Chapter 27: The Proxy’s Weakness
The training yard occupied a natural caldera on the second ring’s outer edge. An ancient eruption carved it into the volcanic bedrock. Later, Academy engineers perfected it into a geometric arena of flawless brutality. Dividing the floor were twenty sparring pits, each one a perfect hexagon of polished basalt separated from its neighbours by raised ridges of reinforced stone. These barriers rose exactly chest-height on an average Dragon conscript. The height was deliberate. They were high enough to contain the debris of a mana exchange but low enough that spectators on the surrounding walkways could watch every impact.
Eshiren watched from the third ring’s observation walkway, forty feet above the yard, his forearms resting on the iron railing. Beside him, Saelis leaned against the wall with her arms crossed. Her dull silver scales matched the volcanic stone behind her. To any casual observer walking by, they looked exactly like two idle conscripts wasting a free hour between lectures. Saelis had chosen this position because the third ring’s walkway was chronically underused. Dead space. The conscripts assigned to this level had training schedules that left a massive ninety-minute gap in foot traffic between the second and fourth hours.
Ninety minutes of uninterrupted observation.
Below them, Tharok fought.
The gang leader occupied the central sparring pit, stripped to the waist, his massive torso sheened with sweat and the faint, ruddy glow of active mana circulation. His shattered kneecaps had been repaired. It was crude, judging by the thick scar tissue visible even from forty feet, but achieved through medical intervention that a lower-ring conscript should not have been able to afford. More of Krazmakor’s funding. The Prince was maintaining his investment.
Tharok’s opponent was a broad-shouldered conscript with obsidian horn-ridges who outweighed Eshiren by at least fifty pounds. The boy circled warily, his guard high, his feet shuffling across the basalt in the cautious shuffle of someone who had already taken one hit and didn’t want another.
Tharok gave him no choice. Closing the distance in two strides, the gang leader drove a straight right into the other conscript’s guard. His punch carried a visible corona of earth-mana, a dense, brown-gold energy that compacted the air around Tharok’s fist and multiplied the kinetic impact by a factor that turned a strong blow into a devastating one. The obsidian-horned boy’s guard buckled. His forearms bent inward. Tharok’s follow-up hook caught him on the temple and dropped him sideways into the hexagonal ridge.
The yard instructor noted the result without comment. Tharok shook out his fists and beckoned the next sparring partner forward.
"Three opponents in twelve minutes," Saelis said. Her voice carried no inflection. Data, stripped of opinion. "His earth-mana output is consistently above the expected range for a third-year conscript in the lower rings. His core density should cap at approximately four hundred units based on his registration profile. He is hitting closer to six hundred."
"I know."
"Six hundred is fourth-ring territory. Upper tier. Nobody in the second ring should be generating that kind of force, especially not a Rokvren with scarred knees and a medical history that would disqualify him from advanced cultivation tracks."
"I know, Saelis."
She exhaled through her nose. The sharp, nasal sound she used in place of commentary when the person she was speaking to was being insufficiently responsive.
Eshiren was not being insufficiently responsive. He was concentrating.
His draconic senses were dialled to their maximum sensitivity, the suppression collar’s drain be damned. He had learned, during his weeks with Vretbor, to read mana signatures the way a musician reads notation: frequency, amplitude, harmonic resonance, the subtle variations in colour and texture that distinguished one caster’s energy from another’s. Every Dragon’s mana carried a unique signature, a fingerprint encoded in the fundamental frequency of their core. Two casters could perform the identical technique, and a trained observer could still tell their outputs apart by the micro-variations in wavelength.
Tharok’s mana was wrong.
The earth-energy coating his fists carried his signature. It had the heavy, grinding frequency of Clutch Rokvren’s geological affinity, but the signature was layered. Beneath Tharok’s native frequency, a second resonance hummed at a lower register, providing the structural foundation that amplified his output from four hundred to six hundred units. The second frequency did not belong to Tharok. It was too clean, too refined, too precisely calibrated to be the product of a lower-ring conscript’s crude cultivation.
The second frequency arrived a fraction of a heartbeat after Tharok initiated each strike. A delay. Microscopic, invisible to anyone who wasn’t specifically looking for it, but unmistakable once you knew it was there. Tharok’s fist moved. His native earth-mana fired. And then, a sixteenth of a second later, the amplifying frequency kicked in, boosting the strike from strong to devastating.
The delay meant the boost was external. Something on Tharok’s body was receiving his mana output, amplifying it, and returning it in a fraction of a heartbeat. An artifact. A device. A piece of technology that did not originate from Tharok’s own core and was doing the heavy lifting that his body could not.
Eshiren pulled his senses back. The collar buzzed against his throat, agitated by the extended observation, and his temples throbbed with the dull ache of sensory overexertion.
"He’s wearing something," Eshiren said. "Under the skin, probably. Subcutaneous implant, or a resonance-bonded artifact sewn into the muscle tissue. It’s boosting his output by forty to fifty percent."
A deep flush spread across Saelis’s scales along her jawline, betraying her sudden anger. "That’s a Category Three violation."
"Explain."
She shifted against the wall, angling her body so that her mouth was hidden from any potential lip-readers on the lower walkways. Her voice dropped to a murmur pitched below the ambient noise of the training yard.
"Academy Bylaw Seven, Subsection Twelve. All combat evaluations and sparring exercises must be conducted using the student’s inherent magical capacity. The use of external artifacts, resonance boosters, mana-storage devices, or any technology not produced by the student’s own core is classified as a Category Three violation of the meritocratic code." Her eyes were sharp, focused, the clinical mask hardened into something that looked like a weapon being loaded. "Category Three is non-negotiable. The bylaws are carved into the foundation stones of the Academy because the entire institution is built on the premise that power is earned, never borrowed. A student caught using an external artifact in a graded exercise is subject to immediate expulsion."
"Expulsion."
"The permanent kind. The instructors execute the sentence on the spot. No trial. No appeal. The bylaw exists because the Academy’s political legitimacy depends on the perception that every graduate earned their rank through pure, individual merit. If students could buy power from artifacts, the ranking system collapses, and every graduate’s credentials become suspect." She paused. "The bylaw has been enforced eleven times in the last century. Every execution was public."
Below them, Tharok finished his fourth opponent. The gang leader stood in the centre of the hexagonal pit, breathing hard, his scarred knees bearing his weight through sheer stubbornness and the supplemental mana flowing from whatever device was buried in his flesh. His crew, four fighters, the remnants of the gang that had survived the reorganisation after the East Corridor, lounged against the ridges of adjacent pits, watching their leader with the dull loyalty of scavengers orbiting a larger predator.
"Krazmakor gave it to him," Eshiren said. The logic chain was short and unambiguous. "Tharok doesn’t have the connections or the resources to acquire a subcutaneous resonance booster. Those are restricted military-grade technology. The only person in this Academy who could provide one to a lower-ring conscript without leaving a traceable requisition trail is someone with access to the upper rings’ armoury and enough political insulation to avoid an investigation."
"The Prince."
"The Prince." Eshiren’s fingers tightened on the railing. "Krazmakor armed his proxy with a device that would get Tharok executed if discovered. Which means either Krazmakor doesn’t care about Tharok’s life..."
"He doesn’t."
"...or Krazmakor is confident that nobody in the lower rings has the training or the incentive to detect a subcutaneous artifact operating at those frequencies."
Saelis’s mouth thinned. "He would be correct. The instructors assigned to the lower rings are not equipped with diagnostic tools for that level of detection. Ghorzhen runs physical trials. He watches performance metrics, not mana signatures. The only person in the second ring who could identify a layered resonance is..."
"Someone who was trained by Vretbor to read mana like notation."
The silence between them was dense with implication. Forty feet below, Tharok cracked his knuckles and laughed at something one of his crew said. The sound drifted up through the caldera’s natural acoustics, wet and eager and carrying the performative cruelty of a boy who genuinely believed that his borrowed power was his own.
"We can’t report it," Saelis said. "If we file a formal accusation, the instructors will investigate. They’ll ask how we detected the artifact. Your observational capacity exceeds what a suppressed conscript should possess. They’ll start asking questions about your mana sensitivity, your training with Vretbor, the anomalies in your healing rate. The investigation becomes about you, not about Tharok."
"I know. We don’t report it."
"Then what?"
Eshiren stared down at the training yard. The hexagonal pits stretched in their perfect geometric rows, bordered by the raised ridges, observed by the walkways, recorded by the surveillance crystals mounted at each corner of the caldera. The crystals were standard Academy infrastructure, passive recording devices that stored mana-signature data for post-exercise review by the instructors. They captured everything that happened in the yard: every strike, every technique, every fluctuation in a student’s magical output.
Every fluctuation. Including the layered resonance of an illegal artifact.
"The practical exam," Eshiren said. "It’s in five days. The exam takes place in monitored conditions with full surveillance crystal coverage and senior instructors observing. If Tharok uses the artifact during the exam, the surveillance crystals will record the layered signature. The senior instructors, not Ghorzhen but the real ones from the upper rings, will review the data."
"He won’t use it during the exam. He knows the risk."
"He will if he’s losing." Eshiren turned from the railing. The pieces were arranging themselves in his mind with the mechanical precision of a lock clicking open, each tumbler falling into place with a cold, definitive sound that belonged to the cognitive mode Vretbor had been trying to teach him. Stop thinking like prey. Start thinking like a Dragon. "Tharok’s entire identity is built on physical dominance. Strip that away from him. Put him in a situation where his raw output isn’t enough, where he’s being beaten in front of his crew, and his options narrow to two. Lose publicly and destroy his reputation, or use the artifact and win."
"He’ll use it."
"He’ll use it. And the surveillance crystals will record it. And the Academy will execute him for violating the meritocratic code." Eshiren met her eyes. "Fighting him directly isn’t necessary, nor is reporting him to the instructors. Our only objective is making him desperate enough to cheat in front of a camera."
Saelis stared at him. Her flat, calculating eyes ran the scenario, testing it for weaknesses, probing the logic for gaps. The process took four seconds.
"The practical exam pairs students for elimination rounds based on ring ranking," she said. "Tharok is ranked ninth in the second ring. You are ranked thirty-first. Under normal pairing logic, you won’t face him until the quarter-finals at the earliest. By that point, he’ll have built enough momentum to win without the artifact."
"Then I need to be ranked high enough to face him in the first round."
"You’d need to be in the top ten."
"I know." Eshiren looked down at the yard one final time. Tharok had left the pit. His crew fell in behind him as he walked toward the eastern corridor, the gang moving in a loose formation that radiated territorial ownership of every square foot they crossed. "Five days. I need to climb twenty-one spots in the ring ranking. Legally. Using nothing but what the suppression collar allows."
Saelis exhaled sharply through her teeth. "That’s not a plan, that is a suicide note."
"It’s a suicide note with a postscript." He pushed off the railing and walked toward the stairwell, the iron grating clanging beneath his boots. "The postscript reads: Tharok Rokvren, expelled and executed for violation of Academy Bylaw Seven, Subsection Twelve. Cause of death: his own borrowed power."
Saelis followed him in silence. But Eshiren caught the sound, barely audible, compressed to its smallest possible form, of air leaving her nose in a single, sharp exhalation.
Her version of a laugh.
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