Only after Soren came to the realisation about the truth of magic circles did his eye return to normal.
And suddenly, pain detonated through his skull all at once.
Soren folded with a strangled cry, his free hand flying to his face so fast he nearly dropped the axe entirely.
It did not feel like a simple stab or burn.
It felt like his eyeball had burst inside the socket, like something had ruptured and sent white-hot fragments through the back of his head.
The suddenness of it hollowed his breath out at once.
For a moment he could not see properly.
Light smeared.
The edges of the arena darkened.
His knees hit the ground harder than he registered.
"What happened?"
Carlen's voice was much closer than before, the composure in it broken by real surprise.
Soren could not answer immediately.
His left eye felt as though it had been torn open from the inside, and every heartbeat drove another violent pulse of pain through it.
"Give… me a second…" he forced out, the words jagged and breathless.
He pressed trembling fingers harder against the eye, half-convinced he would feel blood, or something worse, and dragged in a rough breath.
"Stitch thy flesh, I end thy agony. 「Heal」."
Warm light pooled in his palm and spread into his face.
The relief was not immediate, not complete, but it dulled the agony into something survivable, dragging it down from unbearable rupture to a deep, vicious throb that still made his stomach turn.
Sweat ran cold down the back of his neck.
Slowly, with effort, Soren lifted his head.
Carlen was staring at him now, not relaxed any longer, not worried exactly, but clearly caught off guard in a way he had not been once since the duel began.
Soren got one foot under himself and pushed back up, breathing shallowly until the black at the edge of his vision receded enough for the arena to steady.
"Sorry," he said, voice rougher than he wanted. "I'm not sure what that was."
Carlen's eyes narrowed slightly.
But he did not ask for an explanation Soren did not have.
"Did you catch it?"
Those were the only words he said after a moment.
Soren swallowed once.
His eye still throbbed hard enough to make thought unpleasant, but the answer came without hesitation.
"Yes."
Somehow, impossibly, yes.
He could still remember what he had seen.
The image had not faded with the pain.
It sat in his mind with unnerving clarity, the movement of mana through Carlen's body, the branching glow of his circuits, the way the surrounding mana had been bent into place rather than simply taken.
Even now, with the strange vision gone, the memory of it felt sharper than ordinary sight.
A few long breaths passed.
Carlen did not crowd him.
He did not offer comfort, and he did not pretend that whatever had just happened was normal.
He simply waited, the same way one waited to see whether a blade had been tempered or cracked by the fire.
It was not kindness, exactly, but it was not cruelty either.
It was expectation.
Then finally, he spoke.
"Then try."
The words landed with blunt force.
No reassurance.
No step-by-step breakdown.
No repetition.
Just a blunt command.
Soren nodded once.
"Alright."
He lowered his gaze and closed his eyes, though he didn't strictly need to.
[Concentration] would have helped him filter the arena out regardless.
Even so, he wanted the darkness for this, wanted as few distractions as possible while he reached back towards what he had just learned.
The crowd, the duel, Alex waiting later like a blade hanging somewhere above all of this, all of it could wait for a minute longer.
'Heart first.'
Until now, magic had always been half instinct, half habit.
He cast through his palm because that was what his body knew how to do.
Even when he understood the theory of a spell, the actual process often felt like pressing against something pre-made, an action smoothed over by system assistance, inherited muscle memory, and repetition.
It worked, but not in a way that forced him to truly examine what was happening under the surface.
This was different.
He gathered mana near his heart and, for the first time, did not let the process run on instinct.
He watched it.
Or rather, he felt for it with a care he had never needed before, following the pressure of it as it pooled and thickened.
Then he nudged his magic circuits awake.
The response was immediate.
Mana spread into the network within his body, familiar and unfamiliar at once, a current moving into channels that had always existed and had rarely needed conscious guidance.
Almost at once it tried to rush towards his dominant route, down his arm and into his palm, the easy path, the practised path, the one his body expected.
Soren cut it off.
The interruption was ugly.
Pins and needles lanced down his arm.
His hand twitched around the axe-handle, briefly numb, and an uncomfortable heaviness dragged at the limb as though the mana resented being denied its usual course.
But he ignored it all and forced the current elsewhere, pushing it downward instead through his torso, through his hip, into his leg.
It fought him in small ways all the way down, wanting to slip back towards familiar channels, but now that he knew what to look for he could feel each attempt.
Each time it veered, he corrected it.
Each time it tried to spread, he narrowed it.
Down.
Further down.
Into the left leg.
Towards the foot.
He began building the circle there, not a familiar shape translated thoughtlessly, but the more advanced structure Carlen had shown first.
He tried to hold the image together in his head and replicate the same denser configuration, the same more demanding design, but almost immediately something went wrong.
The mana started draining too quickly.
His circuits strained, and the half-formed structure beneath his foot pulled and pulled and pulled, far more greedily than anything he was used to.
It felt less like casting a spell and more like opening something that wanted to empty him all at once.
Soren's eyes snapped open.
He cut the spell.
The forming circle vanished before it could fully appear, the gathered mana collapsing back out of the structure before it tore more out of him than he could afford.
He exhaled hard through his teeth.
That had not been a mysterious failure.
It had not shattered for no reason.
He simply did not have enough to sustain it.
Carlen, who had watched the whole attempt in silence, gave a short nod.
"Good."
Soren looked at him.
"You noticed the drain and stopped." Carlen's voice stayed matter-of-fact. "If you'd tried to force it, you would've wasted mana and learned nothing. Don't chase a spell just because you've seen it. Cast what you can actually support."
It wasn't gentle advice like Lilliana gave, but it was useful nonetheless.
Soren looked down at the stone beneath his boots.
His breathing had quickened, though less from panic than from effort.
The failed attempt had left a faint hollow ache in his circuits, not enough to cripple him, but enough to remind him how easily overreaching could turn stupid.
For a brief moment, the old instinct stirred, that familiar ugliness that wanted to turn any limitation into proof of inadequacy.
You can't do it.
You're too weak
But the thoughts did not settle properly.
Maybe because the reason was too clear this time.
Maybe because there was no mystery left to hide behind.
Maybe because, for once, failure had produced something useful almost immediately.
He had understood why it failed.
That alone changed the feeling of it.
'Let's stick to what's familiar.'
The answer seemed obvious once he stopped fighting it.
He did not need to reproduce Carlen's intermediate spell.
That had never really been the point.
Carlen had lowered the level once already and had shown him the principle in a form closer to his reach.
Soren had seen the route, the method, the process.
Forcing the highest version he had seen onto a body that could not support it would only turn the lesson into vanity.
So he started again.
He closed his eyes once more, steadier now.
Mana gathered by his heart.
His circuits opened.
The familiar pull towards his palm came, and he redirected it without the same clumsy resistance as before, guiding it down through his torso and leg with firmer control.
This time he did not try to impose a structure that would devour him.
He aimed lower, simpler.
Not crude, but honest.
A spell at his level.
A circle he could actually sustain.
The mana no longer felt like it was tearing itself free of him.
It still demanded focus, still resisted in places, but the strain stayed within reach.
Then the pattern took.
A light green circle unfolded beneath the sole of his boot, clean lines tracing themselves across the arena floor in a compact seal of magic.
It held.
It did not collapse, did not drain him dry, did not slip apart before completion.
It simply existed.
For a moment Soren forgot the crowd.
He forgot the duel with Alex waiting later like a threat lodged in his future.
He forgot the pressure that had been riding in his ribs since entering the arena.
Because he had done it.
Not because the system had handed him a new skill and told him it was now possible, or because a status window had abstracted the process into a neat increase in proficiency.
He had watched, understood, adjusted, and cast.
The joy hit him so cleanly it almost startled him.
It spread through him in a bright rush that made everything else recede for a few precious seconds.
He loved this.
Loved it in a way that sat deeper than fear, deeper than self-consciousness, deeper even than the panic that Alex's name dragged through him.
Magic, when it opened like this, when understanding turned into something real in his own hands, made the world feel wider.
Soren opened his eyes.
The arena came back into focus with the green circle still glowing beneath his foot, stable and undeniable.
He was sweating now, his shirt sticking faintly to his back, the ache behind his left eye still present, his mana not exactly plentiful after the failed attempt, and none of it mattered enough to dull the grin that broke across his face.
It was not small, either.
It came before he could stop it.
A real grin, bright with disbelief and satisfaction and something boyishly happy that he had not had room for in far too long.
He let out a breath that almost sounded like a laugh.
'I did it.'
The thought arrived with uncomplicated delight.
Not tainted by guilt.
Not immediately hollowed out by fear.
Just delight.
Across from him, Carlen stared at the circle, then at Soren, and for the first time since stepping into the arena he looked genuinely impressed.
"Well done," he said.
It was not lavish praise, and it wasn't meant to be.
Carlen did not strike Soren as the sort of person who wasted words on encouragement for its own sake.
That made the line land harder.
Soren looked up at him, still grinning despite himself.
"Thank you, Carlen."
Carlen gave a small shrug, though the faint curve at the corner of his mouth remained.
"You paid attention. That's why it worked. Don't expect me to hand you the same lesson twice."
From the stands, confusion rippled out in waves.
The students watching had no clear framework for what had just happened.
From a distance it must have looked bizarre, a duel where neither side had attacked, where circles had formed and vanished, where Soren had dropped to one knee clutching his face and then stood again, where the entire thing had somehow ended with a basic-looking circle beneath his foot and nothing else to show for it.
Some of them were speaking louder now, trying to piece it together.
Soren heard it, distantly, but it no longer pressed on him the same way it had at the start.
He looked at the circle one last time, then let it fade.
The green light dissolved from beneath his boot, the spell dismissed cleanly.
There was no point continuing.
Carlen had already said what needed saying without saying it directly.
If the match became an actual fight now, Soren would lose.
He knew that.
Carlen knew that.
The only difference was that now Soren was leaving with something more valuable than a few meaningless extra seconds of getting flattened in public.
He turned towards the teaching assistant overseeing their ring.
"I forfeit."
The assistant, who had spent much of the last several minutes looking as though he could not decide whether to intervene or pretend he fully understood what he was seeing, jerked upright.
"R-right," he said, still sounding half behind the moment. "Match concluded. Carlen Frenun wins."
The announcement rolled across the arena.
Soren barely cared about the words.
His eye still hurt.
His mana was lower than he would have liked.
Alex's duel still waited.
But under all of that, tucked firmly inside his chest, something lighter remained, bright and stubborn.
For a few minutes, at least, magic had pushed everything else aside.
And that was enough.
————「❤︎」————