[0430]
The next day, we started early.
Thirty minutes stolen from sleep nobody could afford to lose. Vance was already outside when we stumbled into formation. The air was colder than it had any right to be, and the floodlights carved the parade ground into hard-edged blocks.
"Assessment period is over. You've been measured, profiled, and catalogued." He cracked his neck. "I know where every one of you breaks. And starting today, I get to start breaking."
The Gauntlet had been rebuilt overnight. New obstacles everywhere, fewer handholds, and the balance beam narrowed to a rail. They'd even added a water crawl that was ankle-deep and freezing.
Vance made us complete four runs. Miller cleared the new climbing wall in seconds each time. It took me three attempts on the first run, and it never got easier. By the fourth, my hands were raw, my elbows reopened and bleeding, and my thighs cramped from the cold water. The pack was struggling too — but the awakened recruits recovered between runs in ways I couldn't. Their bodies knitted themselves back together with Ether, while mine struggled to keep up.
After the Gauntlet, Vance split us. Half to Okafor and half to Kael.
I sat against the yard wall, trying to steady my hands as Kael's group assembled.
"Full-contact sparring," Kael announced. "Three-minute rounds. Pairings from your assessment profiles."
He read names off his datapad. "Torres and Briggs. Priya and Vasquez. Jin and Hsu. Miller and Tiernan."
Of course.
The ring was ten metres across, the boundaries set by painted lines.
It felt smaller than ten metres when Miller stepped in.
We hadn't fought since day one; before his awakening, before his deviation, and before a week of Ether filled out his frame.
"Begin," Kael said.
Miller opened with Rotation One. Left hook, right cross, rising knee.
I slipped the hook, ducked under the right cross, then pivoted as his knee flashed past my hip.
He came again, faster this time. The hook barely missed—I felt air skim my cheek. The cross I parried; impact jarred through my forearm and into reopened scrapes. The knee I sidestepped by centimetres.
Then he abandoned the rotation. He flicked a jab as I stepped in, snapping my head back, then whipped a low kick toward my cramping thigh. My leg buckled under the impact. I caught myself, but Miller was already on me, pressing forward and driving me toward the ring's edge.
Three metres of dirt behind me. Then the painted line. Then spectators.
He was herding me, compressing my space, cutting off the angles.
Only two meters of dirt left.
I planted my back foot on the line and cut hard left instead of retreating. Miller's momentum carried him half a step past where I'd been. His weight committed forward, rear leg light.
I hit him in the temple. Not hard enough, my grip was compromised by the Gauntlet, and the shot landed with less precision than I wanted.
Miller grunted and shrugged it off.
"Huh," he said, almost amused.
He came forward again. Feinted back, then surged forward. A different set of moves, but the same rhythm.
I found the window, my fist flashed in with a glancing shot to his ribs as his weight shifted forward. He absorbed it and answered with a sweeping hook to my body.
Overcommitted, the blow crunched into my ribs. I almost dropped to a knee as I doubled over, barely catching myself from falling.
"Stay down, and I'll stop."
I clinched. He shoved me—three steps back, nearly to the boundary again.
I saw Miller's combos forming—the jab, cross, hook—but my feet lagged. The jab smacked my nose. My eyes teared up, and the world blurred.
I pushed forward into his aggression and clinched again. My arms were wrapped around Miller's torso, as his elbow dug into my shoulder.
He shoved me off. I stumbled. He threw a knee. My arm moved reflexively to take the impact. My mind slowed as the background analysis—tracking Miller's shifts, mapping timing, cataloguing adjustments—just stopped. Like a screen turning off.
What was left was simpler. Move. Block. Breathe. Stay up.
Miller threw a combination. I slipped the first two, caught the third on my shoulder—my legs couldn't take me clear. He pressed, and I yielded more ground. He kept pushing on, throwing everything into it.
His breathing changed. His hands dropped, and he overextended a right hook.
I moved on pure instinct, slipped under the swing and drove an uppercut onto the tip of his jaw.
Miller's eyes went glassy as he fell to the floor.
"Winner, Tiernan," Kael called.
The yard went quiet.
I couldn't feel my forearms, my ribs roared, and my nose leaked. My legs trembled beneath it all, but I held—barely.
After a few moments, Miller finally regained consciousness as he fought to rise to his feet, he wiped a smear of blood from his mouth with a ragged forearm before he met my eyes with a fierce glare.
"Nice fight, Rabbit." Miller spat.
He stepped closer.
"You know I'm going to catch up. Every day, I get faster, stronger, and more Ether. That gap you keep squeezing through gets smaller every day."
He walked away, the hitch in his breathing already fading.
I stepped out of the ring as the next pair entered. Faces around the yard watched—some impressed, some confused.
Kael was standing where he'd been throughout, his gaze neutral.
Every other pairing got something from him: a correction, a note, a called instruction.
We got nothing.
I dropped my tray too hard and paste splashed onto the table.
"You look like shit," Jin said.
"Thanks."
"Your nose might be broken. It's sitting crooked."
I touched it. Pain flared. "It's not broken. Probably."
"It's broken," she said with certainty.
Tomás sat across from me, watching me struggle with the spoon for a few seconds before pushing his own tray aside.
"Walk me through it."
"I'm trying to eat."
"You're trying to hold a spoon. There's a difference. Walk me through the fight."
I forced down paste. It tasted like blood; the inside of my cheek was sliced from a hook.
"Rotation One first. Easy read. Then freestyle — he fights forward, weight commits at the end of each chain. There's a window in the recovery."
"That tracked with what I was modelling from outside," Tomás said. "The mid-fight adjustments, too. He disguised the commitment point, but the underlying pattern held."
"Then the blitz happened, and none of that mattered."
Tomás leaned forward. "That's what I want to talk about. The uppercut. I was modelling both of you through the whole fight. Your counters and your reads. They were clean. Predictable, even, once I had enough data on your reaction patterns."
He paused.
"The uppercut wasn't in my model. Nothing in the last ten seconds was. You stopped reading him, and my projection of your movement fell apart completely. I couldn't tell where you were going to be."
Park looked up from his tray. "His Ether signature did something strange during the blitz. I don't know what — I'm not sensitive enough to read it clearly. But there was a fluctuation."
Tomás and I both looked at him.
"I overthink everything," Park said. "But I also watch everything."
"So what happened?" Tomás asked, turning back to me. "In those last moments. What changed?"
I searched for the answer. The replay was patchy. Gaps everywhere. I remembered the blitz's start and the uppercut landing. The middle was foggy.
"I don't know," I said. "I stopped thinking. The reading just stopped working, and then something else was happening, and I don't know what it was."
"Something else," Tomás repeated.
"Yeah."
"That's not very helpful, Marcus."
"I know."
Jin was watching me with an expression I couldn't read.
Ren was at the table. Right next to Tomás. He hadn't said a word, but he had been at the yard. And now he was here, eating paste, occupying space that a week ago he wouldn't have come near.
"Miller's ribs," Jin said. "The liver shot. Was he actually hurt, or was he managing it?"
"He was hurt," I said. "He grunted."
"He recovered fast."
"High vitality. He'll bruise, but I'll bruise worse."
"You already bruised worse," she said, looking pointedly at my forearms.
"Thanks, Jin."
I didn't make it to my bunk before checking the interface. Standing in the corridor outside the barracks, leaning against the wall because my legs had decided they were done for the day.
[CONNECTION: 0.089%]
Up from 0.058%.
[BODY]
Strength: 4
Agility: 5
Vitality: 7
[MIND]
Willpower: 11
Intelligence: 9
Perception: 8
Vitality up. Willpower up. Two stat points on the same day.
On any other day, that would have felt like progress. Like the pattern was finally resolving, the data points converging into something I could understand and use.
Yet I remained fixated on those ten unaccounted seconds. In that span, the clarity that usually guided my reading evaporated, replaced by a haze where instinct, rather than conscious analysis, prevailed.
Although I emerged victorious—Miller brought to his knees—the process defied my comprehension. My practised techniques and pattern recognition, typically the tools I relied on and refined, had broken down under the weight of accumulated injuries.
What surfaced in their absence was elusive: a response beyond conscious control, inaccessible at will, impossible to describe to Tomás, and only faintly registered in memory.
Two stat points that mapped to a fight I only half-remembered winning.
I closed the interface.
Miller was already in his bunk, Ether signature humming. By tomorrow, the fight would be a footnote in his progression. By next week, the gap I'd squeezed through would be smaller. The week after that—
I lay down. The mattress somehow hit every bruise simultaneously.
I'd beaten Miller. I should have felt triumphant. Instead, all that remained was the knowledge that the gap was indeed closing. My only solace was that my connection was climbing, and soon I'd be able to gain access to levels and XP, but by the time that would happen—well, I didn't want to think about it.