I was on the training floor at fifth bell.
Not because anyone told me to be. Because the assessment session yesterday had used a carefully managed fraction of what I could do and the thing about sustained suppression is that it creates a kind of pressure. Like holding your breath. Eventually the body wants to breathe.
The floor was empty at fifth bell. The academy didn't formally start until seventh. Two hours of quiet and a room with mana absorption channels built into the floor specifically designed to contain high output training.
I had been waiting for this since I walked through the gates.
I ran through the skill set first. Body Reinforcement and Iron Fortress passive checks, making sure the foundation was solid. Void Step sequences, the short range compression movement that still occasionally overshot when I wasn't paying attention, working the calibration until it was precise. Mana Blade combinations with the sword, full output, the blade edge holding a charge that left visible marks on the training constructs I was cycling through at a pace that was considerably faster than yesterday's demonstration.
At sixth bell I heard the door.
I finished the sequence I was running, let the construct collapse, and turned around.
Lucien Varek stood at the entrance to the training floor in academy training clothes rather than uniform, sword at his hip, taking in the room with the particular expression of someone who had arrived expecting to find it empty and was recalibrating.
He looked at the three collapsed constructs.
Then at me.
Then at the constructs again.
"Knox," he said.
"Varek."
He walked in and let the door close behind him. He moved to the weapon rack and checked his sword out of habit, the unconscious maintenance check of someone who had been doing it since childhood, and then he looked at me with the focused attention that I had first seen in the orientation room and which had been sharpening steadily since.
"You're here early," he said.
"So are you."
He looked at the collapsed constructs one more time. They were higher calibration than the ones from yesterday's session. The marks on the floor from the Mana Blade work were deeper than standard training output was supposed to produce.
"Yesterday," he said. "The session."
"Yes."
"You were holding back."
I didn't answer. We had been through this version of the conversation with Theo and the answer hadn't changed but Varek asking it was a different thing from Theo asking it. Theo was curious and practical. Varek was asking because the answer mattered to him in a specific way that had nothing to do with curiosity.
He had been the best in the room his entire life. He had walked into this academy as the confirmed top of the S class intake, the name people mentioned when they talked about this year's cohort, the one the noble houses were watching. S minus rank at seventeen was a generational result. The kind of number that built reputations before you had done anything with them.
And then a minor noble with a broken core reading and a name that nobody had mentioned in any of those conversations had registered S rank while visibly not trying.
That was Varek's problem. Not the number itself. The visibly not trying part.
"I want a bout," he said.
There it was.
"Now?" I said.
"Now."
I looked at him for a moment. The set of his shoulders. The way he was holding the sword, not aggressively, but with the readiness of someone who had already committed to the decision and was past the point of reconsidering it.
I thought about what I had said to Theo. Probably going to be a problem. The folder metaphor. The clean simple logic of a situation that had been building since the assessment.
Varek didn't want to fight me because he was angry. He wasn't angry. He wanted to fight me because he was a prodigy and prodigies need to know where they stand and the assessment yesterday had given him an answer he didn't have enough information to fully believe yet.
He needed to see it himself.
I understood that.
"Rules," I said.
He blinked, like rules hadn't been the next thing he expected. "First to three clean hits. No constructs. Full output."
"Suppression off?" I said.
Something shifted in his expression. The word suppression confirming what he had suspected, that what I had shown yesterday was not my ceiling but a managed floor.
"Off," he said.
I thought about it for exactly as long as it deserved.
"Alright," I said.
We took opposite ends of the training floor.
Varek rolled his neck once, the only preparation he made, and brought his sword up into a guard stance that was technically perfect in every detail. His mana output rose as he dropped whatever ambient suppression he ran day to day and the signature that hit my Mana Domain was genuinely impressive. Clean and dense and controlled, the kind of output that took years of structured development to produce.
S minus. Real S minus. The edge of what the kingdom formally recognised as possible.
I let my own suppression down in layers.
Not all the way. I had thought about this in the second between agreeing and walking to my end of the floor. All the way was not something I was prepared to show anyone yet, not in an uncontrolled environment, not on day three of knowing these people. But honest was different from complete. I could be honest without being everything.
I settled at something that felt true without being total. The level that would show Varek what he needed to see without turning a training bout into a problem.
His mana signature registered mine as I came up and something in his posture changed. A small adjustment, barely visible, the kind of thing that happens below conscious control when the body processes threat information before the mind has finished assessing it.
He covered it immediately. Controlled it back to neutral.
Good instincts.
I raised my sword and we looked at each other across the training floor.
He came first.
The first exchange lasted about eight seconds.
He was fast. Genuinely, properly fast in the way that S minus rank produced, his footwork covering ground with an efficiency that would have been difficult to track at lower perception levels. The sword technique was the best I had seen from anyone in the room, cleaner than Mira's directness, more varied than Yenna's magic heavy approach, the product of what I estimated was at least a decade of structured daily training with serious instruction.
His first combination was a feint into a thrust that most opponents at his level would have had to choose between. Commit to the parry for the feint and eat the thrust. Attempt to cover both and do neither well.
I stepped inside the thrust using a compression movement that borrowed from Void Step without fully activating it, let the blade pass outside my shoulder, and redirected his sword arm with my free hand.
He recovered fast. Faster than I expected. Most people when their technique gets interrupted take a half second to reset. Varek was already adjusting before the redirect was finished, his body flowing into a secondary stance that covered the exposure my counter had created.
Good. Actually good.
We reset and went again.
The second exchange was longer.
He had recalibrated from the first one, adjusted his approach, brought more mana into his footwork to increase his movement speed. The combination he ran was more complex, layered, designed to create pressure across multiple lines simultaneously rather than committing to a single attack.
I matched his speed. Not more than matching. Just enough.
We went back and forth across the floor for about two minutes and I was honest enough with myself to acknowledge that if the gap between us were smaller he would be a genuine problem. His technical execution was close to flawless. His decision making in motion was fast and adaptive. The adjustments he made in real time between exchanges showed a quality of combat intelligence that most people at his level didn't have.
He was everything a prodigy was supposed to be.
The issue was the gap wasn't smaller.
I got the first clean hit in the forty second of the exchange, a palm strike to his shoulder that I pulled to about thirty percent force. Still enough that he felt it. Clean enough that there was no ambiguity about what it was.
He reset. His breathing had changed. Not laboured. Just present, where before it had been controlled to invisibility.
"One," he said.
"One," I agreed.
The third and fourth exchanges were where it changed.
Not in the result. In the quality of his approach. He had stopped trying to match my speed and started trying to be smarter than it, which was the right instinct, the correct adaptation for someone who had processed the information the first two exchanges provided. You cannot outrun what is faster than you. You can potentially outthink it.
He set traps. Committed to lines he didn't intend to finish, creating patterns he expected me to read and then breaking them. He used the floor space better than anyone I had fought in the last six months, controlling geometry, forcing angles.
It was impressive enough that I let the third exchange run longer than I needed to because watching him adapt in real time was genuinely interesting.
Second clean hit came at the ninety second mark of the fourth exchange. Same pulled force. Same unambiguous clarity.
He took it without expression.
"Two," he said.
"Two."
He stepped back and looked at me and for the first time since we had started there was something in his expression that wasn't the focused neutrality of a fighter in motion. Something more internal. The look of someone receiving information they had half expected and finding that half expecting it hadn't made it easier to receive.
"You're faster than you're moving," he said.
It wasn't quite a question.
"Yes," I said.
"And stronger."
"Yes."
He looked at his sword for a moment. Then at the floor. Then back at me with the expression fully reassembled into something controlled.
"Show me," he said.
I looked at him.
"The third hit," he said. "Don't pull it. Don't manage it. Show me what it actually is."
I held the look for a moment.
This was the thing about Varek that I hadn't fully accounted for from observation alone. Underneath the easy confidence and the prodigy's certainty was something more interesting. He wasn't asking because he wanted to win. He had already processed enough information to know the bout's outcome wasn't in question. He was asking because he needed to know the truth of what he was dealing with more than he needed the comfort of not knowing it.
That was a quality I respected.
"Alright," I said.
The fifth exchange was short.
He came with everything, the full output of a genuine S minus rank fighter with a decade of elite training behind him, committed and precise and as good as he actually was with nothing held back.
I met him at half suppression, which was still considerably more than yesterday's session, and the difference was immediate and total. His sword met mine and the force differential registered in his hands before his mind had processed the exchange, the kind of physical information that bypasses analysis and speaks directly to something more fundamental.
He adapted. Of course he adapted. Varek was not someone who stopped adapting. He shifted his approach mid exchange with the speed of someone who had trained for exactly this, for the moment when a fight revealed itself as something other than expected.
It didn't matter.
The third hit landed clean and at something closer to honest force and he moved backward two full steps from it despite Iron Fortress being the only thing active on my end.
He stopped.
Looked at me.
The training floor was quiet. Outside the window the academy was beginning to wake up, distant sounds of a building coming to life, seventh bell approaching. In here it was just the two of us and the collapsed constructs and the marks on the floor and the information that the last twenty minutes had produced.
Varek's expression was the most honest I had seen it.
Not defeated. Not angry. Not the wounded pride of someone who had lost and needed to make it mean something smaller than it was. Just a person looking at a fact clearly.
"You were at half," he said.
"Roughly."
"And yesterday in the session."
"Less than that."
He absorbed that. Looked at his sword. Looked at the floor marks from the earlier solo training work he had walked in on.
"What are you," he said.
Not the way Theo had asked it, with the wry acceptance of someone filing information. The way someone asks a question they genuinely need answered and don't have enough context to answer themselves.
"I don't entirely know yet," I said. Which was true enough.
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then he did something I hadn't expected. He nodded. Once, clean, the nod of someone accepting a situation as it actually was rather than as they would prefer it to be.
"Again tomorrow," he said. "Same time."
I looked at him.
"I'm not going to close the gap," he said, with a directness that cost him something to produce. "Not soon. Maybe not ever depending on what you actually are. But I'm going to understand it. And the only way to understand it is to keep going."
I thought about that for a moment.
There was something in it that I recognised. The same logic that had sent me back into the dungeon rift after the first attempt at the Ironclad Serpent. Not the expectation of winning. The understanding that the information was worth the cost of getting it.
Varek wanted to understand me the way I had learned to understand every beast in that forest. Methodically. Through direct engagement. Not because he expected to beat me but because not knowing was worse than losing.
I could respect that.
"Same time," I said.
He nodded again and walked to the door and left without another word.
I stood on the empty training floor for a moment.
Then I pulled up my status, checked the skill points, and thought about what the next session with Cael was going to require and whether I needed to adjust my suppression calibration before it.
Outside the seventh bell rang.
Day three.