Let me tell you something about combat assessments.
Everyone thinks they’re ready. Everyone has been training, bonding with their summon, doing the drills, talking a big game at dinner about fusion depth and output ceilings. The whole first year cohort had spent three weeks vibrating with anticipation like a bunch of overexcited dogs who heard the word walk.
Then the assessment day arrives and approximately half of them forget everything they know the moment someone points a summon at their face.
Human nature. Unchanged across worlds apparently.
I was not going to be in that half. Obviously. I had three weeks of serious fusion work, a network of people I had been quietly building relationships with, and an Ancient Vampire Queen who had spent the last week and a half finding creative ways to tell me she was devoted to me without technically saying the words.
I was prepared.
What I was not prepared for was Instructor Brev pulling out a sheet of paper at the start of the session and announcing the pairings with the energy of a man who had made some choices he found personally entertaining.
"Dravenmoor," he said, not looking up. "You are paired with Aldren Voss."
The name landed in the training ground like a stone in still water.
Aldren Voss was not a first year student.
He was a third year. Seventeen, built like someone had decided to make a person specifically for the purpose of hitting things, with a warrior class summon that had been his family’s bonded line for three generations. He was currently ranked fourth in the entire academy’s combat assessment standings which meant he was good enough to be annoying about it.
He was also, I recalled from the novel’s background material, the student that the original Caelum had fought in Chapter eighteen and lost to badly enough that it had affected his trajectory for the next four Chapters.
I looked at Brev.
Brev was writing something on his clipboard with the completely neutral expression of a man who had absolutely made this pairing on purpose.
"This is an inter-year assessment?" I said.
"For select pairings," Brev said. "When the first year’s development warrants it."
Across the training ground Voss was looking at me with the calm assessment of someone who had been told he was going to fight a first year and was deciding whether to be offended or entertained. He settled on entertained. I could see it in the slight adjustment of his expression.
Great.
"He is going to try to end this quickly," Seraphine said at my shoulder, very quietly. Not worried. Just noting it the way she noted things, with the calm accuracy of someone who had seen a thousand fights and knew what the opening posture of wanting to finish fast looked like.
"I know," I said.
"You are not going to let him," she said.
"Obviously not."
"Good," she said. Then, softer, the warm register she used when she was talking to me and not about the situation: "Do not get hit in the face. I find it upsetting."
I looked at her sideways. "Upsetting."
"I have feelings about your face," she said simply. "It is a nice face. I would prefer it undamaged."
"That is either very sweet or very possessive."
"Both," she said, without any embarrassment about it whatsoever. "Primarily the second one."
I stepped onto the assessment ground.
The combat assessment space was a marked circle about thirty meters across, stone floor with the faint lines of old summoning circles etched into it from decades of training sessions. Brev stood at the edge with his clipboard. The rest of the first year cohort arranged themselves along the outer boundary to watch. So did a handful of third years who had apparently come to see Voss work.
Nothing like an audience.
Voss stepped into the circle across from me. Up close he was bigger than the distance had suggested, which was the most annoying discovery you could make right before a fight. His summon materialized at his side, a heavy warrior class entity in full plate that stood about two and a half meters tall with a sword that I could not have lifted with both hands.
I looked at it.
Then I looked at Voss.
"You are the one with the Ancient Class binding," he said. Not unfriendly. Just confirming information.
"That is me," I said.
"I heard you have been doing second layer fusion work," he said.
"First week," I said.
His eyes moved to Seraphine and came back. "She is going to be the problem," he said, almost to himself.
"Most people find that," I said.
He almost smiled. "I like that you are honest about it."
"I have heard that before," I said.
Brev called the start.
Voss moved immediately. Not hesitant, not testing, just directly forward with his warrior following at his left and angling to cut off my right side. He had done this before. You could see it in the economy of the movement, no wasted steps, the kind of approach that came from fighting the same opening a hundred times until it was automatic.
I moved right anyway.
Because moving into the cut-off was counterintuitive and Voss expected me to move away from it, which meant his warrior was positioned for the direction I was not going.
I felt Seraphine shift into the fusion channel. Not the second layer, we were not there yet in terms of sustained depth, but the first layer running clean and sharp. Enhanced perception snapped into place and the world went detailed. Voss’s weight distribution on his back foot, his warrior’s sword angle, the slight tell in his right shoulder that meant he was about to direct a change.
The warrior swung.
I ducked under it. Not elegantly. My knee hit the stone and I felt that immediately and filed it under problems to deal with later. But the sword went over me and I was inside the warrior’s reach which was exactly where the sword was not useful.
Voss directed his summon back and I rolled away because staying inside reach of something that large was only clever for approximately one second.
Came up on my feet.
Seraphine had moved to cut off Voss’s angle on my left. Not attacking. Positioning. She flowed into the space between us with the specific grace of something that understood combat at a level that made planning look like instinct.
Voss recalibrated. He angled his warrior toward her instead.
Which was tactically correct. She was the bigger threat. Getting her out of position was smart.
Also I had been waiting for him to do exactly that.
I pushed into the second fusion layer.
Ninety seconds was my ceiling. I knew that. So I had one shot at using it before the focus cost became too high to maintain. I had to make the ninety seconds matter.
The channel opened. Deeper than the first layer, that familiar flood of input that I had learned to sort through three weeks of daily practice. Seraphine’s perception running under mine. The sharpening effect along my limbs. And underneath both of those, quieter, the edge of her presence in the channel with its specific quality.
Warm and very focused and pointed directly at keeping me unhurt.
I moved.
The speed enhancement was not dramatic at this depth. Not superhuman. Just enough. I crossed the distance between me and Voss’s flank in half the time my normal stride would take and he was not quite fast enough to redirect because his attention was split between me and Seraphine and Seraphine was doing something with her positioning that was extremely deliberately distracting.
I hit him with a shoulder check that was harder than my size suggested because the fusion sharpening was running through my whole body and Voss was not braced for it.
He stumbled. Two steps. Did not go down because he was solid and experienced but two steps was enough.
His warrior came around fast.
Too fast.
I did not get out of the way in time.
The flat of the sword caught me across the back and sent me forward into the stone and I ate the ground face first and the impact was genuinely unpleasant in several directions at once.