Fenris hit him at dawn.
No warning. No stance. No preparation window that a trained fighter could read and respond to. One moment Ervalen was standing on the valley floor, Soul-Brand active, watching the massive silver-haired figure across forty meters of frozen ground — the next moment the fist was there, already arrived, and Ervalen was in the air.
He landed three hundred and twelve meters away.
He knew the exact number because he counted the distance during the flight, which took approximately two seconds, during which he had time to confirm that his ribs were intact, his Brand hadn't collapsed, and the snowbank he was about to hit was at least four feet deep so the landing would be survivable.
It was survivable.
He lay in the snowbank for three seconds. Assessed. Left shoulder — impact bruising, no structural damage. Spine — intact. Legs — operational. The amber light of his Soul-Brand had flickered on impact but was already restabilizing.
He got up.
Fenris was exactly where he had been, forty meters from where Ervalen had been standing. He looked at him across three hundred meters of frozen valley with those ancient amber eyes.
"Again," he said.
His voice carried the distance without effort.
Ervalen walked back.
---
The first hour was the fist.
Not technique — just the fist, delivered at varying angles, varying speeds, varying output levels that Fenris adjusted with the same casual precision a craftsman adjusted the weight of a tool. Sometimes Ervalen saw it coming. Sometimes he didn't. The ones he saw coming he attempted to respond to — Brand reinforcement, lateral movement, Lance formation — and he quickly learned that the attempt mattered less than the attempt's quality, because Fenris was not trying to hit him before he could react. He was trying to hit him after he reacted and making him understand that the reaction wasn't enough.
· You moved right, he was being told, in the language of impact. Moving right wasn't sufficient.
· You reinforced the Brand, he was being told. Brand reinforcement wasn't the correct application for this vector.
· You formed the Lance, he was being told. The Lance at this range and angle is theater.
He landed in snowbanks, in frozen ground, in the face of the cracked ridge he had been sitting on the night before. He got up each time. He walked back each time. His Brand restabilized each time with slightly better speed as the morning progressed — not growth, just the body learning what was expected of it and streamlining the response.
At the two-hour mark, Fenris stopped.
Ervalen stopped.
They stood on the valley floor. Ervalen's coat had been destroyed in the third impact — he was in training clothing now, cold, functioning, the amber Brand doing enough thermal regulation to keep hypothermia at bay.
"What did you learn?" Fenris said.
Ervalen thought about it honestly rather than immediately.
"My lateral response is three hundredths of a second too slow for vectors from the upper-left quadrant," he said. "Brand reinforcement distributed across the whole body is wrong — I need it concentrated at the specific impact point, which means I need to read the vector faster. And the Lance at short range against something this fast is the wrong tool."
Fenris looked at him. "What's the right tool at short range against something this fast?"
"I don't know yet," Ervalen said.
"Good," Fenris said. "If you had an answer I'd know you were guessing."
---
He sat down on the valley floor, cross-legged, the snow compressing beneath him, and looked up at Ervalen with an expression that indicated a different phase of something was beginning.
"The Lance," Fenris said. "Tell me how it works."
"Soul-force condensed through my Brand into a physical—"
"Not the mechanism," Fenris said. "Why does it go forward."
Ervalen stopped.
It was such a simple question that it looped around to being profound. He stood in the frozen valley and thought about it with the full focus it deserved instead of the fraction it superficially seemed to require.
Why did the Lance go forward.
"Because I intend it to," he said slowly.
"And if your intention was different?"
"It would go — differently."
"You've thrown it at distance," Fenris said. "Downhill, in the Prussonian engagement. The approach run gave you kinetic multiplier. What else could you multiply?"
Ervalen was quiet. The amber Brand was warming slightly — not from temperature, from the specific internal process of something being worked out.
"The approach run gave me velocity," he said. "Which became additional force on delivery. If the Lance itself could carry additional — if the soul-force condensation could be shaped to include—" He stopped.
"Keep going."
"If I could compress a second layer of intention into the Lance while it's in flight," Ervalen said carefully, "it would be carrying two simultaneous force applications at the point of impact instead of one."
Fenris was looking at him with that amber attention. Not approval exactly. More the look of someone watching a correct direction being found in real time.
"Why don't you do that?" Fenris said.
"Because maintaining a second formation while the first is already deployed requires splitting my Brand's output—"
"Can you?"
"Not currently."
"Why not currently?"
"Because my Brand refinement isn't deep enough to sustain dual simultaneous formations at full output."
"And if it were?"
Ervalen felt the shape of it assembling in his mind — the specific architecture of what Fenris was pointing at, the way the pieces clicked together into something he couldn't fully build yet but could see the outline of.
"If my refinement were deep enough," he said, "I could throw a Lance carrying kinetic multiplier from the approach, with a second force-compression releasing at point of impact. The fire would have to address two simultaneous force applications from the same projectile." He paused. "It would need longer to dissolve it."
"How much longer?"
"I don't know. But longer."
---
Fenris stood. The movement was, as all his movements were, a single fluid thing — a body that had been refined for eight centuries simply transitioning from one state to the next without anything as inefficient as a process being visible.
"Dual formation at full output," he said. "That's your work. That's what the next six months are building toward. Not just Rank 5 — dual formation." He looked at the ridge line, at the cracked face of it where his fist had been. "The Lance that hits him needs to be the Lance he's never seen before. Not faster. Not stronger. Different in kind."
Ervalen looked at him. "You've been thinking about this."
"For eleven days," Fenris said. "Since I felt the first Lance."
"You knew before I asked you."
"I knew what the problem was," Fenris said. "I needed to know if you could think toward the solution." He turned back to the valley. "You can. Slowly. We'll work on the slowly."
---
The second hour was footwork.
Not combat footwork — reading footwork. Fenris moved through the valley at full speed and Ervalen tracked him, trying to identify the moment before each direction change, the signal in weight distribution and center-of-mass shift that preceded movement in an entity fast enough to cross forty meters before Ervalen's visual processing could register the departure.
He failed completely for the first forty minutes.
Not partially. Completely. Fenris moved and Ervalen found himself looking at where Fenris had been, which was the specific failure of reacting to presence instead of anticipating trajectory.
"You're watching me," Fenris said, from directly behind him.
Ervalen turned around. "Yes."
"Stop."
"What do I watch instead?"
"The valley," Fenris said. "Watch the whole valley. I am part of the valley. The valley will tell you where I'm going before I go there."
He moved.
Ervalen watched the valley.
The snow.
The snow compressed in the direction of weight transfer a fraction of a second before the body moved. A fraction — not even a full fraction, a partial fraction, the kind of temporal gap that existed only if you were looking for it and knew what it meant.
He caught the next direction change.
Not in time to respond. But he caught it — he saw the snow-signal and understood it and located Fenris's next position before Fenris arrived there. By the time he arrived, Ervalen was already looking at the right place.
Fenris stopped.
He was looking at Ervalen across the valley with an expression that had not been there before.
"You got that from one repetition," Fenris said.
"I was looking for the right thing," Ervalen said. "Once I knew what to look for—"
"Most people need forty," Fenris said.
"Forty what?"
"Repetitions. Before they understand to look at the snow instead of the body." He walked back across the valley, unhurried, the amber of his ancient eyes very clear in the morning light. "You have a mind that compresses time. You're processing faster than your reflexes can execute." He stopped two meters away. "That's your actual problem. Your mind is ahead of your body by approximately half a second. When you close that gap—"
"The Brand refinement catches up," Ervalen said.
"The Brand refinement and the body both catch up," Fenris corrected. "Right now you're thinking at Rank 5 speed and executing at Rank 4 speed. The mismatch is what costs you."
Ervalen absorbed that. Turned it over. Found the implication sitting underneath it.
"How do you close that gap?" he said.
Fenris looked at him.
"You stop thinking," he said.
---
The third hour was the one that cost him.
"Throw the Lance," Fenris said. "Don't think about the Lance. Don't form it consciously. Just — throw."
Ervalen tried.
What came out the first time was barely a fragment — a scatter of amber light that dissolved before it traveled three meters. The Brand had generated it without the conscious formation process and produced something incomplete, unstable, the soul-force equivalent of a sentence started without the intention of finishing it.
"Again," Fenris said.
The second attempt was worse.
The third was better — more coherent, the shape of a Lance without quite achieving it, traveling twelve meters before losing cohesion.
The fourth reached thirty meters and held its form the entire distance.
Ervalen stood in the frozen valley with his hand extended and stared at where the Lance had dissolved thirty meters away.
I didn't think about it, he realized. I just — wanted it there. And it went.
"What changed?" Fenris said.
"I stopped managing the formation and started — intending the result," Ervalen said. "The Brand produced the formation to match the intention instead of following conscious construction steps."
"That's the gap closing," Fenris said. "Intention-first output. You're not there yet — managed Lance at full output versus intention-first Lance at sixty percent. But that's the direction." He walked to the edge of the valley. "Do it a hundred times. I'll be back."
He jumped the ridge.
Ervalen stood alone in the frozen valley and threw Lance after Lance into the cold air — not thinking, intending, feeling the Brand respond to the result instead of the process — while the wind moved and the three moons tracked and the cracked granite settled and the ice-drake pack that had been circling the valley's edge for the past hour finally concluded he was too much trouble and left.
He didn't count the attempts. Counting was thinking.
He just threw.
---
At some point the morning became afternoon.
Fenris came back from wherever he had gone — there were new compressions in the snow on the valley's far side that indicated something large had been moving there, and a distant sound in the mid-morning hours that might have been a significant impact, and Ervalen had filed both of these under Fenris's business and continued his work.
The Lance had, over the course of the morning, become something slightly different in his hand.
Not stronger — not yet, not in one morning. But more direct. The path from intention to output had shortened. The Brand wasn't consulting a process anymore; it was answering a question, and the question was getting crisper.
Fenris looked at the last Lance as it flew.
"Sixty-eight percent," he said. "Up from sixty."
"That's from one morning," Ervalen said.
"That's from understanding the correct direction," Fenris said. "Velocity of improvement is not linear. You'll gain quickly at first because the compression between your mind-speed and body-speed is enormous and the gap closes fast once you're working the right problem." He sat. "Then it will slow. Then it will feel like nothing is changing for three or four weeks. Then it will change all at once."
"Rank 5," Ervalen said.
"Rank 5," Fenris confirmed. "It doesn't arrive gradually. It arrives when enough has accumulated."
Ervalen sat across from him in the snow. His body was wrecked — eleven impacts over the morning, each one calibrated to be survivable but not comfortable, the cumulative effect of which was the specific comprehensive exhaustion of someone who had been testing their structural limits from multiple directions for several hours.
He ate. Drank cold water from a canteen that had been starting to ice at the edges.
---
"You said Straze's configuration won't close the math," Ervalen said.
Fenris was quiet.
"Tell me why," Ervalen said. "Not to argue with it. So I understand what needs to close it."
Fenris looked at the valley. The amber glow of his eyes was steady in the afternoon light — not the hot amber of combat, the cool amber of something that had been burning long enough to know the difference between the two.
"Straze is building layered simultaneous pressure," he said. "Which is correct. The fire adapts to patterns. Multiple vectors disrupt pattern recognition. The suppression field costs the fire energy. The Lance from outside the pattern exploits the saturation moment." He was quiet for a moment. "The model is right. The math doesn't close because the components are all at their current limits."
"Solomon can't sustain the field long enough."
"The field is structurally good. But it costs him more than it costs the fire to burn it. The exchange rate is wrong." Fenris looked at Ervalen. "If the field could last three minutes instead of ninety seconds—"
"The saturation moment is longer," Ervalen said. "More time for the outside-pattern strike."
"And if the outside-pattern strike is dual-formation—"
"The fire needs longer to dissolve it."
"And if the Lance is thrown at Rank 5 instead of Rank 4—"
"The penetration depth increases from twelve meters toward twenty-five."
They looked at each other across the snow.
"The math closes," Ervalen said slowly.
"The math approaches closure," Fenris said. "Whether it closes depends on variables I can't calculate from here." He looked south. "Including what he does when he sees a Lance he hasn't seen before."
"What do you think he does?"
Fenris was quiet for a long moment.
"I think," he said carefully, "that he adapts. Because he always adapts. But I think the adaptation takes longer. And longer is the whole argument." The ancient amber eyes moved back to Ervalen. "The entire plan is buying more time. Every improvement you make buys more time. Every second Solomon can sustain that field buys more time. More time means more opportunity for the one strike that reaches."
"And if none of them reach?"
"Then you learn what doesn't work," Fenris said. "And you build from that." He stood. "Rest. Two hours. Then we do the afternoon."
Ervalen did not ask what the afternoon was.
He closed his eyes.
He was asleep in under a minute — the specific immediate sleep of someone whose body had been waiting for permission.
---
In the valley, the wind moved. The cracked ridge settled another fraction of an inch. The three moons of DEVAS tracked their separate paths across the pale sky.
Fenris stood at the valley's edge and looked south, the amber glow of eight centuries steady in his eyes.
Four meters, he thought.
In six months, let's see what twenty-three years old looks like when it's had time to grow.
He waited for the two hours to end.