[ Three Years Earlier – Ratiora ]
[ Imperial Castle – Royal Combat Grounds ]
The wall met her back before she registered she'd been pushed there.
Stone. Cold through her training clothes. Her Instructor's longsword already angled across her throat, the flat of it, not the edge – he was never careless – pinning her without touching her skin. She had both daggers up on instinct, crossed at the wrist, the only barrier between his own and her neck that she'd managed to construct in the last thirty seconds.
It wasn't enough.
It was never enough.
Her mental shields were in tatters – he had gone through them the way someone flipped pages, methodical and consistent, each layer peeling away without drama, without what she would have called effort. She had built them the whole fight. He had dismantled them the whole fight. She had built faster than anyone else she had ever trained against.
He had dismantled faster than she could build.
Sera could feel the press of his mana against her vessel now – not aggressive, just present, the particular weight of something much wiser and much larger resting against her core with an easy confidence, having never once doubted its welcome.
Leisurely. That was the word. He fought her the way someone took a walk.
She bared her teeth.
He smiled.
There it is, his eyes said, bright with something that wasn't quite amusement and wasn't quite hunger, but lived precisely in the space between them. He tilted his head slightly, the longsword not moving, his other hand finding the stone wall beside her head with a soft sound.
"That's the face," he said, his voice low and conversational. Like they were discussing the weather. "You make that face right before you try something foolish."
"I'm not going to try something foolish," she spat.
She tried something foolish.
She dropped under the sword and drove her elbow toward his ribs and he was already gone – stepping aside, he had already seen it coming from the moment she thought of it, letting her momentum carry her forward two steps into nothing, and then his hand closed around the back of her collar and he forced her once more against the wall.
Her daggers clattered to the floor.
His forearm across her shoulders. Her cheek and chest pressed firmly against cold stone. His mouth near her ear. She struggled. Futile.
"Yield," he said.
She didn't.
"Seraphil," he admonished.
She reached instead – inward, fast, the last thing she had left, sending what remained of her mana outward in thin desperate tendrils toward his vessel, trying to find purchase, trying to find anything–
His mana met hers before it arrived.
Not harshly. That would have been better. He simply – redirected. Caught her wild mana with his own like he was slipping his hand through her fingers. Thoroughly. Gently. Weaving his own mana into hers, traveling upwards into her core, rifling through her with a casual intimacy.
She fought it.
Her vessel contracted, shields snapping up in whatever fragments she could still build, her mana throwing itself against his with everything she had left, which was not very much, which he knew, which was why he was still unhurried, still waiting, still utterly comfortable in the certainty of the outcome.
The press deepened as he continued pushing his mana through her vessel.
Her knees wanted to buckle. She didn't let them.
Give up, something in her said. She clenched her teeth. Her arms were shaking. Her vessel was an open room with his mana meandering through it at his leisure. She raged against his open audacity, his power searching through her memories and her emotions. She had nothing left to build with and nowhere left to go and the stone was cold against her cheek and she had been giving everything for an hour against someone giving perhaps a third.
She flinched as her Instructor grasped a particular memory. Peeked at it a little. Knew what was inside.
"Fine," she shouted. Through her teeth. The word arrived like something torn loose. "Fine! I yield."
The pressure lifted immediately.
He stepped back and flipped her around, pushed her into the wall by her shoulders.
He was looking at her with that same, infuriating expression – the one she had spent years trying to dismantle. A small smile on his lips, a heavy blush on hers. Golden eyes warm and steady and thoroughly, irritatingly composed. Not a hair out of place.
He leaned down and in close, his forehead touching hers.
"Good girl," he whispered.
He stood back up, his hand found the back of her head and yanked her forward – no preamble, no patience, just his mouth on hers, hand around her waist, composed and certain, the pace still his even when it was fast. She felt the pleasure rise off him and pour into her and she felt a stifling hatred for him and something underneath she refused to name.
The pace was always his.
✦ ♡ ✦
[ Ratha Guild – Training Grounds, Horen Plains ]
The briefing that morning had been short.
This time it was hippogriffs. Same red gems. Live or die. First group to go was under Rian's command – fifteen people, two squads, reorganized after the wyvern casualties into the most functional combination available. The injured had been pulled, the gaps had been filled – recalculated over the last few days of drills and analysis. What remained was leaner and, in theory, better calibrated than what had gone into the cave.
In theory.
Rena had delivered the briefing the way she delivered everything – flat, complete, no room for questions that weren't already answered. Arlen had been leaning against the wall behind her, no longer making the effort to look like a Commander – jacket open, arms loose, with an expression that said performance wasn't necessary today. Unlike Arlen, Joel stood straight in position and said nothing, which somehow managed to be its own kind of statement. Rian had stood at the front and looked at all fifteen of them under his command with an inscrutable, flat expression.
Today's test, Rena had said, was not about squad performance.
It was about following commander orders. Rian's team would go first. The measure of success was not how well any single person fought – it was whether fifteen people could move as one organism when someone told them to.
Fifteen people had shouted a clean "hut" when asked. The rest, under the other commanders, had stayed in salute formation.
Sera had done her "hut" and privately noted that moving as one organism was not one of her stronger skills. She already had a thing in her body, it was already difficult managing that one alone.
Now, Rian's team stood in formation on the plains – open ground, no boulders, no cave walls to funnel movement or limit escape routes. Just flat expanse, scratchy grass, occasional wildflowers, hills, the dusty morning light, and the growing anticipatory stillness of fifteen people waiting.
Sera had twin daggers today.
She had picked them off the rack that morning without too much consideration – the weight settling into her hands before she'd finished looking at the rack, her body answering a question her mind hadn't asked yet. Much smaller than the naginata. Faster. Weapons so she could be close and inside and done quickly. Her Instructor had drilled her with daggers for years before the polearm. She knew what they asked of her body. She wasn't as good with them as the naginata, so today was a good day to practice. Important to be well-rounded.
What used to be called Squad Nine, now simply Holt's team, held its position on the left flank – Holt forward, Yoru and Kael beside him, Mira right after. She was cross-legged already, needle in hand, eyes half-closed, mana drifting off her body in slow quiet threads. She'd been doing that a lot lately – communing at every opportunity, focusing with a disciplined ferocity on trying to get that fifth needle under control. Scrupulous soldier, Sera thought, approvingly. Hibiscus was two steps back from the espers with a nervous, steeled expression next to an unflappable Ophelia. Sera on her other side.
Sera stood at the flank's edge and looked across the field to the right.
The second squad had anchored opposite. A total of eight. Six espers she now knew by face and rank – competent enough, the wyvern exercise had sorted that much out. And behind them, stationed at the outer edge, accompanied by one support esper, was the third guide under Rian's command.
Black hair. Purple eyes. Porcelain skin. B-rank insignia on her collar.
She had looked at Sera once when formation assembled early that morning, her expression indifferent and stoic as if she had seen something beneath her, and looked away.
Violet Fardin, Sera recalled from the roster. Wyer's team.
She noted the steely eyes and the good posture. She looked like someone competent.
At least she wasn't Hibiscus. Indifference was much easier to handle.
Beside her, Hibiscus was doing her pre-combat breathing with a grim expression, as if she had swallowed something unpleasant and decided to digest it quietly. The cave had done that – crushed something in her that had previously expressed itself loudly in Sera's direction. She no longer went out of her way to make her opinions known, not under Holt's gaze, not when she knew what the cave had revealed about the gap between her confidence and her actual performance. The verbal commentary had stopped.
The looks hadn't.
Sera received one now – furious, sharp, the hostility of someone who hadn't forgiven her for witnessing the freeze, the slap, and the fact that Sera had been more useful than her in the cave. Still proud. Just now accompanied with a sense of shame. Sera noted it with mild apathy.
Progress, she supposed.
Sera had no particular feelings about this. People improved or they died – the training and the upcoming raid would sort that out efficiently. Hibiscus was improving, which made her useful. If she froze again when it mattered, she would serve a different purpose. The red gem was in Rian's hand today, not hers. She would not have to make the same calculation she did back with the wyvern. She could leave her for dead.
Rian stood at the back line between the two squads, the aforementioned gem in hand. On the platform above – stood Rena, arms loosely crossed, tablet at her side. Arlen beside her, watching with his particular brightness. Joel on the far end, quiet and contained and analytical.
Below, off to the side of the field – was Yuria, already absorbed in her own tablet, collar readings scrolling across the screen, positioned closer to the action than was strictly necessary. Sera noted this with mild interest. The researcher had been present at the wyvern exercise too – nervously, off to the side, the same tablet, the same manic obliviousness to everything that wasn't her data. The collared hippogriffs today, the controlled wyverns before that. Yuria Leth's fingerprints were on both.
After the wyverns, a quiet consensus had formed among the raid members about Yuria Leth. The researcher's involvement in the collar technology wasn't a secret – her presence at the wyvern exercise and now this one made it obvious enough. The logic that followed was not particularly sophisticated: the beasts had been controlled by her technology, people had nearly died, therefore the researcher was responsible. That the commanders had ordered the exercises, that the technology had performed as intended, that fourteen casualties was the acceptable outcome of a calculated risk – none of that entered into it. Blame needed somewhere to go and civilian researchers couldn't fight back.
Sera had noted the undercurrent with neutrality. When the strong had nowhere to put their struggle, it found the nearest soft target.
Intelligent cookie, Sera thought. Able to understand mana and produce tech like that without an awakened vessel.
A few steps behind her, Risa and Takumi observed, talking quietly amongst themselves and pointing out metrics on the tablet held in Risa's hand.
The rest of the raid force lined the periphery – the squads waiting their own turns standing in loose clusters along the field's edge, some stretching, some watching. Preparing to take careful notes on the fight ahead. Forty-something people observing fifteen. An audience that knew they were next.
A screech split the morning air – sharp and carrying, the cry of something large and territorial. Three dark shapes dropped from the sky in formation, wings folding as they descended, the shadow of them crossing the field a full second before they landed.
They hit the ground hard.
The impact traveled through the earth and up through the soles of Sera's boots – three simultaneous thuds, heavy and deliberate, the heavy weight of creatures that had decided exactly where they were going to land. Dust kicked up at their feet. The nearest espers in the formation took an involuntary half-step back.
One of the beasts screamed again – not the cry from the sky, something lower and more directed, a screech that built from the chest and reverberated outward, pressing against eardrums and sternum simultaneously. Several espers flinched. Beside her, Hibiscus's hands flew to her ears.
Three hippogriffs.
Sera felt the difference immediately – not wyverns. They were smaller than the wyverns, each one about half the size. The wyverns had been blind rage and single-minded consumption, creatures that didn't think, only attacked. These thought. She could see it in the way their eyes moved across the field – not solely aggression, assessment. Taking measure. Feathered forequarters and leonine haunches and behind the eyes an intelligence that catalogued every variable with the patience of creatures that were waiting for an opening.
There wasn't actually much of a difference in intelligence between wyverns and hippogriffs. Both were capable and calculating species. Sera noted that the manatech must have been adjusted to reduce the berserk state in the hippogriffs – the wyverns had been driven into it deliberately, all that intelligence buried under forced frenzy. These ones were thinking clearly. Which made them more dangerous in a different way.
The collars sat at their throats, sigils pulsing faintly. They moved the way the gem commanded them to move. They didn't like it.
They remembered that they didn't like it. Forced obedience. Forced compulsion.
The hippogriffs stood at the edge of the field and looked at fifteen people and one commander and ran the numbers. Their eyes moved – not randomly, not with the blind sweep of the wyverns. Methodical. The gem first, always the gem, tracking the pull of it to the figure standing at the far back of the formation. Then the people between. How many. How they were positioned. Where the gaps were.
Sera felt a shiver of excitement run through her arms. She clenched her daggers. Appetizing, the entity within her murmured.
One of the beasts exhaled. A low whistling sound, almost like an owl, almost conversational.
Rian's voice cut across the field.
"Engage."
His team moved.