The Advanced Mana Control Lab was a vast and climate-controlled amphitheater designed to contain catastrophic spell failures. The walls were lead-lined and reinforced with obsidian-glass, designed to absorb kinetic discharge. The air always smelled faintly of ozone and heated copper. It was a sterile, intimidating place that felt less like a classroom and more like a bomb disposal range.
Usually, the class was a mix of aspects working on precision: fire-mages lighting candles from across the room, or wind-users hovering needles. Today, however, Professor Elara Vance had made a specific cut. While the majority of the class worked on delicate third-circle resonance drills in the main area, Elara had pulled eight specific students to the heavily reinforced eastern sector.
They were not necessarily the biggest students in the class. Physical size did not mean much at Zenith. What unified this group was the catastrophic nature of their internal mana. They were the ones whose reinforcement was too explosive, too dense, or too chaotic for delicate work. They were the blunt instruments in a school of scalpels.
"The problem with modern mana theory," Elara lectured as she paced before the line of problem students, "is that it assumes competence. It assumes you have a dimmer switch on your soul. You eight do not. You have floodgates connected to oceans."
She stopped in front of Valerica Sol and Vane.
"Today we are learning impact mitigation so you stop destroying academy property with accidental discharges. You will pair up. One will generate force at fifty percent output. The other will mitigate it using reinforced structure. No Skills. Just manual regulation."
She pointed a stylus at Valerica and then at Vane.
"Gravity. Slum rat. You are together. Try not to break my building."
Vane stepped into the sparring circle opposite Valerica Sol. His hands were throbbing. The blisters from the previous night's training with the broom were raw under his gloves, and a low-level tremor was still vibrating in his radius and ulna bones. It was the Hum. It hadn't left him since he first initiated the Spiral Circulation in the fog.
Valerica was not physically massive. She was tall and athletically built, but she did not look like a giant. Her presence, however, was suffocating. Up close, the air around her felt unnaturally heavy. It was a constant low-grade gravitational pressure that made Vane's inner ears itch. It felt like standing next to an incredibly dense statue that happened to be breathing. Her expression was, as always, bored granite.
"Don't crumble," Valerica grunted by way of greeting.
"Try not to trip over your own gravity," Vane shot back.
They began the drill. Vane set his stance. Without the [Dagger Arts] skill guiding his mana, he had to manually open the floodgates of his wide, scarred channels to reinforce his arm. He tried to crack the valve to halfway.
Instead, the gate ripped open. A torrent of reinforcement mana flooded his right arm. His skin flushed an angry red and the air hummed around his fist as it became harder than steel. He threw the punch.
It was not fifty percent. It was nearly everything he had. It was a clumsy strike fueled by panic and too much juice—a supersonic vector without a guidance system. Valerica did not blink. She raised a hand. Her palm glowed with a dense, purple-grey light.
CRACK.
The impact sounded like a thunderclap in the enclosed space. Vane's reinforced fist hit her palm and the shockwave blew his own hair back. He felt the bones in his forearm groan under the stress of the sudden stop. Valerica did not budge a millimeter. Her physical frame was not huge, but her mana made her heavier than the building itself. The reinforced rubber floor mat beneath her boots, however, compressed with a sharp hiss. Spiderweb cracks appeared in the surface from the transferred force.
Elara checked a holographic display. "Vane. Ninety-two percent output. Valerica. Absorption successful but your density crushed the sensors embedded in the floor again. Failure for both."
"My turn," Valerica said.
Vane braced himself. He pumped mana into his forearms to create a standard reinforced guard. He crossed his arms in front of his chest. He prepared to be a wall.
'Hold the line,' he thought. 'Just take the hit.'
Valerica drew her fist back. It did not look physically imposing, but the light around her hand warped inward, pulling the very air toward her knuckles. She threw the punch. It looked slow. It looked almost lazy.
THOOM.
It felt like being hit by a falling planet. There was no sharp pain, just an overwhelming and impossible weight crushing his defense. Vane's reinforced guard collapsed instantly. He was lifted off his feet and launched backward. He skidded ten feet across the mats until he slammed into the containment field, which flared bright orange.
He slid down the energy wall gasping for air. His arms felt like pulp.
Elara looked at the monitor while pinching the bridge of her nose. "Valerica. I asked for fifty percent. That registered as a minor seismic event."
Valerica shrugged. She looked mildly annoyed at her own hand. "It felt like fifty. My mana is heavy."
The rest of the hour went much the same. The remedial group battered each other around their enclosure. Vane could not regulate his explosive bursts; he either hit too soft or tried to put his fist through Valerica's chest. Valerica could not turn her natural density off; every movement carried devastating conceptual weight. They were battered and sweating and equally frustrated by the ease with which the other students were controlling their power.
"Final drill," Elara announced, sounding exhausted by proxy. "Live resistance. Low speed. Focus on mitigation over power."
Vane dragged himself back to the center of the ring. His arms were shaking from the impacts. His bones felt brittle.
Valerica stepped in. Her purple eyes were calm. "Tired already, rat?"
"Just warming up, heavy-feet."
She came at him. It was slow as instructed, but a slow hook from the Gravity Titan still felt like an inevitable disaster. Vane watched the fist coming. His thief instincts screamed at him to use [Flash Step] to get behind her. But that was the old way. That was running.
His new instincts, the ones he had tried to use earlier, told him to block. To plant his feet and brace for impact.
'No,' Vane thought. The memory of the stone flying at his face in the fog garden flashed in his mind. 'If I stop moving, she breaks me. She is heavier than I am. A wall cannot stop a mountain.'
He didn't think about it consciously. His body, which was aching and exhausted, reverted to the groove that had been beaten into it over the last week of agony in the fog.
'Don't stop,' Senna's voice whispered in his head. 'Velocity is armor.'
He didn't plant his feet. He dropped his hips and began to rotate. He didn't raise his arms in a static block. He began to cycle his forearms in a tight circular motion, mimicking the path of the spear shaft—initiating the Lunar Deflection.
Valerica's heavy fist connected with his forearm. But Vane's arm wasn't there to stop her. It was moving.
SHHH-THUMP.
It wasn't a crack. It was the sound of friction. Vane didn't try to halt the mass of her punch. He caught it on the Cyclic Resonance of his arm and spun with it. He pivoted on the ball of his foot, turning his body ninety degrees.
He used the centrifugal force of his own rotation to guide her fist past his chest. Valerica stumbled. It was a small stumble, just a single step forward to catch her balance because the resistance she expected wasn't there. Her fist slid harmlessly off Vane's rotating guard and punched the empty air beside his ear.
Vane completed the rotation. He was now standing on her flank. He was perfectly balanced. His arms were still moving in a slow, rhythmic guard. He hadn't stopped the unstoppable object. He had just convinced it to go somewhere else.
Valerica straightened up. She looked at her own fist and then she looked at Vane. A flicker of genuine surprise crossed her stony face.
"Huh," she grunted.
The bell rang, ending the session. Elara dismissed them. The students filed out. The majority looked relatively fresh while the remedial group looked like they had been run over by siege engines.
Vane walked toward the exit, grabbing a towel to wipe the sweat and trace amounts of blood from his face. He felt a heavy presence pull up alongside him. Valerica walked next to him. They did not speak for a long time, moving through the gleaming halls of the main campus like two pieces of rough iron that had fallen off a truck.
They reached the junction where the path split toward the dorms.
"You stopped bouncing," Valerica said suddenly. Her voice was low, rough gravel.
Vane looked up at her. She wasn't looking at him. She was staring straight ahead.
"Kael said you fought like a panicked bird," she continued. "Back there. When I threw the hook. You didn't run. But you didn't plant either." She made a vague circular motion with her heavy hand. "You spun. It was... slippery."
"I got tired of flying across the room," Vane said vaguely. "Figured I would let you do the work."
Valerica nodded once, accepting the non-answer. "At least you are still standing," she muttered. "Most of them just crumble when I touch them. It is boring."
She turned toward the high-tier dorms without another word. Vane watched her go. It wasn't friendship. They were just two disasters trapped in the same cage acknowledging that the other one was solid enough to survive the drill.
He looked at his hands. The tremor was still there. But now he understood why Senna demanded the motion. Static strength had limits. Vane would never be as strong as Valerica. If he tried to be a wall, she would always break him.
But velocity? Velocity had no weight class. If he spun fast enough, even a mountain could be deflected.
He turned the other way. He headed not for his villa, but toward the misty edge of the campus. He needed to tell Senna that the engine had worked.