Divine System: Land of the Abominations-Chapter 321: The Trials Begin (2).

Corvin moved with the particular quality of someone for whom technique had long since ceased to be a conscious process and had become simply what his body did when it was pointed at a problem. There was no hesitation in it, no observable decision-making between intention and action, and the result was a speed that was not actually superhuman but functioned like it because the gap where normal people processed their next move simply did not exist in his body’s chain of events.

He came in fast. Nero blocked the first strike and took the second on the forearm — blunt, solid, the kind of impact that would leave a bruise — and he moved back and tried to use the spear’s reach and found that Corvin had already accounted for the reach, was already inside it, and the third strike caught him across the thigh with enough force that his leg reported an opinion about continuing this exchange.

He kept moving.

He was not going to win this. He had known that before it started. But there was a specific thing he was looking for, the same thing he had been looking for across all the pairings — the edge of someone’s range, the thing they did consistently when they were pressing, the pattern that existed because all techniques had patterns and patterns were the grammar of prediction. With Corvin the pattern was harder to find because there was less wasted motion to anchor it to, but it was there, and at two minutes and twelve seconds into the exchange Nero found it: a slight overextension in the shoulder on the dominant side when Corvin committed to a follow-through, lasting perhaps a quarter of a second, not long enough to exploit with anything requiring setup but long enough to register.

He filed it.

Vane called the session after the final rotation and the twelve of them stood catching their breath at various intensities. Nero was breathing harder than he wanted to be, his forearm was going to be unpleasant tomorrow, and there was a numbness in his thigh that would resolve into something more specific in the next hour, but he was also running through the session the way he always ran through things afterward, the full accounting of what had happened and what it told him, and finding that it told him more than any of the previous three weeks combined.

Vane looked at them for a moment.

"Better than I expected," he said, which from Vane was the closest thing to a commendation available, and several of the candidates took it with the suppressed satisfaction of people trying not to show that they were pleased. "Worse than required. You’ll spar again on Thursday."

He left. The session was over.

Garet fell into step beside Nero on the way to the corridor, turning his practice sword over in his hands in the habit he had developed of examining the blade for marks after every session, despite the blade being blunted and the marks being largely imaginary. "You did well against Corvin," he said.

"I didn’t win," Nero said.

"Nobody wins against Corvin," Garet said. "That’s not what I said." He sheathed the practice sword with the careful attention he gave to all equipment-related tasks, which was one of the more consistently competent things about him. "You were still moving at the end, and you found something."

Nero glanced at him.

"I watch," Garet said, mildly. "You looked for something the whole time. At the end you found it." He paused. "Did you?"

"Maybe," Nero said.

Garet considered this and seemed to find it an acceptable answer. They walked the rest of the way to the corridor in silence, and at the junction where their respective rooms diverged he raised a hand in the particular gesture that meant nothing except goodbye, which was its own kind of thing, and turned down his corridor.

Nero went the other way.

His room was at the far end of the east wing, which was the quieter end, which he had decided early on was an advantage. He closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his forearm, already beginning to show the deep bruising that came from a solid impact on bone rather than muscle, and he pressed his thumb into the centre of it to check the depth of it, which was a habit from the months of travel when any injury needed to be assessed for severity with the pragmatism of someone who could not afford to be wrong about what required attention and what didn’t.

It didn’t require attention. It was a bruise. By morning the Vineheart would have dealt with most of it.

This was the part that was still difficult to calibrate — the knowledge of what his body would do versus what the other candidates’ bodies would do, and the maintenance of the gap between those two things remaining invisible. He healed faster. He recovered faster. Lyon’s limiters suppressed the more obvious edges of what he was, but the healing remained, and there was no way to suppress healing without simply leaving him injured, which Lyon had not done, and which suggested that Lyon either did not consider it a risk worth managing or had decided the risk was acceptable compared to the alternative of Nero arriving at each session already carrying yesterday’s damage.

He thought about Vane’s expression during the Corvin pairing — the particular quality of attention that had been present when Nero was still moving at two minutes and thirty seconds, that was not surprise exactly but had in it the note of information being updated.

He thought about the quarter-second in Corvin’s shoulder. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

Then he lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling and thought about Orpheus, which was what he came back to eventually regardless of what else he had been thinking about, the way a current comes back to its bed after spreading across a floodplain. Orpheus, who was twenty-eight years old and held twenty to fifty Seals and was the youngest Captain in the Crimson Crucible’s living memory.