The Guild sponsored a public sparring exhibition every week in the yard behind the main hall — partly entertainment for the city's residents, partly a genuine, practical way for Guild evaluators to track promising talent worth promoting. I hadn't intended to participate. I'd gone to watch, mostly, still turning over everything Selene had told me the night before.
That plan lasted right up until a a voice, pitched to carry across the entire yard, called out my name.
"Lukas Gigonos! Bronze rank, is it? Dorren won't stop talking about your assessment scores."
I turned to find a young man striding toward me with the easy, practiced confidence of someone who had never once in his life been told no and meant it. Fine, well-tailored clothes under a lightly worn practice breastplate. A rapier at his hip that cost more, I'd have guessed, than most of Eldoria's annual income combined.
I appraised him on reflex.
[ Name: Kael Drenmoor ]
[ Age: 24 ]
[ Occupation: Swordsman, House Drenmoor heir ]
[ Skills: Advanced Swordsmanship, Wind Affinity ]
House Drenmoor. The same noble house Boren the caravan master had warned me about on the road.
"I don't believe we've met," I said, keeping my tone carefully neutral.
"We haven't. But word travels fast in this city when a Bronze-rank recruit posts assessment numbers that make Silver-rank veterans nervous." Kael's smile carried just enough edge to make clear this wasn't purely friendly curiosity. "I make it a habit to personally introduce myself to anyone interesting enough to talk about. Care to spar? Purely for sport, of course."
A small crowd had already started gathering, drawn by the noble heir's raised voice and the promise of a genuine match. I felt the familiar, uncomfortable tension of a decision I'd been quietly dreading since choosing to maintain a cover identity in the first place — the exact moment where staying hidden and staying believable started actively pulling in opposite directions.
"I'm not really looking for a fight," I said honestly. "I've got other business in the city."
"Everyone's got business," Kael said, already unsheathing his rapier with a flourish clearly practiced for exactly this kind of audience. "Five minutes of your time. If you win, I'll owe you a favor — and House Drenmoor favors are worth quite a bit more than they sound. If I win, well." He shrugged, grinning. "I get to say I beat the mysterious new talent everyone's whispering about. Seems fair."
The crowd's murmur made it clear that backing out now would do far more damage to my carefully constructed cover than simply obliging him would. I sighed internally and drew the Beautiful Katana, already running calculations on exactly how much of my actual ability I could safely reveal without shattering the "talented but mortal Bronze-rank swordsman" persona I'd spent days building.
"Fine," I said. "Five minutes."
Kael moved first, and I had to admit — grudgingly, watching the wind visibly curl around his blade as he closed the distance — that he wasn't just noble-born arrogance wrapped around mediocre swordsmanship. His Wind Affinity skill let him augment his speed and the reach of his strikes in ways that would have genuinely troubled an actual Bronze-rank fighter. Against me, it registered as a mildly interesting breeze.
I parried his opening flurry with exactly the amount of visible effort a talented swordsman under real pressure might show, let him press the advantage for a few exchanges, and watched his confidence build accordingly. The crowd's murmurs shifted, a few voices already predicting Kael's win outright.
That was, in hindsight, probably a mistake on my part. Watching him grow more confident, more careless, more certain of an outcome that was never actually in doubt reminded me uncomfortably of every arrogant secondary character I'd ever half-remembered from novels back on Earth — the kind of character who existed specifically to be humbled.
I decided, somewhere in that thought, that I didn't actually want to humiliate him. Just end this cleanly enough that neither Guild evaluators nor curious noble houses would look too closely at exactly how I'd done it.
On his next overextended lunge, I stepped inside his reach, redirected his blade with a controlled twist of my wrist, and had the flat of the Beautiful Katana resting against his throat before the crowd had finished registering that I'd moved at all.
Silence fell across the yard.
"Yield?" I asked, quietly enough that it wouldn't carry past the two of us.
Kael's eyes, wide with something between shock and genuine respect, flicked from my blade to my face. "...Yield," he said, loud enough for the crowd, though his voice had lost every trace of its earlier swagger.