It sank.
Not in speed. In intent. The clean academy arcs flattened into lines meant to break bones regardless of their neatness. He struck Eleres's sword aside with a beat that numbed the hand to the wrist and followed with a hook of the guard that slammed into Eleres's jaw. Stars burst; the world tilted.
Varran stepped through to finish it.
Eleres went low.
He threw himself into the space between the instructor's legs, rolled, and came up inside the guard. His blade rose under Varran's hilt, bit the leather of the grip, twisted. For a heartbeat the sword in Varran's hand felt loose—then the instructor wrenched it back with brutal efficiency and paid for that grip with blood where the leather split his palm.
They separated, chests heaving.
Around the court, the noise had gathered into a wall. Names hissed. Bets changed hands. Someone laughed once, too loud, then choked on the sound when Varran's head turned.
"Stand down," another proctor called, voice tight. "Varran—"
Varran's eyes never left Eleres. "He refused the order. He learns the cost."
Eleres's breath came cold now. The ache in his arm had become a steady burn; the cut across his cheek throbbed in time with his pulse. He flexed his fingers and felt the dagger's absence like a missing tooth. No necromancy. No second sight. Only the body the system had reforged and the instincts it had sharpened.
"Then learn with me," he said.
They collided.
Eleres took the first hit to give one back, blade snapping across Varran's knuckles hard enough to draw a grunt. Varran answered with a pommel strike that split Eleres's lip. Eleres cut for the elbow; Varran batted the blade aside and drove a knee into his gut that emptied his lungs in a locked gasp.
Eleres staggered—and in that stagger, he saw the end.
Varran committed. The sword drew back for the decisive blow, weight and line perfect.
Eleres dropped the sword.
It clanged against stone. Both of Varran's eyes flicked—one fraction. Eleres stepped into the strike barehanded, caught the instructor's wrist with both palms, and turned his whole body through the joint the way a door turns through an oiled hinge. The blade slewed off its killing line. Eleres's shoulder slammed into Varran's chest.
They crashed together.
Eleres's hand found Varran's chain again—could have taken the plate, could have torn it free to prove the point. He didn't. He shoved the man into the broken pillar and, with his other hand, snatched the fallen sword from the ground and brought its flat up beneath Varran's chin.
Frozen tableau.
A hundred heartbeats held in one.
Then Varran moved anyway.
He slammed his brow into Eleres's nose. White exploded behind Eleres's eyes. The sword wavered—Varran's gauntlet smashed into his forearm. Pain ripped. The blade fell again.
Varran's follow-up cut would have opened Eleres from collar to sternum—
Cedric's shout cracked across the yard. "Enough!"
It bought the half-breath Eleres needed. He twisted, and the blade sheared a shallow, burning line instead of a fatal one. He answered blind, on reflex, with a short, vicious punch to the wound he'd made in Varran's ribs earlier.
They broke apart, both listing.
Blood ribboned down Varran's side. Blood ran from Eleres's nose and arm and lip. Neither looked victorious. Both looked like men who had thrown themselves against a wall and found the wall willing to throw back.
"Stand down!" The chief proctor's voice finally thundered, power layered into the command. The field guards clanged the hafts of their halberds against the stone as they rushed the rim.
Varran's blade dipped. Eleres's hands lowered.
For a few long seconds, no one spoke. Then the chief proctor turned, cold fury controlled to a blade's edge. "Instructor Varran. You will remove yourself from the field."
A ripple of shock went through the deck. Varran's jaw flexed, but he saluted once, sharp, and stepped back, blue cloak torn and dark with blood.
The chief proctor faced Eleres. His gaze took in the slashes, the bruises, the calm that hadn't cracked even when bone nearly had. "Cadet. Present your plates."
Eleres opened his palm. The brass ovals gleamed, more than he'd had when the fight began—but not the most in the arena. Not the least.
The proctor's scribe hurried to tally. Numbers murmured up.
"Recorded," the chief said. He paused. "You will report to the infirmary. Then to the evaluation hall."
He didn't praise. He didn't condemn. He moved on, voice rising to declare the mixed trial's end, to order the remaining candidates to the exit gates, to summon the handlers to retrieve the injured and the stubborn.
Only then did the noise return—like air rushing back into a chamber that had been sealed.
Taron pushed through the fringe, face pale with sweat and dirt, eyes wide as a boy who had watched a legend leave footprints in mud. "You—are you—"
"I'm fine," Eleres said, which was almost true if one discounted the taste of iron filling his mouth.
Cedric reached them moments later, gaze cutting once toward Varran's retreating back. "You just picked a fight with an instructor," he said softly, somewhere between incredulity and respect. "And didn't lose."
Eleres wiped his lip with the back of his hand, looked down at the smear of red, and let the smallest of smiles touch his mouth. "Looked like a draw to me."
"Draws aren't common here," Cedric muttered. "People will have opinions."
"They always do," Eleres said.
Above, on the deck, the hawk-nosed examiner set down her quill. "Note it," she told the scribe. "Tactical control under pressure. Terrain utilization. Refusal to be cowed."
"And insubordination?" the scribe asked, nervous.
She considered. "Or refusal to be bent. The difference," she added dryly, "is whether he wins enough to make us proud of it."
Down on the stone, Karven clutched his side and watched Eleres go, hatred smoldering through pain. At his elbow, a junior proctor whispered, "Should've left him to the instructor."
Karven didn't answer. His smile was thin and wrong.
Eleres turned toward the gate, plates heavy in his hand, arm heavier at his side. The arena's light felt whiter now, the edges of things too sharp. He walked without hurry, each step measured across the scarred ground.
He had not used old power. He had not needed borrowed sight.
And he had learned something he'd suspected since the day the system gave him back to the world: when men decided which rules mattered, they did so after they decided which men mattered.
He had not lost. He had not quite won. But the field, the deck, the whispering corridors already knew his name.
And beyond the infirmary, beyond the evaluation hall, the path he'd chosen waited—darker, narrower, crowded with eyes that would try to cut his shadow from his heels.
He stepped into it anyway.