The day after his duel with Lysira, Ari couldn't shake the feeling of imbalance.
He'd survived—barely. He'd tricked the system. But not once had he felt in control.
He needed to test himself again.
And there was only one person he wanted to fight.
"Cerys," he said, stepping up beside her in the atrium garden, where delicate Aether sigils danced around meditation trees. "Duel me. Simulacrum. Today."
She didn't look up immediately, but he saw the faint smile curve her lips.
"You really want to lose that badly?"
"I need to know how wide the gap is."
"Between us?"
"Between what I am… and what I'm becoming."
She studied him. His eyes, his posture, his Threadflow—chaotic, surging. Dangerous.
Then she nodded. "Fine. Don't hold back. I won't."
They stood across from one another as the system initialized a balanced duelscape.
Ari selected a volatile desert ruin, full of crumbling sandstone structures and wind-choked pathways—limited visibility, erratic terrain.
Cerys didn't flinch.
Duel Mode: Calibration Locked.
Thread Class Detected: Ascendant (Aetherthread)
Thread Class Detected: Unbound-Probationary (Masked)
Arena Adjustments: Equalized Control Radius
Simulation Start.
Ari moved first, trying to use his newfound Rootveil masking to fake a Hydrothread base again—lashing out with mist-blades and projection clones.
Cerys responded with perfect, almost surgical movement.
She wasn't flashy. She was clean.
Each gesture was precise: sigil burst → motion suppressor → counter-gravity step.
Ari launched a complex pseudo-spell he'd learned from the Rootbound Circle—an unstable bind designed to collapse incoming sigils.
Thread Disruption Attempted...
Cerys: Recompiling... Success.
She twisted midair, summoned a wind-form, and disassembled the trap mid-flight.
Ari countered with a sigil bomb laced in unstable code.
She sliced through it with a straight-line Aethercut, stepping through the sparks.
"You're talented," she called out. "But you're rushing."
"I don't have time to be slow."
"Then you'll never be fast enough."
Ari tried to push harder, his system flickering—switching tactics, layers of experimental Thread behavior unfolding, even attempting to summon unstable fragments of dreamscript glyphs.
But Cerys had trained for years with precision, not potential.
She grounded him—literally—by collapsing the platform under his feet with a controlled airfold. Ari tumbled down a ruined stairwell, rolled, stood, flung up a wall of burning mist.
She walked through it with a sigil shield, caught his final attempt mid-cast, and locked his movements.
Aether Seal Applied.
Threadflow Interrupted.
Simulation Halted.
Victory: Cerys Aetherrose.
They stood in silence as the simulation ended and the ruined arena faded into nothingness.
Cerys handed him a towel for the blood on his brow—simulation bruises that still hurt like reality.
"You didn't lose because you're weak," she said.
"Then why?"
"Because you're still treating your power like a puzzle you're racing to solve."
"Isn't it?"
"No. It's a language. And you're still learning the alphabet."
Ari sat down, breathing hard.
"I can't afford to take years."
"Then you need to stop pretending you're alone in this."
He looked up. Her tone had softened.
"You're not. You have me. Lysira. The Rootbound Circle. Even your system's watching you like a nervous god."
"A god?"
"One that's terrified of what it made... and what it forgot."
Far beneath the academy, in an echo vault far older than Sanctum itself, a watcher scrawled a note into their crystalline log:
Subject: Ari Solen
Progressing faster than expected.
Loss to Aetherrose confirms dependency on unpredictability.
Phase Shift Recommendation: Prepare Dreamlock Trial.
The watcher closed the log.
"The boy dreams of breaking free," they muttered.
"Let's see if he can dream deep enough… to wake."