He didn't feel it coming.
That was the thing nobody told you about advancement — not Straze, not Solomon, not the military assessors who had tested his Brand at nineteen and called him exceptional and filed the paperwork. Nobody told you it didn't announce itself. There was no pressure building, no sensation of capacity straining at its limits, no dramatic moment of will pushing through a ceiling.
He woke up on day forty-one.
Stood up.
Looked at his hand.
The amber was gone.
Not dimmed. Not changed in color or shade or intensity. Gone — the familiar amber light of four years, the light he had looked at every morning since nineteen, simply absent. In its place was something that he didn't have a color name for because it wasn't light in the way amber was light. It was more like the visual equivalent of pressure — something that didn't illuminate the space around it so much as make the space aware of it.
He stood in the stone shelter built into the ridge face and stared at his own hand for a full thirty seconds.
Oh, he thought.
There it is.
---
Across the valley, on the overlook where Fenris sometimes spent the night, he heard movement. He looked up. The ancient amber eyes were already open — had been open, he understood, for some time. Fenris rose from his crouch in one motion and looked down at him across the frozen valley.
"There it is," Fenris said.
His voice carried the forty meters of distance and the quality of someone who had been waiting without appearing to wait, which was the specific patience of something that had learned patience through centuries of practice.
Ervalen looked at his hand again.
"It doesn't feel different," he said.
"It won't yet," Fenris said. "Throw a Lance."
---
The Lance that left his hand was wrong.
Not wrong in the sense of failure — wrong in the sense of being unrecognizable. He had thrown Lances every day for forty-one days. He knew the sensation of them the way he knew his own breathing — the specific pull of soul-force from Brand to output, the condensation process, the flight of it. He knew all of that.
This was not that.
The Lance that left his hand crossed a hundred meters before he consciously registered it had been thrown.
At a hundred meters it was still going — still coherent, still structured, still carrying the dual-formation architecture he had spent thirty days building into his output. At a hundred and fifty it showed no signs of dissolution. At two hundred it hit the far ridge face with a sound like a cannon discharging and left a crater two feet deep in solid granite.
The secondary formation detonated inside the crater.
The ridge face cracked.
Not the hairline fracture of day twelve. A structural split — a section of granite four feet across shearing away from the ridge body and falling to the valley floor below in a cascade of ice and stone that sent snow erupting thirty meters in every direction.
Ervalen stood with his arm extended.
He was breathing slightly faster than normal.
That was it. That was the only physical evidence of what he'd just done.
---
Fenris descended from the overlook — not jumped, walked, down the ridge face with the certainty of a body that had no relationship with falling — and crossed the valley to where the granite section had landed. He crouched beside the crater in the ridge face. Examined the secondary detonation pattern. Put his hand inside it.
He stood.
He looked at Ervalen across the valley.
"How does it feel?" he said.
Ervalen thought about the question honestly.
"Like the same hand," he said. "But the answer changed."
"The answer."
"When I ask it for something — the output answers at a different level. The question is the same. The answer is—" He looked at where the granite section lay in the snow. "—that."
Fenris walked back across the valley. He stopped in front of Ervalen and looked at him the way he had looked at the Lance thirty days ago — the whetstone looking at the blade, the professional interest of something that worked with edges for a living.
"Throw it at me," he said.
Ervalen looked at him.
"Same as day thirty," Fenris said. "Open palm. Full output. Dual-formation."
"Day thirty moved your hand one centimeter," Ervalen said.
"Yes," Fenris said.
"This won't move your hand one centimeter."
"No," Fenris agreed. He held out his palm. "Throw it."
---
The Lance hit Fenris's palm at Rank 5, dual-formation, full kinetic approach from a sixty-meter run.
The primary signature drove eight centimeters into Fenris's palm before stopping — eight centimeters into skin that had absorbed Ervalen's full-output Rank 4 strikes for forty days like they were weather. The ancient amber light around Fenris's hand surged, the eight centuries of refinement engaging automatically, and Fenris's fingers began to close—
The secondary formation detonated.
From inside the eight centimeters of penetration, the second force signature released outward in all directions simultaneously.
Fenris's hand moved.
Not one centimeter.
His entire body moved — one step backward, the snow compressing eight inches under his heel as he absorbed the force, his massive frame shifting its weight with the automatic efficiency of something that had been hit by serious power before and knew how to survive it.
One step.
Backward.
Fenris stood with his right hand held in front of him, looking at it. The palm showed a circular impression — eight centimeters of Lance depth, the texture of it pressed into the ancient skin, the secondary blast pattern radiating outward from the center.
He closed the hand. Opened it.
The impression was already fading.
He looked at Ervalen.
---
"Twenty-five meters," Ervalen said quietly. "Solomon said twenty-five for reliable penetration."
"Against suppression-depleted fire," Fenris said. "With the new suppression architecture Solomon is building — the one that targets dissolution reaction speed rather than output strength — the fire will be slower to respond." He looked at his palm again. "Eight centimeters at point of impact. In a fire that's responding at half-speed." He was quiet for a moment. "The penetration depth scales from the impact depth times the response delay. If the response delay doubles—"
"Sixteen centimeters," Ervalen said.
"If it triples—"
"Twenty-four."
"You need twenty-five," Fenris said.
"I need Solomon's field to triple the response delay," Ervalen said. "Can it?"
Fenris was quiet.
"I don't know what Solomon is building," he said. "But I know what he's capable of." He looked south — that deliberate southward look that meant a decision was being made rather than a habit being run. "It's time."
Ervalen went still. "Time for what?"
"Time for me to go south," Fenris said.
---
The valley was absolutely quiet.
"The coalition," Ervalen said.
"The coalition needs to know what Rank 5 looks like," Fenris said. "They need to build around it. Straze is working from the Prussonian engagement data — one Lance, Rank 4, four meters, ninety seconds of field. That data is two months old and wrong." He turned back from his southward look. "And Solomon needs to see the Lance in person before he can calibrate the new suppression architecture correctly."
Ervalen watched him. "That's not all of it."
Fenris was quiet for a moment.
"No," he said. "It's not."
"You want him to know you're involved."
The amber eyes were very steady. "I want him to know the variable changed." Fenris said. "I want him to receive a report that says: FENRIS has been observed south of the Caledonian range, moving toward the Prussonian Pass. I want him to read that and open a drawer."
Ervalen looked at him. "What drawer?"
"Whatever drawer he keeps the things he's prepared for," Fenris said. "Every serious fighter has one. The preparation they've done for the contingency they hope doesn't arrive." He held Ervalen's gaze. "I want him to open it. I want him to look at it. Because the next time he closes it, I want him to know that what's coming is real."
"You're not going to Straze," Ervalen said. "You're going to the border. You're going to be visible."
"For two days," Fenris said. "Moving south. Clearly. Then I'll come back and we'll run the final four weeks of preparation." He crouched, started picking up his traveling equipment — minimal, practical, the equipment of something that didn't need much. "You have four weeks of Rank 5 work to do while I'm gone. The Lance approach vector. The kinetic multiplier at the new output level. And—" He looked at Ervalen. "The distance."
"What distance?"
"At Rank 5, dual-formation, full approach — calculate your reliable range. Not maximum range. Reliable. The range at which you can guarantee the dual-formation holds through impact." He straightened. "That's your shot distance. You need to know it exactly."
"I'll have it in four weeks," Ervalen said.
---
Fenris looked at him for a moment. That same professional amber attention. Then, unexpectedly, something shifted in it — not warmth exactly, but adjacent to warmth the way a coal-glow was adjacent to a fire. Something that recognized forty-one days of work and found it worth recognizing.
"You advanced twelve days ahead of my estimate," he said.
Ervalen said nothing.
"I've trained eleven people in eight hundred years," Fenris said. "Two of them advanced ahead of estimate." He picked up his pack. "You're the first one I think will use it correctly."
He started walking.
"Fenris," Ervalen said.
The enormous figure stopped.
"The reconnaissance unit Yogiri pulled out of Hyperborea," Ervalen said. "You knew about them from the start. You said they'd see the training eventually."
"Yes," Fenris said.
"You also sent Solomon a letter," Ervalen said. "About the dual-formation. Through a channel you knew would look anonymous."
Fenris was quiet.
"That's why you wanted me to keep throwing after day thirty," Ervalen said. "You wanted them to see the development. Both sides. You needed Yogiri to open the drawer and you needed Solomon to have the right information to build around."
The silence stretched.
"If both sides are building around the correct information," Ervalen said, "the engagement is real. Not a massacre. Not a foregone conclusion. A real engagement with actual variables."
Fenris turned around.
He looked at Ervalen with those ancient amber eyes and in them was something Ervalen hadn't seen in forty-one days of training — something that was not professional assessment or calibrated patience or the long view of eight centuries.
It was the specific look of someone who has been seen accurately and is deciding what to do about it.
"Yes," Fenris said.
"You've been bored for a very long time," Ervalen said.
"Yes," Fenris said.
"And you want this to be worth watching."
A long pause.
"Everything I've done in eight centuries has been worth surviving," Fenris said. "I want this to be worth watching." He held Ervalen's gaze. "There's a difference."
He turned and walked south.
In four steps he was at the ridge. In five he was over it. In ten seconds the valley was empty except for the evidence of forty-one days of work — craters, split granite, compression patterns, and a section of ridge face with a double-impact wound that hadn't been there six weeks ago.
---
Ervalen stood in the silent valley and breathed the Caledonian cold and felt the new Brand burning with that pressure-light that didn't illuminate so much as announce itself.
He raised his hand.
Threw a Lance.
It crossed two hundred meters without effort and hit the far ridge with a sound that rolled through the valley like thunder.
He watched the dust settle.
Four weeks, he thought. Find the reliable range. Build the approach vector. Calculate the exact angle.
He thought about Straze at the Prussonian Pass, building from two-month-old data.
He thought about Solomon in the command tent, working suppression architecture around a Lance profile he'd only read about.
He thought about a white-haired man who had opened a desk drawer, looked at something, and closed it again.
He threw another Lance.
Two hundred and twelve meters. Dual-formation. Both signatures clean.
He calculated the impact depth against known resistance values and arrived at a number.
Then he calculated what that number became when Solomon tripled the dissolution response delay.
He stood in the frozen valley with the Caledonian wind moving through his coat and stared at the number in his head.
Twenty-seven meters.
Twenty-seven meters of penetration.
Against a fire that needed twenty-five for reliable breakthrough.
He stood there for a long time.
He was not celebrating. He didn't have the specific emotional machinery for celebration — had never developed it, had always moved from one correct number to the next without stopping in between.
But he stood there for longer than necessary.
Just standing.
Breathing the cold air.
Looking at twenty-seven meters.
Then he turned north and started working.