Lyra Vane fought like weather.
Not in a poetic way. In the extremely literal way that a person with a wind class summon who had spent two years learning to move with it instead of just directing it tends to fight. She did not stand still. Ever. The wind entity moved around her like a permanent current and she used it to extend her own movement, stepping into gusts that pushed her sideways faster than footwork alone could manage.
It was genuinely impressive.
It was also genuinely annoying to fight against.
We were ten minutes into the cross-training session and I had redirected Seraphine four times, adjusted my own positioning six times, and still had not managed to close the distance to Lyra in a way that was not immediately undone by the wind class pulling her sideways before I got there.
"You keep committing to the angle," Lyra said, not even slightly out of breath. She was three meters away and might as well have been thirty. "Every time you pick a direction you go all the way into it. That is the problem."
"Useful feedback," I said.
"Your summon is faster than you," she said. "Why are you not letting her close the distance while you hold position?"
"Because I am trying to develop my own movement," I said. "Not just stand behind Seraphine and point."
Lyra tilted her head. "Pride?"
"Development," I said.
"Those are sometimes the same thing," she said.
Fair point. Annoying but fair.
Seraphine was at my right, her position steady, and she had been very quiet through this session in the specific way she was quiet when she was being professionally cooperative and also watching Lyra with the full depth of her awareness.
"She is right about the angle commitment," Seraphine said to me.
"I know," I said.
"You want to try the half-step feint," she said. "Commit enough to draw the wind response and then redirect off it."
"Show me the timing," I said.
What followed was one of those moments that happened occasionally in training where the theory and the body memory clicked together in real time. I feinted right with enough weight that Lyra’s wind class pushed her laterally to cover it. Seraphine moved left simultaneously pulling the wind entity’s attention. I redirected off the feint and went straight.
Closed the distance in two steps.
Stopped with one hand flat against Lyra’s shoulder.
Training touch. Not a hit. Just contact.
"Oh," Lyra said.
"Half step feint off the wind response," I said. "Your entity is fast but it responds to committed movement. A partial commit still triggers the response."
Lyra looked at me with the open evaluating expression she used and something in it had shifted from the professional interest of the first day to something warmer. "You learn fast," she said.
"I have good instruction," I said.
She looked at Seraphine.
Seraphine looked back.
The look again. The two-second exchange that had several things in it that did not need words.
"Your summon," Lyra said to me, still looking at Seraphine, "does not like me."
"She does not dislike you," I said.
"She is watching me the way my cat watches birds through the window," Lyra said. "Present and very still and thinking about something."
Seraphine smiled. The pleasant version. "I am thinking about the wind entity’s response radius," she said. "It is approximately two and a half meters. If you step outside that radius during the response cycle it overshoots."
Lyra blinked. "That is accurate."
"I measured," Seraphine said.
"During the session?" Lyra said.
"During the first three exchanges," Seraphine said. "It has been consistent."
Lyra looked at me with an expression that had landed somewhere between impressed and unsettled. "She measured it in real time."
"She does that," I said.
"Is that normal for Ancient Class bonds?"
"I think it is normal for Seraphine specifically," I said.
Seraphine looked satisfied with this characterization.
We ran the session for another forty minutes. Lyra was a good training partner, genuinely. She pushed hard and adjusted when she needed to and called her observations directly without softening them. By the end I had the half-step feint working about sixty percent of the time which was better than zero percent at the start.
My back was also reminding me loudly that yesterday’s sword impact had not finished making its feelings known.
The session ended and we were gathering ourselves when Lyra looked at me with the direct attention she used for real questions. "The Hollow Compact," she said.
I went still.
Not outwardly. But something in my internal register shifted with a suddenness that the fusion channel would have picked up.
Seraphine was beside me in one step.
Lyra noticed the movement and held up both hands slightly. "Not what you think," she said. "I am not connected to them. My family had an encounter with them four years ago. I know the name because we spent two years dealing with the aftermath of their interest in my father’s summoning line."
I looked at her.
She looked back with the open expression that I had been reading for a week and finding consistently honest.
"What kind of interest," I said.
"Recruitment first," she said. "Pressure second. My father refused both. The complications that followed affected our house standing for three years." She paused. "I heard the name mentioned in the faculty administrative corridor two days ago. By someone who did not know I was in the adjacent room."
"Which faculty member," I said.
"Senior Instructor Rael," she said. "He was speaking to someone I did not see. I only heard Rael’s side of the conversation. He mentioned a first year assessment profile. He mentioned the Sovereign Mark."
My name without my name.
"He knows they are watching you," Lyra said. "Whether that means he is working with them or just aware of them I cannot tell from what I heard."
I processed that.
Rael was a name I knew from the novel. Background faculty, rarely mentioned, present in the early academy Chapters as an unremarkable instructor figure. The original story had not flagged him as significant until arc three.