The polished cedar of the residential floors gave way to heavy, reinforced stone as Snow and I descended into the Guild's lower levels. The ambient noise of Vanguard City faded, replaced by the muffled thuds of physical combat and the sharp, sudden cracks of magical discharge echoing down the corridor.
Training Room Four was situated at the very end of the hall, marked by a massive, iron-banded oak door. Even from ten feet away, I could feel the heat radiating from whatever was happening inside.
Before I pushed it open, I let out a slow breath and focused my mind. I didn't want to just walk in blind. I blinked, letting the cool sapphire energy of The Walkers Eyes wash over my vision. The physical world immediately giving way to the brilliant, pulsing blueprint of reality.
I pushed the door open.
The room was massive—a sunken arena of scorched stone and reinforced target dummies, surrounded by raised viewing tiers. But through the Eye, it was a sea of flickering lights.
There were about twenty recruits gathered in the center of the arena. To my augmented sight, most of them looked like flickering candles. Their mana-cores were dim, their energy pathways narrow and tangled. A few stood out—a young Elven archer whose core pulsed with a steady, forest-green Qi, and a heavily armored Dwarf radiating a dense, blocky orange heat.
But all of those lights were completely eclipsed by the man standing in front of them.
The instructor was a Beast-Man, built like a brick wall wearing leather armor. He had the distinct, heavy-set features of a grizzly bear, complete with thick, iron-gray fur running down his forearms and a scarred, imposing jawline. Through the Architect's Eye, he looked like a raging, contained furnace of crimson aura. The structure of his energy was so dense it almost gave me a headache just looking at it.
"Listen up, you soft, newly minted Coppers!" the Beast-Man roared, his voice bouncing off the stone walls. "My name is Instructor Kaelen. For the next three weeks, I am your mother, your father, and the god that decides whether you survive your first Void-Sector patrol!"
I let the Walkers Eyes fade as Snow and I stepped onto the observation tier.
Kaelen's ears twitched. His heavy gaze snapped away from the recruits and locked directly onto me. The rest of the class turned, a sea of green horns, pointed ears, and human faces staring up at the guy who had just walked in late with a fluffy white cat.
"Well, well," Kaelen rumbled, crossing his massive, furred arms over his chest. "How kind of you to join us, human. I hope we didn't start the lesson too early for your pet."
Snow's telepathic voice was like shards of ice in my mind.
"If he calls me a 'pet' again, I'm going to freeze his vocal cords solid. Tell him what will happen if this disrespect continues."
"Do it, Noah. Deliver the message."
I let out a slow, deliberate breath and leaned my forearms against the stone railing. I looked Kaelen dead in the eyes.
"She says if you call her a 'pet' again, she's going to personally freeze your vocal cords solid."
Someone in the back of the recruit line actually gasped. The Dwarf with the blocky orange aura muttered a prayer to the forge, taking a half-step back.
For three agonizing seconds, Kaelen didn't move. His thick, iron-gray fur bristled, and the sheer physical pressure of his aura pressed against the air like a heavy weight.
Then, he threw his head back and let out a booming, roaring laugh that rattled the practice weapons in their racks.
"Ha! Arrogance!" Kaelen grinned, flashing a row of distinctly carnivorous teeth. "I like arrogance! It means you either have the power to back it up, or you're going to die very quickly and save me the paperwork! Come down here, both of you!"
Snow hopped gracefully off the railing, landing silently on the arena floor. I took the stairs, keeping my posture relaxed but my mind sharp. As I approached the line of recruits, I caught a closer look at them. The young Elven archer watched me with wide, calculating eyes, while a pair of heavily armored human knights simply glared at my lack of traditional gear. To them, I was just a guy in Guild-issue clothes with a silver box on his belt and two fine wire-daggers strapped to my thighs.
"Line up," Kaelen barked, his amusement instantly vanishing as he shifted back into instructor mode. "Since our tardy friend has decided to grace us with his presence, we can begin the practical assessment. The Guild doesn't care what your papers say. I don't care what your noble houses or local villages think of you. In the Void-Sector, the only thing that matters is output and survival."
Kaelen began to pace in front of us. Every step he took felt heavy, grounded in a way that my meager 4 Strength could never achieve.
"This is an evaluation," Kaelen continued. "I need to know your affinities, your combat style, and how quickly you break under pressure. We will do this via a simple reaction test."
He stopped pacing and turned to face the line. He raised his massive, furred hand, and a dense, crimson aura flared around his claws. He didn't chant a spell; he just forced the energy into the air. Suddenly, a dozen solid spheres of condensed, hardened earth rose from the scorched floor, hovering around him like miniature moons.
"These are compressed geode-rounds," Kaelen sneered. "They hit with the force of a warhammer. I will fire them at you. You will block, dodge, or shatter them. If you get hit, you go to the infirmary, and you fail Day One. Understood?"
"Yes, Instructor!" the recruits shouted in unison.
"Good." Kaelen's eyes locked onto me, a predatory glint in his gaze. "Since the human and his... companion... have so much confidence, they can go first. Step forward."
Snow let out a low, rumbling purr of anticipation as she padded forward. I stepped up beside her, my hand hovering near my right thigh.
"Don't kill him," I projected to Snow.
"I make no promises," she replied, her silver fur beginning to shimmer with a faint, chilling frost.
Kaelen cracked his knuckles, two of the heavy stone spheres drifting to the front of his formation. "Let's see if that mouth of yours is faster than my earth, human. Defend yourself!"
Without any warning, Kaelen swept his arm forward. The two compressed stone spheres launched toward us at a terrifying velocity, tearing through the air with a heavy, whistling shriek. One was aimed dead at Snow; the other was aimed right at my chest.
Taking a hit like that would shatter my ribs. Instead, I let my massive Spirit pool flood my nervous system and activate Voltaic Step.
The world ground to an absolute halt.
The heavy, whistling shriek of the geode-rounds warped into a low, distorted groan. I could see the individual grooves on the spinning rock hurtling toward my chest. The scorched stone of the arena floor was rough beneath my bare feet, but I didn't feel the sudden, freezing drop in ambient temperature radiating from Snow. I just felt the buzzing, electric heat of my own power.
I blinked, activating The Walkers Eyes. The slow-motion world immediately lit up with glowing structural data. The incoming rock wasn't just a solid, dumb mass of earth; it was a complex, swirling lattice of Kaelen's thick crimson aura, tightly binding the compressed soil and stone together like steel cables.
Because my Strength was a meager 4, trying to bat this away or block it traditionally would snap my arms like twigs. I had to be surgical. I pushed the Eye deeper, peeling back the outer layers of the spell's blueprint. There it was. Right in the dead center, acting as the gravitational anchor for the entire structure, was a single, hyper-compressed node of crimson mana. Fissures of microscopic weakness radiated out from it—hairline flaws in the earth that Kaelen's sheer power was brute-forcing together.
I unhooked the right wire dagger and channeled my energy into the blade.
Even in the time-dilated silence, the high-frequency screech of the Sapphire Dissonance was deafening. It sounded like a thousand glass crystals shattering at once as dense, volatile blue lightning coated the dagger, fighting against the heavy air.
I didn't retreat. I stepped directly into the path of the hovering, grinding rock. I completely trusted my 15 Dexterity to guide the strike. Moving with pinpoint, accelerated precision, I thrust the screeching, lightning-coated dagger forward. It was a perfect, linear strike. I didn't try to smash the rock; I threaded the thin wire-blade straight through one of the structural fault lines the Eyes had exposed.
The tip of my dagger bypassed the hardened outer crust and pierced directly into the exact center of the geode-round, sinking right into Kaelen's crimson mana node. I pumped a surge of my volatile blue lightning directly into his stable earth magic.
At the same moment, Snow moved. A web of brilliant, glowing blue ice materialized in the air in front of her. The absolute-zero threads wrapped around her incoming geode-round like a net.
I deactivated Voltaic Step.
Time snapped back to 100%.
KRA-KOOM!
The arena shook. The geode-round that hit my dagger didn't just break; the violently opposed magics detonated from the inside out. The massive rock vaporized into a harmless cloud of fine orange dust and residual blue sparks. Beside me, the sound of shattering glass echoed through the room as Snow's blue ice completely flash-froze and crushed her rock into a shower of glittering, frozen pebbles.
The high-frequency screech of my lightning faded. The dust slowly began to settle.
I flicked the wire dagger, shedding a few stray sparks of electricity, and smoothly hooked it back to my thigh. Snow sat perfectly still beside me, licking her paw as if nothing had happened.
The entire observation tier and the line of recruits were dead silent. The young Elven archer had her mouth slightly open. The armored human knights were staring at me as if I were a ghost. Even in my standard-issue Guild clothes, the weight of their stares was heavy.
Instructor Kaelen just stood there. The crimson aura around him flickered for a second. He looked at the pile of blue-tinged ice, then at the cloud of fine dust settling around me, and finally up to my eyes.
A slow, massive grin spread across his scarred jaw.
"Well," Kaelen rumbled, his voice echoing in the quiet arena. "I suppose you didn't even flinch."
I met his gaze, completely unbothered, and tapped the silver casing of the D3 on my belt, manually waking the interface to check the schedule.
[Local Time: 07:52 AM]
I dropped my hand from the device. "And for the record, Instructor," I said, my voice carrying clearly across the silent room. "We aren't late. We are actually eight minutes early."