Her footwork was genuinely good — she angled her approach rather than coming straight at him, using the lamplight at his back to reduce his depth perception, her right elbow loading as she closed the distance. The technique was an Iron Mountain variation, modified for her reach and her center of mass, and the execution was cleaner than anything Darius had thrown at him in the classroom.
Nova raised his palm and caught it.
The transferred momentum hit his palm like a wave hitting a cliff. Dust rose in a small ring from the earth around his feet. He did not move.
Seraphine's elbow rested in his open hand. Her momentum had simply stopped. She stared at the point of contact and then looked up at his face with an expression that was somewhere between confusion and the beginning of something more unsettled.
"...What."
"You're too weak," Nova said, and released her arm.
"Bullshit!" She reset her stance immediately, shoulders squaring, jaw set. "Piercing Strike!"
The straight punch came with her blood and Qi wrapped around her fist, visible distortion in the air around the knuckles, real force behind it. He caught that one too, his fingers closing around her fist with measured gentleness. Her fist sat in his hand and she pulled against his grip and the grip didn't move.
He noticed her hand was small.
"What is your blood and Qi right now?!" She was pulling steadily. Getting nowhere. "How are you this strong?!"
"Somewhere around thirty-five, probably."
The sound she made cleared a pair of birds from a nearby tree. She stopped pulling and stared at him. "You. Were at twenty-three. Two days ago."
"I told you the job awakening had some effects."
"Shadow Reaper is a speed profession! Speed professions don't—" She stopped herself. Her eyes narrowed and he could see her working through it, running the available information against what she knew about cultivation mechanics, looking for the explanation that fit. Then her eyes widened. "You awakened a second talent. Something that accelerates your body cultivation."
He released her hand and said nothing.
She read the silence exactly the way he expected her to and looked briefly satisfied. "I knew something was different. Double talent awakenings are rare but they happen, and if the second one is cultivation-acceleration type it explains—"
"Are we dueling or are you talking?"
"Both! I'm multitasking!" She shook her hand out and took her stance again. "Come on then. Let's see what you actually are."
What followed was thirty minutes of the most useful combat practice Seraphine Vex had experienced in her three years at the academy, though she would not fully understand that until it was over.
Nova had set himself a ceiling. No laws. No intents. No Absolute Insight doing the analytical work — his own deduction and comprehension were more than sufficient, his years of training and his current understanding of combat mechanics giving him everything he needed to read a fight without divine-tier assistance. No spatial displacement. No talents at all.
Pure physical body. Pure martial technique. A fraction of his actual speed and strength, dialed down to sit just above her level — close enough to genuinely challenge her, far enough that she couldn't close the gap by pushing harder.
He held that ceiling deliberately. She would get nothing from sparring a partner so far above her that every exchange felt like walking into a wall. She would get something real from sparring a partner she could almost beat, where every improvement she made actually changed the feel of the exchange.
She came at him again with the Iron Mountain elbow, this time using her footwork to generate approach angle. He deflected it with his forearm, redirected the momentum sideways rather than absorbing it, used the Vibrational Force Technique through the contact point at low power — a faint crimson shimmer along his forearm, enough to add disruption without throwing her across the park. She spun with the redirect, found her footing, and came back from the other side.
Her recovery was fast. He noted it.
He let a jab graze his shoulder on purpose. She felt it land and her eyes lit up — warriors who never felt their strikes connect stopped trusting them.
"Your eyes go to my hands before my body moves," he said, blocking her follow-up with a flat palm. "Read the hip rotation first. Hands come after."
She pulled back, reset, came in again. This time her eyes dropped to his hips and she saw the setup coming a beat earlier than before. She ducked under his arm instead of trying to block it and came up inside his guard.
"Better," he said.
"Don't—" she started.
"Don't compliment you during the fight, I know."
She threw a combination — three strikes, the third disguised as a continuation of the second — and he blocked the first two and let the third connect against his ribs. The contact was solid and she felt the force return through her knuckles and understood instinctively that she had hit something considerably denser than a normal seventeen-year-old's ribcage.
"Shadow Cloak!" She activated the talent, shadow energy wrapping her outline, darkening and obscuring her. She moved through it, trying to lose his visual tracking.
He tracked her through the pressure changes her movement made in the air, through the grass sound under her feet, through the thermal differential of her body heat. He let her believe the cloak was working for about five seconds.
Then he stepped aside from a strike that came out of the shadow and said "you're wearing the shadow like a coat. It's not actually concealing you to anyone who isn't using sight as their primary sense."
She appeared from the cloak with her strike having missed. She stared at him. "Then what am I supposed to do with it?"
"Your shadow mage talent gives you access to the umbral dimension. The shadows aren't just visual cover — they have depth. Real depth. You can step into one and step out of a different one, and that's actually invisible rather than just dark."
She looked at her own shadow on the ground with an expression that suggested she was revising several assumptions she had made about her own profession.
"Try it," he said.
She tried three times to do something that he could see her intuiting correctly but couldn't quite execute. On the fourth attempt her shadow had depth that shadows shouldn't have and she half-disappeared — not cloaked, actually gone from the surface space — before snapping back.
"I felt it!" She was breathing harder now, the excitement pushing through the exertion.
"Good. Now use it while we're fighting. Don't stop to work on it in isolation."
She came at him through the shadow dimension and emerged from an angle that genuinely caught him slightly — not enough to matter, but enough that he acknowledged it with a single step backward, the universal signal. She tagged his upper arm with a shadow-enhanced palm strike.
"Yes!" The sound she made was not composed at all and she didn't appear to care.
He smiled and reset his stance.
The next exchange she tried channeling shadow energy into her limbs during close quarters — he had mentioned it was possible and she had immediately decided to try it whether she understood the mechanics yet or not. The first two attempts were unfocused, the shadow energy diffusing before it reached concentration. The third attempt produced a hook that hit his forearm with noticeably more force than her baseline. She held up her fist and looked at it.