He felt them early this time.
Not by much, maybe thirty seconds of warning where before he had ten, but the difference between thirty seconds and ten was the difference between choosing your ground and being handed by someone else.
His Divine Sense caught the signatures at the edge of its range, five of them moving through the tree line on the right side of the road with the same deliberate spacing as the valley ambush. Waiting for the road to narrow before they committed.
Better equipped than the last group. He could feel it even at distance, the divine radiance on each of them was cleaner, more concentrated, the kind that came from fresher commissions and higher-grade blessings rather than field-standard issue.
Heaven was calibrating upward.
"Five," he said quietly. "Right side. Thirty seconds."
Valeria didn’t look at the tree line. "I know."
Seraphine’s hand moved toward her core instinctively, then stopped. He caught it in his peripheral vision and said nothing.
"Same formation as before?" he asked.
"Tighter," Valeria said. "Less gap between each fighter. They’ve adjusted." She stepped back to the road’s edge and crossed her arms. "You’re handling this one. I want to watch you work."
He looked at her.
"You’ll learn more from five real opponents than from another morning of missing me on an empty road." She nodded toward the tree line. "Go."
Then they were out of the trees.
Five of them in heavy armor with their weapons already drawn, divine light running clean and bright along every edge. They came onto the road in a compressed formation, designed to prevent individual targeting.
Lucius went forward.
The first warrior came in on his left with a diagonal cut aimed at his shoulder. He moved left, weight already shifting before he consciously decided, the footwork drilling doing something underneath the thinking, and the cut went past him and found nothing. He was inside the guard before the warrior could reset.
He hit him twice and finished it with a focused solar burst to the chest. The divine radiance guttered and went out.
One down.
"Elbow was too high on the follow through," Valeria said from the road’s edge. "You left your ribs wide open."
He didn’t have time to process it. The second warrior was already there, a shield bash coming in fast and low. He angled his body, redirected the force sideways instead of absorbing it, rotated into a position the warrior hadn’t planned for.
"Better," Valeria said. "That’s early weight transfer. Remember what that feels like."
He drove his elbow into the back of the warrior’s helmet as the man overcorrected and finished it with Smite at close range.
Two down.
The third and fourth came together.
He read the left one correctly, feinting high, going low, weight on the back foot. He watched the shoulder and the hip the way she had drilled into him rather than the weapon. Got the intent right.
Got the timing wrong by half a beat anyway.
The low strike caught him across the thigh, the blessed edge burning a line of holy charge into the muscle that made the leg want to stop working.
"You saw it," Valeria called. "You just waited too long to commit. Trust what you read, don’t wait for confirmation."
He forced the leg to keep working, put his fist into the warrior’s cracked visor and turned to the fourth before the man finished going down.
Too slow.
The fourth hit him square in the back. He went forward, caught himself before going all the way down, spun around.
"Your left side," Valeria said, no urgency in it, just precision. "Every time you finish something on your right you forget your left. It’s a habit, break it now."
The warrior was coming back in. Lucius set his feet, weight distributed, center low, and let him come.
The strike came high. He dropped six inches, let it pass over him, came back up inside the reach and hit the warrior three times fast in the body. The third had everything left in his right hand behind it.
The warrior sat down and didn’t get back up.
Four down.
The fifth hung back and circled, looking for an angle. Lucius tracked him and moved to cut it off. The warrior adjusted, but he adjusted back. A slow rotation on the road that bought them both a few seconds neither of them particularly wanted.
"He’s waiting for you to overcommit," Valeria said. "Don’t. Make him come to you."
Lucius stopped adjusting, rather he held his position and waited.
The warrior read the stillness wrong. He took it as exhaustion, an opening he could use to corner him. He came straight and fast, betting the direct line was faster than Lucius could cover.
Lucius moved left early, weight already shifted, direction decided before the warrior had finished committing, and the strike went through the space he’d just been standing in. He caught the extended arm at the wrist, used the man’s momentum to overbalance him, and put him face-first into the road.
He didn’t get back up.
Lucius stood over the last one and breathed.
His thigh burned, his back ached, and overall his core was running lower than comfortable. He stayed still and waited for it to even out.
Then the System notification lit up.
[Absorbing Defeated Targets...]
[5 targets absorbed.]
[Divine energy processed.]
The familiar pull worked through him quietly, the current-through-water sensation he’d come to recognize, the System taking what the fight had produced and folding it into whatever he was becoming.
Nobody around him would have felt it. Nobody around him would have seen anything change. To Valeria and Seraphine he was just standing still over a fallen warrior, catching his breath.
Only he felt it when the second notification arrived.
[LEVEL UP: 4 → 5]
[All attributes upgraded. Core stability increased.]
[New Skill: Blazing Sun — Enhanced. Efficiency increased. Drain cost reduced by 25%.]
[Divine Sense range extended to 140% of previous threshold.]
He read it once, then again.
The shift followed immediately after. More like a elevation point quietly lifting. His core settled at a level it hadn’t held before. His Divine Sense pushed its reach outward without being asked, the range expanding until the tree line on both sides of the road came into fuller resolution, detail sharpening at distances that had been soft-edged a minute ago.
He flexed his right hand once, feeling the solar energy answer at a slightly different depth. More accessible.
He closed his hand and looked up.
Valeria was walking toward him, reading him the way she always did. The thigh, the back, the right hand. All of it catalogued in a single pass.
"Your left side," she said.
"I know."
"You knew during the fight too."
"Also know that."
She stopped in front of him and looked at the five on the road. Then back at his face. "Pain makes people revert. That’s not weakness, it’s just how bodies work." A pause.
"The goal is to build the habit deep enough that pain can’t reach it."
"How long does that take?"
She considered it. "Longer than we have. So we work faster."
She turned back to the road.
Seraphine fell into step beside him as he followed. He glanced at her. Her face was composed and giving nothing away.
"Your left side," she said quietly.
He looked at her.
The corner of her mouth moved, just slightly. Gone before it fully formed.
He faced forward and kept walking.
The road ran north. His Divine Sense ran wider than it ever had, and the tree line on both sides of the road was cleaner and further and more detailed than before, and none of that was visible to anyone but him.