Thursday morning started at five forty-five with Percy knocking on my door to inform me that the optimal departure window for Steele’s conditioning session had shifted by ninety seconds due to a groundskeeper scheduling change affecting the faculty garden shortcut. I opened the door wearing boxers and a face that communicated murder. Percy noticed neither.

Steele ran us through four miles of hill sprints that made Wednesday’s conditioning look like a spa treatment. Camille finished first because Camille always finished first when the activity involved punishing herself for being alive. I came in third behind Theo, who absorbed the hill gradient the way he absorbed everything, by letting it hit him and using the impact to fuel the next step. Rina finished last again, but she finished, which mattered more than anyone except Rina seemed to understand.

Combat Theory with Dravid consumed Thursday afternoon. He set us loose on the positioning exercises from Tuesday’s demo, and I spent ninety minutes trying to create distance from Camellia Thorn while she moved through space like water through a sieve. Every time I thought I’d established separation, she’d already closed half of it with a single step that somehow covered four feet. Dravid watched from his elevated position with that flat grey stare that stripped pretense from everything it touched. When Camellia finally tagged my shoulder at the eighty-seven-second mark of our third round, Dravid offered a single word of commentary.

"Better."

From Dravid, that was practically a standing ovation.

I met Hiro at Field Zeta that evening. He showed up at four-thirty on the dot, split lip reduced to a faint line, hair restored to its immaculate state, wearing training gear that probably cost more than my first month’s food budget. We didn’t talk about philosophy. We didn’t debate heroism. We just fought for forty-five minutes until we were both too exhausted to throw straight punches, and then we sat in the grass and bled quietly until our respective recovery traits put us back together.

His inside leg kick was destroying me. Every time I moved forward, he’d catch the outside of my lead thigh with perfect timing and angle, dead-legging me for just long enough that his follow-up cross landed clean. By our fourth round I’d figured out the tell, a fractional weight shift to his back foot that preceded the kick by about half a second, and started checking the kick before it developed. Hiro noticed. Adjusted. Started feinting the kick and converting it into a level change that dumped me on my back through a single-leg takedown I couldn’t sprawl against because my weight was committed to checking something that never came.

The bastard was adapting to my adaptations. Which meant I needed to adapt to his adaptations of my adaptations.

We parted without handshakes or friendly words. Just a nod that meant tomorrow and a mutual understanding that whatever this was, it was making us both sharper in ways that regular training couldn’t provide.

Friday’s schedule was a blur of Hero Law with Mercy, who wore the same style of professional attire that made focusing on Accord provisions genuinely difficult, followed by Aspect Development Lab with Dravid, who had each student demonstrate their primary ability while he took notes that he shared with nobody. I showed Phantom Touch at about sixty percent. Dravid wrote three lines in his notebook. The pen stopped moving before I finished, which meant he’d already seen enough.

Felicity cornered me during the midday break and dragged me to the smoothie bar, where she spent twenty minutes dissecting my social media growth. Apparently my interview clip had crossed a hundred thousand views and three separate Hero fan forums had started threads debating whether I was a genius or an idiot for quoting Radiant on live television while still being a first-year student who hadn’t resolved a single case. Felicity found both assessments entertaining and showed me her favorite comments on her phone, her shoulder pressed against mine while she scrolled and her vanilla perfume filling my nose with the specific sweetness that made Sloane want to commit arson.

"This one says you have main character energy." Felicity tilted the screen so I could read it. "This one says you have punchable face energy. The discourse is divided."

"Both camps are probably right."

"Oh, absolutely both camps are right. That’s what makes it interesting."

She looked at me with those vivid blue eyes that held more intelligence than most people credited her for, and her Temptation Gauge sat at fourteen percent in my peripheral vision like a number I kept pretending I couldn’t see.

Friday evening I trained with Hiro again. He’d added a spinning back elbow to his combination work that caught me completely off guard the first time and split the skin above my eye the second time. I countered by discovering that if I committed fully to forward pressure and sacrificed defensive positioning, his footwork became less effective because he needed space to operate and I refused to give him any. We called it a draw at the forty-minute mark when my eyebrow started bleeding fast enough that continuing meant staining the grass in ways that might draw groundskeeper attention.

Saturday existed in two distinct halves.

The first half belonged to Percy, who appeared at my door at seven in the morning with a comprehensive report on insurance regulatory frameworks, cross-referenced with IHL Aspect classification protocols and annotated with footnotes that referenced sixteen different legal precedents. The document was thirty-two pages long. He’d printed it double-sided on recycled paper because environmental responsibility and thorough documentation were not mutually exclusive.

"I found the loopholes," Percy said, standing in my doorway with bags under his eyes that suggested he’d spent all night assembling this report. "Seventeen different exemption categories exist within the actuarial risk assessment framework. Eight of them apply to late-manifestation cases specifically. Three of those eight contain language vague enough that a competent attorney could argue they apply to situations where an individual’s registered Aspect classification does not fully capture the scope of their documented capabilities."

I looked at the thirty-two-page document. I looked at Percy.

"Did you sleep?"