Divine System: Land of the Abominations-Chapter 320: The Trials Begin (1).

Nero stood in the doorway for a moment. The mess hall was half full — candidates from other cohorts, a few off-duty guards, the low hum of the midday hour settling into the stone. The porridge had been replaced by something darker and hotter that smelled of turnip and salt, which was an improvement by most available measures.

He went in, found a seat at the end of one of the long tables, and ate, and thought about the eastern edge of Golgotha and about records made incomplete by difficult circumstances and about the distance between what institutions said about themselves and what they were, which was not always a dishonest distance but was always, in the end, a self-serving one.

He was still thinking about it when the mess hall bell rang for the afternoon session and he stood and picked up his tray and carried it to the collection point, moving through the Red House’s midday noise with the practised ease of someone who had been inside it long enough to stop noticing the details of it and had started, instead, to notice the shape.

Three weeks in, Vane introduced live sparring.

He announced it at the start of the session without preamble, the same way he announced everything — as a statement of what was going to happen rather than a subject open to any kind of discussion. The candidates absorbed this with varying degrees of visible response. Corvin’s expression did not change. Garet straightened slightly, which on him was the equivalent of enthusiasm. Several of the noble candidates exchanged the particular look that passed between people who have trained together long enough to have already sorted out between themselves who among them was worth taking seriously, and were now performing the recalibration of including Nero and Garet and the others in that accounting.

Nero noticed all of this and kept his face neutral and waited to be told what the arrangements were.

The arrangements were straightforward. Pairs would spar for three minutes each round, with Vane observing and the pairs rotating after each exchange. No headshots. No strikes to the throat. Everything else was permitted, with the clarification that "permitted" in this context meant Vane would not intervene, not that it wouldn’t have consequences. The practice weapons were blunted but not without mass, and three minutes at genuine intent produced genuine outcomes.

His first partner was one of the noble candidates he hadn’t learned the name of yet — a young man of approximately his own height with good fundamentals and the particular confidence of someone who had stepped into sparring situations many times before and knew what his first move was going to be before his feet crossed the line. The first move was a feint right and strike left, which was the correct first move against an unfamiliar opponent with a pole weapon, because it tested both the reach management and the defensive rotation simultaneously, and gave you information regardless of whether it landed.

Nero stepped back and let the strike pass and did not counterattack.

The young man reset his stance. His expression had not changed, but something in the quality of his attention had — the slight recalibration of someone whose opening gambit had produced an unexpected result, specifically no result at all, and was now deciding what the no result meant.

They circled.

Nero watched the weight distribution. The young man favoured his front foot on approach, which was a tendency Nero had noted during footwork drills and which was, in sparring, the specific difference between a lunge that committed and a lunge that remained recoverable. He waited for it and when it came he stepped inside the arc and tapped the spear butt firmly against the young man’s ribs — not hard enough to hurt, hard enough to register — and stepped back out before the recovery motion could close the distance.

The young man paused. He looked at Nero with the expression of someone revising an estimate, and then he reset and came again, and this time he kept his weight back, and the exchange went on for the remaining two and a half minutes without either of them landing anything definitive, which was not the same as nothing happening.

Vane said "switch" and Nero moved to the next partner.

The rotation continued. Some of the exchanges were more lopsided than others — Corvin with anyone was simply a different category of problem than most other pairings, and Vane let it run to its conclusion each time without interrupting, which suggested he found the lopsidedness instructive rather than unfair. Edran fought with the controlled urgency of someone for whom three minutes had genuine stakes regardless of context, and Garet fought with a focus that was slightly too intense for the situation and was producing results that were adequate but would have been better if he could occasionally hear himself think.

Sable fought the way she moved — with economy, finding the minimum necessary motion to produce the required effect and declining to use more of herself than that. She was not, by any obvious measure, exceptional. She was simply very rarely where she was expected to be.

When Nero was paired with her he spent the first thirty seconds attempting to establish a rhythm and the next thirty realising that the rhythm he was establishing was one she had anticipated him establishing and had already arranged her positioning to neutralise. He adjusted. She adjusted to the adjustment, two beats ahead of it. He abandoned rhythm entirely and went for something simpler, and for a moment the simplicity caught her slightly wide of where she had positioned herself, and the spear butt touched her shoulder before she turned away from it, and she looked at him with a brief, entirely flat expression that contained neither frustration nor acknowledgment, only the registration of data.

"Switch," Vane said.

His final pairing of the session was with Corvin.

Nero had watched enough of Corvin’s exchanges to understand what was coming, in the abstract way that watching and doing were different things.