Valeria woke in my hand, humming with a bright, sharp energy. "No pressure," she said in my mind. "Just history, watching."

'Proceed,' Erebus added, and somehow, the single, dry word helped.

"Draw when you're ready," Julius said.

I was ready. I drew. The motion was the one I had just spent an eternity perfecting—no pre-load, no heel stamp, no whisper from my shoulder. The blade was already moving, and I was simply invited along for the ride. It was a perfect, zero-tell cut, the kind of attack that had served me against men and monsters.

Julius didn't flinch. He didn't counter. He let my blade arrive, and then he showed me the tax I didn't even know I was paying. He shifted nothing. He simply subtracted something. A patch of space that would have made my cut feel comfortable and clever simply… wasn't there anymore. The line of the cut still existed. The edge still landed. But it felt awkward, ill-fitting, like a well-tailored suit that had shrunk in the wash. It stopped being safe to be in love with the motion.

I adjusted, my body automatically seeking a more stable line for the recovery. He stole the next convenience, too. Every time I moved, the room declined to assist by exactly the amount of help I would have asked for without knowing it. The angles were still angles. The timing still worked. But the ground, my old, reliable partner, refused to conspire with me.

"Your sword is fine," Julius said, his voice even. "Your assumptions are noisy."

He stepped. It wasn't fast. It wasn't slow. He simply arrived in front of my guard without my eyes ever getting a receipt for the journey. His blade was suddenly occupying a space I had been saving for a later thought. I parried out of pure, trained habit. The parry worked, and in doing so, it told him everything he needed to know about my training, my reflexes, and my fears. He didn't punish the parry. He simply edited the context around it so that punishing it would have been redundant.

"You still answer," he said. "Now, start."

I tried to start. I tried to steal the half-beat that had been my bread and butter for years. But he refused to publish one. I tried to initiate, to be the first question in the room. He was already standing in my start, like a person who had arrived early for a meeting and brought their own coffee. My blade's point landed a breath from his coat and simply… lost its argument. It wasn't blocked. It just became less true than the firmness of the place he had chosen to be.

"Again," he said.

I changed my tempo. He took tempo off the table. I tried to create an angle. He shortened the angle until it was a question that couldn't afford to ask itself out loud. He was quietly, methodically showing me how often I leaned on the world to complete my sentences for me.

"You can write," he said, his blade a quiet line between us, "or you can let punctuation do the work. Punctuation is very busy. Stop asking it for help."

I took that personally. I stopped asking. I disengaged and reset, my mind racing. All my advantages—my speed, my half-beat counters, my ability to read an opponent's rhythm—were built on the premise that my opponent had a rhythm to begin with. Julius had none. He was a state of being.

I breathed in four, out six. I stopped trying to be clever. I cut without trusting friction, or echo, or the floor's good graces. The blade felt heavier, but in an honest way, not a tired way. It landed where it landed. My feet accepted the verdict of the stone.

He nodded once, a minimal, academic gesture. "Better."

We went three exchanges without contact. Then four. Then nine. He never swung his blade, and yet somehow, I never owned the room. His presence was a curve that denied all my favorite lanes. My shoulders wanted to grumble and get involved, to add some power, some drama. I did not let them vote.

"Again," he said, and I heard a kind of instructional kindness in it. This wasn't a fight. It was a lecture with consequences.

We ended the lesson without a single drop of blood being spilled, which felt both wrong and exactly right. He stepped back to the rail. The balcony remembered him and held still, the way good bread holds a knife.

"The 'Original Arthur' made Luna," he said, as if we had never stopped talking. "He sent her to me. I did my part, with her help, for long enough. Now the world has you in it, with your guilt and your jokes and your habit of doing the right thing only after you're done arguing with yourself about it."

"You make it sound simple," I said, catching my breath.

"It isn't," he confirmed. "That's why it works." He glanced toward the threads of Order sleeping in the wall. "Lust wears this place like a decoration. She thinks a beat is a collar. She's wrong. A beat is a promise. You keep it for the people who need you. You break the collar."

"You died when she stepped in," I said, because that part still mattered.

"I died when a category of being arrived," he corrected me patiently. "Don't make me your floor. Make me your ladder. Then climb." He looked me over one last time, and I saw a message under the evaluation: we are on the same side of something that does not care.

"Rest," he said. "Then we'll make your shoulders forget even more of their bad habits."

"Yes, sir," I said, because some people you don't pretend to be cool around.

Valeria's hum was bright with a new kind of energy. "He likes you. Or he likes yelling at you. Both are forms of mentorship."

'Proceed,' Erebus said.

I rested against a wall that was now proud to be a wall. I drank water that tasted like work. Then I stood, rolled my wrists, and accepted the day I had been given.

"Again," Julius said.

We both smiled a little. That was new.

"Again," I answered.

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