"Veyriss Thalyndra Roseblade. Manifest your Formless Blade. You have seven seconds."
Veyriss dropped into her stance, will focused to a razor's edge. She reached inward—and grasped nothing.
Her mana core, a deep well of power moments before, was simply… absent. Not sealed, not drained. Erased from her reality. She strained, a silent scream against the void within her, but her body remained inert, unresponsive clay. The seconds bled away in the silence of her own hollowed-out self.
"Time."
Her head snapped up. Gard was moving.
His speed was manageable—a pace she had parried a thousand times. But perception and action were now continents apart. Her mind fired commands that drowned in the leaden sludge of her unaugmented flesh. She willed her arms to rise; they lifted with a pathetic, dream-like lag.
Gard's palm struck her abdomen with a penetrating thud. The air fled her lungs. She was airborne, then a kick hooked her from the sky, driving her down into the stone with a final, shocking THUD.
"Gard, I told you not to—!" Jonathan's protest was cut short as Paul's large hand clamped over his mouth from behind, Serrah's sealing it from the front.
"Stay put, brother," Serrah hissed, all childish affect gone. "This is what happens when you give a prodigy a sword but not a compass."
"It's the Roseblade way to find your own path," Paul growled, forcing Jonathan's head to turn, to watch Veyriss struggle to push herself up. "But we are never left unarmed in the dark. Look at her. She embodies the unbreakable will of Thalyndra, and you gave her fundamentals and a fantasy. While she—"
"Paul, stop." Serrah's voice was sharp, but her eyes on Jonathan held a pained understanding. "Think. When Matthew died saving him from the Serpent… Mother and Father didn't blame him. They blamed themselves. Their guilt made them ghosts in this house. They withdrew. And you were all off-world. He was alone." She looked at Veyriss, who was shakily regaining her feet. "He isn't neglecting her. He's giving her the only toolkit he ever had: solitude, and the demand to survive it."
The fight left Jonathan. He went still, his eyes, over his siblings' hands, holding a lifetime of quiet understanding.
Within Gard's isolated space, the lesson continued. Veyriss's durability spared her serious harm, but her confusion was a deeper wound. Before she found her balance, Gard was on her again. A kick sent her sailing across the space to crumple against the invisible barrier with a muffled crunch.
For a split second, her face was pressed flat against the unseen wall—eyes wide, cheeks squished, mouth a perfect 'O' of pure, undistilled bewilderment.
The image breached the siblings' solemnity.
Paul choked on a snort. Serrah bit her lip, her shoulders shaking. They tried to force it down, to honor the gravity of the moment, but it was futile. The mighty, unstoppable Veyriss looked like a baffled kitten pressed against a window.
Paul's booming laugh erupted first, followed by Serrah's helpless, shrieking giggle. The tension shattered.
Gard ignored them. As Veyriss rebounded, he was there. He caught her by the tunic and slammed her down once more, the impact a grim punctuation to their mirth.
This time, the damage was real. A sharp, stinging heat bloomed across her face and back—not from Gard's controlled strikes, but from the brutal kiss of the unseen barrier and the unforgiving stone. Yet, the physical pain was a distant second to the turmoil within.
Her face burned hotter with humiliation, but that too was smothered by a deeper, more terrifying confusion. It was the void where her mana should be, and the agonizing slowness of her own flesh.
To understand the depth of her disorientation, one had to understand what Veyriss Thalyndra was.
She was an elf who had undergone multiple racial evolutions. She was a Sword Master and Shield Expert, titles earned through will and blade. Stripped of tools and mana, her body alone—fortified by evolution and mastery—should have settled at a level combatants termed 'Semi-Master.' A being of refined, innate physical supremacy.
Gard had suppressed his immeasurable strength to that of a mere Expert. His movements were a languid dance she could chart with her eyes. Yet, her body, this vessel of elevated elf-hood and hard-won mastery, responded as if trapped in thick tar. She saw the kick coming, willed herself to twist, and felt only a pathetic lag. She perceived the grab, screamed internally to pivot, and moved with the grace of a felled tree.
The only reason she wasn't a broken heap of pain was her sheer, innate durability—the last remnant of her evolved state. Gard was using her own hardened body as a blunt instrument against her, pounding the lesson home with the indifference of a smith hammering hot iron.
Veyriss," Gard's voice cut through her daze, laced with mocking disappointment. "Are you spent already? I thought the 'almighty' would have more grit."
Veyriss pushed herself up, wiping a trickle of blood from her split lip. Her breaths were shallow, but her gaze was sharpening, the confusion being forcibly forged into focus. "I'm good. Just… processing."
"I shall allow one question. Make it count."
She didn't hesitate. "What did you do to my mana? And what was that wall? Don't say 'magic.' There's no mana here to shape it."
"A perceptive deduction. It is the Rule of Law," Gard stated, his tone shifting to that of a lecturer amidst a battlefield. "Some are born with an innate affinity for it. Others, like myself, must claw for every shred of understanding."
"I've only heard it in passing. In stories."
"In simple terms, it is the authority to establish a specific, absolute law that binds all within a designated confinement. And it always demands a price."
She glanced around at the shimmering, invisible boundary. "This space is one such law."
"Yes. My understanding is rudimentary, but sufficient to enforce one principle here."
"You banished mana."
"Yes, and no," Gard corrected. "Mana is the fundamental energy, the substrate upon which other powers are built. My law did not banish it. It declared a null state. Within these confines, all fundamental forces are void. No enhancement, no external power. Only the raw, unaugmented self."
The sheer scale of that declaration left her reeling. To create a pocket of absolute neutrality… "The price for such a law, even for a beginner, must be catastrophic. What are you paying?"
"Costs vary. Lifespan. Limbs. Soul-fragments. I pay in a more… transactional currency."
"Monetary?" she guessed, incredulous.
"Precisely."
"A village chief's salary couldn't cover a toll for lighting a candle with this power. Whose money?"
Gard didn't even blink. "Your father's, of course."
From beyond the barrier, Jonathan's laughter—tentatively returning—died in a strangled, horrified gulp.