“Let us begin,” Professor Song said with a tight smile. “I will make warriors of you yet.”
The professor worked us hard. He pushed us to find our limits and then surpass them. That first class was painful and humiliating, but it taught us just how far we had to go before we’d be ready to face off against worthy opponents.
It was going to be a long, hard road to the Gauntlet. I couldn’t rely on my core’s abilities to see me through that journey. I needed to get smarter, faster, more clever than I’d ever been. I made plans even as Song instructed us.
I’d need jinsei, and plenty of it. But even purified sacred energy wouldn’t be enough for what I had in mind.
By the time that first class was over, however, I had a plan. It relied heavily on the hollows, Hahen, and help from my clan. If it worked, I wouldn’t need to repair my core to beat the challenge.
If it failed, though, we might not have any chance of winning this at all.
The Graft
THE GOOD NEWS WAS THAT I recovered, physically, from the first round of delamination. My muscles felt flabby for a few days after my attack, and it was hard for me to catch my breath after I’d climbed a flight of stairs. But a good couple of weeks of training in the Combat Mastery class under Professor Song had gone a long way toward restoring my strength and endurance. My disciple-level core, damaged as it was, still gave me remarkable reserves of resilience that helped me bounce back.
The bad news was that I’d gone back several giant steps where jinsei mastery was concerned. The Army of a Thousand Eyes had become the Army of a Pair of Eyes, while the Borrowed Core and Thief’s Shield techniques took far too long to activate to be useful in combat. I could still summon my serpents if I had enough aspects stored in my aura, and they were still strong enough to make useful weapons. My fusion blade, on the other hand, was difficult and time-consuming to summon because it took me so long to cycle enough jinsei to empower it.
With preparation, I was still a competent threat to most enemies.
If I was ambushed, though, I’d be virtually defenseless.
Given the events of the past year, that wasn’t comforting. There could still be assassins out there holding bullets or blades with my names scrivened on them. If one of them showed up when I wasn’t prepared, my chances of survival were way too low for comfort.
While my elders assured me they were keeping a close eye out for danger, that didn’t put my mind at ease. The last attack had killed my entire security detail, and Hagar was almost killed along with them.
Despite all that, I settled into the School routine. Combat Mastery with Professor Song every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning. Alchemical Artistry with Professor Ankagor after lunch on the same days. Soul Scrivening with Professor Ishigara on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, with academics in the afternoons on those days. Even Empyreals had to learn their ABCs and 123s.
I kept expecting the assessments to disrupt my schedule, but that hadn’t happened. While observers skulked around the school, watching us and taking notes, new tests didn’t materialize. Rumor had it that the School was worried the stress of the Gauntlet would skew the results of the assessments, but no one had directly told those of us being assessed anything.
Several times each week, on a schedule that only Headmistress Cruzal understood, I worked with the hollow initiates. Christina was far and away the most accomplished when it came to cycling, though her attitude hadn’t improved the slightest bit since she’d arrived at the School. She was certain everyone was out to take advantage of her. Maybe she was right. Cruzal wouldn’t stop referring to the hollows as investments, even when it clearly aggravated me.
In fact, that was probably why Cruzal kept at it. She’d put me on her naughty list after the dustup in her office, and it didn’t look like she would erase my name anytime soon.
That was why I kept my training with the hollows very secretive. It was one of the few times she wouldn’t poke her nose in, because she knew I’d stop training them if she interfered. In those quiet times, and with Hahen’s help, I’d shown my students how to extract aspects from jinsei. It reminded me of the ordeal that Tycho Reyes had put me through, with one key difference.
I planned to split everything equally with my students. It wasn’t much, yet, but the purified vials of jinsei and containers of aspects would make a nice nest egg for those students one day. And it was all hidden from everyone else at the School. We got the polluted jinsei from the School’s waste containment unit and used old vials and jars to store the jinsei and aspects in a hiding spot that Hahen had found.
When we weren’t training the hollows, Hahen and I looked for a delamination solution. While I was in class he spent his days in the library poring over alchemy texts that had been ancient when he was just a whelp, and after dinner we’d put our heads together to see if either of us had discovered anything new. I’d had high hopes that my advanced alchemy course would offer some insights into elixirs or serums I could use to heal my core.
That hadn’t panned out, and by the middle of October, I was beyond frustrated. I’d gotten stronger since the episode, but I still wasn’t strong.
I was in such a funk that I hardly paid attention in my Soul Scrivening course, even though I needed all the help I could get with any kind of scrivening. I was hopeless at it, and without Clem or Rachel in my class to help me along, it
