The days after the shed had a different weight to them.

  Not lighter - Jace's muscles still ached from Combat Practicum, his MP still bottomed out during even minor mana exercises, and the wobbling bench in the Mess Hall still wobbled. But the weight had shifted from the dead, formless heaviness of purposelessness to something denser and more directional. Like carrying a load uphill. Still brutal. But at least now he knew where the hill was.

  They trained every morning before first period. The dead circle behind the equipment shed became their space - scorched earth that nobody wanted, which made it perfect for people nobody wanted. Elara had produced, within twenty-four hours of Jace's pitch, a seventeen-page training framework that included skill interaction matrices, resource management protocols, a tiered progression schedule, and a section labeled *Contingency Planning for Catastrophic Failure Modes* that was longer than the rest of the document combined.

  "You wrote this overnight?" Mara had asked, flipping through the pages with widening eyes.

  "I don't require much sleep."

  "That's not healthy."

  "Neither is fainting at the sight of blood, and yet here we are."

  Mara had blinked. Opened her mouth. Closed it. Then laughed - a short, startled sound, like a cough that had changed its mind. Elara had looked briefly mortified, then relieved, and something between them had unlocked.

  The training itself was exactly as brutal as Jace had promised.

  Torrin taught Jace footwork fundamentals - not the fluid, technical patterns from Thresh's class, but the blunt biomechanics of weight distribution and leverage that a dwarf-heritage brawler learned from standing in mine shafts where one wrong step meant a broken ankle. "Don't think about where your feet go," Torrin said, demonstrating a lateral shift that made the ground vibrate. "Think about where your weight is. The feet follow."

  Elara drilled Jace on mana theory - channeling exercises, rune identification from her inscription studies, the grammar of magical structure that turned raw energy into shaped effect. Her teaching style was merciless in its precision. "You're leaking mana from your left channel. No - *left*. The one adjacent to your core, not your hand. Mana channels don't map to physical anatomy. Stop thinking about your arm."

  Mara taught anatomy. Pressure points. The body's mechanical vulnerabilities - where joints hyperextended, where nerve clusters sat close to the surface, where a precise strike could disable without requiring force that Jace's Strength couldn't deliver. She taught from memory, hands steady on a practice dummy, voice quick and clinical and only shaking when Jace asked her to demonstrate on a live partner.

  "Not yet," she'd said, quietly. "I'm working on it."

  "I know. No rush."

  In return, Jace pushed them. He made Torrin practice reading movement instead of reacting to it - standing still while Jace circled him, calling out the direction of the next attack before it came, training those deep-set eyes to anticipate rather than track. He ran Elara through field-identification drills, describing dungeon scenarios and demanding instant analysis: *Three enemies, two melee one ranged, corridor environment, no cover - what's the call?* He sat with Mara while she unwrapped bandages that had been soaked in synthetic blood - the academy infirmary stocked them for training - and held still while her fingers trembled and her breathing hitched and she learned, one crimson-stained wrapping at a time, that the blood on her hands didn't mean someone was dying.

  By the fourth morning, they could run a basic three-person drill without collapsing into chaos. By the sixth morning, Torrin had stopped trying to chase the target dummy and instead positioned himself at the corridor's chokepoint, letting Jace's erratic lateral movement shepherd the dummy into his kill zone. It wasn't clean. It wasn't fast. But it worked - twice out of five attempts - and the second time, Elara called the positioning shift three seconds before Jace executed it, which meant the framework was taking root.

  They were still near the bottom. In Combat Practicum, their drill scores ranked twenty-third out of twenty-six teams. In Dungeon Ecology, their written assessments were middling - strong on analysis (Elara), weak on practical application (everyone else). In Mana Theory, Jace's questions continued to draw Lector Salis's careful attention, but attention didn't translate to grades when his practical channeling efficiency was a fraction of the class average.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  But they were climbing. Slowly, painfully, from the absolute floor toward something resembling competence. Twenty-third wasn't last. Last was where they'd started.

  * * *

  The improvement was invisible to everyone who wasn't looking for it. And most of Ironhold wasn't looking.

  The Mess Hall remained a study in stratification. Left side, right side. Rare-tier tables bright with animated conversation and the casual glow of students cycling through low-level abilities the way athletes stretched - fire flickering between fingertips, minor shields shimmering, practice weapons conjured from class-specific summoning skills. Right side, Normal-tier students eating in clusters organized by party affiliation and future prospects. The reject table, back-right corner, wobbling bench, window overlooking the service alley and its maintenance golems.

  "It's structural, not personal," Elara said one morning, watching a cluster of students at a central table shift their chairs away as Torrin passed with his tray. The motion was subtle - a lean here, a repositioned bag there - but the message was written in body language any [Rogue] could read.

  "It's personal enough," Torrin said. He sat down without acknowledging the slight. The bench groaned. He began eating.

  Kael made it personal.

  It started small - or what passed for small in the vocabulary of someone who'd never been told *no* by anything except gravity. A shoulder check in the corridor outside Combat Practicum, perfectly timed so that Jace's practice sword clattered from his grip and skidded across the floor. "Watch where you're walking, Nomad." Not shouted. Not whispered. Pitched at exactly the volume that carried to the nearest dozen students without reaching the instructors. Kael's fire mana radiated from him in a low, constant heat that Jace could feel against his skin like standing too close to a furnace - the ambient bleed of a Rare-tier combat class that couldn't fully contain its own power.

  Then the comments. Always in public, always deniable, always carrying the easy confidence of someone repeating common wisdom rather than inventing cruelty.

  "Still running that weird squad?" Kael asked in the Proving Grounds, loud enough for the surrounding teams to hear. His party flanked him - a [Frost Sentinel] named Durren who carried a tower shield that gleamed with Uncommon-tier enchantment, and a [Wind Archer] called Sera whose compound bow probably cost more than Jace's entire equipment loadout. "What's the composition again? A broken Tank, a healer who can't heal, a librarian, and... what are you, exactly? The mascot?"

  "Pivot," Jace said, without looking up from re-strapping his practice gauntlets. They were Trash-tier - foam-padded leather that had been worn by at least three previous students and smelled like it. "I'm the pivot."

  "The pivot." Kael tasted the word like it was sour. "That's not a role."

  "It is now."

  "The System doesn't care what you call yourself, Miller. You're a [Nomad]. You do everything worse than everyone else, and now you've recruited three other washouts to do everything worse *together*. That's not innovation. That's a support group."

  Sera laughed. Durren didn't - he had the decency to look uncomfortable, though not enough decency to say anything.

  Kael leaned closer. The heat increased. Not aggressive - controlled, deliberate, the kind of display that was technically just "ambient mana bleed" and technically not a threat and technically not anything the instructors could cite. "You know what happens to teams that try to reinvent the meta? They get people killed. Not in simulations. In real dungeons. The meta exists because it *works*, and when someone dies because you were too stubborn to accept your place-"

  "Ashworth." Thresh's voice cut the air like a blade laid flat. The instructor stood fifteen meters away, his mana-construct arm pulsing once - a brief, bright flare of blue that could have been a warning or could have been a muscle twitch. "Your drill station is over there. Use it."

  Kael straightened. The heat banked. He held Jace's eyes for a beat longer than necessary - communicating, in the silent language of someone who'd grown up powerful and intended to stay that way, that this conversation wasn't over.

  Then he walked away, and the air cooled, and Jace finished strapping his gauntlets with fingers that were steady because he refused to let them be otherwise.

  Other students were less targeted but no less cutting. "The Jinx Squad," someone had started calling them - a name that spread through the sophomore class with the viral efficiency of all good cruelty, attaching itself to every drill score, every ranking update, every public moment of failure. The name found Jace in the hallways, in the tram, in the spaces between classes where students clustered and talked and sorted the world into hierarchies.

  He wore it. The same way he'd worn "Jinx" since the Rust Boroughs. Armor made of the weapons aimed at you. It didn't stop the impact, but it made the flinching invisible.