The hall was loud.
Not chaotically loud, structured loud, the specific noise of multiple bodies undergoing coordinated exertion.
The ring of metal on practice dummies.
The rhythm of feet on stone floor.
The sharp count of a man who did not give his counts any option other than being obeyed.
Alex stood at the entrance and assessed.
The hall was large.
High-ceilinged, stone-floored, with the worn quality of a space that had been used for exactly this purpose for decades without interruption.
Practice racks lined the eastern wall, weapons on one side, conditioning equipment on the other.
Dummies down the centre in two rows.
A sparring area at the far end marked with a slightly different quality of stone, smoother, the kind that had absorbed ten thousand falls and developed an opinion about impact.
There were many students.
The youngest looked to be around fifteen.
The oldest were probably eighteen.
All of them were in the middle of a weapons drill, working through a sequence with the focused repetition of people who had drilled it enough to stop thinking about the sequence and start thinking about the quality of each repetition.
The man overseeing them was at the front of the formation.
He was Theron Blackwell.
He was not large.
He was the kind of compact that came from function rather than aesthetic, nothing on him that wasn’t needed, nothing wasted.
Dark hair shot through with grey.
A jaw that had been set in the expression of professional dissatisfaction for long enough that it had become the resting position.
He walked between the rows of students with the particular manner of someone who was seeing everything and commenting on most of it, his voice a controlled instrument of expectation.
He saw the door open.
He didn’t stop his count immediately.
He finished the beat, because the count was the count, and interruptions acknowledged mid-count set bad precedent, and then his eyes moved to the entrance with the expression of someone who had very specific thoughts about who had the audacity to interrupt a training session and was already composing a response.
His eyes fell on Alex.
A child.
The confusion was visible and brief.
A child, at the training hall door, without apparent reason to be there.
He opened his mouth.
Then his eyes moved.
To Zara.
Standing at Alex’s shoulder.
Then to their clothes, not uniform, not servant’s wear.
The cut and quality of the Abyss household proper.
Then to his mana.
Then to his face again, more focused.
The count died in his throat.
He had heard the announcement.
Every person under Abyss authority in Winterfang had heard it within an hour of it being made.
He had processed it the way experienced fighters processed information, catalogued it, assessed its implications, filed it under things that would matter and exactly how they would matter.
He had not expected to be standing in front of the information two days later.
He moved with the decisiveness of someone who had reached a conclusion and acted on it without deliberation.
The bow was deep and immediate.
Right hand to left shoulder, head down, with the particular crispness of someone who had been doing formal acknowledgments for long enough that they were genuine rather than performed.
"All things fall into the Abyss. The Abyss falls to you." He came up from the bow with the controlled transition of long practice.
"We greet the Third Prince, Alexander Abyss." His voice was clear and carrying, and it reached every corner of the hall without effort.
"Congratulations on Your Highness’s early awakening."
He turned.
Just slightly.
Just enough.
The look he gave the students was not a loud look.
It didn’t need to be.
It was the look of a man who had been communicating expectations with his face for many years and had gotten very efficient at it.
All students registered what they were supposed to do.
The drill stopped.
The formation shifted.
All right hands to thirty left shoulders.
All bowed heads.
"All things fall into the Abyss! The Abyss falls to you!" The timing wasn’t perfect, it was thirty people who hadn’t rehearsed this specific thing, some of them half a beat behind, some of them still processing the logic of what they were looking at, but the intent was unanimous and clear.
Alex looked at the room.
He let the moment exist for exactly as long as it needed to exist.
"Raise your heads," he said.
They raised their heads.
The silence that followed was the specific silence of thirty people trying to make sense of something and doing it with their faces.
Some of them, he could see, had the expression of people encountering the announcement as a confirmed fact for the first time, they had heard it as a rumor, or they had filed it as news from a distance, and now it was standing in the training hall doorway and being five years old at them and the gap between those two things was producing something that didn’t quite have a name.
A few of them had gone to mana assessment without intending to, the automatic reach of fighters who categorized what they were looking at.
He watched their expressions do the math and arrive at conclusions that didn’t fit the frame.
"Continue your training," Alex said.
"I’m here to observe. Carry on as though I’m not here."
The instructor’s, Theron Blackwell’s eyes moved to Alex once, a brief and careful assessment, and then he turned back to his students.
"You heard the Third Prince," he said, and his voice had returned to the instrument it was during training, no warmth, no performance, just expectation with volume behind it.
"Formation. Weapons drill. Again. From the beginning. And since some of you apparently forgot how to hold your positions while we were bowing, we’ll do it twice."
There were no complaints.
The drill resumed.
Alex walked to the side of the hall and stood where he could see the formation without being in the line of movement.
Zara settled at his shoulder.
"What’s your goal here?" she asked, quietly, in the register of someone asking genuinely.
"I want to see what they’re doing," Alex said, watching the formation move.
"How they train. What they prioritize. What the gap looks like between what they know and what I need to know."
"And then?"
"And then I’ll know what I need to know to make a plan." He paused.
"I’m fairly certain mother and you are not going to let me go out and start hunting things for experience until I have a foundation that justifies it."
Zara made a sound.
"No mother in the history of this world," she said, "has let her five year old child go kill things for levels. Not even extraordinary ones. Not even ones who have already demonstrated a capacity to survive things they shouldn’t survive."
"I know," Alex said.
"Which is why I need an argument. Not a request, a demonstrated case." He watched the weapons drill move through its sequence. "If I can beat every student in this hall, I have something to point at. I have proof that the foundation is there."
Zara looked at him.
Then she looked at the hall.
"Alex," she said, carefully, "some of those students are Level eight. A few of them are Level nine. One of them might be at ten already."
"I know."
"You’re Level Zero."
"I know that too."
"And you think you can—"
"I think I’ll figure it out," he said. "Eventually."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"You’re insane," she said, with the tone of someone who had arrived at this conclusion before and was simply confirming it in a new context.
"Probably," he agreed. "Watch the weapons drill. I’m learning something."
She watched.
He was already learning several things.
The weapons drill was instructive not because of what it showed him about how to use weapons, but because of what it showed him about how these students thought about using weapons.
Their forms were clean.
Their repetitions were consistent.
They had been taught a vocabulary of motion and they had practiced it until it was fluent.
That was admirable and it was also a pattern, a deeply ingrained pattern, the kind that revealed itself under pressure.
He catalogued them.
Not their skill.
Their habits.
The specific tells of each body, the way each person had a slightly different relationship between what they intended and what they did, the small divergences between the form they’d been taught and the form their body had settled into.
Patterns.
He stored them all.