Vesna’s door was already open when Soren got there at seven.
That was the first bad sign.
The second was Vesna herself, standing at the window with her hands locked behind her at the wrist in a way that ant she was keeping them still on purpose.
"Close it," she said.
She turned and slid a piece of parchnt across the desk without saying anything first.
The seal at the top was Class C’s crest, pressed in gold wax, and below it was a na he recognized the second he read it.
Lior Vasquez. First rank, Class C.
He read the rest in eight seconds.
"A sanctioned skirmish," he said.
"Three days from now at the Central arena a beast combat, public." Vesna sat down. "Acceptance is mandatory."
"And if I don’t accept?"
"Conduct failure and expulsion by end of week." She picked up her coffee cup, looked at it, and set it back without drinking. "I filed a formal objection on procedural grounds. Denied within the hour."
That was the Bureau’s answer. Not the academy’s.
Lior’s father had soone in administration fast enough to block it before the ink dried.
"Why ?" Soren said.
"Lior’s father is a senior Bureau auditor. He read a dispatch three weeks ago about an F-rank found in a restricted corridor with anomalous mana readings." Vesna’s hands finally moved.
"The F-rank left a trace in the corridor monitoring logs that read as a Bond-tier event in a location where those events are not supposed to happen."
The column.
The dungeon corridor.
The plot hole had just closed itself from the outside in and it was not comfortable.
"So this is a vetting?" Soren said.
"His father wants to know if you’re an asset worth acquiring or a liability worth removing before Lior’s ranking exam. Either answer involves watching your wolf perform in public." Vesna’s eyes went to Grimm, who was sitting by Soren’s boot with her head pointed forward at nothing.
"I don’t know what Lior’s father thinks is in that wolf. But he thinks it is worth sothing."
"Three days," Soren said.
"Don’t be late."
◆◆◆◆
He was halfway to the east corridor when the footsteps fell into pace alongside him.
Lior Vasquez was taller than the Bureau dispatch had made him sound.
He had the kind of jaw that illustration artists loved and his academy jacket that looked pressed at eight in the morning.
His blonde hair sat in a clean line and he walked like every floor had already agreed to hold his weight.
He was smiling.
"Soren Kane," Lior said. "I wanted to introduce myself before the skirmish. I find that’s more civil."
"Sure," Soren said and kept walking.
Lior kept pace without speeding up. "My father tells you produce anomalous readings. He finds that interesting. So do I."
"I’m F-rank."
"You’re three-forty-one with a Council asterisk, which ans you’re either the most dangerous student in this building or soone is using your na as bait." A pause. "I find it’s usually both."
The Crowned Lion at Lior’s heel was the size of a large desk and its mane ran warm gold at the edges.
It walked with the patient slowness of sothing that had never needed to hurry.
Then Grimm stopped walking and the lion stopped too and they looked at each other in the middle of the corridor.
The lion’s upper lip pulled back and its teeth were long.
Grimm sat down on the tile. She didn’t growl or step back, then every shadow in that section of the hallway tilted one degree toward the lion.
The lion felt it.
Lior felt it too.
His smile changed and the new version was sharper in a way that was not going to make Soren’s life easier.
"Ah," he said. "You’re not what the report said."
He looked at Soren, then at Grimm, then back at Soren with a calculation running behind his eyes.
"Three days, F-rank," Lior said, and walked on.
The lion turned and followed him and the shadows went back to where they were supposed to be.
Grimm licked one paw.
He slls like the man who wrote the letter.
"That’s his son," Soren said.
Sa hands opened it. She paused. He has good boots, I don’t care about the boots.
◆◆◆◆
Selah was waiting by the east stairwell with her arms crossed and the frost on her knuckles white and still.
"I already heard," she said.
"How."
"Lior’s friends were talking loudly and I was one floor above them." She handed him a folded page that was not official stationery.
It was a study guide page with notes in her tight handwriting down the margin. "The Crowned Lion. Tier-4. Public combat record for the last inter-class event."
He unfolded it and read.
"The mane," Selah said. "It stores excess mana between charge cycles. Lior lets the lion absorb ambient arena mana during the opening phase and uses that surplus for a second-half surge." She tapped the third line. "If you overcharge the absorption rate, the mana doesn’t cycle out. It blooms back through the mane and the feedback hits the lion’s nervous system. Stops the fight response for about thirty seconds."
He read the note twice.
"You wrote this down?" he said.
He looked at her and she looked back and neither of them said the thing that was already obvious, which was that this was not a favor. She had already chosen a side before he ca down the stairs and she had put it in writing, which was a different kind of choosing.
[DING! — Bond Tier 2 with Selah Young: Trust threshold t. Authorization required. Accept?]
"Yes," Soren said.
Selah blushed. "I didn’t ask you anything."
The frost on her knuckles changed.
It went from white to a color that was not quite blue and not quite green, a shade he had not seen the frost take before, and it moved differently, slower, the way sothing moved when it had settled sowhere instead of just passing through.
Selah looked down at her hands.
She went completely quiet.
The frost spread to the edge of her thumb and stayed there.
She held her palm flat and watched it like it had done sothing she was still deciding what to make of.
"What just happened?" she said.
"The bond deepened."
She didn’t answer right away.
She kept looking at the frost and it kept being the new color and Soren did not explain further because she wasn’t asking for more.
She was taking a second, and he gave it to her.
"Okay," she said, and folded her arms back across her chest.
◆◆◆◆
[DING! — Soul integrity: 74%. Fracture tir: 13 days.]
[DING! — Obsession Index climbing. Ceiling: 75. Grimm: 52/75. Selah: 31/75.]
[DING! — Inter-Class Sanctioned Skirmish registered. Ti remaining: 3 days.]
Three days.
Three days against a Class-C first rank and his Tier-4 lion while his soul ran at seventy-four percent, the Fracture had thirteen days left in it and the Obsession Index kept doing what it was doing.
He looked down at Grimm.
"You heard what Lior said," Soren said. "About the skirmish and the arena."
Yes.
"And?"
Grimm’s tail moved once.
She said through the bond, clear as a door shutting.
I’m ready.
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