The training hall was louder than it had been on the first morning.

  Tunde understood this immediately as a function of numbers rather than enthusiasm, the platform populated at a density that the previous session had not reached.

  Initiates distributed across its surface in the particular arrangement of people who have been here long enough to have established preferred positions and who are using those positions today.

  The noise was the layered noise of concurrent individual training, weapons against practice targets, movement forms conducted at varying speeds, the occasional paired exchange that had not yet been formally designated a sparring session but that both participants understood to be one.

  Every one of them glanced at him when he came through the doors.

  He had expected this. The rankings were public knowledge in the lower district and the events of the previous evening had traveled through the clan’s territory with the efficiency that interesting information always travels, which was faster than the people involved would have chosen.

  He was rank fifteen.

  He was the student of an Outer Elder. He had defeated three members of the top twenty in a single street encounter, which was either impressive or concerning depending on which house your ranking was tied to.

  He kept his face even and his cycling pattern running and went to find Elder Joran.

  He found Elder Joran on a stool at the platform's center, which was not where Joran was ever found and which was therefore either deliberate or a sign that the elder had been waiting for a specific moment, and the moment was the moment Tunde arrived, because as soon as Tunde came close enough to bow, the elder was already speaking.

  "Elder Ming says you immersed yourself adequately," Joran said, without preamble, the observation carrying the quality of something received from a reliable source.

  "As ordered," Tunde said.

  "And you now have a sense of the scale of what you've arrived into," the elder continued, rising from the stool with the unhurried ease of someone whose body has been well-maintained for a very long time.

  "I'm beginning to," Tunde said.

  Joran looked at him with the blindfolded attention that had stopped being disorienting sometime in the previous day and had started being simply present.

  "Keep up," he said, and moved.

  ****

  The elder's version of walking quickly was a specific category of movement that occupied the territory between walking and not being where you had just been.

  Each step carrying an Ethra deployment so efficient and so naturally integrated into the motion that the result looked like speed but felt, to Tunde's sight, like someone simply deciding where they were and then being there.

  He pushed Ethra into his legs and extended his stride and kept the cycling pattern running simultaneously and managed to keep the elder in his sight, which was itself a measure of something, though he was not yet sure of what.

  They left the training hall behind.

  The residential streets of Petal Street and its neighboring districts gave way to the commercial district and then the commercial district gave way to the outer compound roads.

  The traffic thinning as the clan's infrastructure met the clan's perimeter, and then the perimeter walls were behind them and they were on the road that led through the outskirts of Jade Peak's territory toward the tree line that Tunde could see in the middle distance.

  The forest announced itself before he reached it.

  It was not the kind of announcement that the wasteland had made, the wasteland's communication being primarily through the absence of things, the heat and the emptiness and the quality of air in a place where water was a resource rather than a condition.

  The forest announced itself through presence, the Ethra of it reaching outward from the tree line in the specific way that large concentrations of living things extend their Ethra into the surrounding environment, dense and green and carrying the warmth of somewhere that had been growing for a very long time.

  His danger sense prickled at the tree line.

  The Disciples at the forest entrance were stationed in a position that communicated purpose rather than ceremony, their postures the postures of people who were actually watching the forest rather than performing the watching of it.

  They knelt as Joran shot past, the motion of their deference automatic and unbroken, and they looked at Tunde as he followed with the particular looks of people who have recognized someone and have an opinion about the information they are being presented with.

  He went through the tree line.

  The light changed immediately, the full sun of the open territory replaced by the layered, filtered quality of light that has passed through multiple canopy levels before reaching the ground, green tinted and shifting with the movement of the leaves above.

  The smell changed as well, from the dry mineral quality of Jade Peak's compound to something richer and more complex, the smell of living things in large numbers and deep root systems and the specific chemistry of undergrowth.

  His danger sense did not reduce, he activated his Ethra sight and understood why.

  The forest's ambient Ethra was dense enough to constitute its own kind of pressure, the life and forest Ethra pressing against his own Ethra field with the gentle but sustained weight of something very large that is not trying to exert pressure but is simply present in a way that produces it.

  Through the density, he could make out the signatures of the forest's inhabitants, large shapes with the milky brown Ethra of creatures at the peak Initiate or early Disciple tier, moving through the undergrowth with the unhurried confidence of things that are not prey in their own environment.

  Elder Joran's voice arrived from above.

  He looked up. The elder was on a branch that was thick enough to be a small platform, sitting with his legs folded and his arms behind his back and his blindfolded face tilted downward with the attention of someone observing something they find instructive.

  "Defeating three high rankers," the elder said.

  "Tell me how it felt."

  Below the branch, two shapes emerged from the undergrowth.

  They were low to the ground, the brown coated feline compactness of things built for short distances covered very quickly, their yellow eyes catching the filtered light in the way of eyes designed for conditions with less light than the undergrowth provided.

  Long claws, retracted at the moment but present in the way that things that are available are present even when not deployed.

  Their movement as they came into the clearing was the movement of things that have done this before and have a system for it.

  "Pleasing," Tunde said, keeping his attention distributed between the elder above and the creatures below.

  "Good," Joran said.

  "The ambush in the street, I was not aware of before it occurred. I want you to know that. The families involved made a calculation about what was permissible, and they were not entirely wrong about what the clan's official position would be."

  "I believe the great elder would never have sanctioned it," Tunde said, watching the nearer of the two creatures settle into the specific crouch of something about to commit to a direction.

  "Wise answer," Joran said.

  "Also an accurate one. Now. Those are claw stalkers. They are a Tier One creature, native to this forest, peak Initiate in their Ethra grade. They are not individually threatening to a reasonably trained Initiate. They are categorically threatening when they are not the only two in the forest."

  "How many more are there?" Tunde asked.

  "I have been managing the others with domain since we entered the tree line," Joran said.

  "Consider these two a demonstration."

  The first one sprang.

  It covered the distance between its crouch and Tunde's position in a time that his visual processing could track but that left very little interval between tracking and needing to respond, the claws extended and the angle of approach aimed at his throat with the precision of something that had been targeting that specific location.

  He rolled, the motion bringing him below the arc of the attack, and came up already oriented, and drove his fist into the creature's side.

  His fist passed through.

  Not through as in the creature absorbed it, not through as in the strike was deflected, but through as in his fist moved into the space where the creature's body was and encountered a resistance that was less than the resistance of air, the body offering nothing to push against.

  The creature flowed around the impact the way water flows around an object, reforming on the other side of his fist without apparent consequence.

  The second stalker came from behind.

  He vaulted, the danger sense doing its work, and the creature passed beneath him and he landed and they circled and he understood that he was facing something his current toolkit did not have a clean answer for.

  "Regular physical strikes do not work on them," Joran said, from the branch, with the helpfulness of someone delivering information that is interesting rather than time sensitive.

  "Their bodies have a passive Ethra response to blunt physical force. The Ethra in their skin distributes impact rather than absorbing it. The method to connect a strike is projection, pushing your own Ethra outward at the moment of contact so that the strike carries Ethra rather than merely mass."

  "You said I can't project effectively yet," Tunde said, keeping his attention on both creatures.

  "I said it would be difficult and potentially injurious," Joran said.

  "I did not say it was impossible. There is a difference."

  Stolen story; please report.

  The first stalker circled left. The second circled right. He tracked them both through the Ethra sight, watching the milky brown signature of their Ethra shifting as they prepared for a coordinated approach.

  He looked at the ground.

  The branch was arm's length away, broken from its parent tree at some point and lying half buried in the undergrowth, the wood dense and green rather than dry, the kind of branch that would hold weight rather than crumble under it.

  He moved for it, the creatures responding to his directional change with the synchronized adjustment of things that hunt together regularly, and he had the branch in his hand as the first stalker committed.

  "Cycle normally," Joran said.

  "When the Ethra reaches your fingers, push it outward. Slowly."

  He cycled and pushed.

  The Ethra poured out faster than slowly, the control at the extremities not yet refined enough to calibrate the rate, the rush of it destabilizing his cycling briefly, the cuffs registering the disruption and beginning their response.

  He swung through the disruption.

  The branch connected and the world went white at the edges of his perception for a moment, the Ethra discharge from the contact traveling back through the branch and into his hands and up his arms in a wave that his tempered body absorbed with the specifically designed resilience of something that had been built to take this kind of force, the backlash severe and the structural damage zero.

  His Ethra sight cut out. His legs buckled.

  He went to one knee and stayed there, breathing, his hands and arms conducting their trembling report of what had just been asked of them, the muscles working through the aftermath of an Ethra discharge they had not been prepared for.

  The sounds of the two claw stalkers were absent.

  He looked up when his sight came back online.

  Where the two stalkers had been, there were two bodies, and the bodies were not in the condition that bodies are usually in after being struck by a branch, even a branch carrying a poorly controlled Ethra projection.

  The bodies were in two pieces, but the cut was not the cut of an edge or the tear of a force, it was the absence of a section, a clean removal of approximately the middle third of each creature, the remaining portions on either side of the absence still twitching with the mechanical persistence of things that do not yet know they are done.

  No pieces. No indication of where the removed sections had gone. No scatter or spread of the material that should have been there.

  He stared at the bodies.

  Elder Joran dropped from the branch and stood beside him, looking at the same thing Tunde was looking at.

  "Where," Joran said, slowly, "is the branch."

  Tunde looked at his hand. His hand was empty. He had felt the branch in his hand when he swung, the solid weight of it, the wood's resistance against his palm. It was not there. He looked at the ground around him.

  Joran crouched and pressed two fingers to the blood soaked earth, the specific focused gesture of someone using a sense that was not sight to examine a surface.

  He stayed in that position for several seconds, the stillness of someone reading something carefully.

  "Their beast cores are also missing," Joran said.

  "The branch must have exploded on contact," Tunde said.

  "An initiate without a combustion or explosion affinity concept," Joran said, in the patient tone of someone working through a logical chain,

  "Does not produce explosive discharges. You don't have that concept. You don't have any concept. You are an Initiate." He rose from the crouch.

  "What you produced is not accounted for by your currently known Ethra parameters."

  Tunde looked at the bodies. At the clean, comprehensive absence where the middle sections should have been.

  At the earth around the bodies, which should have showed scatter from impact and showed none.

  He looked at the band on his wrist.

  "Do not attribute it to that yet," Joran said, reading the direction of his gaze with the accuracy that had stopped surprising Tunde and had simply become a feature of the elder's presence.

  "The relic absorbs Ethra from external sources. It does not produce the kind of output we are observing. Whatever this is, it came from you." He paused.

  "Or from whatever you are, which is not the same thing as you and is also not separate from you, and which we do not yet have adequate language for."

  The forest around them had gone quiet in the way that forests go quiet when something has happened that the forest's inhabitants have registered and are processing, the usual background noise of undergrowth movement and canopy sounds suspended.

  "You can't repeat it today," Joran said.

  "Your body has reached the limit of what it can manage. Swallow a healing pill and sit down."

  Tunde swallowed a healing pill and sat on the earth beside the pieces of the stalkers, the healing Ethra moving through him with the warm efficiency of something doing exactly what it was designed to do, the trembling in his arms reducing as the muscles received the support they needed.

  He looked at his hands, the scabbed palms from the previous days' training, and found nothing in them that explained what had just happened.

  "The branch was gone when it hit them," he said.

  "Or the branch became something else," Joran said.

  He was looking at the bodies with the expression of someone who has encountered a new category of information and is determining how to file it.

  "Something that removed material rather than displacing it. Something that left no residue." He rubbed his beard.

  "Something that took the beast cores along with it."

  "Where did they go?" Tunde asked.

  "That," Joran said, "is the question I would most like to answer."

  He turned and looked at Tunde with the blindfolded attention, and the expression behind the blindfold was not the warm amusement of his usual manner but something quieter and more careful, the expression of someone who has just been given information that they are taking seriously in a way they had not quite taken things seriously before.

  "You recall what Elder Wren said about your affinity."

  "Something limitless and vast," Tunde said.

  "Full of things not yet named."

  "Yes," Joran said.

  He was quiet for a moment.

  "The things not yet named appear to be capable of removing sections of Tier One creatures along with their beast cores and leaving no trace of where they have gone." He paused.

  "This is, to say the least, outside my existing reference framework."

  Tunde looked at the absence in the middle of the stalker's body, something in him recognized it.

  Not clearly, not with the clarity of understanding what something is, but with the specific recognition of encountering something that belongs to you before you know what to do with it, the Ethra sight in him reading the absence not as empty space but as something that was very full of things he did not yet have the capacity to perceive directly.

  He said nothing about this. He filed it.

  ****

  "Advancement to Disciple," Joran said, as they moved deeper into the forest, the elder walking on the branches above while Tunde kept pace on the ground.

  "The mechanism is straightforward and the execution is not. The Ethra heart must reach peak Initiate level. The Ethra channels within the body must be sufficiently developed and clear to handle the increase in Ethra density that Disciple rank produces. And the impurities that accumulate in the channels through resource consumption must be cleared, because clogged channels at the point of advancement produce advancement failures that range from painful to fatal."

  "The purification elixirs," Tunde said.

  "Five thousand lumens per bottle at minimum, two bottles required for a thorough clearing." Joran paused on his branch.

  "Which would consume your current funds entirely and leave nothing for the resources you need to build the heart to peak Initiate in the first place."

  "But the band refines," Tunde said, the realization arriving in the way that things arrive when you have been told them and then experienced the situation they apply to.

  "The band refines whatever Ethra it processes," Joran confirmed.

  "Its passive function, which has been running since it bonded to you, does not simply filter external Ethra before it enters your cultivation. It also refines what is already in your channels, the passive output of something that was built for a purpose more comprehensive than you have yet discovered." He looked down.

  "Your channels are cleaner than they should be, given the volume of resources you have consumed in a short period. I noticed this during our first session. I attributed it to the relic."

  "So I don't need the elixirs," Tunde said.

  "You don't need the elixirs," Joran said.

  "What you need is volume. Enough Ethra consumed and processed to push your heart to peak Initiate level and enough activity to force the channels to expand to Disciple capacity." He began moving again.

  "Which is why we are here."

  The forest deepened around them as they moved, the trees larger as they went, the undergrowth thicker, the light more filtered.

  The Ethra density increased with the depth, the life and forest Ethra building in a way that Tunde's sight tracked as a gradient, the color deepening from the pale green of the forest's outer reaches to something richer and more saturated at the core.

  The creatures in the undergrowth were larger too, he noted, the signatures he caught at the edges of his sight broader and denser.

  "One month," Tunde said.

  "One month," Joran confirmed.

  "The duel is with Elder Moros's strongest Disciple, which means you need to enter it at Disciple rank or close enough to Disciple rank that the gap between your capability and a Disciple's is manageable." He paused.

  "The duel is also the condition for access to the rift that will open in this forest within the same timeframe."

  "What's in the rift?" Tunde asked.

  "Adept grade essence fruits. Tier Four creatures. Resources sufficient for a peak Adept to make the push to Lord rank." Joran's voice carried the specific quality of someone describing something they want with the composure of someone who has been wanting things patiently for a long time.

  "Lord rank, for me, has been the next step for the last thirty years. The resources to make the push have not been accessible. This rift represents the most viable opportunity I have encountered."

  "And winning the duel gives you access," Tunde said.

  "Winning the duel gives the winner's elder access," Joran said.

  "Which is why I entered the bet. Which is why you are here." He looked down.

  "I am not asking you to be comfortable with the pressure of this. I am telling you what is true so that you have an accurate understanding of the situation."

  Tunde absorbed this with the honesty it deserved. He was being trained because an elder needed a representative for a duel that would determine access to resources the elder needed for his own advancement.

  This was not hidden, which made it more manageable than hidden motives, and it was also not the whole picture, because whatever Joran had seen in him that morning in the skyvessel had been there before the duel arrangement, and the duel arrangement had been made because of Tunde's performance rather than the other way around.

  He could hold both things.

  The pragmatism of an elder's self interest and the genuine quality of an elder who had chosen him when he had no ranking and no history and had told him the truth at every point where telling the truth had cost something.

  "I will reach Disciple rank," he said.

  "You will," Joran said, with the confidence of someone stating a fact rather than offering encouragement.

  "The question is what state you will be in when you reach it, and what you will be capable of once you are there."

  The clearing arrived without announcement.

  It had been cleared recently, the evidence of it in the rawness of the exposed earth and the specific pattern of the disturbance, not the gradual clearing of something that happened over time but the sudden clearing of something that happened all at once.

  A crater, roughly circular, the earth at its edges raised into a natural barrier, the interior smoothed in a way that suggested something with large mass had recently been removed from it.

  A stream ran along the clearing's edge, the water clear and moving at the pace of something fed from elevation rather than from flat ground.

  In the center of the crater, a wooden structure that was honest about what it was: shelter rather than comfort, walls and a roof assembled from the forest's available material with the practicality of someone who had not been trying to build anything impressive.

  "Three weeks," Joran said, landing beside him at the crater's edge.

  "This is where you will be. The stream is drinking water. The forest is your food source. The creatures are your training partners." He looked at Tunde.

  "The Tier Two range begins approximately two hundred meters in that direction. They do not typically come this far into Tier One territory without provocation. Do not provoke them."

  "And if something comes into the camp?" Tunde asked.

  "Then you handle it," Joran said.

  "That is the point."

  He dropped into the crater, sliding down the raised earth to the flat interior, and walked to the wooden structure and looked at it.

  It was small and functional and his for three weeks, which was more than the pit had been and less than the Red Blossom House's room, and he had learned enough about tempering his expectations to both of those reference points to find this one acceptable.

  Joran appeared at the crater's edge, and opened his void ring, and several large sacks dropped into the crater around Tunde's feet.

  He looked at the sacks through his Ethra sight and understood what they were from the colors, the warm orang ,red of essence fruits at the Initiate and Disciple grade, the denser signature of creature meats from Tier One and Two ranges, the resources of months of ordinary accumulation delivered in a single drop.

  "Use them wisely," Joran said.

  "Do not consume everything at once. Let your channels clear between sessions. The relic will process what you consume, but your body needs time to integrate what the relic produces." He paused.

  "And keep the camp quiet. Large quantities of valuable resources emit Ethra that draws attention from things with more mass than the claw stalkers."

  As if to confirm the point, a howl rolled through the forest from the direction the elder had indicated as Tier Two territory, long and resonant and carrying the specific quality of sound that large things produce, the acoustics of it communicating size before the source was visible.

  Tunde looked up.

  Elder Joran was gone. Not receding, not departing, simply not present in the place he had been present a moment before, the branch where he had been standing empty with the completeness of a space that has been vacated rather than gradually abandoned.

  The howl faded into the forest's ordinary sounds.

  Tunde picked up the sacks and carried them into the wooden structure and put them in the corner and stood in the small space with the stream audible outside and the forest's Ethra pressing against the structure's walls with its patient, comprehensive presence.

  He opened the first sack, looked at what it contained, and started thinking about what three weeks meant in terms of Ethra consumed and processed and integrated, and what his channels would need to look like at the end of those three weeks, and what Disciple rank would require that he did not yet have, and what the duel would require that Disciple rank would need to provide.

  He had a great deal to do.

  He started with the cycling pattern, bringing it to the precision that the cuffs monitored and approved of, the familiar rhythm of it settling into its background position beneath his other processes, and then he reached into the sack and selected the first essence fruit and looked at it and thought about the distance between where he was and where he needed to be.

  Then he ate the fruit and began.