Chapter 70: Controlled Sparring
The advanced practical block on Wednesday ran from the second bell to the fourth, which was two hours of supervised sparring in the main arena with a rotating partner system that Hiratsuka had designed to prevent anyone from getting comfortable.
The rotation meant you did not choose your opponent. You arrived at the designated position and whoever was across from you was across from you, and you had fifteen minutes, and then the bell rang and the positions shifted.
I was paired with Cian in the third rotation.
He looked at me across the marked distance and said, without preamble: "I have been watching how you move since the first practical. I want to test something."
"What."
"Whether what I think I am seeing is actually what is happening."
"You could ask."
"I learn more from watching than from asking," he said. "Ready."
He opened with a multi-layer compression sequence, three techniques stacked in a specific order that suggested he had been developing this combination for some time. The first layer absorbed any immediate counter. The second layer exploited the gap that absorption created. The third layer was the actual attack.
I stepped inside the first layer.
The second caught me anyway.
My sleeve tore where the compressed mana skimmed past.
Cian lowered his hand.
"Good," he said. "That means it worked."
He stopped.
"How did you read the tell," he said.
"Your left shoulder tracks the sequence order. It moves before your hands do."
He looked at his left shoulder. Then at me.
"I have been working on that for a year," he said.
"I know. It is almost gone. I caught it early."
He looked at me for a moment with the expression he used when he was deciding whether to be annoyed or interested. He arrived at interested.
"Again," he said.
We went three more exchanges. He found something useful in each one. I found the limit of the compression sequence’s third layer, which was that it committed too much of his available mana to a single vector, which meant the moment it missed, the recovery window was long.
He knew this already. He was not looking for it. He was testing whether I knew it.
The bell rang.
"Thursday," he said. "Same time. I want to try the modified version."
"Same tell," I said.
"Probably," he said. "Come anyway."
The rotation moved me to a position across from a student whose name I had but whose technique I had not fully mapped. She opened with something I had not seen in the practical assessment or in the morning sessions, a wind-based displacement that did not move air so much as relocate the space it occupied. I adjusted mid-step.
She looked surprised that I had adjusted.
I looked surprised that she was surprised.
"How long have you been working on that," I said.
"Since the third year of secondary. Nobody at my previous institution could counter it."
"The counter is lateral movement at the moment of displacement, not forward or back. The displacement affects the vectors you’re already committed to."
She looked at me.
"Nobody told me that either," she said.
"Do you want to run it again."
She did. Three more times. By the fourth time she had started modifying the displacement angle, which was the right instinct.
The bell rang.
I found Reinhardt in the next rotation, which was its own category of experience.
He was three meters away and already explaining something to the student beside him when I arrived.
"—the footwork is wrong because the weight sits too far back, which means the recovery on a miss is longer than it needs to be, which means any technique that forces a miss immediately..." He stopped when he saw me. "Good. You."
"Me," I said.
"I have a question for you," he said.
"You want to spar first or ask the question first."
"Both simultaneously," he said, which was not how sparring worked, and which he appeared to genuinely believe was a reasonable proposal.
We sparred.
He talked the entire time.
Not strategy, not analysis. He was describing a technique modification he had been developing and the sparring appeared to be, for him, an opportunity to test whether the modification worked while simultaneously explaining it to me as it happened.
"If the entry angle comes from above instead of across—" he demonstrated, the sword coming from a direction that required me to move differently than I had planned—"then the defensive response has to account for two planes simultaneously instead of one, which most people can’t—"
I accounted for two planes.
He grinned.
"You can," he said, sounding genuinely pleased about this. "Most people can’t. I’ve been trying to find someone who could. That’s the question I wanted to ask."
"The modification," I said.
"Does it work. Against someone who can actually counter it."
"Yes," I said. "With an adjustment."
"Show me."
I showed him.
He stopped mid-movement and looked at the adjustment.
"That is better than what I had," he said.
"Your original version had the entry angle too committed. The adjustment gives you a withdrawal option if the counter arrives faster than expected."
He looked at the adjustment for a moment, then at me.
"Same time Thursday," he said.
He walked to his next rotation position and immediately began explaining something to whoever was standing across from him.
Leon was three positions over.
I watched his rotation through most of the block. He was paired with four different students. All four finished their exchanges looking like they had learned something they had not been able to articulate what. He did not explain anything.
He simply responded, and the response was always slightly outside what the other student had prepared for, and by the time they had adjusted to the response, the fifteen minutes were over.
His opponent thanked him.
Leon nodded once.
He picked up the practice sword his opponent had dropped and put it back on the rack before walking away.
When he noticed me watching, he simply nodded.
The bell rang.
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