Chandra lunged towards Brion, floating on a wave of flame. Her hands flew out, and a sword of black flame appeared in each hand. It was such a raw display of pure ardor that Xander and several other students rocked back in their seats. Only a couple, like Anoki, seemed to be expecting this level of power. For his part, he leaned forward, looking eager.

Brion looked underwhelmed. He didn’t even move his hands from behind his back. Was he really that arrogant?

Chandra swung with both blades in an overhead strike, aiming straight for Brion’s skull. Faster than Xander’s eyes could follow, hands of red flame sprouted from Brion’s shoulders, catching Chandra’s blades. The force of her assault wasn’t completely ignored, and she drove him back, his feet digging deep furrows in the arena floor. The moment he stopped their momentum, Brion pivoted, trying to hurl Chandra past him and into a nearby wall.

Chandra brought her feet up under her body, switching the direction of the flame from her feet. She took a lazy turn, starting to circle Brion. The black fire swords in her hand shifted to spears, and she hurled them in waves as she drifted on her pillar of fire around Brion. His flaming hands moved far faster than human hands could have tracked, snatching the spears from the air. They vanished the moment they were stopped, Chandra forming a new one a moment after.

“Batter the castle walls,” Xander muttered, and Anoki nodded in understanding. Lilyn looked at them both in confusion.

“What does that mean?” Lilyn asked.

“Chandra’s burning a lot of Ardor on both hovering and throwing spears,” Xander explained. As he spoke, Chandra switched from the spears to instead throwing just orbs of the black flame. “She’s probably gone for a Calvary build - choosing her techniques and her Refinements to favor a fast and hard assault style, leaving little room for defense. Calvary goes for a fast, hard opening, burning though ardor quick in the beginning of the fight. They try for a quick victory because they won’t have much left for the long fight.”

Brion kept spinning in place, his burning arms having to work twice as fast to intercept Chandra’s incoming attacks. Brion still kept his physical hands clasped behind his back, but it looked less like arrogance now from the way sweat beaded his forehead and he grit his teeth. Odds were, as far as Xander could tell, his flesh and blood hands couldn’t keep up with the ones of fire, and Brion was keeping them back so they wouldn’t get in the way of the superior limbs.

“Brion’s a Bastion,” Anoki said, picking up where Xander left off. “Which means he probably only has one or two mobility techniques, and has focused on defense. Bastion still does burn Ardor fast on the defense - those flaming arms can’t be cheap - but if he can force this fight to go on long enough, he should be able to outlast Chandra. If they were still Steel, this would be an easy win for Brion.”

“But that changes at Ivory?” Lilyn asked.

Chandra kicked out one foot, turning her forward momentum into a meteoric rise on a pillar of flame. She held her hands over her head, and a ball of normal fire formed between them. As they watched, the flaming orb pinched in the middle and folded in half, shrinking to half the size while growing to twice the brightness. Brion’s eyes went wide when it folded again, quintupling in brightness, and he started to pour flame into a wall between himself and Chandra.

“At Ivory,” Xander said after Anoki gave him a nod of permission, “Chandra has been able to forge one technique to such a degree that she doesn’t need to completely wear down Brion’s defenses. She just needs to wear him down enough where he doesn’t have the ardor to block the attack.”

The flame folded again, and now the light of the attack was enough to make the observers uncomfortable. A shimmering barrier popped into existence around the arena and darkened the air, filtering down the brightness of Chandra’s attack so the initiates could see what was going on.

Sweat beaded Chandra’s forehead and her arms shook. She held the folded flame aloft, her eyes wide. It looked like she was holding a miniature sun above her head. Then, in one fluid motion, Chandra hurled the flame. The moment it was free from her grip the pressure keeping it folded burst, and the single sphere of fire erupted into a massive wave that washed over Brion. It hit the edge of the arena, and the scripts in place there stopped the flame before it could spread further and cause anyone else any injury.

“Well, I’m impressed,” Lilyn said as the light faded to smoke.

“I was certain Brion had something in place to deal with that flame,” Anoki said, sighingly slightly. “The way he was standing there, he was pretty sure he could deal with it. And he’s two ranks above Chandra, so-”

Xander held up a hand. “It’s not done yet.”

Both Lilyn and Anoki looked at Xander. They’d been watching where Brion had been. But Xander had watched Chandra. She had dropped down to the arena floor again, the flames under her feet going out, but was crouched with one hand out to defend herself.

The cloud of smoke exploded outwards in a ring, and Brion came soaring out in a single low to the ground leap. The flame arms were now solid and looked like they were made of pure obsidian, twice the size they had been a moment ago and still floating a foot above his shoulders.

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Chandra leapt into the air as Brion’s hands came in, slicing through the air she had just vacated. She threw two of the black fire spheres at Brion as she travelled over his head, and caught him in the back with one of them. Brion’s hand lanced out, almost faster than the eye could follow, and caught Chandra around the leg. Chandra started to blast flame from her feet, trying to regain control, but Brion now had her and swung her around, hurtling her like a toy doll across the Arena. Chandra’s burning feet proved to be a disadvantage right now, turning her flight into a wild corkscrew, but Xander couldn’t quite follow that when he was so distracted by the ram’s horns that now emerged from Brion’s skull.

Chandra slammed into the barrier across the arena and fell to the floor. She hissed as she came back up, her legs running like wax as they melted into a serpentine tail. Chandra slithered across the arena towards Brion, and Brion stood his ground. The two clashed, Chandra striking like a cobra but using daggers made of black flame instead of fangs, and Brion using his obsidian arms to try and grab her while stepping back from each strike, giving up ground but also conceding no injury.

In fact, from Chandra’s angle, it would look like she was winning. But that was because she couldn’t see Brion’s human hands. They’d been behind his back the entire fight, and Xander had barely been paying any attention to them, but by sheer chance saw a flicker of light from between his clasped fingers. It was astonishingly bright in that moment, and Xander’s eyes lit up when he realized what it was.

Chandra reared back, and lunged in for a final strike. Brion brought up the obsidian hands to defend - and then thrust his human hands forward over them. Chandra was committed. She couldn’t evade. The same folded flame technique she’d used against Brion, but with so much light Xander suspected Brion had been charging it for the entire fight, unfolded from Brion’s hands like a fan. The arena went so bright it was impossible to see anything, even with the professor adjusting the light level.

Then the brightness faded, and the flame cleared, in time for Chandra’s tail to flop lifelessly to the ground without any sign of anything above her waist.

There was a moment of silence before someone started to clap, and then others were joining in. Brion turned and bowed, once again looking bored with anything. Only then could Xander see how badly he’d been burned across his chest from Chandra’s attack. The burns covered almost his entire torso in blackened char.

Chandra’s body rose up, and in a flash her vaporized torso reappeared on top of her tail, as Brion rolled back to where he was facing her with his hand outstretched. His hands went back behind his back, folding up like they were holding the ball of flame again, but this time when his fingers cracked no light spilled fort. Xander watching in fascination as the whole fight rewound, only without any ardor techniques firing off, just the two people moving through a dance. That also meant they got to see what happened when Brion had taken Chandra’s folded flame. He’d skidded back about ten feet, once again digging deep furrowed, before his skin and had started to sear, and he’d switched into the demonic form.

Of course, Xander had to extrapolate that from the reversed version of events, where Brion switched back to his human form and slid forward, the ground repairing itself with every inch of his motion, until he was once again standing ready to face Chandra with his hands outstretched like they were pouring ardor into a shield that didn’t exist.

Moments later, Brion and Chandra were back to the beginning of the fight, and once again bowed to each other before turning and bowing to Master Rokyn. He smiled to Brion first, showing his favor for the victor, before giving Chandra an acknowledgement of her performance.

“And thus you see what awaits you if you survive the trials,” Master Rokyn said, his tail lashing in the air. “There will be three. You must master three fire techniques. You must reforge your body one more time. And then, with your reforged body and your fire techniques, you will be given a chance to forge a contract with a member of the Chaotic Clans. If you succeed, that Chaos Fiend - that demon - will restore your body and ensure your ability to survive. You will then, truely, be walking on the Path of the Fallen Embers.

“There are many paths that go from there, but they all start here. As a member of the Path of Fallen Ember, you will never go past Sage in the traditional sense - your progression will be Stone, Steel, Ivory, Gold, the Three Forms of Jade, and finally Sage. You will not be able to reach the ruler ranks. But there are alternate paths. Paths where you advance your fiend instead. Those paths are independent of your personal advancement. There have been those who never advanced their own cultivation past Ivory, but walked their demon through the path of the devout from “Neophyte” all the way to “Apostle.” There have been those who found their spirit too weak to contain enough ardor to ascend out of Steel, but formed the full Six compacts with their demon, giving them a Sage’s might.”

He could sense the air in the room, and nodded as if one of them had spoken their misgivings aloud. “That is why the Crucible is so important. By surviving as long as you did, as a Broken, you have proven you have the will needed to not instantly be overwhelmed. But your demon will fight against you. Your demon may even overcome you, at which point we will regrettably be forced to kill you before you can threaten the rest of the Empire.”

No one moved. Several people barely even breathed. Xander looked around and saw that some of the other students looked horrified, hurt, or betrayed. Lilyn looked more thoughtful than worried, although something about this was bothering her. Not that Xander couldn’t think of a dozen reasons being told after the ‘month to live’ news about the demons would be problematic, but she didn’t seem upset. Anoki looked resolved. Almost like he’d expected this. If he’d been to one of the other Academies, perhaps he’d heard enough to be prepared.

Xander...just wanted to find out what these three techniques were, and how he could reforge his body while still at Stone, and how to master both in the timeframe to have a go at getting a demon. Because he had, just earlier today, thought that he would be willing to do anything to have his life back. And given that the Ember Academy Disciples had not yet gone insane and tried to murder the Empire, that meant the Chaos Fiends could be controlled.

So all he had to do was make sure he could control them.