weeks and was still assembling what they added up to.
Yogiri considered the question with the same full attention he gave all the others.
"He drove that Lance four meters through fire operating at suppression-depleted state," he said. "At Rank 4. From three hundred meters." He turned back to the document on his desk. "In six months he'll attempt it at Rank 5. I want to know where he's training."
"And if he reaches Rank 5?" Mort said.
"Then I want to be paying attention when he does."
Mort was quiet for a moment.
"That sounds almost like respect," he said carefully.
"It's accurate assessment," Yogiri said.
Mort went out.
Yogiri returned to his work.
Outside, Byzantium moved through its evening — markets closing, lamps being lit, the particular sound of a city that was very slowly, very cautiously, beginning to settle into a shape it didn't have a name for yet. The administrative office's lamp cast yellow light across organized stacks of paper.
He turned a page.
Somewhere north of the Prussonian mountains, he knew, a twenty-three-year-old soldier was being told to go to Hyperborea. To train under extreme conditions. To push a soul-force Lance closer to penetration depth.
Good, he thought, without fully examining why.
He kept reading.
---
On the road north, in the cold Prussonian dark, Ervalen stopped walking.
He looked up at the sky — the three moons of DEVAS in their different phases, hard and clear over the mountain. He had a pack on his back and orders in his pocket and six months to become something different than he currently was.
He thought about four seconds of contact.
About twelve meters being close but not enough.
About the golden-green eyes that had tracked the ridge line as Yogiri walked away.
He's going to find out where I go, Ervalen thought. Not paranoia. Just the logical extension of what he knew about how that mind worked. He's already sent someone to find out.
He looked north.
Good, he thought, and was slightly surprised to find he meant it.
If Yogiri was tracking his progress, then his progress mattered.
If his progress mattered, then what he built in Hyperborea would be tested.
And if it was tested — really tested, in the specific fire of that golden-green attention — then he would know if it was real.
He walked north.
The mountains were dark and cold and enormous and exactly the right environment for what he was going to do to himself for the next six months.
He was almost looking forward to it.
Almost, he thought, and kept walking.