Chương 3: One Last Time

The eastern training hall was the largest room in my wing, high-ceilinged and stone-floored, with racks of practice weapons along the far wall and a row of narrow windows near the top that let in thin columns of afternoon light. I'd spent more hours in this room than in any other part of the estate, and I knew every scratch on the floor, every dent in the wooden training posts, every place where the stone had been worn smooth by years of footwork drills.

Instructor Bellos was standing at the far end with his back to the door, running a cloth down the length of a sword. It was not a practice blade. Real steel, slim and well-balanced, and he worked the cloth along it in slow even strokes.

"Instructor Bellos." I bowed, even though he wasn't looking.

"You summoned me."

"I heard you're leaving today." He didn't turn around. The cloth moved up the blade, then back down again.

"Yes, Instructor."

"Your decision?"

"Yes." He kept polishing. The steel caught the light from the windows in a thin bright line that shifted as he turned the blade.

"Good. Means you wanted it." He set the cloth down on the bench beside him but still didn't turn.

"You will pass the entrance examination tomorrow. I want that understood between us before you go. The examination requires Ninth Seal. You are at Sixth, and have been for a while now, so there is no version of tomorrow in which they do not admit you."

"... Yes, Instructor."

"Good. Once they do, I will no longer be your instructor. The arrangement under which I was kept in this estate ended on the day your grandfather agreed to send you to Sartheon. I shall leave shortly after you do." He picked up the scabbard and sheathed the blade with a single clean motion, and then he turned around and looked at me for the first time. Bellos had a face that didn't move much. Deep lines around the mouth, dark eyes, a short grey beard trimmed so precisely it looked painted on.

He'd been my combat instructor for six years, and in all that time I had never once seen him smile, or frown, or look surprised, or look anything other than exactly the way he looked right now, which was like a man waiting for you to make a mistake so he could correct it. He had also, in those six years, been the only adult on this estate who looked me in the face when he spoke to me. The servants did not.

The instructors who'd handled my theory work had addressed the air to one side of my shoulder but Bellos had always looked at me.

"Therefore," he said, "one last assessment."

"... Yes, Instructor."

"Take a staff." I crossed to the rack and pulled a practice staff off the wall: ash wood, weighted at both ends. He watched the way I caught it. The grip, the angle, the way I shifted my feet when the weight settled in my hands. He was always watching things like that. The golden text bloomed at the edge of my vision the moment I turned back. [Quest Issued] Objective: Touch Instructor Bellos once in combat. Reward:??? (S-Class) Failure: No reward.

I blinked, but the text held steady, waiting for me to acknowledge it the way it always did. It had been months since the last one. I'd almost started to think it was done with me. I didn't fully understand what it was. I never had. It had been with me for as long as I could remember. I'd started calling it the System when I was young, because that was what it was, too many moving parts, all connected, all feeding into each other, to call it anything else.

Nana Serre was the only person I'd ever mentioned the System to. She'd listened without interrupting, put her hand on my head, and told me it sounded like a blessing from the heavens, and that I should accept what it offered and not ask too many questions about where it came from, so I had taken her advice. I had ground my way to here because of it. Whatever this thing was, it wanted me to grow, and it had its own ideas about how. S-Class, though. That was new. I'd never seen that designation before.

I moved to the centre of the hall and dropped into first stance, left foot forward, staff held low across my hip, and let the mana flow. It came the way it always came for me, as easy as breathing — what I could reach of it, anyway — filling my channels from the core outward until I could feel it humming under my skin and pooling in my hands and running down the length of the staff like water finding a groove. I fed a thin layer of reinforcement into the wood and felt it harden under my fingers.

Bellos didn't take a stance. He walked toward me, unarmed, hands open at his sides, and that was all the warning I got before the floor beneath my front foot erupted. I jumped. A jagged column of stone punched up where I had been standing, and I was already spinning in the air before it finished, pulling mana into my right palm and shaping it into a compression bolt that I fired at his chest before my boots touched the ground. He swatted it aside with a backhand wreathed in green warding light.

The bolt detonated against the far wall hard enough to crack two of the stones in the weapon rack behind him.

"Geomancy. Counter." I landed, drove the butt of the staff into the stone, and sent my will down through the wood into the floor. The ground rippled outward from the contact point in a concentric wave meant to buckle the earth under his feet. It never touched him. He was already moving — a half-turn to the left that barely looked like effort — and the ripple crumbled the floor behind him while he closed the distance to me.

He threw a punch wreathed in compressed air from three feet away, the fist never meant to connect, the pressure wave doing the work instead. It hit like a collapsed wall. I crossed my arms and layered a barrier in front of my chest, and the impact still drove me back three feet, my heels carving twin grooves into the stone.

"Wind form. Switch." Most mages couldn't do this. Most spent their entire lives inside a single discipline, the one their house had passed down through their bloodline, refined behind closed doors over generations and guarded the way a house guards its name. Bellos worked in all of them. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Nana Serre had told me about him once, in that conspiratorial whisper she used when she was sharing something she'd overheard from the elders. She said they called him the Copy Mage, because he could watch a technique performed once, understand its structure, and replicate it as though he'd been drilling it for years.

She said he was considered a prodigy, one of the most dangerous men in the kingdom, and that the only reason he was here teaching a boy in a sealed wing instead of out doing the things that geniuses did was because my grandfather had asked him to be, and when Oserys Aridis asked, people said yes. What made Bellos exceptional was his mana reserves, vast enough to sustain techniques across multiple schools without burning out. What made me exceptional, allegedly, was that my reserves were borderline inexhaustible.

The catch was that I could only reach a sliver of them. The rest of my pool lived behind a wall, and the wall never came down all at once, but in fractions. The cause was an incident that happened when I was three. Nana Serre had told me the northern wing of our estate had come down in a single afternoon. Stone, glass, the gardens around it, all of it.

Nobody had died, she had been very firm about that part, and she had repeated it to me more than once over the years to make sure it stayed in my head, but the wing was gone, and afterward, my grandfather moved me into the eastern wing and ordered the northern one left as it was. From the day after, I had not manifested such power again. The elders said it was still there. I just could not feel it.

The System would assign me a quest I had no business clearing, I would grind through it for weeks, and when I finished, the reward would arrive in a small golden number. Plus one to strength. Plus two to mana pool. Plus one to agility. Every number was a fraction of the wall dissolving, and the sliver I fought with today was the stacked result of years of those quests. A lot of mana by any normal measure, but still a sliver. Bellos switched schools between one breath and the next.

A glyph burned orange in his fingertips and a lance of fire came at my face — a Vashren technique, or close enough that a Vashren would have asked where he had learned it. I pulled the air around me into a tight vortex on instinct, and the fire hit it and spun out in a shower of embers across the floor. Bellos was through the embers before they landed. The fire had been a feint.

I realized it a fraction of a second too late, when his other hand came up low and open and a binding seal locked onto my channels and squeezed. My arms went heavy. The mana in my body stuttered and slowed. For one horrible moment it felt like trying to breathe through a wet cloth. I threw my will against the seal, found the seams where the glyph connected to itself, and tore it apart from the inside with a pulse of raw unstructured mana that blew out of my core in a visible shockwave.

Bellos stepped through the shockwave like it was a breeze. Any other mage would have had to dismantle that binding glyph by glyph, picking the structure apart with precision and training. I had flooded it instead. Crude, and Bellos would have told me so on any other day, but it had worked because when you had the kind of reserves I had, brute force was always an option. Even if it cost you. The wall pressed down the instant the shockwave left me. Harder than it had ever pressed in training.

The mana I had pulled to break the seal slipped back behind it before I could use it again, and the sliver I had been fighting with shrank. I had pushed past my ceiling for the first time I could remember, and the ceiling was pushing back.

"Reinforcement. Full body. Now." I flooded my muscles with everything I had left and the world sharpened. My reactions came up to speed, my limbs with them, and my bones and skin felt compacted and harder than they had been a second ago. I surged forward and swung the staff at his ribs with everything in me. He caught it bare-handed, one palm flat against the shaft, and the impact ran up my arms and rattled my teeth.

I twisted the staff to break his grip, and he let go, but only because his other hand was already flat against my sternum, and I felt the pulse of mana leave his palm a fraction of a second before it launched me backward across the training hall. I hit the ground rolling and came up on one knee. He was already in front of me before I could rise the rest of the way.

His hand closed around the collar of my robe, he pulled me forward and swept my legs out from under me in one motion, and I went down hard, flat on my back, the stone floor knocking the air out of my lungs. His foot came down on my staff. His other hand was open above my chest, a fully formed glyph glowing in his palm, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off it. I didn't move.

I couldn't even if I wanted to, because the wall had clamped down so far that I could barely feel my own channels, and my arms might as well have been filled with sand. He held the position for a long moment, looking down at me, then the glyph faded, and he stepped back, and his foot came off the staff. The golden text flickered. [Quest Failed] Reward: None. Smaller, underneath: [Quest remains active. Objective may be reattempted.] I lay on the floor of the training hall and stared at the ceiling and felt my heartbeat in my temples.

"You fought well." I turned my head. Bellos was standing a few feet away with his arms folded, not looking like he'd done anything more strenuous than take a walk across the room.

"Sharp enough. The examination will not test you."

"... Yes, instructor." I said, bitter to have lost our last spar.

"Do not look so disappointed, I hold the First Seal." I looked at him. There were people in the kingdom who spent their entire lives training and never reached the Third. My combat instructor was a First Seal. It made sense, when I thought about it. You didn't earn the name Copy Mage by being ordinary.

"Before you turn twenty, you will have surpassed me." Ha… haha, I did not know what to do with my face. He had not complimented me once in six years. Not for the glyph work, not for the staff forms, not for the day I'd held my own against him for nearly a full minute when I was thirteen. Now this. On the afternoon I was leaving. I sat up slowly, and bowed from where I sat, deeply, the way protocol said you should after being defeated in a duel.

When I raised my head, he had already turned back to the sword on the bench. The cloth was in his hand again. He was polishing.

"Go. You have a long road ahead of you." I bowed, and started toward the door, but halfway there, I stopped. … He had been my instructor for six years. He had not been kind, exactly, and he wasn't warm either. He had drilled me until my hands bled and corrected my footwork in the same flat voice he used to say good morning, and I had never been certain, in all of it, whether he liked me or merely tolerated me as a contractual obligation to my grandfather. But… he had been here. Every day.

Across from me in this hall. The second person, after Nana Serre, who had been in my life long enough to leave a shape in it. And now he was leaving too. So I turned.

"... Instructor?" He did not look up.

"Yes?" I opened my mouth. There were several things I might have wanted to say, but I did not know how to say any of them, because the protocols I had been taught did not have a phrase for what this was. Thank you felt too small, but anything larger would have been a thing Bellos was not in the habit of receiving, and I was not in the habit of giving, so…

"Thank you," I said. The cloth paused on the blade, briefly, then continued.

"Farewell, Howl." It was the first time he had said my name. I stood there a moment longer. He did not look up again, but I understood, without being told, that this was the version of goodbye he was capable of, and that asking for more would have been unkind to both of us. So I bowed once more to his back, and walked out. The S-Class reward was still in my vision. That meant we would see each other again, one day, one way or another. So no need for regret.

I'd spent five minutes being dismantled by this man and the idea that a second attempt would change anything was the sort of delusion I couldn't afford to carry with me to Sartheon. Before twenty, he'd said. … Fine. I kept walking.