"「Breeze」."
Wind burst beneath Soren's foot, not from a cleanly formed spell in his palm, but from the half-felt circle under his sole, and his body shot across the frozen arena in a jagged rush that nearly tore his balance out from under him.
Alex's sword cut through the place where Soren's shoulder had been a breath earlier.
The movement worked, but only barely.
The force of it travelled wrong through his body, too abrupt, too uneven, his weight thrown forward faster than his legs could properly catch, and for one ugly second it felt less like controlled movement and more like being flung.
His ankle twisted against the slick ice, his shoulder jerked, and his stomach lurched with the sudden acceleration.
'It's unstable.'
His balance wobbled at once, his centre of gravity thrown off by the improvised technique.
This was not something Carlen had taught him directly.
Carlen had only forced him to understand one thing: magic circles did not have to be born in his palm; they could be formed elsewhere, cast elsewhere, used from elsewhere, if his control was good enough.
The rest of this was Soren.
A desperate thought, seized in the middle of battle and forced into shape before he had time to question whether it was clever or stupid.
He had taken that lesson and rammed it into [Breeze], using the circle beneath his foot as a makeshift launchpad.
It was sloppy, abrupt, and far too forceful, more like being kicked forward by the air than moving properly.
Still, it had worked.
That alone was enough to wrench a flicker of surprise onto Alex's face.
Soren saw it, and something in his chest kicked hard.
Not triumph.
Not even confidence.
Just a brief, savage kind of relief.
He could still touch him.
His right hand drew the handaxe back at once, mana gathering along the edge.
The technique was crude in his hands compared to how it had probably been intended to look.
Soren had not learned it in a proper lesson, had not stood in a line with other students while an instructor corrected his posture and guided the angle of his wrists.
He had picked it up the way he picked up most things: from the outside, from a distance, by stealing glimpses whenever he passed the Martial Studies grounds and slowing just enough to watch without making it too obvious.
He had memorised what he could.
The shape of the swing.
The shift in the hips.
The foot that planted and the one that turned.
Then he had gone elsewhere and repeated it alone until the movement felt less alien, until his palms blistered and his arms went numb and he could almost trick himself into thinking he had actually been taught.
Even now, it was not clean.
The arc was a little too forceful, too hungry, his body putting more desperation into it than elegance.
But desperation had carried him this far before.
「Einhardt Axemanship - Crescent」
The glowing handaxe swept across in a tight crescent.
Alex reacted immediately, because of course he did.
His sword came up by instinct, not sloppy or panicked, but exact, the kind of response drilled so deeply into the body it no longer needed thought.
Yet this time Soren had stolen just enough of the initiative.
Alex realised a fraction too late that his guard would not close in time and shifted instead, rotating his body to lessen the blow.
The axe still connected.
It bit only shallowly across Alex's side, more a tearing graze than a proper wound, but it drew blood.
For a moment, Soren stared.
He had done that.
He had actually hit him.
The sight punched a hot rush through his chest so sudden it almost felt like hope.
Then his own mind crushed it.
'It isn't enough.'
A scratch.
A single line of blood on the Hero.
Nothing more.
Something ugly tightened in him anyway, because even knowing it was small, even knowing it changed almost nothing, he still wanted to cling to it like proof that he was not completely outclassed, not completely absurd for standing here.
He did not let himself hesitate.
"「Ignition」."
Flame burst from his palm and rolled forward in a hard bloom of heat.
It spread wide enough to force Alex to answer, bright enough to cut the sightline between them for a split second, and that was all Soren had wanted.
Alex stepped as he moved, sword cutting across with sharp economy, dispersing the fire with a single practised swing rather than wasting motion on retreat.
Even that looked textbook.
Every answer he gave seemed chosen from some invisible manual, precise and proper, the correct response to the correct problem.
Soren was already behind the flames before they finished breaking apart.
He ran through the heat, eyes narrowed against the sting, handaxe already rising again because he had known Alex would clear the fire, had counted on it, had treated the spell not as an attack but as a curtain.
Alex saw him only when Soren was already there.
There was no time for another elegant reset, no room to make the exchange neat.
Soren brought the axe down.
Alex met it with his sword.
Steel struck steel, and the impact jolted straight through Soren's arm into his shoulder, hard enough to make the muscles in his hand spasm.
Alex's posture held.
Even forced into a close-range scramble, he still moved with trained structure, blade angled correctly, footing controlled despite the ice, upper body disciplined.
Soren grinned without humour.
That clean form was exactly why this could work.
"「Shock」."
Mana flashed beneath his foot.
Electricity surged up through the frozen ground and the locked contact of their weapons, climbing into Alex's body in a violent jolt.
Alex's breath caught, and his muscles seized for a fraction, grip faltering just enough for Soren to feel it.
There.
That was it.
That tiny break.
Soren wrenched the handaxe back, mana thickening around the blade again as he shifted to strike before Alex could recover.
This was the kind of opening he understood, ugly and small and snatched in the middle of chaos rather than earned through beautiful exchanges.
Not the sort of chance a proper swordsman would probably want, but Soren had never had the luxury of preferring proper chances.
He drew breath.
He was going to take it.
Then Alex spoke.
"I... still need to rely on it..."
The words were quiet, almost embarrassed, spoken like an apology no one had asked for.
Soren's body went cold.
Golden light spilt from Alex's skin.
It was not violent at first.
It didn't burst outward like a detonation or announce itself with some overwhelming spectacle.
It simply appeared, soft and dreadful, washing over Alex in a glow that turned his hair brighter, his skin cleaner, and his entire figure sharper in a way that made the world around him feel suddenly lesser.
A chill ran down Soren's spine so sharply it felt like something had slid a blade between his ribs.
He tried to form another circle in his palm.
Mana moved.
Yet it moved too slowly.
His eyes widened.
The unfinished lines of light dragged through the air at a crawl, each stroke taking far too long, as though his own body had sunk into something thick and invisible.
His breath felt heavy.
His heartbeat sounded distant.
The world around him seemed to congeal.
The stands slowed.
Not fully still, but close enough that it looked wrong.
Students who had been leaning forward remained half-leaning.
Mouths hung in the middle of cheers.
Hands stayed lifted, fingers spread, expressions trapped between one instant and the next.
Even the drifting remnants of fire and breath in the cold air seemed reluctant to move.
Soren stared.
'No…'
Alex opened his eyes.
They burned gold.
The sight made Soren's stomach drop.
He had known about [Divinity], of course he had.
It was not some hidden mechanic he had never heard of.
He knew what it was supposed to be, knew it was Alex's monstrous advantage, the protagonist's special gift, the thing that marked him as chosen in a way no amount of effort from anyone else could really replicate.
He had seen its descriptions.
He had read the game's version of it.
He had known, in the dry, detached way someone knows information on a screen, that it was absurd.
But this was not a skill description.
This was not text.
This was standing in front of the protagonist while the world itself seemed to bend around him.
Soren's fingers trembled.
'This is [Divinity]...?'
There should not have been anything this oppressive about simply looking at another first-year student, especially not one in class F, like himself.
Alex had been sweating.
Alex had been breathing hard.
Alex had bled.
And yet now, wrapped in that golden stillness, he no longer looked like a boy in a school duel.
He looked like the answer the world had prepared in advance, the shape of someone who was always going to stand above others no matter how much they struggled to close the distance.
Fear hit first.
Not the sharp fear of a blade or a monster or the simple animal panic of something trying to kill him, but something colder, meaner, more humiliating.
The kind that crawled into your bones and whispered that your efforts had always been laughably small.
Then bitterness followed it so quickly it almost felt like the same emotion wearing a different face.
Of course.
Of course Alex had this.
Of course the Hero, the one person the world had decided mattered most, could simply become untouchable the moment things started slipping out of his hands.
Soren's jaw clenched hard enough to ache.
Everything he had done to get here rose in his mind in a jagged rush.
The way he had clawed for every scrap of strength he had.
The blood.
The pain.
The endless humiliating scramble for skills, control and survival.
The nights spent practising things no one had properly taught him.
The way every gain had felt small, costly and uncertain.
And Alex, who moved like a swordsman neatly raised from childhood by proper methods and expectations, could still apologise and unfold something like this from his body as naturally as breathing.
Something in Soren wanted to laugh.
Something else wanted to be sick.
His half-formed spell flickered uselessly in his palm.
'No matter what I do...'
The thought did not finish.
It did not need to.
Because the answer was standing right in front of him in gold.
Alex looked at him with obvious discomfort, as though he hated this moment too.
"Sorry about this," he said, voice carrying strangely clearly through the thickened world. "I really don't like relying on this."
That made it worse.
If Alex had looked proud, smug, or even triumphant, Soren could have hated him cleanly.
He could have shoved all the bitterness somewhere simple and called it anger.
But Alex looked sincerely apologetic.
Like he actually meant it.
Like he genuinely regretted needing the thing that made him unbeatable.
Soren wanted to curse him, but his mouth would not move fast enough.
Alex stepped forward.
One step.
That was all.
But in this dragged-out world it felt enormous, the measured advance of someone who did not need to rush because nothing here could truly escape him.
And suddenly all the things Soren had been trying so hard to believe in over the stretch of time since coming to this world began to crack.
Carlen's lesson.
The new way of seeing.
The stupid flicker of excitement when he had realised he could cast from a half-formed circle beneath his foot.
The narrow victory against Amelia that had, for a little while, let him think he had earned something real.
Lilliana's praise, gentle and earnest and warm enough that he had almost let himself believe it.
Every piece of progress he had gathered with both hands now looked small under that gold.
Not fake.
Not meaningless.
But terribly, painfully small.
He hadn't imagined himself as Alex's equal; he wasn't delusional enough for that.
Still, some part of him had hoped he could at least force the gap into something measurable, something human, something he could grit his teeth and work towards.
This was not a gap.
This was a wall.
————「❤︎」————