Morning had settled over Vardel when Averik and Evelyn walked back into Unit 1. The pressure that had thickened the air before dawn was gone. Cold still clung to the stone corridors and the snow outside the narrow windows, but it was ordinary cold again, hardly worth noticing with Essence moving through his body. A few hours of sleep had cleared the grit from his thoughts and taken the night watch out of his muscles.
A non-awakened worker had breakfast waiting in Unit 1’s eating room. The man showed less in his clothes than in the way he moved around the three people at the table: quiet, quick, careful not to make Garran wait. He set down a pot of thick meat stew, dark bread, and fried root slices, then stepped back. "Commander. Sir. Ma’am. If you need anything else, I’ll be outside."
Garran grunted his thanks and reached for the bread. Averik filled his bowl while Evelyn sat beside him. Her knee touched his once beneath the table when she shifted. For a minute, nobody spoke. The silence wasn’t awkward. It was simply breakfast after a long night.
Garran broke it first. "Eat properly. I’d rather not hear hunger offered as an excuse later."
Averik tore bread in half. "If I need an excuse, I’ll find a better one."
The corner of Garran’s mouth moved. "That’s the spirit." Evelyn glanced from one man to the other and rested her fingers lightly against Averik’s wrist. "Please don’t make me decide which of you is more stubborn this early in the morning~."
"You don’t have to decide," Averik said, and Garran snorted into his bowl.
The meal didn’t drag. The worker returned once to refill hot water without interrupting them, and Garran stood as soon as his bowl was empty. Not long afterward, they crossed into Unit 1’s training yard to settle the promise from before dawn.
Word had traveled faster than Averik expected. Several FU members were already there, and a few more drifted in as Garran walked toward the center. Nobody crowded the yard. They spread along the edge instead, attention fixed on their commander and the new Awakened who had somehow ended up sparring him the morning after a Blood Moon.
Evelyn stopped with them at the perimeter while Averik kept walking. Packed snow had been cleared from most of the central stone, leaving wet seams, old chips, and pale frost in the cracks. Garran stopped across from him with enough room between them.
Garran rolled one shoulder and studied him across the gap. The easy breakfast expression was gone. What remained was the commander Averik had watched on the wall: settled, alert, and irritatingly certain of his own weight in the world.
"Averik, I’ll say it one more time. I have the Sovereign Talent, Sequence 5, Tier 4, Gravity Affinity."
Averik met his eyes. "That doesn’t change anything."
"You think so?" Garran Asked.
Garran’s gaze stayed on him. "For example, I can do this: I declare this training yard as a battlefield for the two of us."
Essence moved around Garran without any dramatic flare. The change was subtler. The space between the yard walls seemed to tighten, as though an invisible boundary had found the edges of the ground and decided they mattered.
A pressure passed through the yard. Averik felt Evelyn beyond the edge of it. He could still see her and hear the muted shift of boots among the Frontline members. Yet the space around him and Garran had acquired a different kind of ownership, one that didn’t belong to stone walls or painted lines.
Without move. Garran said again "I suppose it’s already started, then: living beings inside this battlefield other than me cannot move."
Averik’s body stopped. His weight remained where it had been. Essence still answered inside him, but when he told his foot to shift, nothing happened. When he tried to raise a hand, his arm might as well have belonged to the ground. ’Shit!’
Garran moved. He crossed the first stretch of distance with a speed that made the gap between Tier 4 and Tier 5 brutally simple.
Averik’s eyes caught the start of the motion. His body couldn’t answer it, so he stopped trying to answer with his body.
Cold poured into the stone beneath them. Frost raced outward from Averik’s boots in branching white lines while Darkness flooded the space itself. Morning vanished inside the boundary, and Averik drove Soul pressure through the black battlefield toward Garran.
Garran’s charge lost a fraction of its clean rhythm. Frost caught around his boots, Darkness took his sight, and Averik felt Soul pressure meet an existence far heavier than his own.
Garran resisted it rather than folding beneath it, but resisting all three pressures at once still demanded attention. "Darkness doesn’t apply to me."
The battlefield remained black.
Averik pushed harder. Frost thickened around Garran’s footing, claiming more of the stone around him, while Soul pressure kept grinding against the commander’s existence, searching less for damage than for one imperfect beat.
"Damn it, what’s happening? It’s not working." Garran said, losing his composure.
Something in the restraint around Averik shifted. His body was still held, But whatever Garran had changed to deal with the darkness, the hold had loosened.
’I guess you’re not as smart as I thought, Garran.’ Averik drove against the restraint again. His fingers twitched. A shoulder followed, and then the hold gave him just enough to move.
A Frost Spear tore up from the ice at Averik’s feet and shot straight through the darkness at Garran’s head.
"Darkness doesn’t apply in this battlefield." Darkness vanished, and the first thing Garran saw was a spear point almost touching his eye. His head snapped aside. Essence coated one hand in the same instant, and his palm hammered across the shaft.
CRACK!
The spear broke sideways. Its point carved past Garran’s temple close enough to scatter a few strands of hair before shattered frost burst across the stone. Garran finally looked uncomfortable.
He glanced at the broken spear and then at Averik. "That was close."
Averik’s mouth tilted faintly. "As expected of the Commander."
"As expected of you. If it were anyone else at your level, the fight might’ve ended in just one second."
"Maybe." Averik said.
A few murmurs rose at the perimeter and died just as quickly. Averik ignored them. Garran hadn’t ended the battlefield, and the man’s posture had changed by a fraction. The demonstration was over. Now Garran was watching him properly.
The ground turned treacherous before Garran’s next step landed. Averik felt his own weight drag hard to the left. The direction of down itself had changed along the lane beneath him.
His body reacted fast enough to keep him from falling, Frost drove deeper into the cracks beneath his boots, then flattened ahead into a slick crescent. Instead of fighting the pull head-on, Averik let it take him half a step and redirected that motion into a slide across the curve he had made.
Garran changed the pressure. The pull snapped forward, and Averik’s frost ridge rose between them just before the commander arrived. Garran went through it.
Ice burst from his shoulder in white fragments. His fist came behind it, too fast for Averik to match after the fact, but Averik had prepared before it came. Soul pressure struck Garran in a short pulse. It shifted his line by the smallest amount.
Averik turned through the opening and caught Garran’s forearm on an Essence-hardened guard. The impact still drove through both arms and into his chest, skating his boots backward over his own ice. Three body lengths disappeared beneath him before Frost caught and stopped the slide.
Garran was already following. Averik pulled the frost around his feet upward. Gravity dragged at the ice, trying to take the medium with him, He reached through Frost Authority, kept the rising sheet under his control, and twisted it across Garran’s lane instead of letting it tear away.
Garran smashed a forearm through it, but the break cost a fraction of a beat. Averik stepped inside, drove an Essence-coated fist toward Garran’s ribs, and changed the strike halfway through when the commander’s elbow dropped. Frost snapped across the stone behind Garran’s heel at the same time, closing the clean retreat behind him.
Garran didn’t retreat. He turned his hip and met Averik’s forearm with his own. The collision jarred Averik to the shoulder, and Garran’s other hand came toward his sternum. Averik twisted away before it landed clean, though the edge of the blow still clipped him and sent a heavy shock across his chest. It did no lasting damage, but it made the difference in raw force impossible to miss.
Garran’s eyes narrowed. "You keep changing the floor."
Averik let frost creep under his next step. "It keeps working."
"Noted." Gravity shifted before the word had fully left Garran’s mouth.
This time he didn’t drag Averik in one direction. Weight changed under separate patches of ground, turning the center of the battlefield into a set of bad choices. One step became heavy enough to sink into Averik’s frost; the next tried to throw him forward. A broken slab of ice lifted and slid across his flank like a blunt blade.
Averik ducked under it, spread Frost ahead of his landing point, and sent Soul pressure wide rather than hammering Garran directly. The pressure didn’t break the commander’s resistance. It made him account for it, which was enough to keep the fight from becoming a simple question of who could cross the yard faster.
They traded space rather than wasting blows. Garran advanced through one frozen lane, Averik collapsed it and opened another, and Garran changed Gravity under the new path. Averik stopped trying to hold ground and used the pull to accelerate a lateral shift.
When Garran cut him off, Averik raised frost from an angle that forced the commander to choose between breaking it or giving him another step.
Averik saw the pattern change when Garran’s eyes stopped following individual frost shapes and stayed on him instead.
The opening trick with Darkness had worked because Garran had answered the wrong thing, and his next rule had fixed that. ’Frost, Soul, Darkness: nearly every fast answer I had shown him came through Affinity. If Garran noticed the pattern, the next exchange would be worse.’
Garran eased back two paces. That made Averik more wary than another rush would have. The commander took one breath, eyes still fixed on him, and the pressure across the battlefield sharpened.
"Affinity doesn’t apply in this battlefield."
The change hit at once. Frost already covering the ground remained, but the familiar reach of Frost Affinity went dead. Soul pressure vanished from Averik’s grasp. Darkness, already barred from the battlefield, offered nothing. Across from him, the warped weight of Gravity snapped back to normal as well.
Garran had shut his own Affinity out with Averik’s.
He moved immediately. Tier-4 acceleration ate the distance. "Living beings inside this battlefield other than me cannot move."
Averik locked in place again. Garran had waited until he was already inside the attack lane. ’Fuck!’
Affinity was cut off, but Frost Authority wasn’t. Averik seized the frost already covering Garran’s lane and ripped it upward into a thick guard between them.
Garran hit it without slowing.
CRACK!
The frost guard exploded. Essence wrapped Garran’s fist as it came through the white fragments and drove straight into Averik’s abdomen.
BOOM!
Air detonated behind him. Loose frost and powder blasted across the yard as though the force had passed through his body and kept going. His stomach seized, blood flooded his mouth, and a colder pain scraped across his soul.
His locked muscles couldn’t move to absorb the blow, but the impact moved him anyway. His torso folded around Garran’s fist as tissue tore and compressed inside him. For an instant, his vision flashed white.
Garran pulled his fist back, stepped away, and released the battlefield. Movement returned all at once. Averik’s knees bent under him, but he caught himself before they touched the ground. A small mouthful of blood came up. He turned his head and spat it onto the stone.
Evelyn was beside him almost immediately. "Averik, please let me see you." Her voice was soft, but her eyes had already moved over his posture, his breath, the blood, and then Garran. "That went deeper than it looked."
"I know." Averik closed his attention inward. Soul Affinity found where Garran’s Essence had bruised his soul and forced the disturbance to settle. At the same time, he pushed both Cores to circulate Essence faster. Heat spread through torn tissue as regeneration repaired the damage in his abdomen.
Evelyn’s fingers settled against his arm. She stayed close enough to catch any change and kept watching Garran over Averik’s shoulder.
Averik straightened. "Garran, are you trying to kill me?"
Garran’s gaze lingered for a beat before he pointed toward the frost fragments scattered where the spear had nearly taken his eye. "Have you looked in a mirror? Right at the start, if I hadn’t moved fast enough or made the wrong decision, you could’ve already put a hole through my head."
Averik stopped and considered that. The pain in his abdomen was already fading to nothing. His breathing steadied, and the disturbance across his soul smoothed under his control. "Well... fair enough."
Someone at the edge of the yard laughed once before swallowing it. Garran looked Averik over again. His eyes lingered on Averik’s straight posture before dropping to the blood on the ground.
"And it looks like you’ve already recovered, just as I expected. You’re also the toughest opponent I’ve fought so far."
Averik flexed his hand. No tremor. No lingering pain. His body had finished repairing the damage. "I think that’s because you spend too much time giving orders."
Garran’s expression flattened, then he let out a brief, rough laugh of his own. "Maybe I should order you to be less annoying."
"That sounds like a waste of your Talent." Averik answered.
Evelyn’s hand remained around Averik’s arm. Her concern had eased, though not disappeared. "Please don’t give him ideas~."
Garran shook his head and let the last tension leave his shoulders. Around the yard, the Frontline members began talking again. Their attention moved between Averik and Garran, the blood on the stone, and the Frost Spear fragments scattered near where the commander had stood.
Averik looked once at the broken frost across the training ground. Garran’s rules were dangerous, especially once the man understood what his wording had missed.
Garran glanced toward one of the Unit buildings. "Since you’re apparently not dying, there’s work tomorrow."
That caught Averik’s attention faster than the joke had.
"We need more food and maybe material from outside," Garran continued. "Hunting run. If you want to see when we’re not chasing Frost Zombies, you can come."
A route outside Vardel meant beasts, and it offered more chances to expand what belonged to Averik.
"When?" Averik asked.
"Tomorrow morning." Garran looked at the blood spot on the stone and then at him. "Preferably without trying to spear me before breakfast."
Averik glanced toward Evelyn. She was already watching him with the faint expression that meant she knew exactly what answer he would give. "Okay, I’m coming."