The training grounds were empty at this hour which was exactly why he was here.
He had woken up early, earlier than the schedule required, partly because the body's internal clock apparently ran on Alister's routine and partly because he needed to understand what he was working with before he was surrounded by people who already had expectations of him.
He set the sword down against the low stone wall bordering the grounds and stood in the open space, looking at his hands.
The mark on his forearm was more visible now in the morning light, that faint off-color line running beneath the skin from his wrist toward his elbow. One vein. The base state. He could feel it the way you could feel your own heartbeat once you started paying attention to it, a quiet consistent pull that sat just underneath everything else.
He had read enough of the novel to understand the rough mechanics. Vein Awakening was not just about unlocking power, it was about learning to circulate it. Most students spent their first year just getting familiar with the feeling of their own awakened vein, learning to push energy through it without losing control or burning themselves out. Accidents in first year training were common enough that the academy had a dedicated medical ward that apparently stayed well staffed.
Alister in the novel had skipped that entire fumbling phase because he had been practicing in secret for years before enrollment. His control at entry was already well above average for a first year which was part of what had initially drawn attention to him.
Ethan rolled up his sleeve and looked at the mark properly.
Okay. So the ability was there. The question was whether Alister's years of practice translated into actual instinctive knowledge he could access or whether it was going to be like knowing how to ride a bike in theory while having never touched one.
He exhaled slowly and tried to do what he vaguely remembered the novel describing. Stop thinking about it as something external. It's not a tool you pick up. It runs through you. Feel where it starts.
For a moment nothing happened and he felt slightly ridiculous standing alone in an empty training yard talking himself through a fantasy power system at what was probably five in the morning.
Then something shifted.
It was subtle, less dramatic than he had expected, no sudden heat or surge of energy. More like a door in a room he had always been in just quietly swung open and he noticed for the first time that it had been there. The pull he had been feeling sharpened, gained direction, and he could feel it moving, a slow circulation that ran up his arm, across his shoulder, branching down through his ribs.
"Oh," he said quietly.
He stood there for a while just feeling it move. Not trying to do anything with it yet, just getting familiar the way you learned a new space by standing in it before you started moving around. The body knew this. The muscles, the breath pattern, the way his weight had naturally settled when he stopped fidgeting, all of it had clearly done this thousands of times. He was borrowing a practiced instrument and his job for now was to not get in its way.
After maybe twenty minutes he picked the sword back up.
The circulation shifted the moment his hand closed around the grip, orienting toward his arm almost like it recognized the motion. He went through what felt like a warm up sequence, slow deliberate movements that the body moved through without him having to consciously choose them. He let it. Watched from inside as Alister's trained muscle memory walked him through a form he didn't know the name of, clean economical movements that didn't waste anything.
He was not a bad fighter. Technically he was probably excellent.
He was also completely alone in a training yard talking to no one and emanating enough cold focused energy that he imagined anyone who walked past would give him a wide berth. He understood now viscerally why the original Alister had never made a single friend in three hundred chapters. If this was his default state he probably looked deeply unapproachable at all times without meaning to.
Something to work on.
He lowered the sword and exhaled.
Behind him, footsteps.
He turned, not quickly, just a natural pivot, and found a girl standing at the entrance of the training grounds with a water flask in her hand and an expression that suggested she had not expected anyone to be here either.
She was in the standard first year uniform, dark jacket, silver trim, the collar slightly adjusted in a way that was technically against regulation but only barely. Dark red hair pulled back loosely. She had the kind of posture that came from being told since childhood to stand straight, correct but not comfortable, like a habit she had stopped thinking about.
He knew exactly who she was.
Seraphine Ashcroft.
In the novel she appeared in the third chapter of the first arc, initially framed as a rival, then reframed as an antagonist by the end of the year once the author decided her usefulness as a supportive character was less interesting than making her a source of conflict. She came from a house that had political history with Alister's, the specifics of which the author had kept vague in the way authors did when they wanted tension without doing the actual worldbuilding work. She was sharp, proud, and had a talent for reading people that the story mostly used to make her threatening rather than exploring what it actually meant for her as a person.
The original Alister had looked at her, decided she was a potential problem and filed her under people to avoid. Which had not helped either of them.
Seraphine looked at him with an expression that was carefully neutral in the specific way people were neutral when they were deciding something. Her eyes moved to the sword in his hand then back to his face.
"You're up early," she said. Not a question. Not particularly warm. The tone of someone who was keeping their options open.
The old Alister would have said nothing and turned back to training or at best given her a single word acknowledgment that communicated clearly that this conversation was over before it started.
Ethan looked at her for a moment.
"So are you," he said.
Not groundbreaking. Not a smooth opener. But he held the eye contact and didn't make his face do the thing where it conveyed that her existence was mildly inconvenient, which already put him ahead of canon.
Something shifted slightly in her expression. Not much. Just enough.
She walked past him toward the other end of the training grounds, setting her flask down on the wall, and began her own warm up without another word.
They trained in silence on opposite ends of the yard as the morning light grew stronger and the seventh bell crept closer.
It wasn't a conversation. It wasn't a moment. But she hadn't left and he hadn't driven her away and in the context of Alister Von Draguhn's social track record Ethan was going to count that as a win.