It started as an accident.
Three days into the Ashvale routine, midway through an afternoon session with Valeria, he threw a strike that was supposed to be a standard focused solar burst, the kind he'd been using since level four, reliable and controlled, point-blank output with minimal drain.
The energy was released at the wrong angle, not forward but outward, expanding in a brief cone shape that scorched the ground in a fan pattern two meters wide before dissipating.
Valeria stepped back from it.
The one precise step of someone removing themselves from a radius they hadn't been standing in by choice.
She looked at the scorched ground, then at him, then at his hand.
"Do that again," she said.
"It was a mistake."
"I know. Do it again."
He tried to replicate it. Threw the same strike at the same angle with the same intent and produced a standard solar burst that went forward in a clean line and hit nothing interesting.
