The weeks after the Subway run blurred into a rhythm that Jace's body learned before his mind did.

  Morning: Academy coursework. Combat Theory with Instructor Hollis - a lean, precise woman whose [Duelist] class informed a teaching style built on the principle that every fight was a conversation and most students were illiterate. Hollis drilled stance, guard positioning, and weapon fundamentals with the religious conviction of someone who believed that basics killed more monsters than powers ever would. Jace absorbed it like dry ground absorbing rain. His STR of nine meant his sword work was still underpowered, but Hollis didn't care about power. She cared about form, and form was learnable, and learning was what [Nomad] did.

  Mid-morning: Mana Fundamentals with Instructor Drevin - a weary Conclave-adjunct [Evoker] who taught the practical companion to Lector Salis's theory lectures. Where Salis explained *why* mana behaved as it did, Drevin demonstrated *how* - first- and second-year students learning the physical craft of elemental manipulation. The class was designed for students with MYS scores north of twelve. Jace sat in the back with a Mystical of nine and watched Drevin demonstrate fire shaping, water condensation, and the basic principles of mana-thread construction. He couldn't replicate any of it at combat-relevant scale. His [Wayfaring] penalty turned a ten-MP cantrip into a thirty-MP nightmare, and his pool was twenty-two. But he watched. He studied the *shapes* - the way Drevin's hands moved when pulling fire from ambient mana, the particular twist of intent that transitioned water from liquid to projectile. His Analysis skill - now Journeyman-rank - let him break those shapes down into component movements. He couldn't afford to cast. But he could afford to *understand*, and understanding was the first step toward the day when his stats caught up to his comprehension.

  After lunch: Dungeon Ecology with Professor Harken - the same [Beastkeeper] whose cheerful lethality lectures had introduced them to mana-reactive fungi during their first weeks. Harken had escalated since then. He kept a juvenile Mana-Serpent coiled around his forearm like a living bracelet now, which he claimed was for "demonstration purposes" but which Jace suspected was simply because Harken enjoyed the way students flinched when the creature yawned. The lectures covered dungeon biomes, creature hierarchies, territorial behavior, and the critical differences between natural fauna, mana-mutated fauna, and extraplanar entities. Jace's Basic Anatomy skill deepened with every session - not just *what* creatures were, but *how they moved*, how their mana-channels influenced their combat behavior, where the junctions were that, if disrupted, could disable a creature three times your level.

  Afternoons: Practical combat sessions. The Proving Grounds. Thresh.

  Thresh had changed his approach with Jace's group since the Subway run. Not dramatically - he still ran them through the same drills, still demanded the same standards, still debriefed with the same blunt efficiency. But the drills were different now. More complex. Multi-phase scenarios that required role-switching mid-encounter. A simulation where the healer was disabled and someone else had to stabilize the wounded. A scenario where the primary DPS was crowd-controlled and the support players had to generate damage. Exercises that punished rigid thinking and rewarded adaptation.

  Exercises that felt, to Jace, like they'd been designed for a team exactly like his.

  He didn't ask Thresh about it. He didn't need to. The [Warden] watched them from the observation platform with his mana-construct arm pulsing its faint blue rhythm, and sometimes he made notes on a clipboard, and sometimes he didn't, and the fact that he was watching at all said enough.

  Jace's skill list grew. Not in dramatic leaps - in the slow, grinding increments of daily practice compounded over weeks.

  [Footwork: Evasion] tightened. The gap between System-activated speed and raw muscle-memory execution narrowed until Jace could move in the evasion patterns at roughly seventy percent effectiveness without spending SP at all. Not as fast, not as fluid, but functional - and free. When he did activate the skill, it now cost thirteen SP instead of fifteen. Still ruinous. Still triple what a [Rogue] would pay. But the reduction meant his body was learning, and a body that learned was a body that would eventually learn more.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  His Improvised Combat climbed past Apprentice toward something the System didn't have a convenient label for - the space between codified skill and instinctive adaptation. Hollis's stance work merged with Torrin's brawling fundamentals and the dirty-fighting tricks Jace had picked up from a lifetime in the Rust Boroughs. The result wasn't any recognized style. It was a patchwork, ugly and functional, built on the principle that the best technique was the one your opponent hadn't seen before.

  [Mana Sense] became his second skin. He activated it in hallways, in the mess hall, in classrooms - brief pulses that drained his MP but fed his understanding of the mana-saturated world he lived in. He could feel Torrin's signature now - dense and slow, like a boulder sitting in a river, the mana flowing around him rather than through him. Mara's was warm and diffuse, a gentle radiance that pulsed brighter when she was anxious. Elara's was sharp and structured, like looking at an architectural blueprint rendered in light. Each person was different. Each creature was different. The dungeon beneath the academy hummed with a frequency he could distinguish from the ambient noise of the city above.

  He couldn't act on most of what he sensed. Not yet. His MYS of nine was a keyhole, not a door. But every pulse taught him something about the shape of the world beneath the world, and that knowledge compounded.

  Elara noticed. Of course Elara noticed.

  "Your mana-perception resolution has increased by approximately forty percent since the Subway run," she said one evening, unprompted, while they studied in the library's common section. She had her notebook open to a page of densely annotated observations. "You're reading signatures at a range that normally requires MYS twelve or higher. Either your [Mana Sense] skill rank is compensating for your raw attribute, or your attribute is being functionally enhanced by the skill in a feedback loop. Both options are unusual."

  "Which one worries you more?"

  "The second one. Feedback loops in mana-perception can cause sensory overload in individuals without adequate Mystical grounding. Your MYS is nine."

  "So I should stop?"

  Elara paused. The pen tapped twice. "No. You should be careful. There's a difference."

  Jace was careful. He was also relentless. The two existed in tension, and the tension was productive.

  The group's training sessions evolved. What had started as four rejects teaching each other scraps in a borrowed shed became something more structured - a nightly ritual of cross-training, tactical rehearsal, and mutual education. Torrin's role shifted: he was no longer just a hitting coach but a living obstacle course, a wall that Jace practiced flowing around, a tower that Mara learned to position behind, a barricade that Elara used as cover while she practiced her identification calls. Torrin's own movement improved - not dramatically, not the kind of leap that erased a four in Agility - but he learned to *anticipate* where he needed to be, compensating for lack of speed with an almost precognitive positional awareness born from studying Jace's movement patterns and extrapolating.

  Mara healed. Every night. Small wounds - Jace and Torrin made sure there were always small wounds from the physical drills. Cuts, bruises, strained muscles. She knelt over them with shaking hands and pushed mana through the channels in her palms and watched the blood and forced herself to stay present. Some nights she managed it. Some nights she didn't - the vasovagal response slamming her into grey-edged tunnel vision, Jace's hand on her shoulder, Elara's voice cutting through the static with calm precision. *Breathe. Ground. Focus on the mana, not the blood.* The failures were fewer now. The successes were longer.

  Elara found something in her [Scribe] class that the Conclave had either missed or deliberately neglected. Her inscription work - the ability to transcribe spell formulae and enchantment patterns onto physical media - wasn't just academic. When she inscribed a rune onto a surface during combat, the rune *activated*. Not as a spell - as a triggered effect, weak and short-lived, but *real*. A flash-rune that produced a burst of light. A friction-rune that made a two-meter patch of floor slick as ice for three seconds. A sound-rune that generated a sharp crack loud enough to startle. None of it was combat-grade. None of it would appear on any class's power list. But Elara had spent three evenings in the Forge Quarter experimenting, and when she came to their next training session with ink-stained fingers and a look in her eyes that Jace had never seen before - fierce, almost hungry - she said:

  "I am not useless."

  She said it like she was correcting someone who wasn't in the room. Maybe someone who'd been in every room she'd ever stood in.

  Jace believed her. The question was whether anyone else would.