"Can I ask you something?" Dex said.
"Yes," Corbyn said.
"The other summons in your pool," Dex said. He kept his voice low. Not dramatic. Just practical. "Six more after Ishtar. Are you scared of them?"
Corbyn thought about it honestly.
"Not scared," Corbyn said. "Aware."
"Aware," Dex repeated.
"They’re real things," Corbyn said. "With histories. With their own opinions about being summoned by someone like me." He looked at his cup. "Ishtar looked at me and felt pity. I don’t know how the others will look at me."
Dex was quiet for a moment.
"Ishtar still showed up," Dex said. "Pity and all."
"Yeah," Corbyn said.
"Then maybe it doesn’t matter how they look at you initially," Dex said. "Matters what happens after."
Corbyn looked at him.
Dex was eating again, expression neutral, like he hadn’t just said something worth sitting with.
The dining hall noise moved around them.
Then Corbyn’s system chimed.
A notification. Clean border. Formal formatting he hadn’t seen before.
[FORMAL ACADEMIC CHALLENGE RECEIVED]
[CHALLENGER: STELLAN DRAVES — SS RANK, COMBAT SOVEREIGN]
[FORMAT: SUPERVISED PRACTICE DUEL, STANDARD VALDENMERE REGULATIONS]
[SCHEDULED DATE: THREE DAYS FROM NOW, ASSESSMENT ARENA, NINTH HOUR]
[ACADEMIC NOTE: COMBAT SOVEREIGN IS A WARRIOR CLASS. ABILITIES ARE BODY-BASED, GENERATED FROM THE USER’S OWN OUTPUT. NO SUMMON REQUIRED.]
[NOTE: DECLINING A FORMAL CHALLENGE RESULTS IN AUTOMATIC FORFEIT AND ACADEMIC PENALTY OF TWO GRADE POINTS ACROSS ALL CURRENT ASSESSMENTS]
[RESPOND: ACCEPT / DECLINE]
Corbyn stared at it.
Dex had gone still across the table.
He was reading it upside down the way he’d read Lyra’s document that morning. His fork had stopped halfway to his mouth.
"He filed it formally," Dex said quietly.
"Yes," Corbyn said.
"Which means you can’t walk away from it," Dex said.
"No," Corbyn said.
"Three days," Dex said. He set his fork down. The second helping sat untouched. "Can you summon her by then? Full capacity?"
Corbyn thought about the 58% from this afternoon. The 26 hour recovery estimate. Cole’s instruction not to attempt summoning until 90%.
"Maybe," Corbyn said. "Partial manifestation for sure. Full presence I don’t know."
"And Stellan knows that," Dex said. Not an accusation. Just the shape of the situation laid flat.
"Probably," Corbyn said.
Dex looked at the notification still floating in Corbyn’s vision. Then at Corbyn.
"Accept it," Dex said.
Corbyn looked at him.
"If you decline he gets the grade points and the narrative," Dex said. "He spends three days telling everyone you ran. In a school like this the narrative matters almost as much as the result." He leaned forward slightly. "Accept it. Show up. Whatever happens in that arena at least you showed up."
Corbyn looked at the notification.
He’s right, Ishtar said in his mind.
’About accepting it?’ Corbyn thought.
About the narrative, Ishtar said. Aldric used to say the same thing. How you enter a situation matters almost as much as how you leave it. A pause. Accept it. We have three days.
Corbyn pressed ACCEPT.
The notification closed.
Across the dining hall Stellan was at the noble center table. Corbyn couldn’t see his expression from this distance.
Then Stellan’s head turned slightly toward the commoner tables.
Just slightly.
Then back.
"Cole needs to know tonight."
He turned around.
Lyra was standing at the end of the table with her tray. She hadn’t sat down. She was looking at the space where the notification had been like she’d read it over his shoulder.
"How long have you been standing there?" Corbyn said.
"Long enough," Lyra said. She set her tray down and sat beside Dex, across from Corbyn. "I already sent Cole a message. He wants to see you after dinner."
"You sent the message before I accepted," Corbyn said.
"I sent it when the challenge went out," Lyra said. "Stellan copied the faculty notification board as a formality. Standard procedure for formal challenges." She picked up her fork. "I saw it three minutes ago."
Dex was looking between them with the expression of someone watching something he had predicted this morning and was now finding satisfying.
"Stellan has never lost a formal duel," Lyra said. "Not once. I pulled his full record this afternoon."
"Of course you did," Dex said quietly, to himself mostly.
"He knows your mana isn’t recovered," Lyra said. "He timed this deliberately. Three days is enough time for you to feel like you have a chance. Not enough time to actually close the gap." She ate a bite. "He’s good at this."
"So what’s his second reason?" Corbyn said. "For the challenge."
Lyra was quiet for a moment.
"He wants to see what you actually are," she said. "Not the ceremony. Not the error log. Not the assessment board result." She looked at Corbyn steadily. "He wants to see what you do when you’re underprepared and everyone is watching."
"And if I lose?" Corbyn said.
"Then he knows," Lyra said simply.
"And if I don’t," Corbyn said.
Lyra looked at him for a moment.
"Then he knows something more interesting," she said.
The three of them sat with that for a moment.
Around them the dining hall continued its noise. A hundred students eating dinner. Conversations, laughter, the scrape of chairs. The ordinary machinery of an evening at Valdenmere Academy.
At the commoner table in the corner three people ate in quiet that felt less like isolation and more like the specific quiet of people who have just agreed on something without saying it out loud.
Dex picked his fork back up.
"Cole after dinner," Dex said. "Training tomorrow morning. Duel in three days." He ate a bite. "Normal first week."
Corbyn looked at him.
"You said your life was boring," Corbyn said.
"Was," Dex said. "Past tense."
Lyra glanced at Dex for the first time since sitting down.
Something in her expression that wasn’t quite a smile but lived next door to one.
Then she looked back at her food.
They finished dinner.