Alden regretted agreeing almost immediately — not because Elara was intimidating, though she absolutely was, but because she'd handed him a training sword with the calm, unhurried confidence of someone who already considered the outcome settled. That confidence alone felt like a warning worth heeding, and after last night's reading, he finally understood exactly where it came from. He wasn't sparring a talented classmate. He was sparring someone one stage from Warden.
The evening training grounds sat mostly empty, a handful of students finishing personal drills before curfew, the Rift still hanging visible above the northern district. Elara stepped onto the sparring platform without ceremony. Alden followed, and within seconds the few students left around them slowed, then stopped entirely to watch.
Marcus arrived first, unsurprisingly. "You're actually doing this?"
"Apparently," Alden said.
Marcus grinned like a holiday had come early. "This should be entertaining."
Lena showed up moments later, notebook already open. Alden eyed it. "Why do you have that?"
"Research."
"You're taking notes on a sparring match."
"Research notes."
He looked to Elara for backup. "Do you see what I put up with?"
Her mouth twitched, just barely. "Frequently."
The match started without a signal — just two people facing each other and one of them deciding to move first. Elara struck, and Alden barely got his block up in time, the impact traveling through both arms hard enough to make him question whether "training sword" was an accurate description of the weapon currently vibrating in his grip. This was Initiate Peak Stage control, refined down to almost nothing wasted — the kind of precision his own body simply hadn't been built to answer with equal force.
She stepped back, calm and unhurried, waiting. He attacked, and the results were, generously, educational — mostly for him. Elara deflected everything he threw, not effortlessly, but with a precision that made the gap obvious. No wasted motion. No spent energy she didn't need. Watching her fight felt like watching someone work through a problem they'd already solved a hundred times before.
He retreated after several exchanges, breathing considerably harder than he wanted to admit. Elara hadn't broken a sweat.
"Well," Marcus said from the sideline, arms crossed. "You're still losing."
"Insightful."
"You're welcome."
Alden went back in, but differently this time — less force, more attention. Combat had never been his real strength. Information was. Patterns were. Whatever Realm she stood on, the way she moved still followed rules, and rules could be read. The longer the match ran, the more small details surfaced: the way she shifted her weight a beat before advancing, the particular angles she favored when closing distance. Tiny things. Easy to miss. He didn't miss them.
The Ledger flickered briefly. Observation Recorded.
He smiled. That felt like familiar ground, at least — the one advantage a missing Realm couldn't take away from him.
Elara's eyes narrowed instantly. "You figured something out."
"Maybe."
She sighed and came at him again, and the second half of the match went noticeably better — not because he'd gotten any stronger in the intervening minutes, but because he'd gotten smarter about reading her. He predicted two of her advances outright. Forced her to adjust her footing more than once. Lasted longer than anyone watching had probably expected out of someone the system itself couldn't classify.
It still ended with a training sword resting lightly against his shoulder. Clear defeat. He wasn't bothered by it, and neither, apparently, was she.
"You improved," Elara said, and the words landed harder than the loss had — she wasn't in the habit of handing out praise she didn't mean.
As they walked back from the field, conversation came easier than it had a week ago.
"Your fighting style is strange," Marcus said.
"Thank you."
"That wasn't a compliment."
"Sounded like one."
Marcus sighed theatrically. "I mean you think too much."
"Impossible."
"No, he's right," Lena said immediately.
"Betrayal. Constant betrayal." He shook his head. "One day I'll find teammates who actually support me."
"You should lower your expectations," Elara said, entirely deadpan.
Nobody reacted for a full second. Then Marcus burst out laughing, hard enough that Lena had to fight down a smile of her own. Alden just stared at Elara, who blinked back, apparently unaware she'd said anything remotely funny — which somehow made it land even harder.
Strategy class the next morning improved Alden's mood on principle alone, even if most of his classmates disagreed with their expressions if not their words. Professor Rowan wrote a single word on the board: Survival.
"Most of you think strategy exists to help you win," he said, tapping the word. "It doesn't. Strategy exists to help you survive." For the next two hours he walked through real accounts of past Rift expeditions — teams who'd won despite being outmatched, teams who'd died despite overwhelming advantage, the difference almost always coming down to a handful of decisions made under pressure. When to push. When to pull back. When to trust the person standing next to you instead of second-guessing them.
Alden filled another notebook. Marcus suffered audibly. Lena looked thoroughly delighted.
Their first assignment after class turned out to be refreshingly mundane — no Rift involvement at all, just mapping emergency evacuation routes across academy grounds. Most teams groaned. Alden found the idea genuinely interesting, which Marcus took as a personal affront.
"We're making maps."
"Yes."
"We're going to be Wardens."
"Correct."
Over several hours, Team Seven covered parts of Blackthorn most students never bothered with — supply warehouses, medical stations, the barrier-control towers humming quietly at the academy's edges. Conversation loosened as they worked. Lena told stories about growing up in a merchant household. Marcus complained at length about noble etiquette lessons he'd clearly resented since childhood. Elara chimed in more than she usually did. Alden mostly listened, asked questions, filed things away — and somewhere in the middle of that afternoon, it struck him that Team Seven had quietly stopped feeling like an assignment and started feeling like something closer to friendship.
On the walk back toward the dormitories, he caught a flicker of movement on a tower balcony above the training grounds — Professor Vale, standing perfectly still, watching the courtyard below with an attention that didn't match idle curiosity. Her gaze found him before he could look away, and for a moment neither of them moved. Then she turned back toward the distant Rift, and the moment passed as if it had never happened at all.
He filed that away too, alongside everything else he hadn't figured out yet.
That evening, as he reviewed the day's notes, the Ledger opened again — not an emergency, not a warning, just something new.
Research Mode Updated. New Archive Entry Available.
His attention sharpened at once. The day had already given him more than he expected. Apparently it wasn't finished yet.