For a long moment after the mana storm subsided, no one spoke.
The training hall was still scarred—fine fractures webbed the stone floor where water pressure had crushed it, faint scorch marks traced the air where fire had surged and then obeyed. The adaptive runes embedded in the walls dimmed slowly, recalibrating, as if even they needed time to process what had just occurred.
Rebecca was still kneeling.
Her hands trembled around her grimoire, knuckles pale, chest rising and falling too quickly. Mana still pulsed through her veins—too much of it, far too much—like a river that had suddenly burst its banks and was now struggling to remember where it was supposed to flow.
Mariella stood rigid, one hand pressed against her chest, eyes unfocused as if she were still perceiving layers of space that no longer existed.
Dominante, half-crouched, stared at her own hands with a mixture of awe and irritation, flexing her fingers as faint mineralized mana crystallized and dissolved around her skin in uncontrolled pulses.
Lencar watched them all in silence.
Then he spoke.
"What I did," Lencar said, voice low and exact, "was give each of you one of the magic attributes I possess. I did not, however, teach you how to contain it."
The words were a verdict. They hung in the air like a rune about to strike.
Rebecca found her reply before she thought it. "Then teach us."
Lencar's expression did not change, but there was something like relief in his shoulders. He moved with the economy of someone used to the weight of decisions. "Good. You want to live and you want to fight. You will need both sets of skills. This base will be your crucible."
He stepped back and touched a runic panel. Three holographic sheets unfolded in the air, dense with diagrams, breathing cycles, markings that mapped muscle groups to mana pathways. Lencar watched their faces as the instructions settled around them.
"First: why you will fail if you rush," he said. "Losing control is not a metaphor. It is a physical injury. Mana is pressure. When you expand your capacity without tempering the vessel — the body — the pressure will rupture tissue. Nerves fry. Limbs fail. Organs overheat. If the magic you wield is not aligned to your circulation, it will seek a path of least resistance. It will take it. You will know this as pain. If you ignore that pain you will not live to regret it — you will be gone."
Dominante's jaw worked. "So the training is—"
"—how to make the vessel and the fire one," Lencar finished. "To forge mana into habit."
He began with the plan. It was clinical, strict.
Conditioning the Vessel (Weeks 1–3):
Daily core circuits: planks, isometrics, explosive bridging. The goal was not bulk but resilience — tendons and fascia conditioned to withstand rapid mana surges.
Cardiovascular windows: sprint repeats with weighted breathing to expand oxygen extraction and mitochondrial response.
Cold exposure sets: short cold plunges to force vascular constriction and expansion, training rapid mana circulation adjustment.
Circulation Alignment (Weeks 2–5):
Controlled mana pooling drills: inhale, hold mana at the solar plexus, exhale releasing a calibrated pulse. Repeat until the pulse is a metronome.
Micro-pressurization: small, focused surges designed to test localized nerve tolerance. Scale slowly. A single overpress is a warning that the vessel must be reinforced.
Forging and Tempering (Weeks 3–8):
Patterned forging: threading one attribute through another in small, repeatable lines. For Rebecca, water was the base — fire would be threaded through as a secondary weave: not to burn, but to raise temperature in controlled lattices.
Resonance training: harmonics exercises using sound and breath to stabilize frequencies. The body learns to accept new mana attributes by matching frequency.
Sparring and Integration (Weeks 4–onward):
Controlled free-sparring with strict rules. Damage is permitted only to flesh that can regenerate (not severing limbs). Healing beds reduce catastrophic injury but do not negate poor technique consequences.
Emergency collapse drills: learn to shut down safely when overload occurs. It saves lives.
He tapped a panel and a map of recovery times unfurled. "You will want to go faster than this schedule. I understand. But the calendar is written in blood. Ignore it, and you become an experiment you cannot consent to."
Rebecca stared at the schematic of her own body — the tiny blue lines tracing circulation, the zones marked "thin" that Lencar said they would armor slowly. "You said you'd leave us with training content?"
"I will leave behind manuals and recorded drills. I will not babysit. You will be tested by success and failure. That yields the lessons you can't write down." He looked at Mariella. "You will run the constant surveillance feed. Keep me updated. Any noble movement. Any abnormalities. If you detect noble mages attempting to catalog anomalies, notify me immediately. Do not engage unless you have control."
Mariella nodded, already thinking in logistics.
Then he spoke of forging in more specific terms, slowly, as if translating a science for dense ears.
"Tempering is incremental. You will pulse your mana at slightly higher frequency than before. The body learns through micro-injury and repair. We do not allow the larger failure because the plant beds heal crucial tissue recovery; they cannot cure the lack of tendon integrity. Do the muscle work first, then the micro burns. Repeat. Let the cells accept new pressure as routine."
Dominante, ever the engineer, interrupted. "Are there written thresholds? Numbers?"
"Yes." Lencar tapped the panel; numbers appeared — exact BPM targets for different exercises, squeeze times, mana pulse lengths measured in heartbeats, safe overload curves. "Scientific benchmarks. You will chart daily. If a metric deviates beyond the curve, you stop. You rest. If you keep pushing through deviation, the curve becomes a warning misread as courage. Courage is a strategy; stubbornness is a death sentence."
He walked to the side of the hall. With two palms he flicked the floor; the adaptive stone whirred. Roots split the tiles and three large flower beds blossomed into being — petaled rings of golden flora that pulsed with soft green mana. Each bed was about the size of a small cart; their cores thrummed faintly.
"Plant Recovery Magic — Healing Flower Bed," Lencar said. "These are regenerative foci. They reconnect broken threads of mana and close tissue ruptures. They are not miracles. They restore; they do not recreate. If you sever an artery or remove an organ, no plant will fix the physics. Do not test that boundary."
Rebecca took a few steps closer, inhaling the humid, plant-scented air. The petals reflected a thousand tiny runes when she peered into them. They smelled of warm soil and old rain.
"You will spar," Lencar continued. "You can go all out. You will have almost every tool here to simulate battlefield conditions. But you will not intentionally sever limbs. You will not kill. You will not become monsters in your first week. You will learn to break; you will learn to heal. Do not hide failure. Report it. Learn from it."
Dominante's voice cut through, half accusation and half admiration. "You prepared this before we even agreed."
"Yes," Lencar said. His smile was small and not unkind. "Anticipation is efficiency."
They suited up.
It wasn't showy armor or gleaming plates. It was practical — flexible, mesh-like garments designed to absorb shock and report metrics. Lencar had woven monitoring sigils into them, and as they buckled the garb hummed against their skin; their grimoires accepted the new reference sections and began to whisper quietly in the back of their minds.
Their first exercises were not flashy. Lencar made them leg circuits, sprint repeats, isometric holds against pulleys attached to rune anchors. The purpose was simple: condition the tendons, expand lung capacity, teach each muscle group how to shrug off sudden mana surges.
Rebecca's first mana drill was the hardest: a gentle pool-and-release exercise. She inhaled, held for three counts, gathered her water, then attempted to thread a small focused ember through it — a practice Lencar had prescribed to teach water and fire to breathe together. It flared at first, a jagged, panicked bloom that surged toward ignition; steam hissed and the tiles fogged. She felt a literal tearing sensation in her forearm that scared her — a minor microstrain — and she shut it down. Her body trembled; the plant bed hummed and a warm vine unfurled to cradle her shoulder while its green light washed the strain inviscid.
She lay there for a long second, mouth open, tasting metal and rain. Mariella stood near, silent, eyes reflecting the panic and the pride of having just made it to the edge and not fallen.
Dominante's first attempt was to condense mineral in her palm. At first she produced grains, then a shard. It was ugly: porous and wrong. The shard spalled into dust and she swore. On the third attempt, something took — a small sliver of quartz formed on her palm and held. She laughed, a short bark. Her exhilaration was combustible.
Mariella's smallest fold of space — a blink-step from one marker to another — at first bruised the air around her, leaving a faint ozone-scented smear. On trial four, she stopped short of a marble column and instead appeared a handspan away — precise, measured, terrifyingly elegant in its economy.
They sparred in tiny rounds. Lencar did not watch like a guard; he watched like a scientist recording. When any of them pushed too far, the flower beds brightened and soaked up the worst of the feedback. Cuts knit closed faster. Bruises bloomed and then faded under green light. It did not take away the lesson; it cushioned it.
By midday the three were exhausted but standing. They had new bruises; they had new data; they had new respect for the slow scale of change. Dominante was already scribbling into a slate, cataloguing mineral gloss and tensile strength. Mariella moved through space with slightly more economy, measuring the exact sensation of the anchor points. Rebecca hoarded the memory of a successful ember threaded clean through a silver pool and felt a little more like herself.
Lencar returned from the Grand Magic Zone the day he had said he would, but not because the training demanded it. He returned because he liked to observe the first failure and first success. He smiled at each of them without comment and then did what he had done since the start: he raised the bar one degree higher and left again within the hour.
Before he left, though, he placed a small device on the wall that hummed, a sentinel rune tuned to a frequency that would alert him if the pattern of mana in the capital deviated from the expected. He clasped Mariella's wrist with a brief, private pressure, and said: "Details. Every anomaly. Do not trust your curiosity to become action."
She nodded, the brief contact leaving a trace of something like warmth. Rebecca felt the room pivot on that small gravity.
Finally he folded space.
The portal sighed shut.
The three of them remained amid the rising scent of bloom and mana and sweat. They were tired in a way that felt right — not hollow, but earned — and the future spread before them like a road with no return signs.
Dominante's voice cut through the quiet. "You do realize what we did."
"We do," Mariella replied.
Rebecca looked at her hands — callused now, fumbling to keep an ember from growing too hot. "We chose it," she said.
They were a small army in a cavernous base. A new name had been spoken into the architecture and accepted. The methods were written into their bones now, not by rhetoric but by muscle and heat.
Above ground, nobles slept in soft rooms. Below, a handful of people trained to rewrite the rules. The Heretic Vanguard was still only an idea. But ideas, when forged deliberately and trained like steel, cut.
They began again at dawn.