The week began before dawn.

  Kaelen was already bleeding.

  Zev Kaelthorn didn’t believe in warm-ups.

  Lightning cracked across the high spires of the Storm Crucible as Kaelen was hurled backward for the fourth time in as many minutes, his body skidding across scorched stone.

  “Again,” Zev said calmly.

  Kaelen forced himself upright, lungs burning, Ni thrashing beneath his skin. He raised his hand—

  The bolt never formed.

  Zev appeared in front of him in a flash of blue-white thunder and struck Kaelen across the chest with a bare palm.

  The impact detonated.

  Kaelen slammed into a pillar hard enough to crater it.

  “Lightning isn’t force,” Zev said, walking toward him. “It is decision. You hesitate—so it abandons you.”

  Kaelen coughed blood and staggered up anyway.

  He didn’t answer.

  He attacked.

  This time, lightning crawled along his arm—not wild, not explosive, but focused. It struck Zev’s forearm.

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  Zev’s eyes flickered.

  Not pain.

  Interest.

  Sera Noctyrr trained him in silence.

  The Shadow Hall was lightless, endless, wrong. Kaelen couldn’t tell where walls ended or floors began. Every shadow moved. Every breath felt watched.

  “You are loud,” Sera’s voice whispered from everywhere. “Even when you think you are still.”

  Kaelen stepped—

  —and a blade kissed his throat.

  Another brushed his ribs.

  Another hovered over his eye.

  “You bleed intention,” Sera continued. “Shadow does not obey those who want. It obeys those who disappear.”

  She vanished.

  The hall erupted.

  Shadows attacked from every angle—binding his limbs, choking his breath, stealing his balance. Kaelen fought, panicked, summoned blood, lightning—

  Wrong.

  Every response made it worse.

  Finally, exhausted, trembling, he stopped moving.

  He breathed.

  He let go.

  The shadows… slowed.

  Not retreating.

  Listening.

  Sera reappeared inches from his face.

  “There,” she said softly. “That moment you stopped existing? Remember it. You will fail again tomorrow.”

  Roric Varn nearly killed him.

  The Blood Knight’s arena stank of iron and old death. Roric didn’t draw his weapon—he didn’t need to.

  “Blood is not rage,” Roric said, driving a knee into Kaelen’s stomach hard enough to lift him off the ground. “It is endurance.”

  Kaelen collapsed, gasping.

  Roric hauled him up by the hair and forced Kaelen to keep fighting even as his vision blurred, blood soaking into the sand.

  “Again.”

  Kaelen struck.

  Missed.

  Again.

  Missed.

  Again.

  Finally—

  He didn’t fall.

  He stood.

  Bleeding. Shaking. But standing.

  Roric paused.

  “…Good,” he said, almost reluctantly. “Now we begin.”

  By the time Kaelen reached Vex Morcant, his hands barely obeyed him.

  Vex laid weapons across a stone table—blades, chains, spears, hooks, firearms older than empires.

  “Pick one.”

  Kaelen chose instinctively.

  Wrong.

  Vex disarmed him in under three seconds.

  “Again.”

  Wrong.

  Again.

  Wrong.

  “You think weapons are extensions of your body,” Vex said coldly. “They are teachers. And you do not listen.”

  By nightfall, Kaelen collapsed facedown in the armory, fingers twitching as weapon forms burned into his muscles whether he wanted them or not.

  Vex stepped over him.

  “Pathetic,” he muttered.

  “But fast.”