Scott opened his mouth.
Whatever he’d been about to say never made it out.
Alex was already moving, the first step deliberate, controlled, his focus dropping inward toward the small core of mana sitting in his chest, directing a thread of it down toward his legs in a motion that had become second nature somewhere in the last several hours of practice.
He pushed.
A faint boom cracked through the air, barely audible over the general noise of the hall, and then he was simply somewhere else, the distance between himself and Scott collapsed into nothing in the space of a single heartbeat, the room blurring at the edges of his vision as his body covered ground faster than anyone watching had time to process.
The Viper’s Spine came up.
Steel kissed skin.
A thin line of red welled up along the side of Scott’s neck where the blade had bitten in, no more than a millimeter deep, but real, the kind of cut that meant something different from a bruise, the kind that announced exactly how close it had come to meaning something far worse.
Theron’s hand shot out and caught the blade an inch further along its arc than it should have needed to, his fingers wrapping around cold metal with the kind of reflexive speed that came from decades of exactly this work, and for one suspended second the entire hall held its breath, every recruit frozen mid-motion, mid-sentence, mid-thought.
Scott staggered backward, one hand flying to his neck, eyes wide and shaking, his breath coming in short, audible gasps that filled the sudden silence of the hall.
Theron’s face had gone pale in a way that had nothing to do with the cold evening air seeping through the open doors.
He’d been close.
Closer than he wanted to admit even to himself, the blade’s momentum carrying further than his initial read of the strike had accounted for, and if his hand had been a fraction slower, if his instincts had hesitated even slightly at the sight of a five-year-old moving like that, hesitated the way any reasonable person’s instincts might at something so far outside what they’d ever trained for.
Scott would not have walked away from this spar.
"Scott." Theron’s voice came out lower than usual, controlled in the specific way of a man forcing his own alarm into something useful, something he could actually use to teach rather than just feel.
"Look at me. Right here, look at me."
Scott did, hand still pressed to the thin line of blood at his neck, his eyes searching Theron’s face for some kind of reassurance.
"You weren’t ready," Theron said.
"Your Highness moved on the first signal and you were still standing there with your mouth half open, thinking about what to say instead of what to do. In a real fight, that hesitation kills you. It doesn’t matter how good your stance looks if your mind isn’t where your body is, if you’re three seconds behind the moment you’re actually standing in."
Scott’s face had gone red, humiliation settling over the residual shock in equal measure, his free hand curling into a fist at his side.
"I lost focus. I’m sorry, instructor, it won’t happen again, I swear it won’t, I just wasn’t expecting him to move that fast, nobody told me he could move like that, I thought this would be, I don’t know, gentler than this."
"Nobody is ever expecting it," Theron said.
"That’s the entire point of training for it instead of waiting to find out the hard way in a fight that actually matters."
He turned to Alex.
There was something in his expression that hadn’t been there before the first exchange, something Alex recognized immediately because he’d spent years learning to read exactly this kind of shift in adult faces, the particular recalculation that happened when someone’s understanding of a situation got rewritten in real time.
It wasn’t fear, not quite.
It was closer to a man recalculating, in real time, exactly what kind of child he was actually standing in front of, and not entirely liking the conclusions his own mind was offering up.
"You used too much mana for that strike," Theron said, and his voice had steadied back into instructional mode, though something underneath it remained taut, like a string pulled almost to its limit.
"It was fast, effective, decisive, I’ll grant you all of that without hesitation. But in a prolonged engagement, that kind of expenditure leaves you running dry long before your opponent does, and an opponent who knows what they’re doing will simply wait you out. Efficiency matters as much as speed, maybe more, depending on who you end up fighting."
Alex nodded once.
"I’ll work on that. I noticed it myself, actually, somewhere in the back of my mind while it was happening, but I didn’t have time to correct for it mid-strike."
He looked at Scott, who was still standing there with blood drying along his collar, eyes shaking with something between adrenaline and shame, his sword hanging loose and forgotten at his side.
"Get up properly," Alex said.
"We’re starting again."
He said it without any particular heat, no triumph in it, no cruelty either, simply a statement of what was happening next, delivered the same way he might have told Zara to bring him a different weapon.
Scott climbed back to his feet, wiping the thin trickle of blood from his neck with the back of his hand, and there was something different in his eyes now, the humiliation curdling into something sharper, something with a harder edge to it.
’He thinks he’s going to win this one,’ Alex thought, watching the shift happen in real time, the way Scott’s jaw set and his stance dropped lower without anyone needing to tell him to fix it.
’Good. That’s the right reaction. Anger that turns into focus is useful. Anger that just stays anger and burns itself out for no reason gets people killed, gets them sloppy at exactly the moment they need to be sharp.’
Scott’s reasoning wasn’t wrong, either.
He’d Awakened a while back, his mana control already settled into something competent after months of guard training, and a five-year-old’s base attributes, even an unusually capable five-year-old’s, should have sat well below his own by simple, unforgiving math that every recruit in this hall had been taught to trust.
He squared his stance, gripped his practice sword with both hands this time instead of one, and felt something steady itself in his chest, a resolve hardening where embarrassment had been sitting a moment ago.
’I will not lose to a child,’ he told himself.
’Not twice. Not in front of everyone I train with, not after they already saw what happened the first time.’
The rest of the hall had gone quiet, every other spar abandoned, every recruit now clustered loosely around the open space, watching with the particular stillness of people who understood they were seeing something they’d be talking about for weeks.
"Begin," Theron said.
This time, Scott moved first, mana flooding down into his legs in a controlled surge, and he closed the distance fast, his blade already swinging in a tight horizontal arc aimed to test rather than to finish, a probe rather than a commitment.
Alex met it.
He’d pulled back on the mana this time, sending only a fraction of what he’d used in the opening exchange, and the difference showed immediately in how the clash played out, steel meeting steel with a sharp ring instead of the explosive, distance-erasing burst from before, the sound carrying clean through the hushed hall.
They separated.
Circled.
Clashed again.
Scott pressed forward with a quick feint high, then dropped his blade low at the last instant, a clean piece of technique that should have caught most opponents flat-footed, the kind of move he’d clearly drilled enough times to make it feel natural under pressure.
Alex wasn’t most opponents.
He read the shift a half-second before it landed, his own blade dropping to intercept, and the two weapons met with a crack that rattled up through both their arms, the impact strong enough that Scott felt it in his shoulder.
’He’s better than me at mana control,’ Alex thought, resetting his footing as Scott pulled back for another exchange, watching the way Scott’s breathing had already started to deepen with effort.
’I knew that going in. I’d be surprised if it were any other way, given how much longer he’s had a mana core. But control isn’t the only variable in a fight, and reading the opponent matters just as much, maybe more, and that’s the part the Aspect has been quietly building since the moment I started this body, the part nobody can teach in two months of guard training.’
They clashed again. And again.
Scott’s brow had started to bead with sweat, the continuous small bursts of mana through his legs and arms taking a visible toll, his breathing growing more deliberate with each exchange, each breath a conscious effort rather than something automatic.
He thought, somewhere in the back of his mind beneath the focus of the fight, that Alex should have run dry by now.
A five-year-old’s reserves, even an exceptional one’s, simply shouldn’t last this long against the steady drain of real combat, shouldn’t be able to keep matching him exchange after exchange without some sign of slowing.
But the prince was still there.
Still matching him.
If anything, getting marginally better with each clash, small adjustments compounding in real time in a way that made Scott’s stomach twist with something close to dread, a creeping suspicion that he was fighting something he didn’t fully understand.
Their blades met a sixth time, a seventh, the rhythm of the fight settling into something neither of them had planned for, two people genuinely testing each other rather than one humoring the other, the spar having long since stopped being a formality.
Around the edges of the hall, the watching recruits had gone completely silent, the kind of silence that meant nobody wanted to be the person who broke it.