Chương 124: Chapter 117

Cale Instructor Vehn called the end of the paired exercise and directed us to the Crucible for the practical sparring component. The lower hall was for close work. The Crucible was for everything else. The Crucible was what students called it. The academy's formal documentation referred to it as the Primary Expression Application Facility, which was the kind of name that existed to be ignored. The Crucible had been around longer than most of the faculty and was not going anywhere. It earned the name.

The structure was enormous even by the standard of a campus that did not do anything halfway. A vaulted ceiling rose high enough that the upper tier observation galleries looked like a different altitude entirely, their railings running the full circumference of the interior at two levels, the higher one reserved for faculty observation and the lower one open to students not currently in session.

The floor below was divided into twelve practice zones by embedded mana markers that ran pale gold underfoot, each zone large enough to contain a full class exercise with room to spare. The columns that supported the ceiling were Technica-reinforced stone, each one housing dampening arrays that kept Expression discharge from bleeding between zones and from reaching the outer walls. The light came from mana-integrated panels in the ceiling that adjusted output based on the density of active Expression work below.

Twelve zones. Multiple classes running simultaneously. On a busy afternoon you could watch six different disciplines from the observation gallery and not run out of things to learn. Today was a busy afternoon. Our zone was seven, third from the north wall. To our left, zone six was running a third-year Elementa Arcanum class that was currently producing visible sparks at irregular intervals.

To our right, zone eight had what appeared to be a second-year Technica integration session, students in partial armor configurations that hummed at a frequency you felt more than heard. Further out, zone three had an Aura-focused combat sparring class that was generating enough noise to wake the living and seriously bother the dead. You could see everything from zone seven. Everything in zone seven could be seen.

The other classes ignored us as we did them, though there seemed to be eyes of passing attention directed our way, some of it landing on me. You develop that instinct in a place like the Wastes. It was hard not to when just about everything you encountered could kill you. I kept my eyes on zone seven and did not look up. Petra ran the infusion again on the Crucible floor and was still having problems with her flow, so I helped her adjust the pressure on her channels. It worked better.

She tried again and we made another adjustment. Then again after her next attempt. By her fifth try and fourth adjustment she pushed through and activated all three primary systems, flooding each with Aura which came out much stronger because her mana purity was sharpening in real time. I had not meant to do that. I forgot that my mana has a tendency to make others stronger. I considered it and decided I was fine with it. No one would notice.

Petra's three primary systems lit up simultaneously and held for a full count before releasing cleanly. Several people in zone seven had stopped working to watch. Several people in zone six kept up the pretense but were just as entranced. I found this strange. What did everyone else do when they were trying to purify and work through their own system, but test, clean, restrain, and move back to the process? How else did they improve their Expression application or mana purity?

Sure, I had a clear advantage, but they did not know that. The process was still somewhat the same even if I skipped a few steps. A girl with copper hair moved toward Petra, eyes wide, a smile on her face.

"Petra, that was incredible. A week ago your channels barely flowed. Now you have one of the clearest Aura applications I have seen. What did he do to you?"

"Combined technique," Petra said. She was still looking at her hands.

"He threaded Aura and Sanatio and moved through my channels from the inside." The girl with copper hair's jaw dropped.

"I did not know that was even possible." I shrugged.

"Advanced Sanatio users do it all the time, but it is a lot harder if you do not properly integrate the Aura into the thread, which admittedly is more difficult than it looks." The copper-haired girl looked at me. Her name was Senne. She sat three rows ahead of me in Theory of Applied Expression and asked questions that were actually insightful, though she had a habit of dressing them up as simple ones.

She had a calibration issue in the upper meridian chain that was causing her output to bleed before it reached application. Her channels were scattering the mana in ways that cut her effectiveness roughly in half, which was a real shame because she had good purity. She did not ask. She just looked.

"Upper chain," I said.

"You have a meridian bleed, not a blockage. Different fix." She blinked.

"How did you—""Your Aura signature when you run infusion has an obvious bleed pattern. Visible if you know what to look for." She crossed to where we were standing and gave me a tentative look.

"Can you help me? I have been trying to understand and fix this for two years." I studied her for a moment, reluctant to draw more attention. Then decided, what the hell. I took her hand and placed my fingers at her wrist, measuring her mana flow and mapping the bleed through her system. She had formed her Aura core in her upper chest, which was a unique placement. I traced the meridians, which were unusually thick, and followed the pattern until I found the problem. There it was, exactly where I expected it.

I spent four minutes on the bleed issue. Bleed problems, once fixed, required the practitioner to do most of the retraining themselves to recondition their flow and deal with the more effective cycling. She should see her mana usage and Expression conversion improve by close to half. I showed her where the mana bleed was happening and ran a thread through to demonstrate the corrected pathway, then fixed it and ran through the application twice. By the second pass she had it.

By the time I stepped back from Senne there were three more people waiting. Then five. I helped them. A second-year with overcorrected Fortis reinforcement that was compressing her channels through over-application when she had not properly laid the foundational Aura first. If she did not fix that she was going to damage her own mana channels. I showed her the correct application and walked her through the technique, which was a common correction for strong Aura users.

I then helped a girl named Rielle whose Kinetica output was inconsistent because she had learned the technique from a resource with a fundamental error in the core instruction set. A third student whose problem I identified in thirty seconds and fixed in forty-five had taken a heavy injury to his Arcanum core that was affecting his processing. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. At some point Instructor Vehn stopped running the formal exercise and started watching.

I had suddenly become something of a spectacle. Students from zone six had drifted to the edge of our zone marker. Then students from zone eight. The Technica armor class had gone quiet. Even zone three's sparring class had lost some of its noise. After I finished I had most of the Crucible staring at us.

"What are they looking at?" I said to Petra, as I scanned their faces.

"You. We were just running Advanced Aura and Sanatio applications, fixing people with all sorts of problems. I cannot even fully explain what you were doing, but you were doing it better than our town healer and he has sixty years of experience with Aura and Sanatio." Petra looked at me steadily.

"Cale, who the hell are you?" I was saved from answering by the instructor calling the sparring component. In practice the formal rotation had dissolved because the people who had been helped wanted to test the corrections in application, and the people who had not been helped had shifted into a configuration that clearly meant they were waiting. A broad-shouldered third-year named Oswin stepped into the cleared space and looked at me. He was good.

He had trained seriously since he was young, and he had won enough to have opinions about it. He was also radiating a competitive energy I had seen before, along with furtive glances at the girls in the class.

"Practical application," he said.

"Since we are apparently doing that." Everyone backed away to the edges of the grid. He stood in the middle, put up his hand, and waved me forward. I raised an eyebrow, amused.

"Sure. Why not." We squared up, bowed, and he took a fighting stance.

"Oswin Karst. Third year, two-core practitioner." I took my own stance.

"Cale Arcanus. Two and a half... uh." I paused.

"Good to meet you." Oswin blinked at me. I moved on. He settled deeper into his stance, knees bent forward, arms up. I watched Fortis reinforcement flare along his elbows, wrists, and fists alongside Kinetica Aura in his legs. Effective. Clearly practiced. The combination was tight, far less flashy than Sarien's overwhelming style. I paused at the thought of Sarien. It had been a while. I should check in. I was about to reach for my standard Aura and Elementa Arcanum mix but then decided I should give a handicap.

I am the Ghost of the Wastes after all. I settled on purely Ventus Elementa Arcanum. Close-quarter control, the style my master called the Fist of the Pocket Wind. I doubted that was the real name. She had terrible naming sense. I used to tease her about it all the time. I settled into neutral stance as he closed the distance. The wind caught Oswin in pockets of condensed air.

I shifted the pressure around his movements with extended arm positions that looked a bit ridiculous, all wide sweeping gestures, but I knew how effective this style could be. My master used to love it when she was trying to avoid hurting her opponent and wanted to be a bit flashy. The interplay between us was more like a dance than a spar. Oswin pressed, and I continued with the subtle redirection at the wrist, long cutting movements of hands and feet keeping him off-angle.

He lost ground as we stepped and quickly got frustrated. He came in with a reinforced hammer blow, which I caught with a snake twist of my arm, the following adjustment to his positioning causing his back foot to shift by three degrees. Three degrees was enough. The strike went where I was not, and Oswin's momentum carried him past me, and I stepped around him in no hurry and waited. I could have attacked his back. I did not.

He skidded and lost his balance but recovered almost instantly and returned to opening position. He stared at me. Unsure. We went four exchanges. By the third he had figured out the wind was coming but not where, which was better than most people managed. He started trying to compensate. The compensation was interesting. He was adapting in real time, the mark of someone actually good rather than just trained. On the fourth exchange I let him get close enough to feel what close felt like and then stepped out of it.

He stopped. Looked at me. Nodded once, filing the information rather than conceding the point.

"Ventus," he said.

"Yes."

"Just Ventus."

"A bit of Aura. I cannot help it. It is a habit."

"Why do I feel like you were not really trying."

"Do not be ridiculous. It was a good fight. Your Fortis and Kinetica combination is more controlled than most at your level. Keep working the layering and you are going to be something special." He nodded and stepped back with a bow. The class was staring at me again. What did I do this time? That was not even particularly flashy.

"Who else would like to spar with Mr. Arcanus?" Every hand in the room went up. I sighed. The next person stepped in before the space had fully settled. What followed was not a brawl and it was not a proper sparring rotation. It was something in between, the class reorganizing around a center point which happened to be where I was standing, people cycling in and out with varying levels of intention and skill and exactly one consistent result. I kept the Ventus subtle.

I kept the Sanatio reinforcement at habit level rather than application. I moved the minimum required distance, used the minimum required output, and made certain nobody landed on anything that would leave a mark. Nobody landed on anything that would leave a mark. The drift from other zones had become a genuine audience. Students who had no class connection to zone seven were standing at the zone markers, watching. They had found something worth it. Some of them were upperclassmen.

Some of them were clearly from the third-year combat track. A small cluster near the north marker appeared to be arguing about something in low voices, though the argument had the quality of people who agreed on the substance and were debating the framing. Above, in the lower observation gallery, the railing was significantly more occupied than it had been when we arrived. Instructor Vehn had moved to the edge of the floor. He had decided, professionally, to observe and document rather than step in.

Rielle came back for a second round and lasted longer than her first, which was the point. The third-year with the Kinetica subspecialty made me work slightly harder than the previous six, which I appreciated. Senne, when her turn came, was running her corrected calibration in live application for the first time. She was faster than she thought she was. This surprised her. It did not surprise me. Petra did not come back into the rotation.

She stood at the edge and watched, as focused as she was on everything else, and I had the impression she was learning more from watching than most of the participants learned from taking part. I was somewhere in the middle of the session when I noticed that one person in the lower observation gallery had not moved since we arrived. He leaned against the railing, relaxed, in no hurry.

He had taken the one spot in the room where he could see everything and be required to do nothing, and it did not look like an accident. Dark clothing. His stillness read different from Petra's, less analysis than amusement, the amusement of a man watching something the rest of the room had not caught yet. Kaereth Valmor. His own class, whatever it was, appeared to have continued without him.

He had simply stopped participating in it and relocated to the gallery, watching zone seven, more interested in it than in whatever he was supposed to be doing. He had not come down to the floor. The exchange I was currently in ended. The next person stepped in. I handled it. Kaereth watched. Instructor Vehn finally called the session. The rotation dissolved. People drifted toward their gear with the energy of a room that had collectively experienced something it was still processing.

The audience at the zone markers dispersed slowly, like people not quite ready to stop looking at something. I collected my things.

"Ventus only," said a voice from beside me, which was closer than it should have been given that Kaereth Valmor had been in the observation gallery one level up a moment ago. He had come down very quietly. I looked at him.

"Mostly," I said.

"The Aura reinforcement is below application threshold," he said.

"That was more out of habit than technique. Which means you were running essentially nothing except Ventus Elementa Arcanum in a hand to hand style that is basic only exclusively on redirection. You did that for the better part of an hour against most of the class." He paused.

"And nobody landed a clean strike."

"One or two came close," I said.

"The third-year with the Kinetica subspecialty," Kaereth agreed.

"He is better than he presents. Someone told him that showing what you actually have is a tactical error and he took it too seriously." He looked at me. It was close to scrutiny without quite being it.

"Why Ventus."

"It was what the class was covering." He smiled, and the smile said the answer was technically accurate and entirely insufficient.

"Of course," he said.

"My mistake." He picked up nothing because he had brought nothing down from the gallery, which meant the whole descent had been purely to have this conversation, and he walked toward the exit, unhurried, having gotten what he came for. He left.

I stood in the emptying Crucible and looked at the door for a moment and then looked at the floor and then picked up the last of my things and walked out in the opposite direction, and I did not think about what Kaereth Valmor was actually saying, and I was not successful at it at all.