I woke to voices muffled, low, the kind that argues without wanting the patient to hear everything. Pain still lived in me, but it had retreated from screaming to a steady, angry thrum. The world was a soft-edged painting; light bled at the corners.
"....he needs a healer," Darius said, voice tight. Not the teasing baritone from the training yard. This had teeth.
"No potions for weakness and certainly no healers." Father answered. The words were flat, measured. Even half-conscious, I knew the timbre: Aureon Valencrest, always the damper of pleas. The air behind his voice was colder than the room.
Darius didn't back down. "He's D-ranked. You can't forget that. You forget that we were Master-A, that his body isn't built like ours. A broken rib doesn't close with pride. Why are you even going this hard on him ? You've been treating him like this since we left for the military, it's not his fault Mother....."
A silence. Something metallic clicked in the background — a guard shifting, boots on stone. Alfred, maybe. The old steward never spoke unless summoned.
"Respect yourself boy , or I will put you in your place".Father said finally. The phrase landed like an edge. It wasn't a request. It wasn't even anger. It was a promise of consequence if the line was crossed.
Darius' tone changed; fury folded into control. "Yes, father." The reply was sharp enough to cut his anger in two.
A soft sound Aria's, and I made out the worry threaded through it. "He passed out. We couldn't get him to steady himself , he has a serious fever and it looks like he also has a concussion. He won't be able to train like this "
"Fine," Aureon cut in. "Bring a healer. Discreet." The word carried more weight than the order itself. They should bring one. He would permit it .... an exception. The household had rules, and he bent them when it suited the House. It told me two things: one, whatever woke in me worried him; two, Darius was close to burning away his patience.
I drifted under that, and the world narrowed to the sound of my own heartbeat. My ribs protested; some internal corner still bled. The pain was a map of where the night had struck me — a geography of bruises.
When I woke properly the healer was there: a thin woman with pale hands and a quiet face. She smelled of herbs and hot water; she moved like someone whose life was constant patchwork. No flashy regalia. No miracle vial. Just expertise.
"Relax," she murmured in a language I didn't need to parse. Her hands hovered over my flank, palms cold. I felt something like pressure and then a warmth spreading, slow as sap. The world brightened. The sting that had been constant — the one that flared every inhale — shrank like a tide pulling back.
Aria's hand found mine. Her fingers were clean and steady. "You had us worried." Her voice was small; it didn't carry the clipped Valencrest polish. It carried something else. Care. Not pity. Care that meant she would throw herself into any danger for me and then correct me for letting it happen.
Darius stood at the foot of the bed, arms crossed, angry and helpless in the way soldiers sometimes are when they love someone who doesn't want to be rescued. "You should rest. No more pushing today." He didn't ask. He ordered in the softest tone he had.
Father waited in the doorway while they tended me. He watched, unreadable. When they finished and the healer bowed to him, he inclined his head once and the healer left. Discretion observed. The house kept its image.
They stayed by my side until it was clear I was out of danger. Aria kept muttering the same, useless reassurance — "It's okay. You're okay." Darius threw in a line about not dying before the trials and something about shame, but it landed different this time: not as a threat but a brittle shield against fear.
They left the room with a noise like a sigh. Door clicked. Patrolled footsteps receded. Silence folded back in.
I watched the ceiling and tasted iron at the back of my mouth, and for a moment my chest felt too empty for thought. Then the old calculation began again, slow and stubborn: what I had taken in, what the Architect had fed me, and what could be built from it.
Reactive Step — that brief, reflexive evasion the system gave me — was crude but honest. It had come from a single night of being ground down and still managing to move when logic and instinct battled. The skill let me shave a frame off reaction time, redistributing momentum enough to avoid contact. Useful. Necessary.
But looking at the way Darius moved — the Gravemind rhythm ..raw power compression, hips and calves timed to compress aura and explode it forward — I saw vectors of force. I could model the push and the forward collapse. It was force and intent in one package.
Aria's moves were silk and shadow. The Vyre sweep didn't just hide motion. It rearranged perception with subtle aura modulation — a micro-variation in light absorption and mana waveform that blurred intent. That was precision, not brute force.
Reactive Step gave me a window; Darius' pattern supplied raw momentum; Aria's flow offered concealment and redirection.
If I could combine the three — take Reactive Step's micro-evasion, graft in Darius' momentum templates to turn evade into riposte, and overlay Aria's perception-bending buffer so a counter struck before the opponent knew where to defend — then I could do more than survive. I could start dictating the frame of battle.
It would be expensive. Every analysis took points, and every attempted assimilation burned neural threads. I'd learned that the hard way. My brain already hummed like a furnace. The smell of overcooked wiring was almost literal at the back of my skull.
But the math was clean.
Deconstruct: map Aureon's strike vector and timing down to milliseconds.
Assimilate: fold Reactive Step timing into that vector to create an anticipatory micro-step.
Augment: stitch a shadow modulation pattern a shallow waveform that misaligns the opponent's visual-cognitive sync for .08 seconds.
Result: a step that doesn't just evade but redirects force into an opening.
I let the idea sit, letting the Architect run cold permutations at the edge of awareness. The healer's work held; the pain receded to manageable.
I thought of Lyra then the memory that didn't belong to this life but cut the same. Of the warm hand I'd lost, the scream I couldn't stop. Revenge tightened my chest like another band. Not for spectacle. For proof. For memory. For making sure the ones who erased my past could not do so again.
My siblings had left me alone because they had duties, because houses mean schedules and the world doesn't wait for broken things. They had also stayed long enough to prove, in their own clipped ways, that they weren't entirely as my father was. That softness was dangerous. I kept it.
I tested a breath, shallow, and felt the Architect's hum settle like an engine idling. The plan was simple on paper. Painful in practice. Beautiful in its cold efficiency.
My eyes closed again. Sleep wanted me, honest and black. The edges of the battle plan blurred into the dark.
One step at a time, I thought, smiling privately at that old, absurd phrase. First build the foot. Then the step. Then the road they'll have to walk back on.
When the world swallowed me whole, that was the last thing I held the geometry of the strike, the shape of the evasion, the promise that pain would translate into power.