The forest was silent.

  Not the comfortable silence of nature at rest, but the hollow, breathless silence of a battlefield after the last soldier had fallen. No birdsong threaded through the canopy.

  No insects clicked their rhythms in the undergrowth. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath, as if the trees themselves had chosen stillness over drawing the attention of the monster in their midst.

  Tunde exhaled slowly, tossing the last of the tier 1 beasts aside like discarded refuse. It struck the earth with a dull, wet thud and did not move again.

  He stood amid the wreckage of what had once been a thriving ecosystem, fur, carapace, and claw scattered across flattened brush, the ground churned dark where creatures had thrashed out their final moments.

  His knuckles were crusted with dried ichor, his shirt torn beyond repair, but his skin, his impossible skin, had already begun the quiet and relentless work of healing itself.

  Bite marks faded like ink dissolving in rain. Lacerations sealed over with nothing more than a faint itch to mark their passing.

  Deep beneath the surface, his body toiled without rest, methodically dismantling the residual toxins several of the beasts had delivered in their dying desperation, breaking them apart like a furnace consuming wet wood, slow but inevitable.

  He opened his palm.

  A beast core sat heavy in his hand, its dim inner light pulsing faintly, the last whisper of a creature that had once ruled its stretch of this forest.

  He regarded it for a moment, then tossed it onto the pile beside him. Seven cores. Eight. Twelve. They clinked together softly, each one a small testament to hours of brutal and relentless work.

  Whatever creatures had not fallen had long since fled. He could feel their absence, that instinctive void that settles over a hunting ground when something has declared itself apex.

  They had recognized, in whatever primal language fear spoke between beasts, that the thing standing in their forest was something their instincts had no name for.

  Not a ranker. Not a predator. Simply something that refused to stop.

  Tunde lowered himself to the ground in one fluid motion, crossing his legs and straightening his spine, falling into the meditative posture Elder Joran had hammered into him across weeks of grueling repetition. He closed his eyes.

  His breathing slowed. Evened. Deepened.

  The Ethra he had absorbed through the relic stirred at his call, flowing through his lines like a river that had finally found its proper course.

  He guided it, coaxing it through the channels of his body with the careful precision of a craftsman shaping hot iron, not forcing, not rushing, simply directing.

  He felt it pool and settle, a tiny drop of concentrated energy added to his reserves like a single coin placed at the bottom of a vast, empty vault.

  Minuscule. Almost laughably small.

  And yet, a smile found its way to his face all the same.

  A cough broke the silence.

  Not a sick cough, nor a startled one. Deliberate. Measured. The kind of sound a man made when he wanted to announce himself without the vulgarity of words.

  Tunde's eyes snapped open. His body moved before his mind had finished registering the figure standing at the clearing's edge, resonance surging through his limbs with a sharp, familiar discomfort, his fist already cutting through the air in a strike that carried the full weight of everything he had spent the morning building.

  Elder Joran caught it with one hand.

  Not with effort. Not with any visible expenditure of will. He simply raised his palm and the fist stopped, the resonance that had ridden it dissolving like morning mist against warm stone.

  The elder's expression did not change. He studied Tunde for a brief moment, then chuckled, low and unhurried.

  Tunde's face flooded with heat. He dropped immediately, pressing his forehead to the earth.

  "This student greets his master," he said, the words rushing out faster than he intended.

  "A disciple," Elder Joran remarked, his tone carrying something in it that made Tunde's spine tighten involuntarily, something between observation and quiet satisfaction.

  The elder let the silence stretch before he continued.

  "I must say, I am surprised. Tell me, how did you advance?"

  Tunde sat up slowly, collecting himself. He retold the story plainly, sparing no detail, pulling the scorpion carapace from his void ring and holding it forward as evidence.

  Elder Joran took it from him, turning it over in his fingers with the casual interest of a scholar examining a curiosity at a market stall.

  Then he whistled softly.

  "Venomspike scorpion, tier 2." The elder's voice was almost conversational, but Tunde heard the weight beneath it.

  "Deadly poison. You should be dead by all rights."

  He tossed the carapace back without ceremony.

  "And yet here you are," Joran continued, folding his hands behind his back, "not only alive but a disciple as well. I am impressed."

  Tunde bowed again, holding the position until the elder gestured for him to rise. He sat up straight, watching Joran's face the way he had learned to, reading whatever small signals the man allowed to surface.

  "Tell me,” The elder said, his voice shifting to something quieter, almost gentle in the way that still water is gentle before it reveals its depth.

  "Were you afraid of dying?"

  The question sat in the air between them. Tunde held it, turned it over honestly, resisting the reflex to give the answer a ranker was supposed to give.

  "Yes," he said at last.

  "As the poison spread, I wondered if that was the end. I did not want to die. I wanted to fight. I wanted to live."

  Elder Joran said nothing. His expression gave nothing away, the familiar mask of a man who had lived long enough to hear every possible answer and learned to reveal his judgments only when he chose to. Tunde took the silence as permission to continue.

  "I am not sure how," he admitted.

  "But I kept moving. I kept fighting. And I woke up a disciple."

  The elder was quiet for a long moment, his gaze moving past Tunde to settle on the littered clearing, the pile of beast cores, the gouged and battered earth.

  When he finally spoke, his voice carried the unhurried weight of a man reciting something he had long since accepted as truth.

  "Nobody wants to die," Joran said.

  "Especially rankers. No one climbs the ladder of power only to be struck down before reaching the peak. But that is the fate awaiting most who walk this road, dying before they ever glimpse what they were reaching for."

  He paused, letting the words settle into the ground between them.

  "Tell me, are you aware of the Hegemons?"

  Tunde shook his head. He had heard the word before, passing between Elyria and Thorne like something sacred and half-forbidden, but he had not pressed for meaning then.

  The elder nodded slowly, as though the answer confirmed something he had already known.

  "Most people think of them as myths," Joran said, a faint and unreadable smile crossing his features.

  "No one has laid eyes on a Hegemon in centuries. Entire cities rise and fall, rulers are born and buried, without a single soul among them ever standing in the presence of one. I myself have never seen one. Not even the Regents, the ones said to speak in their stead, have I encountered in the flesh."

  He paused, tilting his head as though listening to something distant.

  "And yet every child grows up knowing their names. Every story told around fires in every corner of Adamath carries their shadows. The founders of the cults, the true powers underpinning this world, beings whose very whispers are said to have unmade continents." He smiled again, faint and wry.

  "Or so they say."

  Tunde leaned forward slightly, drawn in despite himself.

  "What are their affinities?"

  The elder laughed, a genuine sound this time, brief and unguarded.

  "Affinities," Joran repeated, as though savoring the smallness of the word against the scale of the question.

  "Perhaps affinity is not the right word for what they wield. We might call them concepts, but even that falls short. Whatever they command has long surpassed the fusion of two affinities. It is something beyond, something for which our language was not built. More than one concept, or so it is rumored."

  Tunde felt the enormity of that settle over him like a second sky. More than one concept. He had barely begun to grasp what a single concept meant, what it demanded of a ranker to even approach its threshold, and these beings wielded multiples as though they were tools.

  "Baelthor the Warbringer," Joran began, his tone shifting into something ritualistic, each name given its proper weight as though naming them carelessly might carry consequences.

  "Hegemon of the Heralds. Thogu the Shrouded Whisper, Hegemon of the Veilweavers. Luwaye the Abyssal Beast, Hegemon of the Abyssal Seekers."

  He paused, and when he continued, his voice had dropped a register.

  "Temporus the Time Devourer, Hegemon of the Temporal Weavers. Lysandria, the Mistress of Illusions, Hegemon of the Illusion Weavers. Astradriel the Equilibrium Keeper, Hegemon of the Balance Keepers. Mekrandor the Luminary Artificer, Hegemon of the Artificer's Guild. And Sylvagorn of the Wild Heart, Hegemon of the Wild Wardens."

  Silence reclaimed the clearing.

  Tunde had been holding his breath without realizing it. He exhaled slowly, committing each name to the deepest part of his memory, carving them in like inscriptions on stone.

  Eight names. Eight beings that stood at a height so removed from where he currently stood that the distance between them was not a matter of ranks or years or even lifetimes.

  "These eight," Joran said quietly, "are so far beyond us that the word god would not feel dishonest. Immortals who were present when Adamath was shaped and who will remain when it finally unravels into nothing."

  Tunde stared at the beast cores beside him. Twelve of them. Proof of a morning's work, proof of advancement, proof of everything he had endured to reach this moment. And yet, measured against what the elder had just described, they were dust.

  Good, he thought. Then I have a long way to climb.

  "Every initiate dreams of that peak," Joran said, pulling Tunde back from the precipice of his own thoughts.

  "And yet most never make it to disciple rank. So tell me, when the poison was eating you alive from the inside, what kept you moving? What kept the light from going out?"

  Tunde's hands closed into fists against his knees. He sat up straighter, not out of posture, but out of something that rose from deeper than discipline.

  "The oath I made," he said. "The day you took me in as your student."

  The elder said nothing. The forest said nothing.

  "I swore to avenge my people," Tunde continued, and the words came without effort now, each one carrying its own gravity, polished smooth by the number of times he had turned them over in the dark.

  "To return to Crystalreach and uncover the truth of what happened to us, what was done to us, and why it was buried. To grow strong enough that nothing, no person, no creature, no power in Adamath, could stop me from standing in that truth."

  His eyes were steady. Not burning with performance. Simply certain.

  Elder Joran looked at him for a long, wordless moment.

  "That fire," the elder said at last, his voice softer than Tunde had ever heard it.

  "That is your force. Your foundation. Many rankers lose it along the way. Some let it gutter out slowly without even noticing, mistaking comfort for peace. Others burn so fiercely and so carelessly that the flame consumes them before their enemies ever get the chance."

  He stepped closer, and for once he did not look like a man about to impart a lesson. He looked like a man sharing something that cost him something to say.

  "You must tend it. Feed it carefully, tame it with patience. Let it be a furnace for your enemies and a hearthfire when you are cold and lost and unsure of yourself. Let it be the thing that finds you in the dark when everything else has gone quiet."

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  He stepped back, folding his hands behind him, and the moment passed.

  Dawn had begun to press through the canopy, the first gold light of morning falling in broken shafts across the torn earth of the clearing.

  Elder Joran raised one hand and caught a leaf drifting down through the light with the absent ease of a man catching a falling cup, something done a thousand times, requiring no thought at all.

  "The road only grows harder," he said, his eyes somewhere distant.

  "The higher you climb, the more dangerous your enemies. Every step up draws more eyes toward you, more interest from people whose attention you would rather not have." He let the leaf go, watching it resume its fall.

  "The question is whether you can carry that weight without letting it bend you."

  Tunde met the elder's gaze.

  "Nothing will stand in my way," he said. He raised his fist, resonance blooming through it like a lit coal.

  "And if something does, I will move it."

  The elder studied him for another moment. His usual half-smile was absent. In its place was something rarer, something that looked almost like acknowledgment.

  "Good," Joran said quietly.

  "You will need that in the days ahead."

  He gestured once.

  "Do not hold back."

  ****

  Tunde exploded forward.

  Resonance ignited through his body in a single rushing wave, and he closed the distance between them in a fraction of a breath, his first strike a straight right aimed at the center of the elder's chest with every gram of force his frame could generate.

  His second came before the first had landed, a low kick sweeping for the elder's ankle, his third already chambering as his body twisted through the motion. He fought the way he had learned to think in this forest, not in isolated strikes, but in connected, flowing chains, each movement feeding the next.

  Elder Joran moved through it like water around stone.

  Each deflection was minimal, precise to the point of artistry, catching Tunde's wrists or elbows at exactly the angle that redirected force without absorbing it.

  Every time the resonance riding Tunde's strikes met the elder's hands, it rippled inward and then simply ceased, unraveled by something Tunde's eyes could follow but his understanding could not yet reach.

  He pushed his Ethra sight to its limits. The elder's lines pulsed and shifted with every deflection, rolling and fluctuating like a deep current disturbed by a stone thrown from above, turbulent for only a moment, then smooth again before the next strike arrived.

  It was baffling. It should not have worked. The laws of force did not permit what he was watching, and yet the elder moved backward through the clearing with an unhurried grace, as though Tunde were walking him through a leisurely stroll rather than hammering him with everything he had.

  "You advanced because of trauma," the elder said, perfectly calm, as though they were seated across a table and not in the middle of a bout.

  "Your heart, adapting to the venom, pushed past the limit it had been holding against. That is what broke you through."

  Then, without warning, Elder Joran went on the offensive.

  He did not anticipate it. There was no shift in his posture, no tensing of his shoulders, no tell that Tunde's Ethra sight could catch in time.

  One moment the elder was deflecting, and the next his leg had swept through a precise arc and connected with the side of Tunde's torso with a force that had no right to belong to a kick that looked so casual.

  Tunde left the ground.

  He flew through the air in a long, tumbling arc, crashing into the trunk of a large tree with an impact that shook bark loose from the branches above.

  He slid down it and crumpled to the ground in a heap, ears ringing, the world briefly reduced to a warm, disorientating blur.

  He lay there heaving, limbs heavy and disobedient, his body screaming at him in the particular language of deep, rattling shock.

  Elder Joran descended silently before him, hands folded, watching.

  "Advancement," the elder continued, as unhurried as ever, "occurs when the body forces itself past the ceiling of its current Ethra limit. The energy that has been building inside you congeals, purifies, and then detonates outward, rebuilding you at a higher foundation. It is not a gentle process."

  Tunde pressed his palm against the ground and pushed. His arm shook.

  "Most rankers require artifacts to temper themselves to that threshold," Joran continued.

  "Higher tier Ethra crystals, relic-assisted cycling at dangerous speeds, pushing the heart to its absolute peak before attempting the break. Some die in the attempt, their hearts unable to sustain the pressure of a tier 2 crystal poured through channels not yet ready to carry it. And many others never even reach that point, lost to tier 2 rifts before they can place their hands on an Ethra crystal at all."

  Tunde gritted his teeth and pushed again. His arm buckled. He dropped back to his knees, and then, despite every instruction his pride issued, he pitched forward and lay flat, his cheek against the cool dirt, his body simply refusing to cooperate.

  "What is happening to me?" he ground out, the words barely coherent.

  He turned his awareness inward. The Ethra was flowing, steady and uninterrupted, the channels clear, no blockages or ruptures he could identify.

  And yet his muscles had become something resembling wet cloth, heavy and structureless, carrying none of the tension that normally answered his commands.

  "Resonance," Elder Joran said, settling himself on a nearby rock with no particular urgency. From seemingly nowhere, he produced a fruit, deep gold in color and emanating a fragrance that hit Tunde's empty stomach like a physical blow. The resulting sound his body made was deeply undignified.

  The elder took a slow, deliberate bite and continued.

  "As much as it consumes Ethra, resonance feeds on something else as well. Stamina. Endurance. The raw vitality that keeps your body functioning beneath the surface of your power. It drains that reserve steadily with each use, and when that reserve empties, your body becomes what you are experiencing now."

  He gestured vaguely at Tunde's state.

  "The last time I felt this particular sensation, I could not move for an entire day. And I was an Adept at the time."

  He regarded Tunde with what might have been genuine curiosity.

  "But you, with that peculiar body of yours, only reached this state after using resonance how many times?"

  "Ten," Tunde croaked.

  "Ten." The elder's eyebrow crept up his forehead.

  He was quiet for a moment, chewing thoughtfully.

  "Ten resonance uses from a newly minted disciple. That is enough to dismantle an entire team of disciples operating in formation." A pause.

  "Assuming they close with you and do not simply stay at range. What would you do then?"

  The question was not rhetorical. Tunde knew the elder well enough to understand that by now.

  He lay on the ground, exhausted, starving, his limbs far away and unresponsive, and he still turned the question over with what remained of his functioning mind.

  "Projection," he rasped.

  He willed his void ring open. Elixirs, pills, and small glass vials of condensed healing compounds spilled from it and scattered across the dirt around him. He reached for the nearest one.

  Elder Joran was in front of him before his fingers touched it.

  "No," Joran said.

  The single word was not harsh, but it carried the finality of a door being closed.

  "In a state like this, the body heals better on its own terms. Tier 2 meat. Tier 2 fruit. Clean vitality, taken in naturally. Push elixirs into a system already under this kind of strain, and you risk poisoning yourself on top of everything else."

  He tilted his head slightly, a familiar and infuriating glimmer of something almost like amusement surfacing.

  "Though with your body, perhaps even that would not finish you. Still, there is no reason to find out."

  Tunde chose not to dignify that with a response.

  He dragged his hand toward the provisions in his void ring instead, pulling out dried meat and a sealed container of vitality liquid, and he began to eat with the focused and graceless efficiency of a man for whom survival had temporarily overtaken all other concerns.

  He chewed. He swallowed. He felt his body begin to receive it, drawing the nutrients and the trace Ethra in the meat down through every depleted channel like parched earth drinking rain.

  It was slow. And then it was less slow. The heaviness in his limbs receded by degrees, and he pushed himself first to his elbows and then to a seated position, continuing to eat without pause.

  By the time he reached for a second piece, he could feel his hands again in the way they were supposed to feel, responsive and his own.

  He exhaled slowly, turning his gaze to the elder.

  "I created resonance to pull myself out of situations that should have killed me," Joran said.

  He had finished the fruit at some point during Tunde's recovery and now watched him with the calm attention of a craftsman examining his work.

  "It guarantees the end of whatever stands against you when applied correctly. But it demands a price."

  "I do not fully understand the logic, elder," Tunde admitted.

  "Resonance forces your body to accumulate Ethra for projection," Joran explained.

  "The clue is in the name. Projection is energy built to be released, expelled outward in a single decisive movement. When you hold resonance instead of projecting it, you are storing a force inside channels that were designed for throughput, not containment. Hold it long enough, or push it past your capacity, and it will begin to damage your Ethra lines from the inside."

  He let that settle.

  "As an Adept, I can sustain it for a handful of uses before I require serious recovery, and a vitality mage capable of repairing Ethra line damage does not come cheaply." He fixed Tunde with a look.

  "You, however, are operating in an entirely different category of physical endurance, thanks to whatever your companion introduced into your body tempering."

  Tunde straightened slightly.

  "Was it truly that significant?"

  "She had no idea what she possessed," the elder said plainly.

  "She described it as a spoil of war, something she had collected without fully understanding what she had stumbled across. Whether it was fortune or fate that put it in her hands, I cannot say. What I can say is that the bone she used in your tempering process did not merely reinforce your skeleton. It restructured the density of your entire body, reinforcing tissue, organ, and Ethra channel alike. At this moment, I would estimate your body can absorb the physical punishment of an early-stage Adept without suffering permanent damage."

  The words landed with considerable weight. Tunde let himself hold them for exactly as long as it took the elder to raise one finger.

  "Do not become careless," Joran said, his tone carrying the particular gravity of a man who had watched carelessness kill extraordinary people.

  "Adamath is vast, and its dangers are more varied than strength alone can account for. Disciples carrying Lord-level relics and weapons. Rankers whose affinities operate outside anything documented in the clan's records. Ancient bloodline techniques passed through families who have had centuries to refine them. Your body is formidable. There is always something more formidable."

  Tunde nodded. The lesson was familiar, but he heard it differently now than he had weeks ago, with more weight behind it, more personal evidence to give it teeth.

  "Such as, for example," the elder added, his expression shifting subtly, a faint furrow appearing between his brows, "your opponent in the coming duel."

  Tunde's chest tightened.

  He had not seen the elder frown often. It was rare enough that each instance had lodged itself in his memory with uncomfortable clarity. Whatever prompted that expression from Joran was never trivial.

  A stone cracked against his skull before the thought could sink him.

  "Look alive," the elder said sharply.

  "That face you are making has no business on a ranker who intends to survive what is coming. Fear the battle before it begins, and you will walk into it already defeated."

  Tunde pressed his lips together and straightened.

  "Apologies, elder."

  Joran regarded him for a moment, then gave a single, measured nod.

  "Good. If nothing else, at least if you die at the hands of the second-strongest disciple in this clan, you will not die making that face."

  Tunde stilled.

  "Second-strongest?" The words came out before he could contain them.

  "Thalas Verdan," the elder said, in the tone of a man reading from a record he found personally distasteful.

  "Son of Jashed Verdan, current clan head, Adept, and a man who has spent considerable effort ensuring his son carries every advantage privilege can purchase. Thalas is known for his jade affinity, disciplined in melee combat, his preferred weapons being jade gauntlets of no small quality."

  A pause.

  "And a little something extra."

  Tunde held the elder's gaze.

  "Something extra."

  "Family heads who wish to guarantee their children's dominance do not wait for nature to run its course," Joran said.

  "Affinities are introduced by force, through bestowments or through preparation for the Convergence. The goal is simple, to place their heirs beyond the reach of those who do not share their advantages."

  "The Convergence," Tunde said slowly, reaching for what he knew.

  "Every ten years. Ethra affinities crystallizing in natural formations across various regions."

  "Correct. Approximately two years from now, by current reckoning. The clan will begin maneuvering for it well before then." Joran's expression remained flat.

  "The affinities drawn from Convergence events are pure, unmediated by human hands. Far superior to bestowments, which carry the dilution and instability of being copied from one vessel to another."

  Tunde absorbed this, then arrived at the question his pride had been delaying.

  "Does that mean Thalas has not yet fully mastered his second affinity?"

  The elder's response was a short, humorless sound that fell somewhere between a laugh and a dismissal.

  "Thalas has been training with his second affinity, pressure, for over a year. He did not receive it and leave it to rest. He applied himself to it the same way he applies himself to everything, completely, and without patience for failure." Joran watched him.

  "Whatever comfort you were hoping to find in that question, let it go."

  The brief window of hope closed quietly.

  Tunde exhaled and ran the numbers in his head the way the elder had trained him to. Resonance carried too steep a cost to lean on as a primary strategy.

  Against Thalas, with an unknown second affinity and a year of practice behind it, he could not afford to spend himself in the opening exchanges and hope for the best. He would need to think. He would need to be smarter than he had ever been before.

  "You are not facing a soft opponent," Joran said, and his voice had shifted again, stripped of the wry edge it sometimes carried, leaving something that sounded uncomfortably close to concern.

  "Thalas Verdan has been sent into tier 2 rifts as a matter of course. Tier 3 on occasion, for what Elder Moros describes as sport. He is Elder Moros's favored disciple for reasons that are not sentimental. The man does not do sentiment."

  Tunde was not entirely certain whether the elder was trying to prepare him or depress him. The result felt roughly equivalent.

  He was pulled from his calculations when Joran rose from the rock, turned to face the deeper forest, and raised one hand, pointing toward the distant shift in the treeline where the undergrowth thickened and the quality of the silence changed.

  "Beyond that line," the elder said, "is the territory of the tier 2 beasts. The true inhabitants of this forest." He did not look back.

  "My method is simple. Once you cross that boundary, you do not retreat. You face what finds you, or you die facing it. There is no middle ground to stand on."

  "Yes, elder," Tunde said.

  His voice was steady. His eyes had gone cold, settling into the particular stillness that had begun to come naturally to him over these weeks, the quieting of everything that was not useful.

  "Nurture that flame," Joran said, and his voice was already becoming part of the forest, softening at the edges.

  "Tend it carefully. Let it lead you when you cannot see where you are going."

  Then the elder moved.

  He did not run. He simply ceased to be where he was, and Tunde's Ethra sight, flaring at full intensity, caught only the barest impression of him, a ripple in the lines of natural Ethra that threaded through the undergrowth, and then even that was gone. He had not left the forest. He had become indistinguishable from it.

  Tunde stood alone in the ruined clearing.

  He rolled his shoulders slowly, feeling everything settle into place, muscle and bone and the steady low hum of Ethra moving through him.

  He gathered his provisions back into his void ring, closed it, and stood for a moment looking at the boundary where the forest deepened and darkened, and the shadows between the trees became something heavier.

  Then he walked forward.

  Not because he was unafraid or because the numbers were in his favor. But because the oath he had spoken aloud this morning was not a thing he had said for the elder's benefit.

  He had said it because it was the truest thing in him, older than his rank, older than his training, anchored somewhere so deep that even the poison of a tier 2 Venomspike scorpion had not been able to reach it.

  Crystalreach was waiting.

  And he was not the same person who had left it.

  ****

  The clearing that Tunde had vacated did not stay empty for long.

  Thalas Verdan pressed through the treeline at a pace that left shallow furrows in the soft earth, his presence displacing the air around him the way water displaces around a stone thrown hard into still depths. He was not a large young man in the way that brutes are large.

  He was built with a particular, deliberate quality, compact and precise, every movement economical in the way that came not from natural ease but from years of being told that waste was a form of weakness.

  He stopped at the edge of the clearing and looked at it.

  Twelve beast cores. Tier 1, all of them, but collected systematically, not scattered the way they fell when a ranker panicked through a fight.

  The ground was churned and marked in patterns he could read, a single fighter moving through multiple engagements, always controlled, always pressing forward. The tree at the far edge bore the impact scar of something heavy and fast.

  His eyes moved across it all with the cold, cataloguing attention of someone who had been taught to assess threats rather than dismissing them.

  Then his jaw tightened.

  An initiate. These were the leavings of an initiate.

  The rage that rose in him was not the hot, blinding kind. It was the kind that settled in behind his eyes and made everything very clear and very sharp.

  He had been raised in the understanding that the Verdan name was not simply a heritage, it was a standard to be maintained at any cost, a ceiling that could not be allowed to shift upward by someone with no blood right to raise it.

  He had been told he would be fighting a wastelander. A nobody. An initiate plucked from obscurity by a blind elder with something to prove and given a stage he had not earned.

  He looked at the clearing again.

  Twelve cores. Controlled engagement marks. A tree with an impact scar that suggested the wastelander had not left the forest after taking that kind of hit.

  That was what had been sent into the territory of the tier 2 beasts.

  Thalas breathed in slowly through his nose and out through his mouth, a technique his father had taught him for moments when the easy answer was not the right one.

  He had been going to dismiss this. He had been ready to treat it as an insult dressed up as an opportunity, an exercise in controlled restraint while he dismantled someone who had no business sharing the floor with him.

  He was still going to win. That was not in question.

  But Thalas Verdan had not become the second-strongest disciple of the Verdan Clan by underestimating what he could see with his own eyes.

  He reached into his Ethra, feeling the first affinity rise smooth and familiar as jade along his arms, and the second, heavier, more deliberate, like the feeling before a great structure finally gives way, pressing at the edges of his channels.

  He moved into the forest.

  Whatever this wastelander was, he would find out personally.

  And then he would end it.