Three years passed.
Not quietly nothing in Exalibar's life moved quietly but with the particular, purposeful momentum of a thing that had finally found its direction. The training Valery had promised was real and it was relentless. Not just combat drills and sparring rotations, though there was plenty of that. What she gave him was something more foundational: access. To records, to researchers, to practitioners whose names didn't appear in public databases, to the accumulated institutional knowledge of people who had spent their careers studying mana at depths that never made it into academy curricula.
He learned, in those three years, the difference between knowing something and understanding it.
His mana capacity grew steadily
The team trained together. The losses of Lekratia became architecture the failures and the near-deaths folded into the preparation, the knowledge of exactly what could go wrong informing everything they built afterward.
Sky's leg healed clean. His hair went back to silver, the drawn pallor of the hospital replaced by the same easy, devastating confidence that had always been his default mode. He and Jane did not immediately find their way back to each other. They circled the damage for a long time, with the careful distance of two people who understood that the thing between them was worth taking seriously enough not to rush. Eventually, slowly, they found a new ground to stand on. Jane relearned her mana. Forty to fifty percent of what she'd had was, it turned out, more than enough to work with when the efficiency that remained was deliberately cultivated. She did not return to the field. She did not return to the advanced combat track. She found, in the quieter applications of what she had left, something she hadn't previously known she wanted, Medicine.
Aisha rebuilt the serum from the molecular level up. She didn't sleep much during that period, and the lab beneath her house accumulated a sediment of empty coffee cups and annotated failure reports that she referred to later as "the archive of every way I was wrong." The final formulation was not the fifth version or the tenth. It was the twenty-third. It worked for every case she could construct. She was reasonably confident it would work for cases she hadn't constructed yet.
Ethan remained exactly as aggravating as he had always been, and his publicly acclaimed hero career was, by any objective measure, spectacular, which did not make him easier to be around. Exalibar and he reached, over three years of forced proximate existence, something that was not friendship and not peace but was at least a functional working arrangement built on mutual respect of capability and mutual irritation of everything else.
Theo stayed off the field and became, from his position behind the screens, one of the most effective members of the operation. He never fully lost the expression he'd worn when he looked at Kaelen's corpse. Exalibar suspected he never would.
And Chloe, Chloe was there. Through all of it. Not as a fixture or a constant or a comfortable presence that he stopped noticing, but as someone whose attention remained specific and deliberate, who saw him clearly on the days when he wasn't sure he wanted to be seen, and who had a gift for asking the single exact question that cut through everything he was carrying and made it smaller. He did not, in three years, find an adequate way to tell her this. She seemed to know anyway.
The dreams stopped coming and the white room kept its secrets.