Shunjiro found his way back to the guest room without Yuuna.

The halls of Starheart Fortress felt different when he walked them alone. During the tour, Yuuna had made the massive corridors feel like pieces of a secret route, guiding him through turns and stairways with the quiet confidence of someone who knew exactly which paths belonged to soldiers, servants, guests, and people who were not supposed to be wandering at all. Without her beside him, every light felt sharper. Every stretch of polished stone seemed longer. Every distant footstep made him wonder if someone would round a corner and ask why a Radiance adventurer was moving through the fortress in the middle of the night.

By the time he reached his door, the warmth of the room waiting beyond it should have been a relief. Instead, he stood with one hand on the handle for several seconds, staring at the dark wood as if the answer to what he was supposed to feel had been carved somewhere into the grain. Yuuna’s face would not leave his mind. The way she had looked after he spoke. The way her voice had softened when she apologized. The silence after he told her he hoped they could still be friends.

He opened the door and stepped inside.

The room was exactly as he had left it. His ruined clothes remained folded aside, the bed waited beneath thick blankets, and the tray from earlier sat on the table with the remains of his meal. The normalcy of it all made the balcony feel even stranger, as though the kiss and the conversation afterward belonged to a different night entirely.

Shunjiro closed the door behind him and leaned back against it.

I should have handled that better.

The thought came immediately, but it did not help. He did not know what “better” would have looked like. Lying would have been cruel. Accepting would have been worse. Yuuna had barely known him, but that did not make her feelings fake. He understood that much. She had opened herself to him in a way that was sudden, maybe reckless, but not meaningless. He had seen the insecurity beneath her question. He had heard the old hurt hiding behind Akira’s name. He had answered honestly because that was all he knew how to do, and still the memory of her standing alone on that balcony twisted in his chest.

He moved away from the door and sat on the edge of the bed.

For a while, he simply stared at the floor.

Yuuna was beautiful. That had not been a lie. She was clever, skilled, warm in a quiet way, and much easier to talk to than he would have expected from someone in an SS-ranked guild. She had made him laugh after a day filled with prisons, kings, storms, and secrets. There was something kind about that. Something dangerous, too, because it would have been easy to let the warmth of the moment carry him somewhere he was not ready to go.

But when he closed his eyes, the person waiting there was not Yuuna.

It was Itsuki.

Shunjiro lowered his head, elbows resting on his knees as the ache in his chest changed shape. He thought of Itsuki before everything had fallen apart. Itsuki smiling gently when Shunjiro got too excited. Itsuki holding her staff with both hands, trying to act braver than she felt. Itsuki healing wounds with that soft warmth that made pain feel less lonely. Itsuki worrying over others before herself, scolding him quietly when he ignored injuries, standing beside Illumina even when the fear was obvious in her eyes.

Shunjiro’s hands curled against his knees.

He had promised her he would end it. He had promised he would come back. He had survived the Shadow Realm, Malachi’s training, Tsubasa’s attack, Jayiden’s blades, the blizzard, and the Stellar Empire’s gates. Yet none of that mattered if he returned too late to help the people who needed him most. Itsuki was going through something he could not fully understand, and the thought of her sitting somewhere in Radiance without light in her eyes made the warmth of the room feel distant.

I have to get back to her.

The thought was simple, but it steadied him.

Not because he knew what he would say when he saw her. Not because he believed a few words from him could undo what Suzu had done. He was not that arrogant. But he wanted to return with something. Strength, maybe. Hope, if he could find it. Enough of himself to stand in front of her and remind her that she was not alone, even if she could not answer him yet.

Shunjiro rubbed both hands over his face and let out a long, tired breath.

He was exhausted.

His body had been pushed too far for too many days. The cold had left a strange heaviness in his bones. His mind wanted to keep turning, to chase every mistake and every secret until morning, but his body had already begun sinking toward sleep.

He stood, checked that the Devil’s Luck Dagger was within reach beside the bed, and removed his boots.

The mattress gave beneath him almost too softly.

Then exhaustion finally pulled him under.

Morning arrived with pale light and falling snow.

Shunjiro woke slowly, the kind of sleep that ended not because he felt rested, but because his body remembered danger before his mind did. He opened his eyes to the guest room’s quiet warmth and lay still for several seconds, listening. No footsteps outside the door. No voices. No scrape of a lock. The storm had weakened during the night, but snow still whispered against the fortress windows, soft and persistent.

For one strange moment, he almost forgot where he was.

Then everything returned.

Shunjiro sat up and pushed a hand through his hair, blinking away the last scraps of sleep. His thoughts tried to drift back toward the balcony, but he forced them aside. He could not fix that conversation from bed. He could not return to Radiance by sitting in a guest room. Aurelius had told him he could use the training grounds if he felt well enough, and Shunjiro knew himself too well to pretend rest would calm him more than movement.

He got dressed in the warm plain clothes from the wardrobe, fastened the Devil’s Luck Dagger at his waist, and checked the blade once before sheathing it again. The weapon’s dark material caught the room’s pale light without truly reflecting it. Malachi’s gift felt heavier now, not in weight, but in meaning. Shunjiro touched the hilt with his thumb, then turned toward the door.

The fortress corridors were more active in the morning, though not crowded. Attendants moved with quiet purpose, carrying linens, trays, and stacks of folded uniforms. Knights passed at intervals, their white-and-blue clothing marked with stars at the chest. A few glanced at him with interest, but no one stopped him. Whether that meant Aurelius had given orders or everyone already knew exactly who the strange Radiance boy was, Shunjiro could not tell.

He did not ask for directions.

Yuuna’s tour had given him enough of the route to piece together where he needed to go. From the guest corridor, he took the broad stairway down two levels, avoided the royal wing without needing a warning this time, crossed the interior walkway above the fortress’s central hall, and followed the warmer passage that sloped toward the southern side. He recognized certain windows, certain turns, and the long corridor where he had first seen the city’s star-shaped layout through the glass. Moving through the fortress alone in daylight made the previous night feel even more reckless.

She really did take me everywhere.

The thought brought a complicated warmth to his chest, and he quickly looked ahead.

Eventually, the fortress opened toward South Star Bastion.

The air changed before he reached the training grounds. It grew colder, sharper, and filled with the faint metallic scent of weapons and snow. A covered passage led him outside into a wide military yard where the stone beneath his boots had been warmed enough to keep the main paths clear. Snow still fell across the Bastion, lighter than the storm that had nearly killed him, but steady enough to blur distant buildings and gather in white lines along rooftops, fences, and weapon racks.

Shunjiro stopped beneath the edge of the covered walkway.

The Bastion was emptier than he expected.

He had seen it from afar the night before, alive with movement even under snowfall. Knights had trained in groups, officers had watched from platforms, and patrols had crossed the district in clean patterns. Now only a few figures remained in the distance. A pair of knights stood near one of the far gates, speaking quietly. Another crossed between buildings with a spear resting against his shoulder. Farther away, someone carried a crate toward the barracks. The training grounds themselves were mostly open.

Too open.

Shunjiro narrowed his eyes.

This is suspicious.

The thought came with no real surprise. Aurelius had offered the training grounds too smoothly. Amaya had watched him too carefully. If the Bastion was emptier than it had been the night before, then someone had made it that way. Shunjiro did not know whether that someone wanted to give him privacy, observe him, or trap him into revealing something, but he doubted it was simple kindness.

Still, he had come here to train.

He stepped out from beneath the covered walkway and into the falling snow.

The cold touched his face immediately, not violent enough to steal his breath, but enough to remind him that the Cosmic Continent did not care how warm the roads were. The open training yard stretched ahead, wide and mostly clear, marked by packed stone, practice dummies, weapon stands, and low barriers half-buried along their edges. A few raised platforms overlooked the field from above, built into the surrounding walls and command structures.

Shunjiro walked to the center of one empty yard and looked around.

He had no instructor. No target. No clear routine for fighting in snow. Malachi had thrown him into training until his body learned through pain, but Malachi was not here, and Shunjiro doubted the Stellar Empire would appreciate him tearing apart their training grounds with golden sand before breakfast.

So he started with the one thing he could practice anywhere.

Control.

Shunjiro planted his feet shoulder-width apart, closed his eyes, and drew in a slow breath.

His spiritual energy rose carefully through his body. He let it spread first through his chest, then along his arms, down his legs, and into his hands. The warmth of it pushed back against the cold in a way that felt familiar. Snow continued falling around him, but the presence inside his body sharpened, steady and bright beneath his skin.

Then he turned it off.

The change was immediate.

His spiritual presence vanished.

The world did not change visually, but he felt the difference in a way that was hard to describe. It was not the same as suppressing his energy. Suppression still had shape. Even a hidden flame gave off heat if someone knew how to feel for it. This was closer to removing the flame completely without extinguishing the person holding it. His body stood in the training yard. His breath moved in the cold. His heart beat steadily in his chest. But spiritually, he became nothing.

A blank space.

An absence.

He held it for five seconds, then released.

His energy returned in a controlled pulse.

Shunjiro opened his eyes and exhaled.

Again.

He drew the energy up, let it fill him, held the sensation long enough to memorize the edges of it, then shut it away completely. On. Off. Presence. Absence. Flame. Void. He repeated the cycle slowly at first, careful not to let the return flare too sharply. Malachi had made it clear that sloppy control defeated the purpose. If he vanished, then came back like a beacon, anyone paying attention would know exactly where to look.

The cold made it harder.

His body wanted warmth. His energy wanted to rise instinctively against the snow, to coat his limbs and protect him from the bite of the morning air. Turning it off while standing in the open felt wrong, almost like willingly dropping his guard in enemy territory. That was probably why it mattered. If he could only perform the technique in comfort, then it was not reliable.

He kept practicing.

On.

Off.

On.

Off.

From a high platform overlooking the yard, Amaya watched him without moving.

Her white cloak stirred faintly in the wind, and the long braid of gray hair over her shoulder gathered a few specks of snow before they melted against the fabric. She had expected him to train. Aurelius had made certain the grounds were cleared enough for the boy to believe he had space, though not so empty that the arrangement would look theatrical. A few knights remained at a distance, instructed to continue ordinary duties and ignore the guest unless ordered otherwise.

Amaya had expected sword drills.

Perhaps basic reinforcement.

Maybe something involving the dagger, if he trusted the weapon enough to reveal how he used it.

She had not expected this.

Her eyes narrowed as Shunjiro’s presence shifted again.

One moment, he was there. Not powerful enough to be frightening, but far stronger than a C-rank should have been, his spiritual energy controlled in uneven but promising layers beneath the surface. The next moment, something happened that Amaya’s senses refused to name. She did not feel him suppress his energy. She did not feel him lower it. She did not feel the subtle compression that came when a trained fighter hid their presence.

She felt him become unreachable.

Then he returned.

Amaya’s fingers curled lightly against the railing.

Impossible.

The word came with irritation more than fear. Spiritual energy could be masked, thinned, shaped, concealed beneath another source, or blended into a surrounding field with enough skill. But it did not simply disappear while the person remained alive and standing in front of her. That kind of absence belonged to corpses, empty rooms, or things that were not there at all. A living fighter could not turn himself into a gap in the world.

Shunjiro did it again.

Amaya’s expression hardened.

Whatever he was doing, he was doing it deliberately.

She left the platform without a sound.

Shunjiro was halfway through another cycle when the space behind him changed.

He did not sense her.

He did not hear a step.

One moment the training ground felt empty behind him, and the next a voice spoke close enough to make his entire body jolt.

“What are you doing?”

Shunjiro spun so quickly his hand nearly went to the Devil’s Luck Dagger.

Amaya stood behind him, calm and composed in the falling snow. Her white regal clothing looked almost untouched by the weather, and the saber at her waist rested against her hip with quiet confidence. Her blue eyes held the same sharp suspicion from the night before, only now there was something else beneath it. Irritation, maybe. Or interest hidden badly behind discipline.

Shunjiro forced his hand away from the dagger and straightened. “Lady Amaya.”

She did not return the greeting. “I asked what you were doing.”

He met her stare with full confidence. “Meditating.”

Amaya looked at him.

The silence that followed made the lie feel much worse than it had sounded in his head.

“You are still lying?” she asked.

There was no anger in her voice, exactly. Just dry irritation, as if he had given her a report with half the pages missing and expected her not to notice.

Shunjiro opened his mouth, then closed it.

He had no good answer.

Amaya’s eyes narrowed slightly. “That was your explanation?”

“It was the first one I thought of.”

“And you chose to say it aloud?”

“I committed to it.”

Her expression did not change, but he had the strange feeling she was one careless sentence away from deciding he was hopeless.

Shunjiro let out a small breath and tried to recover. “I am practicing control.”

“That was not control.”

“It felt like control to me.”

“That is not an answer.”

“No, but it is closer than meditating.”

Amaya stared at him for another moment. Snow passed between them in thin white streams. Shunjiro could feel the weight of her attention, precise and uncomfortable. It reminded him nothing of Aurelius’s vast pressure, but in some ways it was worse. Aurelius felt like a mountain deciding whether to move. Amaya felt like a blade already measuring where to cut.

Shunjiro decided standing there being questioned would only make things worse.

He tilted his head slightly. “Since you are here, do you want to show me some tricks with spiritual energy?”

Amaya’s brow lifted a fraction. “Tricks?”

“I am still learning.” He allowed a small smirk to form, partly because he wanted to test her and partly because nerves made him reckless. “You came all the way down here. Curious, are we?”

Amaya stepped closer, and although her spiritual pressure did not rise dramatically, Shunjiro felt his body recognize danger anyway.

“Do not get cocky,” she said.

The smirk faded slightly. “Understood.”

“I came down because His Majesty allowed you to use these grounds, and because you are hiding enough that ordinary observation will waste my time.” Her gaze moved briefly to the dagger at his waist, then back to his face. “If you want help, then fight me.”

Shunjiro blinked. “Fight you?”

“A spar.”

“With you?”

“Yes.”

He looked at the five stars on her chest.

Then at the saber at her waist.

Then back at her face.

“You are the leader of the Stellar Empire’s knights.”

“I am aware.”

“And you want to spar with me.”

“I want to see what you can do.”

“That sounds different from helping.”

“It is how I decide what help you need.”

Shunjiro considered that. It made sense in a terrifying way. Malachi had not taught gently either. He had watched Shunjiro struggle, struck him when his stance failed, corrected him after mistakes, and forced him to understand his own body through pressure. Amaya was colder than Malachi, less amused, and probably far less patient, but the principle was familiar.

Still, sparring with her was dangerous.

Shunjiro did not need anyone to explain that. He could feel it from the way she stood. Her posture was relaxed, but nothing about her was open. Her hand did not rest on her saber because it did not need to. She looked like someone who had already seen the first ten ways he might try to move and found all of them disappointing.

He also remembered what Yuuna had said about the empire. No adventurers. Knights handled everything. Amaya led those knights. If she wanted to see his ability, refusing might only make him look more suspicious. Agreeing, however, meant stepping into a test arranged by people who already knew he was hiding things.

Shunjiro’s fingers brushed the hilt of the Devil’s Luck Dagger.

Amaya noticed immediately. “Use it.”

He looked at her.

“Your weapon,” she said. “Your spiritual energy. Whatever else you are hiding. Use everything.”

Shunjiro kept his face as neutral as he could.

He did not know how much Aurelius and Amaya had already guessed, but he refused to reveal the golden sand immediately. The self-healing was already difficult enough to explain. If he filled a foreign training ground with sand while snow fell around him, every set of eyes in the Bastion would have another reason to study him. Besides, the weather itself was a problem. Sand and snow did not naturally belong together. Wet, freezing air might slow the grains, clump them, or force him to spend more energy keeping them responsive. He would have to learn how to fight with it here eventually, but not before he understood how Amaya moved.

If he survived the opening without embarrassing himself, then maybe he could decide how much more to show.

Shunjiro looked across the empty training yard. Snow continued falling over the heated stone, melting where it touched the clearest sections and gathering along the edges in uneven white ridges. The air was cold enough to sting his lungs when he breathed too deeply. His body would need to adjust. His footing would need to stay careful. His spiritual energy could not simply flare for warmth whenever he wanted it to.

This is good, he thought, surprising himself. I need this.

Radiance would not always give him clean ground, clear weather, and enemies who waited politely. The Shadow Realm had taught him that. Jayiden had taught him that. Tsubasa had thrown him across continents. If Shunjiro wanted to stand beside anyone, Takeshi, Itsuki, Illumina, or even Malachi, he needed to stop treating bad conditions like interruptions and start treating them like part of the fight.

He drew a slow breath and looked back at Amaya.

“Alright,” he said.

Amaya’s hand finally settled near the hilt of her saber.

Shunjiro rested his fingers against the Devil’s Luck Dagger, feeling the dark weapon answer with silent weight at his side.

“I will spar with you.”

Amaya did not give him a signal.

She only stepped away, drew her saber in one smooth motion, and turned slightly so the falling snow moved between them in thin white streaks. The blade caught the morning light with a clean shimmer, narrower and more elegant than the weapons Shunjiro had seen most knights carry, but the moment it left its sheath, he felt the spiritual pressure gathered along its edge. It was not overwhelming. Amaya was holding herself back, yet even restrained, the air around her felt sharpened.

Shunjiro drew the Devil’s Luck Dagger.

The dark blade settled into his hand with familiar weight. After thirty days with Malachi, it no longer felt strange to hold a weapon that was smaller than most swords but heavier in meaning than anything he had ever carried before. His fingers tightened around the hilt, and he lowered his stance while snow melted against the warmed stone beneath his boots.

Amaya watched him without expression.

“You said you wanted to see what I can do,” Shunjiro said.

“I did.”

“Then I am starting.”

“Good.”

He moved first.

Spiritual energy rushed through his legs, not enough to reveal everything, but enough to carry him across the open yard faster than an ordinary C-rank adventurer should have been able to move. The snow dragged slightly under his boots where it had gathered along the thinner heated sections of stone, and his first step slid more than he liked, forcing him to adjust his weight halfway through the dash. He corrected quickly, lowered his shoulder, and cut in from Amaya’s left with the dagger angled toward her ribs.

Her saber was already there.

Steel met the Devil’s Luck Dagger with a sharp ring that snapped through the training yard.

Shunjiro felt the impact run up his arm. Amaya did not even shift her feet. She guided his blade aside with a turn of her wrist, clean and effortless, as if she had known the exact line of his attack before he committed to it. Shunjiro twisted with the deflection, letting the momentum carry him around instead of fighting it, and slashed upward toward her forearm.

Amaya leaned back just enough for the dagger to pass in front of her sleeve.

Shunjiro stepped in again, refusing to give her space, and drove a short thrust toward her center. The saber tapped the side of his dagger, not hard enough to knock it away, but perfectly placed to change the angle. His thrust slipped past her instead of into her. Before he could recover, Amaya’s free hand struck him in the chest.

The blow drove the air from his lungs and sent him sliding backward across the warmed stone. His boots scraped through slush, and he caught himself before he fell, one hand briefly touching the ground as he coughed a breath back into his body. Pain spread through his ribs in a dull, immediate wave.

Amaya had not moved from where she stood.

Shunjiro looked up at her, eyes narrowed, and a surprised smile tugged at his mouth despite the pain.

She is fast.

No, that was not right. Fast was too simple. Jayiden was fast. Sora was fast. Yoshinori with lightning moving through his body was fast in a way that made ordinary motion feel slow. Amaya was different. She was not rushing to match him. She was already placed where she needed to be, her movements so efficient that they barely looked like movements at all.

He pushed himself upright and rolled his shoulder once.

“Again?” Amaya asked.

Shunjiro’s grip tightened around the dagger. “Again.”

He attacked with a different rhythm this time.

Instead of rushing straight in, he circled left, then cut right, using small bursts of spiritual energy through his feet to change direction. The cold air stung his throat each time he breathed, and the snowy patches around the training yard forced him to stay aware of every step. He feinted low, then shifted high, dagger flashing toward Amaya’s shoulder.

Her saber rose before the feint finished.

The parry was light, almost casual, but it stole the attack completely.

Shunjiro dropped his weight and spun under the saber’s line, aiming for her side. Amaya turned with him. His blade cut through empty air where her coat had been a heartbeat earlier, and before he could draw back, the flat of her saber struck his wrist.

Pain flashed through his hand.

The dagger almost slipped free.

Shunjiro clenched down hard and retreated a step, only for Amaya to follow for the first time. The change happened so abruptly that his instincts screamed before his mind did. Her saber came down toward his shoulder, not with killing force, but with more than enough power to bruise bone if he failed to block it. He raised the dagger and caught the strike.

The impact shoved him down to one knee.

Shunjiro gritted his teeth and pushed spiritual energy through his arm to keep the saber from forcing the dagger lower. Amaya’s expression remained unchanged above him. Her blue eyes watched him with calm precision, studying not only his strength but the way he chose to use it.

Then she lifted the pressure and stepped back.

Shunjiro rose quickly, refusing to show how much his arm ached.

The few knights still present in the distance had stopped pretending not to watch. None came closer, but Shunjiro could feel attention gathering around the yard like a second layer of snow. That made him more aware of everything he was not showing. No sand. No healing unless absolutely necessary. No full reveal of how strange his energy could become. Just the dagger, movement, and spiritual reinforcement.

He exhaled slowly.

She is not reacting after I move.

At first, it had felt like Amaya was simply reading his body well. Experienced fighters could do that. Kaito had done it. Malachi had done it constantly during training, predicting where Shunjiro would overreach before he even realized it himself. But this was sharper than skill alone. Amaya was not watching his shoulder and guessing the blade path. She was not waiting for his foot to shift before choosing a defense. Her saber was already where his dagger needed to go.

It felt like she was answering questions before he asked them.

Shunjiro changed again.

He lowered the amount of spiritual energy in his body until his presence felt smaller, then rushed forward at half speed, deliberately making his opening attack look clumsy. His dagger swung wide toward her right side, the kind of strike an impatient beginner might throw if he wanted power more than control. Amaya’s saber moved to intercept it.

Shunjiro cut the attack short.

His body dipped, spiritual energy snapping through his left leg as he changed direction and stepped inside her guard. The real attack came from below, the dagger flashing upward toward the gap beneath her elbow.

Amaya’s knee struck his stomach before the blade rose halfway.

The impact folded him.

Shunjiro staggered back, one arm crossing his midsection as he sucked in a sharp breath. His eyes watered from the force of it. Amaya had not struck with enough power to break anything, but she had hit precisely where his body least wanted to be hit. He coughed once, then forced himself straight.

Amaya’s saber lowered slightly. “Continue.”

The word irritated him more than it should have.

He lunged.

This time, frustration pushed him harder. Spiritual energy surged through his limbs, bright and hot beneath his skin, carrying him forward with enough force that the snow around his boots scattered outward. He attacked in a quick sequence, dagger cutting from left to right, then reversing into a thrust, then breaking into a backhand slash aimed at her upper arm. Amaya parried the first, avoided the second, and stepped through the third before it reached full speed.

Her saber’s hilt struck his jaw.

Shunjiro stumbled sideways, tasting blood where his teeth caught the inside of his cheek. Before he could fully recover, Amaya struck again, this time with the flat of her blade across his ribs. The blow knocked him off balance, and his boots slipped on a thin patch of snow that had not melted fast enough. He hit the ground shoulder-first and rolled once before springing back up.

His breathing had changed.

He could hear it now, harsher than before, misting visibly in the cold air. His body was warming from exertion, but the snow kept trying to steal that warmth back. Fighting here was not like fighting in Radiance, not like fighting in a dungeon, and not like training beneath the dead sky of the Shadow Realm. The weather itself was part of the battlefield. Every step needed to account for slick stone, uneven slush, and air cold enough to punish wasted breathing.

Amaya looked perfectly comfortable.

She stood in the snowfall as if the training yard had been made for her, which, Shunjiro supposed, it had.

He wiped a thumb along the corner of his mouth, saw a faint smear of red, and smiled despite himself.

Amaya’s gaze sharpened slightly. “You find this amusing?”

“No,” Shunjiro said. “I find it impressive.”

That was the truth. Frustration burned under his skin, but awe burned with it. Amaya was untouchable in a way that felt different from being overwhelmed by raw power. She was not crushing him beneath spiritual pressure. She was not showing off enormous techniques or burying the yard in attacks he could not answer. She was simply present at the correct place every time, and that precision made the gap between them feel enormous.

He wanted to understand it.

He raised the dagger again.

More energy.

The decision came naturally, one layer at a time. He let spiritual energy fill his legs first, then his arms, then his core. The warmth expanded through him until the cold felt farther away. His breathing steadied. The soreness from the night before retreated beneath the force running through his body. Snow melted faster where his presence touched the air around him.

Amaya watched with the same unreadable calm.

Shunjiro disappeared forward.

His speed was no longer careful. He drove across the yard with enough force to crack through the thin snow layer beneath him, dagger held low until the final second. He attacked from the right, then vanished into a sidestep and came from the left. The dagger carved a dark line through falling snow as he slashed toward Amaya’s shoulder. She leaned away. He followed with a thrust. She angled her saber and deflected. He shifted his grip, turning the dagger reverse in his hand, and drove an elbow toward her chest to force space.

Amaya stepped inside the elbow instead of away from it.

Her shoulder struck his sternum.

The blow stopped him cold.

Before his body could decide whether to retreat or strike again, her saber hooked beneath his dagger arm and lifted, breaking his guard. Her foot swept behind his ankle. Shunjiro twisted, caught himself with spiritual energy through his legs, and avoided falling, but Amaya had already adjusted. Her palm struck the side of his face.

The world tilted.

He hit the ground hard and slid several feet through melting snow.

For a moment, he lay still, staring up at the pale sky above the Bastion while snow fell onto his face.

She read all of it.

His jaw throbbed. His ribs hurt. His stomach still remembered her knee. But beneath the pain, his mind kept circling the same impossible truth. He had changed rhythm, speed, angle, and intensity. He had feinted. He had stopped attacks midway. He had improvised after slipping. He had tried to bait her into overcommitting. None of it mattered. Amaya moved as if every version of him had already failed in front of her.

Shunjiro pushed himself back to his feet.

The Devil’s Luck Dagger was still in his hand.

He was breathing harder now, but his eyes had sharpened. He let more energy rise. Not a little this time. Not a controlled fraction meant to keep him looking harmless. He opened the channels Malachi had forced him to strengthen and allowed spiritual energy to pour through his entire body, pushing close to the highest output he could use without losing control. The air around him grew warmer. Snowflakes melted before they touched his shoulders. His grip on the dagger steadied, and the ache from Amaya’s hits faded beneath the surge.

Her expression did not shift. Her breathing did not change. The saber remained angled at her side as if nothing about him had become more dangerous.

That bothered Shunjiro more than if she had smiled.

He rushed her with everything he was willing to show.

The first strike came faster than before, aimed directly toward her center. Amaya parried. Shunjiro let the deflection spin him instead of stopping it, driving a kick toward her side. She slid past the kick with barely a turn of her hips. He landed, pushed off again, and attacked before his stance fully settled, using the awkward angle to create a slash that should have been difficult to predict.

Her saber caught it.

The force of their blades meeting sent a sharp vibration through the yard.

Amaya’s eyes flicked briefly to the Devil’s Luck Dagger.

Shunjiro saw interest there. The dagger had not released any strange burst, had not triggered whatever deadly luck Malachi had worked into its edge, but Amaya seemed to feel something in it with every clash. The blade carried a pressure that did not belong to ordinary metal, a wrongness beneath its dark surface that even Shunjiro did not fully understand.

He tried to use that moment.

Shunjiro twisted his wrist, slipped the dagger along the saber’s edge, and stepped closer, aiming a short cut toward Amaya’s sleeve. She moved before the blade could touch fabric. Her saber turned down, locking his wrist for half a breath, and her elbow drove into his chest.

He staggered but did not fall.

He forced more energy into his legs, planted his foot, and attacked again.

Amaya met him.

For the next several exchanges, the training yard filled with the sound of steel, breath, and sliding steps. Shunjiro attacked from every angle he could find. High cuts, low cuts, sudden thrusts, broken rhythms, half-steps, retreats turned into lunges, feints layered inside real attacks. His dagger flickered through the snow in dark arcs, and his spiritual energy carried him faster with each attempt.

Amaya remained unreachable.

The silence made the spar worse.

Malachi had laughed, insulted him, corrected him, or told him when his feet were wrong. Kaito would have given measured instruction. Even Tetsuo would have said something blunt after knocking him down. Amaya only watched and moved, forcing Shunjiro to learn from failure without being handed the shape of the lesson.

His frustration grew.

So did his focus.

Another exchange ended with Amaya turning his dagger aside and striking his shoulder with the back of her saber. Pain flared down his arm, but Shunjiro refused to retreat. He stepped in closer than he should have, nearly chest-to-chest, and drove his knee upward. Amaya shifted aside before the knee rose. Her hand caught the front of his shirt, and with a clean turn of her hips, she threw him.

Shunjiro slammed onto his back.

The impact drove the breath from him.

He stared at the sky again, teeth clenched, body aching against the warmed stone. Snow landed on his face and melted into cold trails along his skin. Somewhere above him, Amaya’s silhouette appeared at the edge of his vision.

“You are faster than your rank suggests,” she said.

It was the first real comment she had offered.

Shunjiro turned his head slightly and looked at her. “That sounded almost like praise.”

“It was an observation.”

“Of course it was.”

“You are also still hiding something.”

His expression stilled.

Amaya’s blue eyes remained on him, calm and cutting. “Do not look surprised. You have spent this entire spar deciding what not to show me.”

Shunjiro sat up slowly, soreness moving through his body in several different voices. He wanted to deny it, but after the meditating lie, even he knew there was a limit to how many bad answers he could give before he insulted both of them.

“I am in a foreign military kingdom,” he said. “Being careful seems smart.”

“It is smart,” Amaya said. “It is also in the way.”

He rose to his feet and rolled his aching wrist. “You said you wanted to know what I can do.”

“I do.”

“And if I show you?”

“Then I can stop wasting time measuring the shadow of your ability and start helping you improve the ability itself.”

Shunjiro looked at her for a long moment.

If Amaya could read him this completely, then fighting her like a normal opponent was useless. He needed angles that did not come from his body alone. He needed pressure from places she could not simply parry with a saber. He needed the part of himself he had been holding back since he stepped onto the field.

His fingers tightened around the Devil’s Luck Dagger.

Fine.

Deep inside his body, beneath the soreness and cold and frustration, something golden stirred.

Shunjiro lowered his stance again and looked at Amaya.

“I understand,” he said.