With sixty-seven cycles until the Grand Melee, the nature of their training shifted from a general struggle for survival into a focused, targeted regimen. The Gilded Cage, with its endless supply of varied opponents and its relative stability, became their new, temporary base of operations. They did not establish a camp. To do so would be to create a target. Instead, they became ghosts, a small, cohesive unit that moved through the city's shadows, using the Undercroft as their sanctuary and the upper plazas as their training ground.
The Cartographer had given them access to a series of 'dead-drops,' hidden caches and safe rooms throughout the Undercroft that he used for his own operations. These became their nightly refuge, places to rest, plan, and study the codex without fear of being ambushed.
Olivia's primary role became that of a coach and a strategist. Her dual Aspects gave her a unique ability to analyze a fight. Her core power allowed her to read the true story of a conflict, while the Unspoken Lie allowed her to see all the potential deceptions, feints, and misdirections. She could watch two strangers duel in the plaza and deconstruct their battle into a sequence of questions and answers, of statements and rebuttals.
Her first and most difficult student was Elara. The shieldmaiden's grief had been forged into a weapon of pure, cold fury. In combat, she was a terrifying sight. She no longer just defended; she attacked with her shield, using its inverted, concussive pulse to shatter formations and using its edges as a brutal, crushing weapon. She was a juggernaut. But she was also reckless. She would put herself in harm's way, her own survival a secondary concern to the destruction of her enemies. Her new story was one of vengeance, and it was a story that could easily have a very short, tragic ending.
"You're fighting angry," Olivia told her after one brutal sparring session where Elara had easily overpowered Silas, but had left herself open to a dozen theoretical killing blows. "You're trying to end the fight. You need to focus on controlling it."
"Lorcan is dead because I wasn't strong enough to end the fight," Elara bit back, her voice cold. "Never again."
Olivia knew that direct argument was useless. She had to edit the narrative. "You're right," she said, a statement that surprised both Elara and Silas. "You weren't strong enough. But what you think of as strength is just force. Lorcan's strength was his precision. He never wasted a shot. Your shield is a wall, Elara. But a wall can be weathered down. A wall can be climbed. The assassin didn't break your shield; he went around it by breaking Lorcan. Your defense needs to be smarter. It needs to defend not just your body, but your mind. Your team."
She began to train Elara not just as a warrior, but as an anchor. She would use her illusions to create chaotic, multi-pronged attacks, phantoms of assassins striking from the shadows, illusions of artillery fire raining from the sky. Elara's task was not to defeat them, but to create a zone of absolute, undeniable truth in the middle of the storm of lies. She learned to shape her shield, not just as a dome or a wall, but as a fluid, shifting barrier. She learned to feel the narrative of an attack and create a defense that specifically countered its story. She was slowly, painfully, transforming her grief from a blunt instrument of rage into a sharp, intelligent tool of protection. Her story was changing from 'Vengeance' to 'Sanctuary.'
Silas, in contrast, had the opposite problem. His power was subtle, a story of endings and decay. In a chaotic melee, it was too slow, too focused. He was a master of the patient duel, but in a brawl against ten opponents, he was vulnerable.
"You think of your power as a touch," Olivia told him, as he practiced his rule-decay on scraps of metal in their safe room. "You are a poet writing a final, elegant verse for an object. The Melee is not a poetry reading. It's a shouting match. You need to learn how to scream."
She, with the help of the codex's knowledge, began to teach him how to weaponize the 'dissonance' he had discovered. Instead of focusing his power on a single target, she taught him to create an area-of-effect narrative. He learned to project a story of 'wrongness' into the very air, a field of entropy that didn't just decay objects, but interfered with the stability of manifested Aspects.
His first successful attempt was during a street fight they had stumbled into. A warrior with an Aspect of Living Flame was about to incinerate his opponent. Silas, from a rooftop above, cast his new power. The warrior's flames, a story of pure, hot rage, suddenly sputtered, their color shifting to a sickly green. The narrative of 'wrongness' had infected the story of the fire, making it unstable, unreliable. The fire-wielder looked at his hands in confusion, his ultimate weapon having just betrayed him. Silas had not attacked him directly, but he had edited his ability to fight. He was learning to be a saboteur, a debuffer, a wrench in the gears of his enemies' power.
Echo served as their living encyclopedia and sparring partner. It held the combat data of millions of fighters. Olivia would have it manifest the simulacrums of different opponents, and they would train against them. They fought the disciplined charges of the Iron Legion, the chaotic assaults of the Wild Hunt, the esoteric energy blasts of forgotten mages. Echo could replicate their styles with chilling accuracy, its golden, holographic form a perfect, tireless opponent.
But Echo's most important role was in observing Olivia herself.
"Your dual-Aspect integration is inefficient," it stated one cycle, after Olivia had successfully defeated a simulacrum of a high-level beast-tamer. "You are treating them as two separate tools. You switch between the story of 'context' and the story of 'the lie.' This creates a fractional delay in your reaction time. A delay that a true top-tier opponent will exploit."
"How do I combine them?" Olivia asked. She had felt the disconnect herself, a mental 'gear shift' as she moved from one power to the other.
"They are already combined," Echo replied. "Your struggle is in your perception. You see truth and lies as opposites. This is a flawed, sentimental viewpoint. From a data-driven perspective, a lie is simply a piece of information that does not correlate with the current reality-state. It is a potential truth. A future truth. Or a past truth. Your power is not 'context' and 'lies.' Your power," it said, its voice holding that strange, resonant quality it took on when it was processing a profound piece of data, "is the control of information. The true story is just the accepted data set. A lie is a proposed edit to that data set. They are the same function, viewed from different angles."
The construct's words hit her with the force of a physical blow. It was a revelation that completely reframed her understanding of herself. She had been seeing her powers as a moral choice, a balance between her true self and the dark tool she had acquired. But Echo was right. From a purely functional standpoint, they were two sides of the same coin. Her core Aspect read the existing information. Her second Aspect wrote new information. Reader and writer. It was that simple.
The realization unlocked a new level of control. She stopped thinking in terms of switching between modes. She began to see the battlefield as a single, fluid text. She could read an opponent's attack—a charging warrior with a flaming sword—and simultaneously edit the ground in front of him to be ice, while also editing the air around his sword to be damp and cold, weakening his flame. It was a seamless, instantaneous process of reading, analyzing, and rewriting reality.
The four of them were changing. They were no longer a desperate band of survivors. Elara was becoming a bastion of absolute, intelligent defense. Silas was becoming a master of narrative sabotage. And Olivia was becoming a true reality-editor, a warrior who fought not with her sword, but with the very story of the battle itself. Echo, the construct, the lie who had started as her guide, was now her most important teacher.
They were getting stronger. They were becoming a cohesive, terrifyingly efficient unit. But as the countdown to the Grand Melee ticked down, Olivia knew that their individual growth was only one part of the equation. The true test would be whether their new, combined story would be powerful enough to survive the brutal, bloody poetry of the Proving Grounds' greatest, most violent event.