Thresh waited until they'd reached the gallery level.

  "Miller."

  Jace stopped.

  Thresh stood with his arms crossed, the mana-construct prosthetic glowing faintly in the overhead light, his face a topographic map of scars earned in places darker than this arena would ever simulate. His eyes moved across the four of them with the flat, comprehensive assessment of a man who'd spent twenty years sorting the living from the soon-to-be-dead.

  "Your positioning was sound. Your threat identification was correct. Your engagement priority was wrong."

  Jace blinked. He'd expected a dismissal. A lecture on class limitations. The standard institutional response to a [Nomad] failing at combat: *this is what you are, accept it*.

  "You engaged the forward hostiles personally instead of supporting your DPS at the chokepoint," Thresh continued. "Blackforge had the power to eliminate all five targets if they came to him. Your job was to bring them to him. Instead, you fought them on their terms with a stat line that can't support sustained melee engagement. You emptied your Stamina in ninety seconds because you tried to be the thing you're not instead of enabling the thing you have."

  Jace opened his mouth. Closed it.

  Thresh's gaze was steady. Hard. But not cruel. "Your party has one man who hits like a collapsing building and can't chase his own shadow. You have an analyst who identified the enemy deployment before it happened. You have a healer with the magical aptitude to keep someone alive through sustained damage. And you have yourself - whatever that turns out to be." He paused. "You tried to be a [Skirmisher] today. A [Skirmisher] would have done it better. Figure out what *you* do better, and do that instead."

  He turned away. Called the next team.

  Jace stood in the gallery with his empty resource pools and his aching chest and his bruised pride and Thresh's words landing like stones in still water, sinking to the bottom where they'd sit for a long time.

  Mara appeared at his elbow. Her color was coming back. "I'm sorry," she said again. "I tried to stay conscious, I-"

  "It wasn't your fault."

  "It was, though. If I'd-"

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  "It wasn't anyone's fault." Elara was standing behind them, one hand still on her hip, her grey eyes fixed on the arena below where the next team was beginning their exercise. "It was a systemic failure, not an individual one. We attempted to operate within a framework that does not accommodate our capabilities. The framework failed. Not us."

  "The framework kicked our asses," Torrin said.

  "That is another way of stating it."

  Jace watched the team below - a clean four-person composition, Tank and DPS and Healer and Controller, moving through the goblin nest with the synchronized efficiency of a machine built for exactly this purpose. They'd clear it in under a minute. They'd look good doing it. They'd earn the marks and the rankings and the respect because the System had given them roles that fit the structure and all they had to do was play them.

  He looked at his hands. The practice sword had left blisters on his palms - his Vitality wasn't high enough for the calluses to form quickly. The hardlight wound across his forearm was already fading, the simulation damage dissolving as the construct's energy dissipated, but the memory of it lingered - the shock, the pain, the instant arithmetic of *I cannot do this the way they do it*.

  Thresh's words.

  *Figure out what you do better.*

  He didn't know yet. The honest answer was *nothing*. He did nothing better. Every skill, every technique, every combat application was something he performed at a fraction of the efficiency of whoever it actually belonged to. That was the math. Elara's math. The System's math.

  But math wasn't everything. Math said his positioning was wrong - but Thresh had said his positioning was *sound*. His read of the terrain, the threat assessment, the prediction of the flanking attack - that had been right. The failure wasn't in thinking. It was in execution. In trying to be the blade when he should have been the hand that aimed it.

  *You tried to be a [Skirmisher] today.*

  He hadn't. He'd tried to be *useful*. But being useful and being a [Skirmisher] weren't the same thing, and he'd conflated them because every model of usefulness he'd ever seen wore a role like a uniform and performed it like a script.

  What if usefulness looked different?

  "Hey," he said.

  Mara looked up. Torrin turned his head. Elara's eyes shifted from the arena below.

  "Same time tomorrow. After classes. Meet me at Training Field 6 - the outdoor one behind Holt Wing."

  Mara frowned. "For what?"

  "I don't know yet." He flexed his blistered hands. Felt the hollow absence where his Stamina should have been, the cold empty channel where his Mana had bled out trying to fuel a body that didn't know what it was for. "But I'm going to figure it out."

  Torrin looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded - once, heavy, like a door closing on the way things had been.

  Elara said nothing. But she didn't look away. And at the corner of her mouth, barely visible, the ghost of something that might have been the beginning of belief.