The second training yard was already busy.
Soldiers were moving between the surrounding buildings with field packs on their shoulders and weapon cases in their hands. Farther down the grounds, an instructor was reading names from a roster and sending each soldier toward a different station, and the shouted responses carried over the ring of steel and the steady tramp of boots on packed earth. The air smelled of weapon oil and dust, along with the faint scorch that still clung to the targets from the day before.
Edith was waiting on the reinforced strip.
Owen slowed when he saw what she was holding. It wasn’t the blunted practice sword she had used against him for most of the month. Her bonded sword was already in her hand.
She had never needed it to control one of their spars. She had told him yesterday what he had to do, and neither of them repeated it now, but seeing the real weapon in her hand made the morning feel considerably more serious.
"The fighting area is the same as always," Edith said, nodding toward the distance lines painted along the reinforced ground. "Step outside it, and you’ve conceded the exchange."
She shifted her grip. "Everything we’ve trained is available to you. Your fire, your transformations, your strength, and whatever order you think will work. I’ll fight seriously enough to test you, but this is still an assessment. I’m not trying to injure you."
Owen nodded and summoned his longsword.
He took a moment before stepping forward and looked at the distance between them. Edith had watched him change swords hundreds of times by now, so surprising her simply by transforming the blade wasn’t realistic anymore. What he needed was harder than that. He had to create a moment where she knew a change might be coming and still couldn’t answer it with ordinary swordsmanship.
Edith raised her sword, and the assessment began.
Owen attacked first. He opened with a direct cut that made Edith shift her feet, then followed before she had fully settled. When she moved to take control of the centerline, he cut the exchange short instead of committing to the response she wanted.
A month ago, she had been able to handle him from almost one spot. That was no longer true.
She was still comfortably ahead, though. She caught his next strike, turned it aside and answered with a counter that Owen only avoided by giving up ground. She didn’t chase him. She simply took the space he had surrendered and made him work to earn it back.
He added fire to the next exchange, but only for an instant. The copper markings brightened just before impact, and flame flashed along the blade without roaring out. Edith slipped off the cutting line and countered at once.
Owen didn’t try to force his way through. He changed weapons instead.
The longsword narrowed into a rapier while he recovered, and the broad cut he had been about to throw became direct point pressure. The new line made Edith abandon her counter and shift outside the thrust.
Owen followed with a second thrust, working through the narrow opening rather than trying to slash.
Edith parried it and stepped in hard, closing the distance to take away the space the rapier needed.
He changed again, this time to the arming sword. The shorter blade let him stay comfortable as she crowded him, and their swords struck twice at close range. Owen got his shoulder past the line of her first counter, and for a moment he held the exchange instead of being pushed out of it.
Then Edith found the opening anyway. The flat of her blade tapped against his weapon hand before he could recover.
She stepped back without a word. The first exchange was hers.
They reset.
This time, Owen switched less often. He stayed with the longsword for longer stretches so Edith couldn’t simply wait for the next change, mixed in short bursts of fire, and began watching which of his attacks made her defend in the same direction.
Edith raised the pressure as well. She attacked far more often than she had in the opening exchange, and Owen had to keep deciding whether to hold his current sword, change while retreating, or spend fire to deny her an opening. When he chose badly, she punished it. When he chose well, the exchange simply went on.
At one point, she drove him backward with a series of fast attacks that would have run him out of the marked area a month ago. Owen kept his footing, absorbed the pace, cut sharply to one side and worked his way back to the center without needing to stop and recover. A little later, a long exchange left both of them breathing harder, and Owen was still moving properly at the end of it.
When Edith created what would normally have been safe longsword distance, Owen tried the greatsword for the first time that morning.
The blade lengthened as he advanced. Edith read the change quickly enough to evade the first attack, but the extra reach made her give up the counter she had been preparing and fall back.
That caught Owen’s attention. It wasn’t that the greatsword was better than his other swords. It was that Edith had already decided what she wanted to do before he changed the conditions.
The next time he reached for the greatsword, she didn’t retreat in a straight line. She stepped inside the arc where the bigger blade was comfortable, which left Owen a choice between switching to the arming sword and losing the exchange.
He switched, and Edith was waiting for it.
Her sword met his the instant the shorter blade appeared and nearly knocked it out of line. Owen got out of the exchange, but only just.
That told him something important. Edith wasn’t reacting to his swords anymore. She was reading why he chose them.
A month of training had shown her every configuration he had and how he decided between them. She knew the correct answer to each situation just as well as he did, which meant that choosing the right sword every time would only make him easier to predict.
The fight settled into a long middle stretch. Owen used the longsword as his base and switched to the rapier whenever a straight line opened, to the arming sword when Edith forced him close, and to the greatsword when he could make use of the extra reach. Edith kept winning individual exchanges, but the margin was narrowing.
She had to reposition more often. One fire-assisted cut forced her to break contact entirely instead of countering. A rapier thrust made her turn farther outside than she had meant to, and a sudden change to the arming sword took away one of her usual close-range answers.
Owen noticed all of it, but he stopped treating each small success as an achievement. What he was looking for was repetition.
Eventually, he found it.
Whenever he set up a believable rapier thrust toward her centerline, Edith preferred to move to the same outside angle and control his point rather than retreat straight back. It was efficient, it kept her close enough to counter, and it had worked every time.
Owen tested it once more. He changed to the rapier and attacked straight down the line, and Edith moved outside, took control of his blade and struck him before he could change again.
Another exchange to her. Owen was annoyed to lose it, but not as annoyed as he might have been.
Before they reset, Edith lowered her sword slightly.
"If you spend the whole assessment looking for one perfect transformation," she said, "I’ll keep beating you until the session ends."
Owen nodded and said nothing.
They began again.