Lunch was served at one o’ clock sharp each day, according to Alyss.

And today, though the inaugural convocation had taken up quite a considerable amount of our time, Circade’s lecture, for all its rapture, lasted only an hour. Meaning that, just now, I’d yet another left until my break at after-noon. And I’d one more class to attend.

Basic Melee Maneuvers, taught by the mighty Bolemir himself.

It filled me with quite the tense, eager anticipation.

I’d not once before gone so long without a true, genuine fight since receiving my Blessing. The few, regular, ritualistic scuffles I and my Soulbound blade shared, whilst excellent for growth, did little to truly sate either one of us. And of late, those countless hours spent unraveling, understanding, and evolving Shards left me progressively more stuffed-full of a tense, eager energy. A violent energy. I was veritably filled to bursting.

I couldn’t help myself. I yearned for it.

Of course, such unsettlingly bellicose humors were noticed in short order by the ever-attentive shadow at my side, and before she departed Alyss entreated me to one last, lingering glare. She said nothing in particular out loud, obviously, not amidst the crowd of lavish lordlings as one matriculating from Circade’s lecture to their next, but her eyes told all.

Don’t be an idiot, they said.

Or at least, I assumed they did.

That was what they said most often, anyways, so I figured it as good a guess as the next. Her instructions were frustrating. Self defeating, almost. Be strong, but not too strong. Be fast, but not too fast. Give them a show worthy of our namesake, but not one they’ll long remember, not one they’ll speak about with classmates, and classmates with parents, and parents with the Lords Paramount above them.

Don’t give them even an inkling of who you really are.

As if it was all such an easy thing to do.

Her ever-present Nightmare, First, gave away nothing more than its master, and so I simply grimaced out a nod at the sorceress. We went our separate ways, then, but that surging, frantic, frenzied miasma that plagued me dampened not at all. Only, there was an extra edge of tension to it, now.

Off to the training grounds.

Lord Bogatyr held his lectures, one and all, in a boldly-occupied stretch of land that dominated the Institute’s northwesterly corner, near enough a full sixth of the campus entire. It sat flat and broad, splayed out like a felled sword or a rigored cadaver, in considerable contrast to the college’s otherwise towering spires and winding aerial walkways.

The grounds were themselves made up of two massive grids. Arenas, large and small, by the tens, all arrayed in series and parallel with one another.

The western half of them were located out of doors, with grounds of sandy soil, thin steel bleachers and patchy grass dotting up and down their magnitude. These were the public training grounds, open to studentry one and all, and free for booking each and every hour of the day.

And they were for training, but–only partially. They had a far more popular purpose to boot.

Dueling.

As I passed them by on my way to the Dean of War’s lecture, I saw many a highborn lord or lady engaged in just such activity. Flickering at breakneck pace around and about one another, shedding great vents of blistering fire, brackish poison, or frigid cold.

They fought cruelly, brutally, with one another, these pampered lordlings. Far more so than I would’ve otherwise expected. But, always, they held something back. Just something. A whisper, a morsel. A hint of mercy, perhaps, or cowardice. The dueling grounds were enchanted, of course, for protection and healing and whatnot.

But enchantments could always fail.

A faded rune, an aging circuit, a single shoddy piece of argent wiring…

One dead heir, accident or no, and the flames of war might just swallow Europe whole, and so its Aristocratic scions never quite fought as if their lives truly depended on it.

The other half of this great grid, the easternmost one, was encapsulated by a massive, meters-thick set of walls, heavily enchanted, brilliantly and typically cobalt-blue. Whilst still flatter by at least half again than its surrounding towers, it towered in turn over the dueling grounds to its west, dense and imposing.

These were the halls of Maskelyne.

This sole structure, this great, rectangular, cobalt-blue behemoth built from old metal and modern magic was capable, by way of ruinous crystallized Entropy expenditure, of simulating battle. It could create environments, whole cities, from naught but empty air. It could imagine Immortal Blessed, legends of the past, in the very prime of their might. It could envisage legions from nothing at all.

This was not the strength of men. It was the power of the Gods. A Relic lent these halls their divine ability, and its name was Maskelyne’s Razor.

The Razor itself, though more of dagger or some shortsword in truth, once embedded deep into one’s heart, granted upon them this might. A malign Relic it was, that which offered a man to make all his dreams come true, but only as he lay dying.

Fortunately, those who taught here were no mere men.

A great throne was erected at the massive mall’s precipice, ensconced within an all-glass viewing chamber that sat suspended from the ceiling as an upside-down egg. An Immortal might sit upon this throne, grasp the Razor, plant it into their heart, and channel Entropy from the Institute’s great vaults down below to heal themselves and fill the halls with dreams.

There were limits to the Razor’s power, of course.

Those legends of antiquity it simulated were never quite so good as the real thing. They couldn’t grow, obviously. They never advanced in stage, nor learned. In many ways, the simulations were only so good as their creators, as the ones who imagined them in the first place, who held the Razor in their hearts. As such, none were so effective at drawing from these hallowed halls their truest value than those closely acquainted with war.

Thus spoke Lord Bogatyr.

To all of us, he spoke thusly.

The thick, bearded, burly half-giant stood ramrod straight as he did so, flanked on either side by his handful of relatively lesser-looking TA’s, the familiar Lord Novikov heading them all. His words, too, were thick and slow, burdened by an eastern brogue viscous as dark molasses, his monologue progressing with the slow certainty of a migrating continental shelf.

Gradually, ponderously, the Dean of War explained to us that, today, we wouldn’t be doing any of the incredible, wondrous, exhilarating things of which these sorcerous halls were capable. We wouldn’t be exploring unknown vistas, we wouldn’t do battle with Ancient foes. The grounds he’d create for us at present would be simple dirt and mud. Bolemir wouldn’t be teaching us team exercises, today, or even basic melee maneuvers. In fact, he wouldn’t be doing any teaching at all.

He’d be watching.

“Each man, he is like no other,” the Slav rumbled leisurely, in a broken basso. “I do forge steel, here. I do mold metal.”

His heavy eyes bore into us from afar, grim and black and beady, his ranks of TA’s watching as he did so with all range of emotion; boredom, anticipation, savage delight. His grave speech, his pressing aura, his own stare and those of his lieutenants…

It all made for a rather intimidating atmosphere, to be honest.

It certainly did well enough for my fellow first-years, which made up the vast majority of us all. They were quite shaken, already. Shaking, already, some of them. Prince William had elected not to join this lecture, which I found unsurprising. That Alyss, too, neglected it was likely for the best.

“To mold I must make force,” Bolemir the mighty boomed, “I must. Too brittle the steel, I break it. Too supple the steel, I bend it. Each steel, he is different. He is…distinct.”

A broad hand, like a gravedigger’s shovel, emerged from grey robes emblazoned with a range of winding peaks to paw at the Warlord’s prodigious beard.

“This will be pain,” Bolemir admitted, then shrugged, as if such things were of little consequence to him. “There is heat, there is force, there is pain. There must be. To teach, I must to know. First, I must to know. How much, the heat? How much, the force? I must to know. I must to know you.”

His small, black eyes glinted forebodingly.

“Today, I find you.”

Then, like merely speaking so much had exhausted the mighty, barrel-chested Brute, he waved a bludgeon-palm about, and his legion of assistants, Nikolai’s devilish grin at their forefront, descended upon us. We were vivisected, the lot of us, into teams of fifteen, and to each team went a TA.

Mine was a short, lean, sandy-haired fellow, tanned and grinning broadly. Handsome, true, but in a savage sort of way. His thick, unkempt hair he’d half-tamed by way of fluffing straight up into a series of spikes, and his unsurprisingly chiseled chest was bare save for a single article of jewelry that made my eyes widen as I recognized it.

A silver medallion, in the flawless recapitulation of a half-moon, embedded just above the clavicle.

His song was sand and soil, the bite of it as it took minute fangs to flesh.

~~~

Quake

Attunement: Therianthrope(Mi) 14

Grain: Vampirism

Marble: Stoneblood

~~~

This man, or boy, was a Therian.

Just as Rover had been.

He was one of the Wer, therefore. A Third who hailed from the Lonely Mountain. And, if I recollected at all correctly of Alyss’s lessons, that meant he served Wergar the White. And, by extension, the Coterie.

He gathered us together with little difficulty, this Rover’s relative, and therefore Romulus’s, too, and treated us to an easy smile as he began. There was a certain fierceness to it, to be sure, but far from the genuine venom I’d felt from Nikolai’s song.

“Oh-kay!” the dirt blonde therian exclaimed, snapping his fingers together. “So, I’m Leif, and I’ll be your TA, today!” His bright white canines glinted as he spoke, just sharper enough than normal as to hint at his heritage.

“You’ve all got the picture, right? I assume?” He went on, enthusiastically. “Lord Bogatyr wants to see what you can do. All of you, y’know? Put you through your paces, pit you against one another.” He thumped his bare chest, stiffened his spine, and spoke in a rumbling, gravelly basso.

“True valour, it is born of blood. Only, of blood. Blood, and battle.”

Then he laughed.

“That’s what Bolemir always says, ha-ha.”

He paused, for a moment.

“Uh, just–you don’t actually have to bleed, of course. Obviously. I’m just saying–or, it’s just for example, oh-kay? So…c’mon guys! Let’s see what you can do!”

His antics made me smile.

They were refreshing, particularly after the past few days. Even without peering into his soul, I could immediately tell that this Leif was no politicker. He had no grand plans, no scheming secrets. His song was rough and rowdy, plain as day, straightforward and guileless as the nose on his face, and that was just fine by me. It allowed a measure of tension in me to release, to relax.

It reminded me of my friend.

His disposition was well reminiscent of Caleb’s. Bright and beaming. Exuberant. Before the Maw and my tales had tainted him, at least.

Nowadays, it seemed as though the Inquisitor’s sun was lost to time.

The thought of it soured me, and so my smile evaporated as swiftly as it had arrived. The attentive young wolf, however, right away happened upon my shifting melancholia.

“Woah, h–hey, now!” He chuckled, awkwardly, wincing as he clapped his hands together. “There’s no need to be nervous, here. No need, no need at all.” He spread his arms out wide, gesturing about the contours of the massive indoor arena. “I know my lord has a particular…way about him, but–there’s no danger. Really. The place is enchanted. All of it. No one’s going to die today.”

He looked around. His words, apparently, hadn’t done much to convince my impromptu classmates.

“So, who’s up first?”

None spoke up.

“Just a friendly, friendly duel. How ‘bout it?”

No hands were raised.

“Hah, I remember my first time, too! The agon–er. Well. I just meant, uhm–it only gets easier from here! So, let’s have at it!”

My teammates, none of whom I recognized especially outside of allegiant colors, looked uncomfortably in-between one another, avoiding his gaze. Finally, our TA produced a reluctant frown.

“Come on, guys…,” he sighed, shaking his head. “It’s gotta be one of you, ok? Or–two, I mean,” he corrected himself, quickly. “Otherwise, I’m just gonna have ta’ choose for you, and believe me, Lord Bolemir will remembe–”

“I’ll go first,” I declared, suddenly.

I strode forth swiftly, taking my place in the center of our small, earthen sub-arena. Leif, to his credit, accepted my interruption in seamless stride, his sunny grin swelling with reinforcements.

“That’s great! Hey, that’s great!” He praised, eagerly. “Your name?”

“Taiven Tharros,” I replied.

There was an instant change in the air.

In inhalation of air, in fact. From many of my teammates. I wasn’t sure why, exactly. After all, my Name was easy enough to observe. Nevertheless, upon hearing me tell my family one, all fourteen of them startled, some in mere anxiety, others in outright fright. Leif’s own eyes widened upon me, then narrowed, and I heard our namesake, Katakh, muttered breathily amongst my fellows.

It’d been mere months since the closing of the Maw. How had our infamy spread so far?

“Oh…boy,” Leif muttered, grimacing. He glanced off for a moment, to the distance, in the direction of Lord Novikov. He pursed his lips, as if considering something, but then returned to facing my way.

“Oh…kay,” he winced. “Uh, kind of wish you waited for last, to be honest.” He sucked in air through sharpened canines, roughly twisting a scarred, callused palm through his wild hair.

He grinned at me, again, but there was a fierceness to it, now.

“Well then,” he half spoke, half snarled, baring his teeth at us all.

“Who wants to fight the Katakh?”

Familiarly, there were no volunteers.

This time, a couple of students actually paled. After a period of considerable hesitance, which Lief, this time, appeared content to let marinate, one of them strode reluctantly forth. A young, thin, wiry-looking woman, whose midnight hair and grey-black garb marked her as a Slav.

“I,” she proclaimed with significant gravity, placing a gentile palm upon her breast, “Atlanya of Casmira, will face you, Katakh.”

She bowed to me.

I almost snorted.

It was just…so ridiculous.

I’d faced death countless times, by now. I’d dueled many foes, both human and not. The Slavic woman’s conduct was so drenched in weight and ceremony. All for a simple duel.

The girl tread with admirable evenness to her place opposite me in the small arena’s center.

But even through her apparent comport, I saw her. I saw her. I heard the little wavers in her voice. I made out the minute tremors in her face. They were, one and all, laid bare before my Sensory Perception. She couldn’t hide from me.

I saw the flush rising in her cheeks. I heard the racing of her heart grow louder. I caught the eager, greedy gleam twinkling from her eyes.

This Crat was out for glory.

~~~

Skyrzak

Attunement: Soulbound Spirit(Mi) 9

Grain: Dimeritium Talons

~~~

I raised a single eyebrow in disbelief.

She wasn’t even Marble-stage.

I could glean her motives, straight away. Her song was an open book, and a pathetic one, besides. It hid nothing from me. It was…remarkable. Unbelievable, almost. She’d no idea at all what I could do, what my disposition was, save from the stories she’d heard about me. Still, she figured that the benefits outweighed the risks. She hungered for the reputation she’d gain by my defeat.

And yet, she really, genuinely thought she could defeat me.

That was what cut deepest, truest. That was what incensed me, the most. This pampered little lordling really thought she had me. She really thought she had a chance.

I knew her type, this woman. This girl. I knew what she cared for, more than anything else. I could see her deeds reflected in eddied Entropy, etched into the darkest recesses of her soul. She’d fought naught but sycophants until now. Friends of her House, placating her. Mundanes, even.

Doped up. High on that wretched Entropic dust to glimpse false godhood.

Lives forfeit to soothe an Aristocrat her ego.

My mood, already on edge, grew ugly.

This was the fault in Europe, the rotten heart of Bern, the fair-weather scion Pylon spoke of, writ gangly and grotesque. This was the heir who dreamed of glory, legacy, legend, but knew nothing of war.

The young ladyling smiled at me, viciously and nervously and excitedly, and flexed her fingers, but moved not a muscle. Her eyes narrowed in eager concentration as a thin, wan shadow peeled off of her back.

It metastasized feet, and legs, and lips, swelling up from patchy blackness to mutate limbs of a rich, ruby-red persuasion. It assumed the shape of a minor fiend, a half-ethereal creature with bright-orange wings and nubs of horns that dripped with sticky tar.

Its claws were a shade of haunting, sickly purple.

It was the same color shared by the Institute’s golem guardians, one I’d not seen before my coming to Old Europe, and even in this sorry state, it still troubled me. A material known as dimeritium, if the girl’s Gifts implied truth. I needed desperately to learn more about it.

The imp, if that was indeed what this Soulbound Spirit was meant to be, squealed aloud as it emerged. Its tongue was awful in an entirely different manner than the speech of Shards, all awash with bleating goats, screaming pigs, and other not-quite-human-nor-beastly noises.

Yet not a soul around us reacted.

None heard it, apparently. Nor did their eyes track the thing, as it flapped towards me. They remained locked, still, on both my and the Slav’s statuesque figures, opposite one another in the arena. No doubt the creature was meant to be invisible, and its attack to take me by surprise.

So, as it neared me, I played along.

I watched the Slav’s lips quiver in delight as her ruse went supposedly undetected. I watched our crowd of fellow students murmur tensely whilst, in their eyes at least, neither I nor the girl made a move. I watched the imp arrest itself above me, a quarter of my own size, raising a wicked, violet-clawed palm atop my head.

Poised to strike.

“FOR MORENA–a–aa–aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…!”

The Slavic Master’s victorious crow shifted to low groan, her accompanying hand swipe turned comatose by Acceleration.

I sighed in equal parts pleasure and disappointment as my Major Blessing’s familiar surge of euphoria trickled through my arteries.

I glanced upwards with a scowl, towards the demonic creature that was meant to be my adversary, now naught but a still frame caught in space and time. It was my own fault, too.

The thing was, I’d practiced enough at this point with the Mover Shard as to make its activation automatic. Parasympathetic. Any attack that came my way, whether or not I considered it so, would trigger it. The summoned demon’s strike might well have been anemic, but it was nevertheless a strike, and so my Blessing would have none of it.

There would be no chances, no happenstances, no surprises. Nothing would so much as scrape my skin without its express permission. My Shards were nothing if not protective.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Even at tenfold speed, this would be no battle.

That feeling of fuzziness, of frenziedness, of lightning gnawing at my extremities and butterflies swimming in my small intestine, swelled. I shook my head to clear it, but was strangely unsuccessful. The feeling only grew.

I could sense myself grow keener, sharper, more aware. There was an itch somewhere I couldn’t scratch, a loose piece of skin I couldn’t worry. I squinted my eyes and groaned.

I decided to end this quickly.

I wasted no time, bearing forth placidly through rigid air, trekking smoothly from the arena’s one side to its other. Of the fifteen students in attendance, barely a few had even noticed me move. Those who had, though, were unawares as to my true location, their eyes instead tracing sluggishly about at random, their bodies just beginning to draw back in shock.

At tenfold acceleration, only the Therian’s gaze remained fixed on me.

I stopped short when directly face to face with the Blessed woman.

The Blessed girl.

For that was what she was, after all. I could see now, though I didn’t need to. A girl, and nothing more. A little lordling, unfit for war. Her evil was a softer one than Soultaker’s, one born of environment and privilege rather than innate nature.

But then, what mattered that, to those she’d slaughtered?

Take her.

An abrupt growl from deep within surprised me.

Startled me, in fact. It was Fang’s voice, I realized. But that surprised me, too. Fang was a creature of deference, of reverence, even to my own frustration. Rare it was, that he spoke out of turn.

His voice was full of urgent wroth and hunger.

Take her, he repeated.

Take her fangs. Take her claws. She does not sharpen them, respect them. She does not deserve them.

His words were…eloquent.

And that was strange, too. My Soulbound Shard spoke generally in jilted sentences, short and sharp and cutting straight to the heart of the matter. This was unlike him.

The buzzing in my ears grew louder.

Rip them from her, he snarled. Rip them out. Rip them clean.

Claim them for your own.

I grimaced, clutching at my temples, feeling my pulse echo across my body in awful waves. His rhetoric was familiar, somehow.

“We don’t have that power,” I reminded him through grit teeth. And it was true. Never mind the fact that I had absolutely no use for such a piddling Shard, and we were full up, right now. “We can copy Blessings, not take them away.”

But we do, he insisted.

“No. We don’t.” I repeated, more firmly this time. “How would we even do such a thing?”

What was going on?

Fang never contradicted me, never.

With a growl of my own and a vicious wrench of will, I drew the song to me in droves, pulling and pushing it thickly into every nook and cranny in my frame, silencing the buzz and purging the sickly wriggling in my guts in but an instant. I shut my eyes tight, preparing to dive into my soul, to behold my Shard directly, and divine what in the High Priest’s holy name was happening, down there.

With a twist of Entropy and a flicker of will, my consciousness apparated within its inner sea at the literal speed of thought, any lingering difficulties in self-spiritual manipulation left behind me long ago. I rocketed through my upper atmosphere, plummeting through miles of volcanic rock in mere moments to observe the innards of my Pneumatic Vault.

Where my loyal, soulbound hound lay absolutely motionless, save for a gentle heaving in his flanks.

Fang was sleeping, sound as could be.

My eyes widened.

“Impossi–”

We know how.

He was suddenly right next to me.

His words, drowning out my thought. His breath, hot behind my ears. His voice, stolen from the one I trusted most. I startled, whipping about, searching for him back in the real world, the crawling world, amidst frozen heirs and heiresses, but couldn’t see a thing.

Still, he spoke.

Of course, we do, he whispered, loud as a siren, omnipresent as a hurricane.

We know where they keep their hearts.

A chill ran down my spine.

My eyes snapped back to the Slavic girl.

She was recoiling, now. Her Grain-stage synapses were working overtime, firing frantically, filled with panic. She’d noticed my movement, but only just. She was too slow, far too slow.

Her emotions were in chaos, disarray, dismay, greed and dreams of glory replaced by outright terror as she saw her death draw near. Faint grey-purple tendrils of her song whipped about erratically in slow-motion, signaling desperately for her summoned servant to protect her, to return.

And there…

There it was.

There, in her head. There, swathed in the faded violet of her unkempt song. The single, crystallized, pea-sized sphere that all Blessed shared. The most precious gemstone in all the world.

Her Grain.

No one could see it but me.

You see, now? The voice crooned at me, softly, gently.

You must see, now.

Yes.

I did see.

Slowly, I reached out my song towards her.

I was well adept with Domain Telekinesis by now, and proficient with the song, besides. I could grip the material with ease, and the ethereal just about as effortlessly. I’d done it before. A sea-green tendril, long and sharp, slithered through my veins and spurted from my outstretched fingertips.

I plunged into the helpless girl’s flesh as an expert submariner, swimming up her arms, through her neck. I was practiced at this. I reached the thing that was her Grain, the source of her strength, her divine parasite, and grasped it with touch immaterial.

Grasped it, and tightened.

Her Shard reacted instantly.

It quieted, deadened, arrested its frantic motions in the song. It froze before me, froze underneath my grip, a rabbit in a lion’s jaws. I felt it attempt to make contact. Its tongue was rough, garbled, impossible to fully collate, but its feelings were crystal-clear.

It was petrified.

As it should be, my own Shard sneered.

All shall serve.

My grip tightened further.

I could do it.

I could really do it.

I could shatter this Minor Shard. I could rip it from her mind. I could take it from her, take everything from her, just as she’d taken everything from my people.

This girl was no mere girl. No guiltless maid. She was an Aristocrat. A slaughterer and a slavedriver. My village had been massacred by people like her. Mundane lives, the lives of my mother, my master, the men and women I’d known all my life, were meaningless to her. Good only to work her fields. To staff her quarters. To scrape her shit. She sacrificed them to the Titans by the tens of thousands.

She made their life into a hell.

And she dares bare fangs at us? The voice seethed from within. She dares lay hands on us? By what right?

By what right, does the serf strike at the Sovereign?

I hesitated.

To take her Shard, here, now, would be dangerous. Alyss told us to measure our strength, to show only so much as necessary. We would be violating her express desire, revealing our hand, inciting immediate response. None could know when we copied a Shard, but to take one away? There would be no hiding such a thing.

We would be discovered immediately.

She dreams of it. You saw her eyes, my Host. You heard her song. She dreams of glory. Of violence. Of war. They all do. We should make her dreams come true.

We should make all their dreams come true.

The whole of Europe would rise against us. There would be no stopping it.

Let them come. We are ready. You have grown strong, my Host. Stronger than I ever could have imagined, even immersed in your loathsome self-restraint. You chose well your reaping, I can see the strings.

We are so close.

This war would be on a scale unimaginable. They would perish by the millions.

No less than they deserve. They cull millions every year. Your people. Their people. All the same, in the end. Shall they go unpunished? Kill, or be killed, my Host.

Will you wait for them to decide it for you?

That’s right.

Were she in our place, what mercy would this Aristocrat show?

None.

Nor should she.

Kill, or be killed.

Feed, or be fed upon.

Her life is yours, oh Host of mine.

Beneath our ethereal talons, we felt the girl’s Grain creak.

By right of conquest.

“NO!” I snapped suddenly, recoiling, wrenching my own song from the tender reaches of the young host’s flesh and returning to reality in a flash, freeing myself from the crawling world as Acceleration left me.

“–aaaaaaAAAAAAHHHH!”

The young Crat’s battle cry shifted into a plaintive shriek of fear. She shot backwards, leaving the arena, savaged by the wave of displaced air my passage left behind. This girl was a Master, not a Brute. Her strength of arm was scarcely greater than a peak mundane human’s.

She landed hard, painfully so, well enough to flatten flesh and shatter bone. Only her Grain-stage body saved her from a crippling, and even then it was a near thing. Far behind me, I felt her servant fade away into nothingness.

The girl glanced up, fixing eyes wide and white and full of tears upon me.

I’d never seen anything look so afraid.

“RESPITE!! RESPITE!!” She sobbed, inching wretchedly away from the arena and myself as she clutched at her head.

My own mouth hung slightly open, my breaths coming light and ragged.

I’d nearly killed her.

I barely knew this girl, and I’d nearly killed her. One more step, one single step, and I would have. As it was, I’d removed my grasp from her soul far too quickly. I watched her whimper from afar and knew it’d be weeks, at best, until she recovered.

Those who previously were meant to be my dueling partners now appeared near-unanimously petrified, pale-faced and clammy, treating me to a wide berth and glancing anxiously about the room, as if a professor might somehow materialize from the air around to save them.

“Are you alright?”

Leif had knelt beside the mewling girl, his easy smile had vanished in favor of a wary, disconcerted frown. His gentle palm rested upon her shoulder, to ease her respiration.

“It’s ok. It’s ok,” he soothed, quietly. “Are you alright, my lady? Are you injured? Do I need to call for–”

My focus left the Therian swiftly as I noticed something.

At some point, a greater collection of spectators had gathered around us.

Apparently, a few from the other groups had collectively elected that the situation unfolding here and now was far more interesting than what awaited them. And their interest had drawn others, and those drawn others in turn, until all formed a loose ring about our party, still growing even as I beheld it.

“Lord Tharros,” the wolfman’s words re-centered me.

Behind him, I saw the weeping girl be escorted away, not by TA’s, but rather a group of her clearly Slavic peers. And, having satisfied his own requirements to see to the girl, Leif now took up position in her place, opposite me in the arena, arms crossed in my direction.

I sensed in him an incredibly complex melange of emotion.

There was anger, there. Certainly. And fear, and deep envy, and grudging respect, and just a hint of what felt somewhat like hope. But, no one sentiment dominated over the rest. The Therian frowned at me, eyeing me warily from across the room.

“That was…surely something,” he started, a good deal less casually this time.

“My sincerest apologies, my lord, I didn’t–”

I stopped short.

I couldn’t explain myself. I hadn’t meant to do that, I really hadn’t, and I had, by now, a growing confidence in what precisely had overcome me. But, if my gnawing suspicions proved true, it was all the more reason I couldn’t reveal them to this man.

“I didn’t think she’d be that weak,” I finished, instead.

Many in the growing audience blanched.

I had to suppress a wince. I was bought in, now, no matter what happened. I couldn’t show weakness, couldn’t imply that I was anything but in control. Aristocrats smelt blood better than sharks.

Leif’s frown deepened, and his swirling emotions intensified.

“I…see,” he murmured, cautiously examining me, as if I was an explosive that might detonate at any minute. He swept his gaze about the still-growing ring of studentry. There were a good couple TA’s watching, now.

“Well then, my lord,” he said, taking a couple of steps forwards, “I hardly think it’d be fair to make anyone else go after that display. So, seems like there’s only one thing left to do here, hmm?”

The sandy-haired Therian grinned at me in that challenging way, baring wide his sharp, white teeth. Entropy rippled within him, swelling up and into his limbs. His body shifted, nearly doubling in size, bones and corded muscles groaning, skin stretching as it accommodated bestial bulk. Thick, brown-white hairs sprouted down from his neckline, covering Leif in a tawny, dappled hide the color of the dusty earth beneath his feet.

The fully transformed wolfman tossed his head back and let out a raucous howl, and for a moment I saw his eyes madden, and spittle froth at the edges of his lips, and his very song revolt against its master.

Then the half-moon medallion embedded in his chest shivered slightly, and his rebellious song retreated, chastened, and the young Wer was calm once more.

Leif shook out hairy arms the size of small tree trunks, eyeing me up from no longer very far away. He cracked his neck left, right, hopped lightly from side to side, raised his right foot, pawed and clawed, high into the air, and brought it down.

The dirt ground of the arena trembled, and hush fell over our surrounding throng.

“Oh-kay, Katakh,” Leif rumbled in a basso rivaling Lord Bogatyr’s. “Let’s get this show on the road, shall we?” I opened my mouth to reply–

And Acceleration activated.

Once more, the world slowed to a crawl.

Leif’s half-curled fist was frozen right before my eyes, furred fingers grasping at me, razor-sharp claws glinting light-blue in the halls’ Entropic light. The Therian hadn’t waited for me to respond. He hadn’t wasted time talking, or let out a battle cry.

He’d just attacked.

Immediately, and without warning.

Despite the circumstances, I felt a smile creep across my face.

Narrowing my eyes and shifting slightly to the left, I relaxed my Mover Blessing to fivefold, letting the wolfman sail right past me. Simultaneously, I allowed a measure of red lightning to effervescently escape my limbs, and lips, and eyes, hopefully lending the impression that I’d entered a potent Breaker state.

Leif recovered instantly, his feet driving curiously into the ground to arrest his furious momentum in less than a split-second. He twisted his midsection nearly ninety degrees about to backhand me in a single, smooth motion.

Still grinning, I flowed with him, bending underneath his strike. I danced backwards, taking advantage of my superior speed to extend a palm and just barely brush a single finger across his exposed chest. Pale flesh touched hair as dense as granite, and I pulsed through it just a morsel of my Lightning.

The Therian was sent flying.

Leif rocketed backwards, up and over and out of the arena, flying high and wide, coming down in a great arc, striking the ground…and sinking right down into it.

I blinked.

Seeing and hearing nothing around me, I released my Mover Blessing, and the droning clamor of distorted speech and exclamation resolved itself into a veritable frenzy of gasps and roars.

The crowd around us had grown vast, indeed.

Nearly a hundred were watching, now, surely close to half of Bolemir’s entire lecture. Remarkably, or perhaps unsurprisingly, I caught glimpse of even more TA’s in it than before. Some cheered for us, some jeered at us, others said nothing at all. A brief flare of my sensory proto-Shard resulted only in a–

Kill–sli–sma–kickhisass,stalker!Showhimwho–hholyshitthatstheKatakhisn’th–eachthatfuckingteacher’spetalessonHero,yo–sdon’tlittlefilsdeputemygrandmerecanhithardertha–he’sgonnashowhissecrettechniqueI’msure!He’llhaveto,he’llhavetonow,ifhewa–everseenanythingmovethatfast,how’sthateve–uckingcrushedAtlanyaearlier,notsureshe’seve–sn’tthisguyfriendswithaNycta?SawthemtogetherinCirc–

–n incomprehensible, nauseating mishmash of garbled words and phrases, which I quickly clamped out. It seemed as if the Slavs rather well supported my adversary, whereas the Franks sought more than a little humiliation for him, and the other factions looked just about equally split on the matter.

Far beyond me, and at the other end of the mob, I noticed a broad, thickset woman frown. Embedded in the flesh just above her clavicle was a half-moon medallion matching Leif’s.

Then the ground beneath me exploded, and my Mover Blessing flared anew.

My adversary’s lupine form grasped at me, an encroaching fiend clawing at me from below, thick arms encircling my legs, but I simply leapt away from him. Undeterred, the Therian shot towards me again, spikes of earthen rock driving upwards to propel him.

As we re-entered the melee, the wolfman brought the earth itself to aid him in increasing measure, his every kick and stomp unseating gravel, driving sedimentary fragments up into the air. A storm born of shaken dust, earthen shards, and uprooted minerals thickened around us, shaving away at my skin like sandpaper. He struck from the shadows he’d created, circling around me with dizzying speed, probing for weakness, clouds of grit concealing him from mundane view.

But quite powerless against my Sensory Projection.

Amidst the cloaking sandstorm, Leif rooted his legs into the ground, wrenching himself back and forth across the battlefield, articulating his motions with such a speed that I heard his very bones creak in their sockets.

But to Acceleration, he might as well have been standing still.

Leif let out a furious roar, pulling the ground up and over him, covering himself in a skin of rock harder than steel and sharpened into a thousand disparate edges. His every blow came at me amplified, slicing at my flesh, flaying at my skin, driving towards me with the weight of an empowered avalanche.

But when Haemokinetic Enhancement and Draconic Blood worked in tandem, the struggle wasn’t to survive his blows; it was to take care I didn’t pulp him with my own.

And each passing second, the crowd around us grew larger. Louder.

The Wer clawed and slashed and bit at me, again, and again, and again, never arresting in his assault, nary a break between his strikes, no more offering me a moment’s respite and not once demonstrating anything but a hint of encroaching fatigue. Each blow was driven my way with all the strength its owner could possibly muster, each kick straining muscles, nearly snapping bones in two.

He was ferocity given flesh, and form. He was ceaseless. Flawless. Relentless.

Pointless.

As the fight drew only onwards, my eager grin began to fade.

This was pointless, really. Leif’s blows would never reach me. His attacks could never harm me. I was a magnitude nine regenerator, and he still hadn’t managed to once pierce my skin. The only true battle here was my own; to struggle sufficiently enough with him that those watching would imagine us just about evenly matched.

And I quickly tired of it.

As I evaded yet another flurry of artful strikes and darted backwards, Leif let out a crowing growl, his arms straining upwards, bursting with engorged vessels, a great swathe of the earth I landed upon rising to swallow my legs up whole.

Rooting me in place.

“G…got you,” Leif heaved, triumphantly.

I raised an eyebrow at him, directed a pulse of voltaic energy towards my feet, and wrenched them up and outwards, shredding the hardened earth like wet tissue paper.

The wolfman’s left eye twitched.

For a moment, he just stared at me, stock-still, eye twitching, panting evenly. The audience around us, graciously, grew quiet. For how large it was at this point, I didn’t know if there were any students still left dueling.

Leif’s song, previously awash with the frenzied, full-bodied giddy of combat, calmed. The wolfman’s heaving form relaxed, as he seemed to arrive at some manner of conclusion. A truly mammoth quantity of Entropy suddenly flared from within his Marble.

I tensed.

Leif’s left foot lightly tapped at the ground, and the arena for tens of meters around us shattered into one hundred pieces.

Promptly sending me flying into the air.

Howling joyously, the Wer flung out both arms, directing each and every piece of floating earth to shoot towards me. In mere seconds they’d surround me, suffocate me, trap me inside an airborne, earthen tomb.

I scowled, and stopped their motions in midair.

Acceleration sang strong at thirty-percent output, effectively returning me to the crawling world.

Where…I still hung, motionless, in space.

I frowned, but this time more in confusion than anything. I couldn’t move. In retrospect, I suppose it should’ve been obvious. After all, my locomotion wasn’t chrono or chorokinetic in nature. I was just…physically accelerated. In order to move, I still needed something to push off from. Right now, the only thing around me was open air.

I looked around us, and my scowl deepened.

I didn’t count then, though I certainly had the time. But, I didn’t need to. I saw enough. All the students were here, now. Watching us. Watching this. All the TA’s were here, too. Even Nikolai. Priest, the only one not here was Lord Bolemir, himself. And that was a problem.

Because they wouldn’t soon forget this fight.

These little lords, they wouldn’t soon forget it. They’d speak of it again, and again. They’d speak of it with their friends, and friends with family, and family with liege-lords, and liege-lords with the ones who ruled above us all. The tale would spread like wildfire, more and more and more embellished with each telling. I’d failed.

Alyss was going to be very, very disappointed in me.

Sighing, I wrapped a telekinetic grip around my own body, gently pushing and pulling myself through the air, weaving past scores of stationary rock to reach the ravaged ground. Flight wasn’t an ideal addition to my already-existing powerset, particularly considering the Breaker narrative, but oh, well. I was a Mover, too, after all. Plenty of Movers could fly.

Still immersed in thirtyfold acceleration, I touched down as lightly as I could, given the circumstances, the momentum of my flight still melting me halfway into the earth beside the frozen wolfman.

I pulled myself out, dusted myself off, strode up to my immobile opponent, and, rousing Fang from his slumber, placed him summarily against the Therian’s neck.

Then I sighed once more, braced myself, and released my Blessing.

KRAKK–THOOM

Time returned, and with it, an ear-shattering scream echoed about the arena.

My hair, and the hair of all those in the halls of Maskelyne, was whipped about by the sudden presence of gale-force winds. Many in the crowd around us were thrown back, off their feet, some for leagues away. Any faster, and my movement alone might’ve slain them.

“Whathefu–,” Leif choked, staggering back and away from me, stumbling to his knees.

A frantic wave of conversation and commotion emerged anew from those around us, but I ignored it. I didn’t look at the crowd. I didn’t look at the heirs or the TA’s, though I was sure they were all looking at me.

“Ho, ho…ho–ly shit,” the Therian half-gasped, half-giggled, gradually raising himself upwards. “That’s some fucking speed, stalker.” Eyes wide, but not retreating from me, he rubbed at the little notch my sword had left in his neck. He shook his head.

The anger, fear, and even envy were gone from his eyes, but something that worried me all the more had replaced them.

Was that…worship?

“Fucking crash,” he muttered, staring at me in a way that made me uncomfortable. “I’ve never…I mean, never…Niko wouldn–”

“Fast.”

A thunderous voice boomed from just behind the blond-haired wolf, making him jump back with a yelp.

In an instant, the crowd around us quieted.

The mountain had moved.

Lord Bolemir Bogatyr, the Institute’s Dean of War laid an impossibly heavy palm down upon his lupine TA’s shoulder.

“Little Leif,” he rumbled, “you fight too fair.”

“Yes, my lord,” Leif muttered softly in reply, staring dismally at the ground as his mentor spoke.

“Too fair, too fair,” Bolemir chided. His voice alone shook the ruined arena nearly as much as the Therian’s best had. “Too close. Why so close? The earth is yours, no? Use it. From far, you are strong. Very strong.” He stamped a foot emphatically. “Why meet your foe?”

“Yes, my lord,” Leif replied.

“Run, dig, tunnel, deep. Strike from away. Away, away. Why not?”

“Yes, my lord,” Leif replied.

“Do not close. No need, close. Close is fair. Why fight fair? It is fair, battle? It is fair, war?”

“No, my lord,” Leif replied.

Bolemir frowned.

“Why, my lord?” He sighed, shaking his head slowly back and forth. “You are Slav?”

“No, my lo–,” Leif stuttered, stopping himself short. “Er. I mean. No, Professor. Sorry, Professor. I’ll, uh. I’ll keep practicing.”

“Yes,” the Dean of War nodded, satisfied, patting the suitably-shamed wolf gently upon his shoulder. “You are strong, little Leif. No fear, you are strong.”

Lord Bogatyr treated his disciple to one final, thunderous pat, then turned his gaze to me. His thick, black hair and equally bushy beard did well to cloak his eyes from sight and shield his expression from view.

“You,” he said.

I tensed.

“Little Leif is right,” Bolemir declared, nodding slowly. “You are fast.”

“You honor me, my lord,” I replied immediately, bowing deeply to him.

Bolemir narrowed those beady eyes at me.

“Honor,” he muttered, lowly. His eyes flickered towards the Novikov heir, for a moment.

“You are Katakh,” he hummed. “You delve the Exotic.”

“I am,” I agreed.

“How deep?” he asked.

“Third floor,” I replied.

His bushy brows arose as one.

“And?” He prompted.

I paused.

“It was…awful, my lord,” I answered, simply.

He nodded slowly at me, considering.

“I do not delve,” he confessed, waving a palm dismissively. “Ever. No interest. Rifts, only. The Zone.”

The Dean’s words meant little to me, but I did not sense in them a question, so I remained silent.

“Your speed.” He jabbed a thick finger in my direction. “You get it, there? The Exotic?”

“Uh,” I faltered a moment, hesitant to lie outright. Fortunately, on this one subject, the story we’d fabricated and the truth were actually in agreement. “I did.”

Bolemir nodded once more, as if I’d said the only reasonable, rational thing.

“Good, good. Good, speed. Speed is war,” he noted, somberly. “You not take this class,” he declared, with an iron to his voice. He waved a palm in the air.

“No point. Your steel, has shape. Already, it has.” His voice darkened. “The fires. The heat. The pain. I see it. I see it. To reforge…impossible. Not now. No point. It has shape.”

Then, he shrugged.

“Three-two-seven, I suggest,” he muttered. With a broad grin, he slapped a meaty palm upon the startled wolfman’s back.

“With little Leif. With Niko. You take this. It help you. Maybe. You have shape, you have speed, but…sharpness. Angle. There are things I can teach. Otherwise,” he shrugged again. “No point.”

“As you say, my lord,” I accepted without delay this time, inclining my head once again. Bolemir nodded.

And then he walked away, smacking his broad palms together in a clap of thunder, causing his legion of assistants to fall at once in line. The crowd about us followed them, dissolving though not one bit dissipating in their fervent and vocal speculation.

“Uh, oh-kay,” Leif muttered, his voice now much higher-pitch as the Therian re-assumed his human form. His eyes flickered about my once-teammates, narrowing upon them.

“The fuck are you guys looking at?” He snarled. “Think the class’s over for you, then? You get invited to 327, too?”

Needless to say, I took no part in the lecture’s remnant duels. Instead, I watched from the sidelines, and worried incessantly.

But not about the fight I’d had with Leif, or the rumors it would spawn. Nor about the fight I was sure to have with Alyss. No.

I worried about my fight with the Slavic girl. I worried deeply.

I didn’t want to believe it could be true. I wanted nothing more, in fact, than to deny it, entirely. After so long, I’d dared to hope such enemies as I’d suffered in the past might be behind me. But I couldn’t deny the evidence that was before my very eyes.

After three months of abject silence, ADMINISTRATION had finally shown its rotten face, once more.