The stone hit the tree trunk with a dull thud, utterly graceless, and rolled miserably into the grass.
"No. That's not it."
ZE-RAK narrowed his eyes, a dull frustration twisting his gut. Sitting apart from the camp in the bluish twilight, he was making his body repeat the instinctive dodge that had saved his skin from the arrow. But nothing worked. His mind remained stubbornly empty, his body, slow and disconnected, refused to reproduce the magic that had inhabited it.
The incident from the afternoon haunted him. That reflex wasn't one. It was knowledge. An absolute and inexplicable certainty, sprung from the void, that had preceded the danger. As if another version of himself, living a fraction of a second in the future, had whispered a warning.
"Concentrate," he growled to himself, picking up another, smoother stone.
He threw it high into the air and followed its trajectory, trying to feel the moment it would fall, to anticipate the impact before it happened, to trigger that internal alert. Nothing. The stone fell heavily at his feet, inert and mute.
"Tss. Stupid."
He stood up abruptly, anger taking hold of him. This sudden quest seemed hopeless, childish. Was it just a coincidence? A survival instinct heightened by the ambient paranoia? He had much more important things to think about: his mother, his sister, surviving here, facing MASSI. Preparing for tomorrow's EVALA class.
"It's a coincidence. Luck. Nothing more," he muttered, heading towards his hut, determined to chase these thoughts from his mind.
But the doubt was now a tenacious seed. It had germinated, and its roots dug deep, constantly reminding him of that sensation of knowing.
---
The next day, the camp awoke in relative calm. It was a day without official classes, left to the apprentices' initiative to train or rest. An ideal day to blend into the crowd and observe.
For ZE-RAK, rest was out of the question. Sitting on his straw bed, back straight, he stared at the earthen wall of his hut, his mind in silent turmoil. Tomorrow, the EVALA class. With MASSI. The name alone sent a wave of cold, black anger rising in him, which he immediately pushed back. He must not let himself be distracted. Hatred was a fire that consumed the one who carried it. He needed all his lucidity.
He closed his eyes, taking a deep breath, seeking flat calm within himself. Then he reopened them, his gaze emptying of all light, of all external focus, turning inward, toward the unknown.
"Alright. Let's start from the beginning."
And the world around him faded.
Not a fog, but a dissolution. The sounds of the camp—muffled laughter, distant axe blows—were extinguished. The smell of earth and thatch was replaced by a mineral dryness. The gloom of the hut became a harsh, white light that had no source.
An infinite desert of sand stretched out in his mind. The silence was absolute, crushing. The sun, high and pale, gave off no heat. And facing him, a blurry, flickering silhouette took shape: an agouti.
Not the real agouti from MOUGBE's lesson, but a creation of his mind, an amalgam of all the learned details. "The agouti is wary... very sharp hearing. I must be discreet." In his world, ZE-RAK became a shadow. He advanced, learning to place his foot, to control his breathing, to become an element of the landscape. The agouti's silhouette startled, ears pricked, and disappeared down an imaginary burrow before he could take a second step.
"Too loud... Again."
The scene reset. The sand was smooth, virgin. The agouti reappeared. Again and again. He learned perfect stillness, the patience of a stone. He became a rock, then a bush. Failures followed one another, but each time, he adjusted, refined. His mind recorded the data, recalibrated the model.
Then came the strategy.
"Nuts. I need to bait it. Where? Near its burrow? But if it's not inside, how to know?"
The scene changed. He saw his own hands, pale and almost translucent in this world, burying nuts near a hole. Then the wait. Long, interminable. The sun didn't move. Nothing. Frustration rose, but it was just another piece of data, analyzed, then discarded.
"Tss, so you also have to rely on luck, on habits. What a pain. No total control."
He tried something else. Following tracks. His mind, sharpened by monastic concentration, became a scanner, generating fictional droppings, crumpled blades of grass, half-erased footprints. He learned to read the ground, to reconstruct a path.
Suddenly, without warning, a clear and sharp sequence erupted, different from the others. It wasn't constructed, thought out; it was given, like an imported memory. The agouti appeared, wary. It stopped. Raised its head. Stayed motionless for a precise time. Sat back down. Advanced three precise steps, stopped again to scratch the ground.
ZE-RAK, in his simulation, held his breath. That's it. Its pattern. Its vigilance routine.
In his head, he adjusted his position accordingly. He raised his arm, holding a spear that didn't exist, a ghost weapon. He calculated the wind (non-existent), the distance, the flight time.
The agouti took its third step.
ZE-RAK threw.
The imaginary spear sliced through the silent air and stuck in the sand, right where the animal should have been.
But the agouti had already leaped, disappearing into a crevice that hadn't existed a second before.
"Too slow. The decision. And too predictable. The angle was wrong. Let's start over."
Hours passed. The sun outside, the real one, rose and then began its descent, ignoring the motionless sun of the inner desert. ZE-RAK was still sitting, his gaze piercing an invisible point in the void of his hut, his body as still as a statue. No mental fatigue showed on his face, only an intense concentration, a cold obsession burning from within. Sweat beaded on his temples, not from physical effort, but from the immense cognitive expenditure.
He explored, tested, failed, and started over. It was a laboratory without limits, and he was its sole master, the subject and the experimenter. He was no longer trying to reproduce the dodge; he understood that was just a manifestation. He was seeking the mechanism. The lever to activate.
He was so absorbed that he didn't see the night truly fall. He didn't feel the evening chill penetrate the hut. He didn't feel that tomorrow, in the real world, facing MASSI, his body would perhaps know things his conscious mind still ignored, nourished by the thousands of failed simulations and the few fleeting successes of this day.
He didn't know that the border between his imagination and reality, already porous, had just become terribly thin. The desert waited, silent, to cross the threshold.