Chapter 81: Retrograde
"What are you even thinking?"
Solenne bent and retrieved her rapier from the frost. She didn’t look at him while she did it, which somehow made it worse.
"Training Stima and magic simultaneously." She stood and wiped the blade clean with two strokes of cloth. "You do understand that’s near impossible. Yes?"
Arthur was still coughing. Both hands on his knees, blood taste sitting at the back of his throat. He spat sideways.
"I heard someone attempted it before." She examined the blade. "They died."
He straightened up. Wiped the saliva off his chin with the back of his sleeve.
"It is possible, princess." He met her eyes. "After all. You’re looking at the success right now."
Solenne stared at him.
Then she laughed. A real one, not the polite variety that people in her position usually deployed. It started short and cracked open into something genuine.
"That," she said, still laughing, "is the most arrogant thing anyone has said to me in recent memory." She pressed two fingers to the corner of her eye. "You are barely producing a shimmer of Stima. And you said that with your whole chest."
’Princess is starting to irritate me,’ Vexis said. ’Let’s switch. I’ll show her.’
I can’t do that. Arthur thought back. I don’t know how.
’Oh come on—’
But I like where your head is at.
’Hm?’
Be my eyes again. Like before.
Vexis grinned. Slowly.
Arthur rolled his shoulders back and straightened fully. Solenne was still wiping her eye. He waited until she looked up.
"With all respect, your highness." He kept his voice easy. "What exactly is funny? Maiden forbid a man dreams big. Hope is free, last I checked."
Solenne stopped laughing. She looked at him the way people looked at something that had surprised them without permission.
"You are a mage," she said. "Enrolled at this empire’s most prestigious magical institution. And you are telling me you are actively training both disciplines."
Arthur shrugged. "Free will. You’ve heard of it?"
"I am not a mage and even I know the graduation oath." She stepped forward. "That upon completion you are a mage through and through. You bind yourself to the discipline."
Arthur cracked his neck. Left side, then right. "I’m a second year. Graduation’s a ways off."
Her eyebrow twitched.
"How about this." He tilted his head at her. "I’ll show you I’m not just a mage."
"You’re asking me to duel."
"Princely right, princess."
Solenne’s lips curled. Her eyes did something that wasn’t quite amusement anymore. Something closer to interest. The rapier hung loose in her hand.
Then Arthur heard it.
Not a sound exactly. More like a pressure. Air being displaced faster than air was supposed to move, the specific wrongness of something already in motion before his eyes could find it. And Vexis screamed.
’MOVE.’
Every muscle in Arthur’s body snapped taut. He sidestepped right on pure reflex.
Solenne’s fist hit the tree directly behind where his face had been. The tree became a memory. Just bark fragments and a stump that hadn’t finished realizing what happened to it.
"Oho." She turned, knuckles faint purple, smoke curling off the skin. Grinning. "You saw that."
Roz opened his mouth from the ground where Arthur had set him. "Brat. I’m a bellus, not a mage, but I can feel her aetheric field from here." His red eyes were very still. "Overwhelmingly dense. Like yours."
Arthur kept his eyes on Solenne. "Which has more density?"
Roz paused.
"You."
Arthur grinned. Vexis grinned beside him.
He picked Roz up, set him carefully on a flat stone well clear of what was about to happen, and turned back.
"Alright, Vexis. Stima."
’Hell yeah. Scatter everything.’
He launched.
Solenne brought her right arm up in a clean block, no wasted motion, already countering off the same motion with her left fist driving straight for his center.
’Twist. Upper left.’
Arthur twisted. The punch hissed past his ear. Then the kick came, no windup, just the heel connecting clean with his ribs and the world tilting.
He hit the frost hard. Came up on one knee.
"Your footwork is honest," Solenne said pleasantly, already resetting her stance. "Tragically so. I could read your next two moves from the first."
Arthur pushed off the ground. Came in again, angling right this time.
’She’s shifting her weight. She’s going for the left shoulder—’
He ducked. Her elbow whistled over his head and he drove his fist forward at her side.
She rolled with it. Absorbed it across her forearm, turned the momentum sideways, and used it to bring her knee up into his stomach.
The air left him. Again.
"Better angle," she said. Not unkindly. "Still predictable."
’You’re telegraphing your shoulders,’ Vexis said. ’Every time you commit you drop the left first. She’s reading it.’
He reset. Breathed in. Tried again.
This time he kept his shoulders level, drove low, and hit her twice in the ribs before she caught his arm at the wrist. She pivoted and threw him over her hip. He hit the ground face-first and tasted frost and dirt.
"Your combinations are sloppy," she said, stepping back to give him room to rise. Genuinely helpful tone. "You’re stringing moves together without knowing why each one belongs after the last. Your hands and feet aren’t talking to each other."
Arthur rolled over and sat up. His nose had started bleeding somewhere in the last exchange. He wiped it on his sleeve and stood.
"Okay. Commentary noted."
’She’s right,’ Vexis said flatly. ’You fight like someone who learned it last month.’
"I did learn it last month."
’I know. That’s what I’m saying.’
Solenne tilted her head. "Are you talking to yourself?"
"Frequently." He came in again.
She moved around him the way water moved around a stone, never exactly where he was going, always one step ahead of the decision, and he caught a heel kick to the chest that launched him sideways into a tree. Bark exploded around him.
He coughed.
Stayed on one knee a second longer than he needed to.
"Vexis." He kept his voice low.
Vexis drifted close.
"How’d you do it. Auros. At the culmination."
Vexis was quiet for a moment. Not performing the quiet. Actually thinking, which was a different thing.
’Standard Stima perfuses blood outward and holds it there,’ he said. ’Scatters it through every muscle, every joint, everything at once. It works. But it stagnates. Blood pools and just sits in the tissue. I kept losing output in long exchanges. The longer a fight went the more I felt myself dropping off, even with the reserve full.’
Arthur listened.
’I noticed something. When I flexed a muscle fully and then let go, then flexed again, the blood moved. Not just sitting, actually moving. Cycling through the tissue with every contraction. So I started doing it deliberately. Flex everything. Release. Flex again. One cycle per second. Not on and off the way you think of it. More like a pulse.’
The frost pressed cold through Arthur’s knee. Solenne stood twenty meters away, not rushing him.
’The stroke volume changes with each pulse,’ Vexis continued. ’And when stroke volume changes fast the pressure differential spikes. Every fiber gets hit with actual force rather than just saturation. It’s the difference between a river flowing and a river with current.’ A beat. ’My body runs hotter. Muscles tear faster. Aetherthin becomes a real risk. But the output is three times what static perfusion gives me. Maybe more.’
Arthur looked at his hands. Flexed them once, slowly.
It was exactly cardiac logic. Stroke volume, contractile force, pressure gradient. The heart didn’t just fill and sit. It squeezed. The Mageia Core is considered a second heart. Vexis had discovered this, entirely by accident, that Stima worked the same way.
"What do you call it?" Arthur said.
’Nothing. I don’t name things.’
"You have to name it. That’s a rule."
’That’s not a rule.’
"It should be. Everything cool gets a name."
’This is why I can’t stand you.’
Solenne stepped forward. One heel kick in a straight line, no wind-up. Arthur scrambled sideways and caught the edge of it across the ribs and went down rolling, debris scattering. He came up coughing, his lip split now, blood warm at the corner of his mouth.
"Holy smokes! Just name it!" he called.
Solenne opened her mouth across the area. "Did I hit you hard enough? Are you oka—"
’Why does everything with you have to have a name!’
"Because names make things real! Come on. One word. First thing that comes to mind."
Vexis made a sound that had no word attached to it. Then:
’Retrograde.’
Arthur stopped.
Solenne launched. A dive, low and fast, into a roundhouse that caught him square in the chest. He went back hard and hit a tree and the bark came off in a sheet around him and he slid down it and sat in the frost and stared at the dark Creslan sky.
He smiled despite everything.
"Retrograde," he said.
He stood up.
His lip was bleeding freely. His ribs had a complaint. His nose hadn’t stopped. He looked at Solenne across the frost and then he flexed.
Everything. Every muscle from his calves to his jaw, every fiber pulled tight in one full contraction.
Then he let go.
Then he flexed again.
Let go.
Flex. Release. Flex. Release.
Heat rushed through him.
Frost hissed beneath his boots.
His skin burned.
His pulse accelerated.
Like switching something on. His skin went warm all at once, then warmer, and he could feel the pressure building behind each pulse, the differential spiking with every cycle, the blood actually moving through him instead of pooling.
"Holy." He flexed again. Released. "I feel no cold."
Solenne went still.
His hair lifted slightly at the edges, just barely, from the heat radiating off his skin. The frost directly beneath his boots began to melt in a slow ring. The faint purple glow started at his hands and crept upward through his forearms, dim but real.
Flex. Release. Flex.
He could hear his own heartbeat in his ears. Loud. Even. Pounding with the rhythm of the technique, as if the Mageia Core behind his sternum had recognized the pulse pattern and decided to match it.
"Alright." He looked at Solenne directly. His voice came out steady despite everything bleeding on his face. "It’s official."
He flexed one final time and held it.
"Retrograde. First Pulse."
He launched.
The dirt scattered everywhere.The frost shattered. The ground beneath his first step cracked down the middle, a clean split radiating outward from the impact point.
Solenne’s eyes widened.
For the first time since the south field, she moved her feet.
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