Jace looked at him. Torrin met his eyes - steady, unblinking, the deep-set brown gaze of someone who understood structural metaphors on an intuitive level because he'd grown up watching his father shape metal.

  "Open ground," Jace confirmed. "We adapt. Not because we're better. Because we're *built* to. Because nothing about us is fixed, which means nothing about us can be broken by changing the conditions."

  Quiet settled over the dead circle. The afternoon light was fading, the sun dropping behind the academy's western towers, casting long shadows across the training field. The mana-lamp brightened automatically, its enchantment compensating for the dimming world.

  Elara spoke first. "I want to be clear about what I'm agreeing to, if I agree. You're proposing that I serve as strategic intelligence - pattern recognition, enemy analysis, tactical coordination. In combat."

  "In combat. Near combat. Close enough to see the field, far enough to stay alive."

  "My STR is five. My VIT is seven. A stiff wind could incapacitate me."

  "Then we don't let the wind reach you. That's the point - we cover each other. All of us. Not role-based, person-based."

  Elara was quiet for a moment. Then, very precisely, she removed her reading spectacles, cleaned them on her sleeve, and replaced them. It was, Jace had learned, what she did when she was making a decision she couldn't reverse-engineer through analysis alone.

  "I'll need access to the bestiary archives," she said. "Full monster behavioral data, not the sanitized student version. And dungeon environmental profiles. If I'm going to call tactical shifts in real-time, I need a database deep enough to predict from."

  "I'll get you in," Jace said. He had no idea how, but he said it with the confidence of someone who'd figure it out.

  Torrin uncrossed his arms. "I hold the line."

  "You hold the line."

  "And you bring them to me."

  "Every single one."

  A nod. Small, final, like a rivet being driven home. "Good."

  Mara was last. She sat with her knees drawn up, her satchel clutched against her chest, and her eyes fixed on a point somewhere between the mana-lamp and the darkening sky. When she spoke, her voice was quiet but steady - steadier than Jace had heard it since the semester began.

  "I fainted during the simulation. When Torrin got cut. I saw the blood and my body just - stopped." She swallowed. "If this goes wrong - when this goes wrong - people are going to bleed. You're going to bleed. And you're asking me to be the one who keeps you alive when that happens."

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  "I'm asking you to learn how," Jace said. "Not tomorrow. Not alone. We'll figure it out together."

  "And if I can't? If I freeze when it matters?"

  "Then I'll yell at you until you unfreeze. Torrin will block whatever's trying to kill you. Elara will give you a medically precise description of exactly which blood vessel is the priority. And you'll do it anyway, because that's what this team does - we do things we're not supposed to be able to do."

  Mara stared at him. Her eyes were bright - not tears, not quite. The brightness of someone standing at the edge of something and looking down.

  "You're kind of an ass, you know that?"

  "I've been told."

  She breathed out. A long, slow exhale that carried something heavy and left something lighter in its wake. "Okay."

  "Okay?"

  "Okay. I'm in. But I'm setting ground rules for medical protocols, and nobody argues with me about wound treatment. Nobody." She looked at Torrin. "Especially you. I don't care if you can bench-press a mana-tram, if I say sit down, you sit down."

  Torrin's mouth twitched. The closest thing to a grin Jace had seen from him. "Yes, ma'am."

  They sat with it for a moment. Four people on dead ground behind a rusted shed, the sky going purple above them and the mana-lamp burning steady in the gathering dusk. No cheers. No dramatic declaration. Just the quiet, exhausted, terrified commitment of people who'd looked at the hand they'd been dealt and decided to play it anyway.

  Jace sat down - finally - on the cold, caustic soil that Elara had complained about. It was cold. Slightly gritty. He didn't care.

  "So," Mara said, pulling a battered notebook from her satchel. "When do we start?"

  "We already did." Jace opened the journal to the first page, angling it toward the lamp. The cramped handwriting stared up at him, rust-brown and urgent.

  *They told me I was nothing. I believed them for a while. Then I stopped.*

  "Tomorrow morning," he said. "Before first period. We meet here and we start figuring out how to be something nobody's ever seen before."

  Elara pulled out a second notebook - because of course she had a second notebook. "I'll draft a training framework tonight. Skill interaction matrices, resource management protocols, and a preliminary assessment of each of our development vectors."

  "I understood about half of those words," Torrin said.

  "I'll use smaller ones."

  "Appreciated."

  Mara was already writing - a supply list, from the look of it, medical supplies and nutritional supplements and what appeared to be a schedule for graduated exposure therapy. For herself. She was planning her own treatment protocol. Jace watched her write and felt something shift in his chest that wasn't mana and wasn't a System notification and had nothing to do with stats or skills or class architecture.

  It felt like belonging.

  He crushed the thought before it could soften him. There was too much work ahead for softness. Tomorrow they'd start training, and the training would be brutal, and they'd fail more than they'd succeed, and the rest of the school would watch them fail and shake their heads and say *I told you so* with the satisfied certainty of people who'd never had to reinvent themselves from nothing.

  But tonight - for ten more minutes, in the lamp-lit circle behind the shed - they were a team. Improbable, unproven, held together by stubbornness and spite and the faintest, most fragile thread of hope.

  It was enough.

  It would have to be.