The training hall ran through its usual rhythm that morning, recruits pairing off for sparring drills, weapons racks half emptied along the wall.
Theron stood at the center calling out the rotation, telling everyone to get into position, when Alex and Zara walked through the doors the way they did every day now.
Heads turned. Bodies bowed.
"We greet the Third Prince."
Alex nodded them back up, same as always, and let his eyes find Scott across the hall.
Something was different about him today.
Scott stood with his sword already in hand, weight settled easy on both feet, and there was a small, confident smirk sitting on his face that hadn’t been there last week. Not arrogance exactly.
Certainty.
’He thinks he’s going to win today,’ Alex thought, walking closer. ’And he’s probably not wrong to think that.’
’Zara told me each level gives eight points across all attributes, plus five free ones to put wherever you want. If he’s leveled even once since the last spar, that’s not a small gap anymore. That’s the difference between fighting a trained soldier and fighting something closer to what my old world would’ve called peak human condition. Every enhancement stacked into one body. All the benefits, none of the ten years it usually takes to burn through a person doing that to themselves.’
He reached Scott and stopped a few paces off, close enough to talk without either of them needing to raise their voice.
"You look ready," Alex said.
"I am ready." Scott rolled his shoulder once, loosening it. "I want to be straight with you before we start, Your Highness, because I don’t think it’d be fair otherwise. I completed a mission a few days back, out past the eastern treeline, nothing glamorous, just a culling job on a den of ridgeback wolves that had wandered too close to a farming settlement. But it pushed me over a level."
"I figured something had changed," Alex said. "You’re standing differently."
"I feel differently." Scott’s mouth twitched, somewhere between apology and honesty. "Last week I was holding back more than I let on, not because I didn’t respect you, but because I genuinely wasn’t sure how hard I was allowed to go against the prince of the kingdom I serve. Today I don’t think I can hold back even if I wanted to. Whatever’s changed in me since the mission, it’s not something I can dial down on command. I wanted you to know that going in, so you’re not caught off guard by it."
Alex looked at him for a moment, weighing the warning for what it was.
"I appreciate you saying that," he said. "But don’t hold back. If you go easy on me because of who my father is, that helps neither of us. I need to know exactly where I actually stand, not where a version of you that’s being careful with royalty thinks I stand."
Scott studied him, something in his expression settling into quiet respect.
"Alright," he said. "Then we do this properly."
Theron drifted closer to the center of the ring, closer than he normally bothered standing. He didn’t say anything about it. He didn’t need to.
Everyone in the hall could feel that today wasn’t going to look like last week.
Alex held his hand out without looking. Zara pressed the Viper’s Spine into it.
"You’ve got this," she murmured, low enough that only he’d catch it. "Just remember what we drilled. Don’t try to match him head on if you can help it. Redirect first, hit second."
"I remember," Alex said.
He ran through two quick test swings, felt the weight settle into his grip, and took his stance.
Across from him, Scott raised his own sword level with his shoulder, eyes steady, that smirk finally gone now that the moment had actually arrived.
Theron didn’t ask if they were ready. He could see it on both of them.
He lifted one hand into the air, held it there a second, then dropped it.
"Begin."
Alex sent mana into both legs and arms in the same breath, trying to split it evenly the way he’d been practicing all week.
It didn’t work.
The moment he pushed a second stream through, the first one lost its shape, mana scattering the instant something else demanded his attention. He got maybe half of what he wanted into either limb.
’Fine. First exchange, I take whatever I can get.’
They closed the distance and met head on.
The impact sent him skidding back a full three steps, boots dragging grooves through the dirt even with mana braced through both legs.
’There it is,’ Alex thought, resetting his footing fast. ’The attribute gap is true. Even with everything I’ve got running, I can’t stand flat against him anymore. If I let this drag out the way every other spar went last week, I lose. Simple as that.’
Zara’s expression had gone sharp and still at the edge of the ring, the easy humor from this morning nowhere in it now.
She’d seen the first exchange the same as everyone else had. She didn’t need to be told how this would end if it kept going the way it was going.
They met again. And again.
Every single time, Alex got pushed back a little further, boots carving new lines into ground that was already scarred from the last exchange.
He was reading Scott’s movement the way he’d trained himself to all week, watching for the tell before the strike landed, using every piece of footwork the falling drills had beaten into his legs.
None of it was enough to close the gap by itself.
Fifteen seconds in, Scott’s foot came up in a sudden rising kick aimed at Alex’s stomach.
It connected clean.
Alex folded around the impact and went airborne, twisting once before he hit the ground several feet back, breath punched clean out of him.
He rolled up anyway. His body remembered the motion before his mind fully caught up to what had just happened to it.
Scott was already closing again, blade coming in high.
Alex got the Viper’s Spine up in time to block it, and the force of the parry sent him stumbling three more steps before he managed to plant his feet.
’Alright,’ he thought, chest heaving. ’Time to actually use what I’ve got.’
They clashed again, and this time Scott’s swing came in faster than Alex expected, the force of the block sending him tumbling backward across the dirt.
He rolled through it, came up on one knee, and triggered the mechanism.
The Viper’s Spine snapped outward with a sharp metallic click, segmented blades unfolding on their spring joints, and the whole shape of the weapon changed mid-motion, whipping toward Scott from an angle that had no business coming from where Alex was crouched.
Scott’s eyes went wide.
’What in the-’
He barely got his sword up in time, the extended blade catching against his guard with a force that rattled up through his arm.
He shoved it off and reset his stance just as Alex was already moving again, mechanism retracting and re-extending in the same breath, coming from a completely different direction than the last strike.
Scott blocked that one too, though it cost him a half step back this time.
’What is this weapon,’ he thought, jaw tight. ’It’s not a sword. It’s not a spear. It’s both, and it keeps changing which one it wants to be right when I’ve already committed to blocking the other.’
Alex pulled every last drop of mana he had left and funneled it straight into his legs, retracting the blade into its compressed length as he moved.
He crossed the distance between them fast, faster than his body should have been able to manage on fumes, and swung.
Scott met him.
Both of them threw everything they had left into that single exchange, and the collision between the two strikes cracked out across the hall loud enough that half the recruits watching flinched.
The force of it sent them both flying backward, out past the edge of the sparring circle, and they hit the dirt outside the ring at nearly the same instant.
For a second neither of them moved.
Then they both groaned, pushed themselves up onto their elbows, and looked toward Theron at the same time, waiting.
Theron studied the two lines carved into the ground where they’d landed. He studied them both for a long moment.
Then he announced—