The combat yard sat at the academy's eastern edge, a wide expanse of packed earth ringed by low stone benches, and Arthur stood at its border with the rest of the first-year cohort, watching Instructor Sutton pace the length of the assembled students with the particular unhurried scrutiny of a man conducting an inspection rather than beginning a class.
SUT: Today we establish baselines. Sword against sword, no abilities, no Alchemy. I want to see what you actually are before I spend a year teaching you to hide behind what your soul gave you for free.
He read pairings from a slate, names called and matched with brisk efficiency, and Arthur felt something settle in his chest, quiet and certain, when the name that followed his own was not one he'd expected.
SUT: Lyerm. Ashby.
A ripple of interest moved through the gathered students, quiet but unmistakable, and Arthur, glancing across the yard, found Corin already watching him, his expression composed into something politely unreadable, the particular practiced neutrality of someone who had decided, well in advance, not to give anyone the satisfaction of a reaction. Talon, beside him, was not nearly so composed.
TLN: That should be interesting.
COR: It'll be brief.
He said it without heat, simply a statement of expected fact, and crossed the yard toward the marked circle with the easy, unhurried confidence of someone who had never once had reason to doubt the outcome of a duel before it began. Arthur followed, practice sword in hand, the familiar worn weight of it settling into his grip the way it always had, and took his position across from Corin, and for a moment neither of them moved, the yard's noise dropping away into the particular held silence that preceded any real contest.
SUT: Begin.
Corin opened with a feint high, then dropped low, blade angling for Arthur's leading knee. Arthur read it a half beat before it landed, pivoted, let the strike pass wide, answered with a cut toward Corin's exposed shoulder that Corin caught on the flat of his own blade with barely a fraction of effort spared.
Corin pressed forward. Three strikes in rapid succession, high, high, low, each one probing, testing, and Arthur gave ground in small, deliberate steps, absorbing the rhythm of it, the particular pattern Corin's technique kept falling into, always three strikes and a reset, always testing the same three angles before committing further. He broke the pattern on the fourth exchange.
Instead of retreating from the low strike, Arthur stepped into it, closed the distance Corin hadn't expected him to close, and drove his own blade up in a tight, economical arc that forced Corin backward for the first time, the crowd's murmur sharpening into something more attentive. Corin's composure did not crack, but something in his eyes did, a flicker of genuine recalculation.
He came again, faster now, the testing patience gone, replaced by something sharper, more committed, and the duel accelerated into a rhythm that left the watching crowd struggling to track individual strikes, blade meeting blade in a rapid percussive sequence, high guard, low parry, a redirected thrust that nearly opened Arthur's guard before he recovered, a counter that clipped Corin's shoulder hard enough to draw a hiss of breath. They broke apart, circling, both breathing harder now.
COR: You've trained.
ART: Six years.
COR: It shows.
He said it without warmth, an observation rather than a compliment, and came again, and this time Arthur felt something different in the strikes, a fraction more force behind each one than pure muscle should have accounted for, and understood, in the half second before he could properly react, exactly what was happening. Corin's blade had begun to glow, faintly, along its edge, a thin seam of shifting light that had not been there a moment before.
The next strike landed hard enough to nearly take the practice sword from Arthur's hands entirely, the impact ringing up through his forearm with a force that had no business coming from a boy Corin's size, and Arthur, stumbling back a full step, understood that whatever restraint had governed the duel until this exact moment had just been abandoned.
ART: That's Alchemy.
COR: Is it?
He did not deny it. He did not stop, either, the enhanced blade coming again in a strike that Arthur only barely deflected, the force of it numbing his fingers, and around the ring the murmur of the crowd had shifted into something sharper, more alarmed, several voices calling out at once. Instructor Sutton moved.
Arthur did not see him cross the distance. One moment the instructor stood at the ring's edge, arms folded, and the next he was between them entirely, having closed twenty feet of packed earth in a span of time too brief to properly register, and Corin's glowing blade, already committed to its downward arc, met not Arthur's guard but Instructor Sutton's bare hand, two fingers closing around the flat of the enhanced steel and simply stopping it, dead, mid-strike, the way a person might catch a falling leaf. The yard went utterly silent.
SUT: I said no Alchemy.
He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. He held Corin's blade motionless between two fingers, the enhanced edge still glowing faintly against his skin without so much as scorching it, and looked at Corin with an expression that carried more weight than any shout could have managed.
COR: I-
SUT: You heard the instruction. You chose not to follow it. I want you to sit with why, before you offer me an explanation I haven't asked for yet.
He released the blade, and Corin lowered it slowly, his composure finally, visibly cracking, a flush climbing from his collar that had nothing to do with exertion.
SUT: Lyerm.
ART: Sir.
SUT: You held your ground against an enhanced strike with an unenhanced blade and didn't lose your footing. That's worth noting.
He turned back to the wider yard, his voice returning to its earlier brisk, instructional register, already moving on to the next pairing, and Arthur lowered his own sword, his arm still ringing faintly from the last impact, and found Corin watching him across the circle with an expression that had shed every trace of its earlier composure. There was no anger in it. Arthur had expected anger.
What he found instead was something closer to genuine unsettlement, the particular look of someone confronting a result they had not prepared for and did not yet know how to file away.
COR: You should have lost.
ART: I know.
COR: I don't understand why you didn't.
Arthur considered this honestly, turning it over the way he'd learned to turn things over years before, and found he did not have a clean answer to offer, only the truth as he understood it.
ART: I've spent a long time learning not to break the first time something hits hard.
Corin held his gaze for a long moment, something working behind his eyes that Arthur couldn't fully read, and then, without another word, turned and walked back toward Talon at the ring's edge, his shoulders set in a rigid, controlled line that suggested the composure he'd worn into the duel was costing him considerably more to maintain now than it had an hour ago. Talon watched him go, and then glanced back once, briefly, toward Arthur, something in his expression that had not been there before the duel began, a small, private recalculation quietly taking place behind otherwise unreadable features.
He said nothing. He simply looked, and then followed Corin from the yard, and Arthur, flexing the numbness slowly out of his sword hand, understood that whatever had just happened in that ring had changed something, even if none of them yet had the words for exactly what.