Sylvia went in aggressive.
That was Levi's first observation. She'd evolved — the blue-tipped flames running as her baseline now, the Intermediate Phase's foundation giving her output that the old 2nd Form hadn't had — and she was leading with it, attack after attack, the Fiery Fists landing in combinations that would have ended most fights inside the first thirty seconds.
Kylie absorbed all of it.
Not struggling — absorbing. She read each attack a fraction before it arrived, blocked what needed blocking, dodged what could be dodged, and counter what left an opening. Her hand-to-hand was better than anything Levi had faced personally, better than anything he'd watched Melissa demonstrate in the training yard. And she wasn't even in her forms yet.
*She's letting Sylvia wear herself out,* he thought. *The aggressive approach is playing into it. Sylvia needs to change this.*
Sylvia figured it out. She activated her enhancement 2nd Form on top of the fire — the speed jump was immediate, the combination pushing her into a register that finally surprised Kylie, the reaction time narrowing to something that required actual effort to manage. Kylie activated her 3rd Form and met the new speed with a defensive technique that absorbed the impact rather than opposing it.
"Black Turtle Palm," Kylie said, and the shockwave from the collision ran through the training room and rattled the equipment on the walls.
*Cancelled Sylvia's impact attack entirely,* Levi noted. *Interesting technique — takes the force and redirects it rather than blocking it.*
They went again. Kylie more offensive now — the defensive phase over, the reading complete, the match shifting into something reciprocal. Sylvia responded by pushing her speed to the ceiling.
"Enhanced Rocket Thruster: Rapid Throttle."
The speed was insane — the kind of speed that stopped being something you tracked and became something you registered in retrospect. Sylvia's fist connected with Kylie's face before anyone watching had fully processed that she'd thrown it.
The room went quiet.
Kylie was falling.
And then she wasn't. She caught herself mid-fall in a way that wasn't conscious — the body acting on something underneath consciousness, older than decision. When she straightened, her stance was different. Not the relaxed defensive posture she'd used throughout the match. Something lower, more rooted, the weight distribution of a different approach entirely.
"Oh," said Kiyandra, from the side. Quietly. Like a warning.
Sylvia saw that Kylie was still upright and went in again.
—
What happened next was fast and specific and very unpleasant to watch.
Kylie spun as Sylvia's right hook came in — not dodging it exactly, using it, the rotation converting Sylvia's momentum into her own. Her elbow found Sylvia's left jaw on the way around. Then the opposite spin, the momentum redoubling, and the left hook connected with Sylvia's right cheek with the kind of force that had nothing to do with the size of the person delivering it.
Sylvia went down hard.
The room cringed — collectively, involuntarily, the specific cringe of people who had seen this before and knew exactly what it felt like. Zoe and Priscilla were already moving to her.
"Kylie," said Kiyandra.
Kylie blinked. She looked around the room with the slightly unfocused quality of someone surfacing from somewhere internal. "What happened?"
"You did it again," said Kiyandra.
"Again—" Kylie saw Sylvia on the floor and her expression changed. "Is she okay?"
"She will be when I'm done," said Zoe, already working. "But you didn't have to do that."
"I got carried away. I'm sorry." Kylie said it to the room, to Sylvia, to the general principle of having a trance-state combat response that didn't know what round it was.
Priscilla looked up from where she was beside Sylvia. Her expression had moved from concerned to something with an edge to it. "Fight me next," she said.
"Hold on," said Curwyn. "You'll be fighting Kiyandra, not Kylie."
"Fine." Priscilla's eyes hadn't left Kiyandra. "I'll wait until Sylvia wakes up."
"So she can watch you lose too?"
The room went quiet in the specific way rooms went quiet when something had been said that couldn't be unsaid.
Levi looked at Curwyn. Curwyn looked at Ross. Ross looked at the ceiling.
"This was day one," Ross murmured to Curwyn.
"I'm starting to question my life choices," Curwyn murmured back.
Priscilla held Kiyandra's gaze with the calm, specific composure of someone who had made a decision. "We'll see," she said.
✦ ✦ ✦
Curwyn called the match. Priscilla levitated Sylvia gently to the room's edge and took the centre.
Kiyandra was already in her stance.
Levi settled in beside Winters. "This should be interesting," he said quietly.
"Telekinesis against chi manipulation," Winters said. "Yes." He sounded genuinely curious rather than patronising. "Kiya's never fought a telekinetic before."
Priscilla opened with Repulse — a pure force push, clean and direct, aimed at closing the distance question before it became a problem. Kiyandra activated her 2nd Form and met it with the Black Turtle Palm, the chi absorbing the force the same way it had absorbed Sylvia's impact attack.
Then Kiyandra went offensive.
She crossed the distance fast — faster than the 2nd Form should have allowed, the chi enhancing her movement in ways that were hard to track — and launched the Crimson Suzaku Kick at a height and angle that targeted Priscilla's levitation path. Priscilla threw up a telekinetic barrier. Kiyandra went through it.
Not around it. Through it. The kick broke the barrier on contact and Priscilla dodged by moving up and back, activating her own 2nd Form, the silver of it settling over her as she recalibrated.
She managed the next sequence — the White Tiger Claw and the Crimson Suzaku Kick in combination, Kiyandra testing her range coverage, Priscilla dodging what she could and cancelling the rest with targeted Repulse pulses. It was working. The spatial awareness was doing what it always did, giving her the geometry of the fight in real time.
She activated Motionless.
The spell spread from her in rings, the telekinetic force arresting motion within its radius. Everything in the affected zone stopped — equipment, dust particles, the air itself.
Kiyandra kept moving.
Priscilla stared.
"How," she said, quietly, to herself.
Levi leaned toward Winters. "Why isn't it working?"
Winters was quiet for a moment — the pause of someone assembling an explanation rather than formulating one. "The twins put themselves in liquid Ultimatium once," he said. "Let it cool and harden around them. Only their faces were free. Then they tried to get out."
Levi looked at him. "How long did that take?"
"Months. I fed them through straws. Kept them hydrated. Watched them work against it every day." Winters' expression was the expression of someone who had observed something extraordinary and was still processing the full implications. "The Ultimatium didn't break them. They built resistance from the inside out. Their bodies, their chi, their will — all of it hardened in the same process." He paused. "Priscilla's telekinesis can hold anything with physical mass. But Kiyandra's will isn't physical mass. It's something else."
Levi was silent for a moment. *They put themselves in liquid Ultimatium and broke out through will over months. And I thought Hercules was extreme.*
In the centre of the room, Priscilla had activated her 3rd Form. The silver blazed. She reached for the Great Repulse — the spell that had held back an army at the Levatian border, that had pushed a military squadron a mile backward, that Hercules himself had walked through step by deliberate step—
"Priscilla, don—" Levi started.
She released it.
The force was enormous — everything in its path displaced, the walls absorbing it, the room shaking. Kiyandra activated her 3rd Form and walked into it. One step. Then another. The force pressing against her and failing to stop her, the chi running through her body like something that had made up its mind and couldn't be unmade.
Priscilla watched her come.
The steps. The unstoppable progress. The force field failing to close the distance. The figure still approaching through everything she had.
Something cold settled in her chest that had nothing to do with the fight.
She threw the strongest barrier she could build — full 3rd Form output, every particle of spatial force concentrated at a single point. Kiyandra slowed. Her hand found the barrier's edge. The chi focused at her palm and she pushed, slowly, deliberately, the barrier compressing under the pressure.
"Your power is great, Priscilla," Kiyandra said, her voice level, no cruelty in it — just fact, delivered honestly. "But will is the foundation of force. And your will is not yet stronger than mine."
"Please stop," said Priscilla.
Kiyandra stopped immediately.
She stepped back, the chi releasing, the pressure gone. She looked at Priscilla with something that had shifted from combatant to person. "Are you all right?"
Priscilla didn't answer. She descended from her 3rd Form and levitated to Levi's side.
"What happened?" he asked.
"Nothing," she said.
He looked at her — the specific quality of her expression, something closed off in it that hadn't been there before the fight. He thought about Hercules walking through the Great Repulse step by step. About Priscilla standing in the road watching it happen with everything she had failing to stop it.
"I'm here if you need to talk about it," he said. He put his hand briefly on her head — the same way he'd done it a dozen times, the gesture that was somehow both ordinary and specific to them.
Priscilla's expression shifted fractionally. "Sure," she said.
✦ ✦ ✦
"Levi," said Curwyn. "You're up. Ross."
Ross bounced on his heels with the energy of someone who had been waiting for this and wasn't going to pretend otherwise. Levi stood and stretched and walked to the centre of the room.
Winters watched from the side with his arms folded. *Electricity versus sound,* he thought. *I want to see his ceiling.*
The match started and Ross went first — a direct strike, testing the baseline. Levi blocked and countered. Ross blocked the counter and came back. They traded for two minutes in the equal register of two people discovering each other's fundamentals, neither of them reaching for their ability yet.
Then Levi telestrided.
The relocation was fast enough that Ross lost him for a second — the half-second gap that the telestride created between where Levi was and where Ross's perception expected him to be. Three hits landed in that gap before Ross had recalibrated.
Ross activated his auditory sense — sound-based spatial awareness, the ability to locate targets through the sound signatures their movement created. He stopped tracking visually and started tracking through the room's acoustic field.
The next telestrided attack was dodged. Ross countered with a supersonic wave and sent Levi sideways. Levi recovered mid-air, teleported behind Ross, attacked — and Ross met the attack with a supersonic boom that detonated on contact and blew him back.
Levi found the wall and stood on it for a moment.
His ears were ringing. Not from the boom — before that, a sustained high-frequency ringing that had been building since the match started, now sharp enough to affect his tracking. He traced it back: the fight had been generating sustained sound output, and Ross's ability was ambient as well as directed. He'd been seeding the air with frequency the whole time.
*Clever,* Levi thought. *Passive debuff running underneath the active attacks. He's been wearing down my perception this whole time.*
He activated his 2nd Form. Ross activated his.
Ross shot a supersonic wave — focused, direct, high output. Levi brought up the Ecstatic Palm and let the wave hit it, the electricity in his palm converting the sound energy on contact, the wave dispersing rather than landing. Ross blinked. Nobody cancelled his attacks. Nobody.
He didn't have time to process it.
Levi clasped his hands.
Ross moved toward him, fast, pressing the advantage of confusion. He was good in close range — the sound ability working at every distance, the martial arts solid. He was almost there.
"Godspeed: 1st Gear," Levi said.
Ross was on the floor.
The watching squad had time to register the sound of the technique activating and then Ross was down. The sequence between those two moments was not visible to anyone in the room except, possibly, Winters — and even he had only a partial impression of it, a suggestion of movement that the eye had caught the edges of without the centre.
Zoe moved to Ross. "He's fine," she said, after a moment. "Just unconscious."
Winters unfolded his arms slowly. *Godspeed: 1st Gear. He uses the mudra to concentrate the energy before release — the clasped hands aren't a habit, they're a technique.* He looked at Levi, who was standing in the centre of the room breathing normally, and filed everything he'd just seen in the place where he filed things that were going to matter.
"Decent," said Curwyn.
"Decent," Levi agreed.
✦ ✦ ✦
The bell at the front door rang. Curwyn went to answer it and came back with Charlotte.
Levi was on his feet before he'd consciously decided to stand. "Charlotte."
She crossed the room and he hugged her — the kind of hug that two people gave each other when they had both been through something and were relieved that the other one was standing. She held on for a moment before stepping back.
"You look terrible," she said. The affection in it was unmistakeable.
"I just woke up from a coma," he said. "What's Sylvia's excuse?"
Charlotte looked at Sylvia on the bench, still slightly unfocused from Zoe's healing. "What happened to her?"
"Initiation," said Levi.
Charlotte looked at the squad. At Kylie. At the scored training pillar. "I'm not doing an initiation," she said.
"I was joking," said Levi. "Probably."
She looked at him with the expression that meant she didn't entirely believe him but was choosing to let it go. "Good to see you, Levi."
"You too." He held her gaze for a moment. There was weight behind the ordinary words — her father's throne room, the city she'd grown up in, the specific grief of someone who had lost a parent and a kingdom in the same afternoon. He didn't say any of that. He didn't need to. "You too," he said again, and meant everything it held.
—
The twins ran the training session.
An hour in, the four newcomers were on the floor. Not injured — depleted. The specific exhaustion of a body that had been asked to perform at a level it hadn't reached before and had discovered, through direct experience, exactly where its current ceiling was.
"We're only getting started," said Kiyandra.
"How," said Sylvia, at the floor.
"We've trained like this every day since we were children," said Kylie. Not unkindly. Just factual.
"The Ultimatium training," said Levi. He was on his back, staring at the ceiling, doing the mathematics of two more hours in his head. "That was extreme even for you, right?"
"That was the worst thing we've ever done," Kylie confirmed. "But the results were worth it."
"Two more hours of this," said Levi.
"Minimum," said Kiyandra.
Levi looked at Priscilla. Priscilla looked at Sylvia. Sylvia looked at Charlotte.
Charlotte had the expression of someone who had survived things and was prepared to survive this too, but was not going to be theatrical about it.
"Fine," said Levi. He got up. "Let's go."
They went.
—
Three hours later they were on the floor again, and this time they stayed there.
Kiyandra looked at them with something that wasn't quite respect and wasn't quite surprise but contained elements of both. "They lasted the full session," she said.
"Longer than I expected," Winters said. He was watching Levi specifically — the way Levi was lying there thinking rather than simply recovering, the quality of someone who was already calculating what needed to change and how.
"You like them," said Curwyn.
"What's not to like," said Winters.
"Heh." Curwyn looked at the four of them on the floor. "They're going to be interesting to watch against the Rogues."
"Everything about them is going to be interesting," Winters said. He looked at the ceiling. "They've already been through things that most people in this squad haven't. The question isn't whether they're capable." He paused. "The question is how they adapt to a world that's completely different from the one they grew up in."
"Only the future will tell that story," said Curwyn.
"Yes," said Winters. "It will."