Vane skipped lunch. In Oakhaven skipping meals had been a necessity born of poverty when he was young. At Zenith, surrounded by endless buffets of high grade nutrient food, skipping a meal to train in a freezing contaminated fog bank was a choice.
It was a choice that hurt. His stomach growled. A familiar hollow ache sharpened his focus.
He was back on the rusted balcony of the forgotten sector. The mist was thinner today allowing a pale watery sunlight to illuminate the cracked flagstones.
Senna sat in her chair. The blanket was pulled tight around her wasted frame. She looked exhausted and her breathing was audibly wet but her eyes were merciless as they tracked his movements.
"Again," she wheezed. "You are decelerating on the transition."
Vane reset. He held the real spear now. The weight of the star-metal tip was a constant drag on his exhausted shoulders. They had moved past the basic spin. Today was about the kill.
"The Lunar Deflection keeps you alive," Senna lectured. Her voice barely carried over the hum of the distant engines. "It creates the safety zone. It strips the friction from the air so the world cannot touch you. But you cannot spin forever. Eventually you must strike."
She tapped the balcony railing with a broom handle.
"Show me the First Form. Quicksilver Thrust."
Vane gritted his teeth. He began the cycle, initiating the Spiral Circulation through his marrow.
Whoosh. Whoosh.
He spun the spear in the vertical figure-eight pattern. He felt the Hum build in the shaft. The air began to whistle as the mana sleeve smoothed out the resistance.
"Now!" Senna barked. "Release the vector!"
Vane pivoted. He tried to convert the rotational energy into a linear stab. He snapped the spear forward aiming for the chalk mark on the pillar.
Thud.
The tip hit the pillar. It was a solid hit. It chipped the stone.
"Garbage," Senna pronounced flatly.
Vane lowered the spear. His chest was heaving. "It hit the target. It cracked the stone."
"You poked it," Senna spat. "You used your arm muscles to push the spear forward. That is a dagger move. That is a tavern brawl stab. If you do that against an armored knight he will laugh at you."
She rolled her chair forward.
"The Argent Horizon is about conservation of momentum, boy. You do not push the spear. You throw it."
She gestured to the spinning motion.
"You build the speed in the spin. The energy is already there. The Quicksilver Thrust is just opening the gate. You let the spear fly out of the orbit. You do not add force. You just direct the vector. Let the mana do the work."
She looked at him with disdain.
"You are working too hard. You are trying to muscle the world. Again."
Vane wiped sweat from his eyes. "It feels like I am going to lose my grip if I let it fly like that."
"Then hold on tighter," Senna snapped. "Or lose a finger. The choice is yours. Spin it."
Vane resumed the stance. He spun the spear.
Hiss. Hiss.
He focused on the weight of the tip. He felt the centrifugal force pulling it outward. It wanted to fly away. It wanted to be a projectile.
'Don't poke,' he told himself. 'Unleash.'
He waited for the upswing. He waited for the moment the spear tip was aligned with the target. He stepped. He didn't push. He just snapped his wrists and let the momentum carry the weapon forward.
SNAP.
The sound was different. It wasn't a thud. It was a crack like a whip breaking the sound barrier. The spear shot forward so fast Vane almost dislocated his shoulder stopping it at full extension. The tip didn't just chip the stone pillar. It sank deep into the masonry with a high-pitched ping.
Vane stared at the weapon. He hadn't used any strength. He had just let the spin go straight.
"Better," Senna observed quietly. "You are still tense in the shoulders. But you stopped acting like a brute for half a second."
"That was..." Vane pulled the spear out of the stone. "That was fast."
"It is the fastest thrust in the world," Senna said. "Because it has zero wind-up. The enemy sees you spinning. They think you are defending. They do not see the attack wind up because the attack is already moving at full speed before you even aim it."
She coughed into her handkerchief.
"You have a free block right now," she noted. "According to the schedules I remember, the first years are currently eating lunch or socializing in the lounges."
"I am not hungry," Vane lied. His stomach immediately betrayed him with a loud growl.
Senna gave a dry chuckle that turned into a wheeze.
"You are starving," she corrected. "Why are you here, parasite? You proved you could take a beating. You don't need to be here every spare hour."
Vane looked over the edge of the balcony at the endless clouds below.
"The instructors in the main campus... they are teaching us how to win duels. How to look impressive for the evaluations," Vane said quietly. "They aren't teaching us how not to die when things go wrong."
He looked back at her, meeting her sunken eyes.
"You turned a hallway into a blender to stop a nightmare. That is the only lesson I care about right now."
Senna studied him. The cynicism that usually coated her expression thinned just a little.
"Get some water," she murmured looking away toward the fog. "Then show me the Thrust again. Try not to dislocate your elbow this time."
That evening, the silence of the Great Library felt suffocating compared to the honest quiet of the fog.
Vane sat across from Isole Sylvaris at their usual secluded table. His body felt like one giant bruise. Every muscle fiber was twitching from the strain of Senna's drills and the vibration of the spear. He was staring at an open tome on advanced defensive warding theory. The words swam before his tired eyes.
"Your concentration is fracturing," Isole noted calmly, not looking up from her own studies. The dual aura of green life and red death twisted lazily around her pale hair.
"Just tired," Vane mumbled rubbing his face. "Vyla's quiz tomorrow is on Dynamic Field Stability. I don't get it. How do you keep a defensive ward stable when it is taking impacts from different angles simultaneously? The math implies the shield should collapse if the pressure variance is too high."
Isole closed her book. She picked up a glass of water sitting on the table and placed it in the center.
"Think of the ward's mana not as a solid wall but as a structure," she said. Her voice was wind-chime soft. "If the structure is rigid, it shatters under unequal pressure. A dynamic ward must distribute the force."
Vane frowned. He tried to translate that into something that made sense to his physical brain. He thought about the spear. When he held the spear still and hit a rock, the spear jarred his hands. It was weak. But when he spun it... when he created the Hum... the rock bounced off. The faster he spun, the more stable the defense became.
"It is not about structure," Vane murmured. "It is about frequency."
Isole paused. She looked at him. "Explain."
Vane grabbed a quill. He stood it up on its point and let go. It fell over.
"A static ward falls over," Vane said. "Like a wall. If you push it hard enough, it breaks."
Then he picked up the quill and spun it on the table. It stood upright, whirring softly, resisting gravity. When he tapped it with his finger, it didn't fall. It wobbled and corrected itself.
"Gyroscopic stability," Vane said, watching the quill spin. "You don't make the ward harder. You make the mana circulate faster. If the flow is high enough, the shield becomes self-correcting. The vector of the attack gets distributed along the rotation."
He looked up at Isole.
"Dynamic Field Stability isn't about building a better wall. It's about maintaining the RPM. If the spin drops, you die."
The library went very quiet.
Isole stared at him. Her mismatched eyes—one vibrant emerald, one deep scarlet—narrowed slightly. For the first time since he had met her, she looked genuinely surprised.
"Rotational inertia as a stabilizer for mana constructs," she repeated slowly. She tasted the concept. "That is a remarkably... kinetic way of describing arcanic theory, Vane."
Vane froze. The paranoia that had kept him alive in Oakhaven snapped back into place. He had used Senna's logic.
"Just... something I noticed in the lab," Vane said quickly, shrugging it off. "Valerica's gravity field spins. Thought it might apply."
Isole watched him for a beat longer than was comfortable. She didn't buy it. But the High Elf merely gave a small enigmatic nod.
"It is the correct answer," she murmured opening her book again. "Though if you write 'RPM' on your exam paper, Vyla will fail you. Use the term Cyclic Resonance. But the principle holds."
She didn't press him. But as Vane looked back down at his textbook, he felt the weight of her attention linger. He was getting better at understanding the theory, but he was starting to realize just how many people were watching him learn it.