Headline

“Caleb, meet Ase Tiv Das-Yem-Zir,” Nai said. “Ase Tiv, meet Caleb Hane…and shake his hand.”

I’d stretched out a hand without thinking about it, but Tiv took it in stride. He was a towering Farnata, but thin as a rail. When he clasped his hand on mine, I could feel just how much Adept energy he had bound up in him.

That was odd.

I’d gotten used to the energy Nai emanated, intense as it was. Just standing near Tiv barely saw him register as Adept. Was that a consequence of no longer having my radar to clarify my complex Adept and psionic inputs? Whatever the case, Tiv’s hand felt like it could burst into flames at any second.

The Adept himself was rather cool-headed though.

“The new alien,” he recognized. “I’ve read some of the reports from Serralinitus and our Warlock here. It’s an honor to meet you.”

“Likewise,” I said. “I…think you’re the first Ase I’ve met besides Serral.”

I couldn’t come up with any better conversation, because Tiv was just too bizarre. He seemed barely Adept until I actually shook his hand, and then the energy in his body lit up like a Christmas tree.

I glanced at Nai: with the benefit of the radar, surely she was picking up on at least some of this.

She…was…if I read her faint frown correctly. But she didn’t seem surprised, and in fact she mastered her expression quickly trying not to give anything away.

“Caleb is Adept and until now his learning has been scattered. Incredible in some areas, and completely deficient in others. I think you can help.”

“Absolutely!” Tiv said with a grin. “Go that way, I’m over in arena four with a group of fresh Adepts. You’ll fit right in.”

“Thanks,” Nai said.

We started walking in the direction Tiv had indicated, but Tiv himself walked in the opposite direction—the same way he’d been going when he noticed us.

“Is…he not coming with us?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Nai reassured me. “He’ll meet us there.”

“You’re messing with me somehow…”

“Of course,” she grinned. “This is going to be fun!”

“Okay, but why is he…” I trailed off as we descended to the sub-level and entered the arena in question. From inside the arena, I could feel the presence of more Adepts.

The only other time I’d felt so many Adepts in one place had been the home-day gathering, but those had been interspersed throughout a crowd of non-Adepts. The group Tiv was talking with was more than twenty strong, all but one or two of them Adept.

And it was Tiv speaking to the class.

“Wait…he was just…” I looked back up the stairs we’d just descended.

There was no way Tiv would have wound up back here first or without passing us.

“[What in the world…?]” I muttered, throwing Nai a glance.

She badly disguised her grin. The amount of satisfaction she was getting out of this only made me refuse to ask her for the answer.

Today’s chaperones elected to stay on the ground level catwalk, overlooking the arena pit. It was the first time I’d seen any of them willingly brook that kind of distance from me.

Closer inspection revealed that Tiv was not actually speaking to the whole group, but rather to small clumps where pods of two or three Farnata were huddled together materializing and dissolving their creations over and over again.

“Tiv!” Nai called out, drawing a few heads.

“Warlock!” Tiv grinned, drawing a few more. His eyes set on her, then shifting to me, before inquisitively finding Nai again.

For a moment the entire class derailed as they realized an Adept legend was present, but Tiv shouted them back to their work almost instantly.

“Not a chance, any of you!” he said, still a head-and-a-half taller than anyone else here. “All of you have parameters to refine, and besides: it’s only right that I get to pester Warlock before any of you.”

Tiv got exactly zero laughs from his audience, but they obeyed and returned their attention to their Adept practice.

“Shamya, Nai,” Tiv said.

“Shamya, Tiv,” she replied. “I heard about this little workshop you put together, and I’ve got one for you.”

She jutted her chin at me.

I was still hung up on Tiv being here at all, and it showed on my face enough for even Tiv to notice. And he hadn’t seen a human face before today.

“Your tagalong looks like he ran into me in the hall,” Tiv mused.

“He did,” Nai said. “Caleb is still wrapping his head around it.”

And indeed I was. In the minute since I’d seen him last, Tiv felt like a completely different Adept. His mind was registering much more like an ordinary Adept’s to my psionics, and he was properly emanating that Adept buzz rather than bundling it all inside himself.

“I sure am…” I said, trying to work it out.

“Well pay attention,” Nai said. “You can figure it out later.”

“Well let’s see what I’m working with,” Tiv said. “Ratings?”

“L1,” she said, “with an outside chance for L2 in intricacy. We don’t have a sample size big enough to confirm that though.”

“Wait, why does sample size affect what I’m rated?” I asked.

“Adept ratings are descriptive, not prescriptive,” Nai reminded me. “Adepts tend to measure in clusters, but those clusters aren’t quite identical between Farnata and Vorak. The L1 clusters measuring Farnata adept range average almost a full meter further than the Vorak one. On the flipside, the Vorak have a wider variance in their L1 intricacy cluster. There’s a lot of small differences like that, and we haven’t seen enough Human Adepts to tell your species’ quirks.”

“Like Vorak Adepts developing augmentations more commonly than Farnata,” I recalled.

“Or Farnata with flash-formation,” Tiv said, “that’s correct.”

“Flash formation?” I asked.

Tiv frowned. “Wow, Nai, you really haven’t covered much have you?”

“His circumstances were unique,” she protested. “The normal learning sequence was already out of the question even before the language barrier came down.”

“Right,” Tiv mocked, “and that fact is completely unrelated to the fact that you can’t really teach anyone the normal sequence?”

“He was creating combustive materials and modifying their design on the fly within a day or two of activating,” Nai pouted.

“What does he mean you can’t teach it?” I asked.

“I’m self-taught,” Nai said. “You’re not the only person who learned Adeptry out of order.”

“So what is the normal order?”

“Not energetic materials first, I can tell you that much,” Tiv said.

“Nai had me practice building up my magnitude by making as much inert mass as I could, over and over,” I said. “Is that first?”

“Yes,” Tiv said. “At least, the inert materials part. How much mass can you muster?”

“Now? Almost twelve kilograms,” I said.

The edges of Tiv’s mouth tugged. “That’s low, even for an L1. What was your limit before you tried building it up? Can you tie off creations? Sustain them?”

“Those first few days, I couldn’t get more than a couple grams, and I’m not sure what ‘tie-off’ means,” I said.

Tiv’s eyes widened a fraction.

“That’s very low,” he said, focusing on the first part. “How many is ‘a couple’ in this case? Four? Eight? Thirty-two? You said he was making combustibles? What kind of energetics could he have made with that little mass?”

“He’s atypical,” Nai insisted. “He could only bring forth about two or three-dozen grams, but his energetic ratio was through the roof. Caleb, show him.

I asked.

she clarified.

I pointed my finger at the ceiling and materialized a pea-sized mote of phosphorus-mimicking material.

It didn’t even need to contact the air to start burning; it had its own oxidizing agent mixed in. For a split second, the whole arena was awash with light. Even the soldiers spectating from the catwalks were left blinking.

Only Nai and I had materialized something over our eyes instead of just shutting them.

In my case, opaque contacts, only in existence for exactly the moment of detonation. In her case, shades.

Tiv might have caught some of the blinding light, but he was grinning.

“That’s incredible!” he said before looking around the arena to see who had been disrupted by my stunt. Several Adepts’ creations had fallen apart or dissolved with the break in the concentration.

I felt bad. Did I need to apologize for messing with their projects?

“Let that be a lesson!” Tiv called out to them. “You are not going to be able to materialize undisturbed. If that’s all it takes to ruin your focus, then every Vorak with a flashlight is going to be more than a match for all of you…”

“As for you,” he turned back to me, “If Nai isn’t sure if you’re an L2, we can put you to the test. Do you know how intricacy is measured?”

“No,” I said, “and my impression was that Nai doesn’t either.”

Tiv laughed, “No, of course she wouldn’t. She’s L1 in that category.”

Nai took her lumps with dignity and chose to glare at Tiv more than me. Her tormentor barely noticed though. He put all of his attention on devising a test for me to measure my Adeptry.

“Make something that stays entirely within the confines of that ring, and have it move out of the ring, far enough to cross this line.”

As he spoke, he swiped a finger in midair, materializing a circle on the ground as well as a line a few feet past the circle.

“Alright…” I flexed my Adept skills and came up with a quick solution to the problem.

Inside the circle, I materialized a small ball with a selective charge before creating a similarly selective, but oppositely charged block on the far side of the line. The ball was light enough by comparison that the block stayed put while the magnetic fields pulled.

The block magnetically drew the ball, and it rolled out of the circle and past Tiv’s mark.

“Excellent!” he cried. “Posed with the same problem, seven in eight of this lot decided that they were only allowed to create anything within the ring.”

I frowned. I’d been trying to be clever with a loophole. I had made something that hadn’t broken the boundary of the ring. And I’d also made something separately that made my first thing move. Apparently it was what Tiv had been wanting.

“Now try it again, but this time, abide by that restriction: only materialize within the ring and have your creation propel itself in some way.”

That was significantly harder…

It was not a large ring, a bit less than six inches across. Maybe I could create two matching charges to repel each other…

That was exceedingly difficult though. The way I’d learned to create opposite charges had been based in symmetry, like pulling on two ends of a spring, ready to snap back together. I didn’t know how to make pairs of separate, identical charges.

Okay, new tack then.

Magnetic fields weren’t the only things I could make to move something.

I materialized a simple deformed cap on the ground, carefully cascaded its position through the floor, and materialized the smallest bundle of pressurized gas I could.

There was a tiny crack and my improvised cap blasted all the way to the far wall.

“Huh,” Tiv said. “Well that technically works. New restriction now: the whole thing has to stay within five centimeters of the floor, and it needs to remain at rest inside the circle for at least five seconds after you materialize your last element.”

“Are you just going to keep on stacking the restrictions on until I fail?”

“Oh at least until then,” Tiv grinned, “and more after that.”

It took me several attempts to properly settle on my design, and I ended up organizing my designs psionically. The finer details were too difficult to keep straight without psionic assistance.

Even with each piece well defined and visualized in my mind, I still had to create them one at a time and assemble them by hand.

It was little more than a wheel with a simple set of gears attached to a tensioned cable. The tension would ratchet through blank gears without moving the exterior wheel long enough to satisfy Tiv’s delay before finally matching teeth with the wheel itself and weakly rolling the whole assembly across the floor.

Test after test, Tiv gave me another. Each one was simple, but restrictive like the first ones had. ‘Keep this ball from moving’. ‘Ensure this ball moves’. ‘Use Adeptry to create writing as small as possible’. ‘Blindfolded, make three identical objects’.

And so on and so forth. The motion tasks were among the hardest.

“For a creation to move,” Tiv said, “it has to be made to move. It’s a bit reductive, but linguistics has a very good application to Adeptry. Whatever adjectives can possibly apply to your creation, you need to decide. That includes motility, durability, shape, the list is endless. If you want something to be capable of movement or change, you need to decide exactly how, and build it to be capable of such.”

I finally fizzled out when he wanted me to make a creation capable of navigating a small series of turns on the ground. Several of the other Farnata Adepts, apparently having finished their own assignments, had taken a closer look at what Tiv had me doing.

“I can’t,” I admitted. “Not today. I don’t have any ideas on how to change the creation with the turns. I’d have to spend time figuring out the mechanics instead of brute-forcing it like this.”

I’d been leaning on my psionics heavily, and still only just barely keeping up with what Tiv had put before me.

“Well, you’re probably L2 in intricacy,” Tiv confirmed. “Though still below the average L2 if I were to guess.”

“You’re not stuck with L1 intricacy then,” I said, still dedicating a bit of my attention to puzzling out how he’d been in two places at once. Every Adept, even Nai, had a category stuck in L1…

“No, I am not,” Tiv grinned. “But I want to see more of your abilities, and not just in theory. Spar with me. You’ve been in fights before, right? I want to see your practical skills put to the test.”

“I’ve got three chaperones I’d have to run it by,” I said, looking at Nai. She nodded. Leen and Fenno up on the catwalk gave their approval too.

“Don’t go easy on him!” one of them shouted down, I wasn’t sure which.

“But also don’t actually hurt him,” the other one called out, concerned. “I don’t want to get cited for letting the alien get hurt.”

“There’s only so much Laranta can say if the alien himself agrees,” Tiv said, staring at me expectantly.

“I’m down to spar, but you have to spill,” I demanded. “How did you get from the hallway to here before us?”

“Oh, no avoiding that secret anyway,” he said.

Tiv gave a goofy grin and struck a pose.

In the same instant, I saw double.

One Farnata had moved, but two energetic aliens stood before me now.

A perfect copy of the Adept stood beside him, in the same goofy pose wearing the same stupid grin.

No…not a perfect copy. Psionically, the clone stood out. Whatever intractable gap normally existed between consciousnesses seemed to have a greatly diminished presentation. My mind was still surrounded by the abstract void, but the clone’s wasn’t. If I looked closer, I felt like I could peer into any corner whatever structures Tiv had imbued it with to act. And just like before, Tiv’s clone didn’t feel Adept, even though it was wrought with energy.

Tiv wasn’t kidding when he said he wasn’t L1 in intricacy!

“You can make copies of yourself?” I asked.

That was beyond anything I could have ever expected out of Adeptry. The Tiv we’d encountered on the way here must have been on an errand! They were capable of making choices and carrying out tasks!

How far did the clones’ cognition go? How indistinguishable were they from the real Tiv?

“Yes!” both Tivs said.

“That is… all kinds of screwed up,” I said, still peering at the mind of the clone.

“I’m sorry?” Tiv asked, taken aback.

“Well, it’s just, the clone can’t stick around forever, right? But it’s also conscious, self-aware. So since they’re intelligent, don’t they know they’re about to die?” I asked. “In a way, you’re killing yourself every time you make one…”

Considering what Nai had shared about Farnata and suicide, I realized how dicey of territory I was leaning into, but the words had already been spoken.

But Tiv, or rather his clone, was ready with the response.

“It is not the same because I knew what I was in for,” he said. “A few moments ago, ‘Tiv’,” he pointed to his original self, “created a clone, fully prepared for the reality that his consciousness might be the one in the clone. I’m not killing myself because ‘I’ am Tiv, and Tiv continues to live.”

“[Holy crap,] you [Prestige] yourself?” I asked. “Oh that’s so much worse…”

As horrifying as it was though, it was impressive too. This was easily the most complicated Adept power I’d ever seen. The number of separate materials that must go into one, the physical construction of it…how much had Tiv based his clones on his own body, and what corners had he managed to cut?

Did the clones have discrete cells, or was it simpler to create a Tiv shaped lump made of flesh analogue?

I could see why Nai had been so eager for me to meet him.

“You want me to fight him,” I guessed. “Or rather, his clone.”

“No one makes for a better sparring partner, than the one who can’t die,” she agreed.

I elected to not push the existential horror angle of Tiv’s ability any further. He seemed to have it handled…and I was actually interested to see how I stacked up against an Adept who wasn’t Nai. Maybe he was a bit closer to my level.

“I figure we keep it simple,” Nai said. She stamped her foot on the floor and a loose chalk ring of a few meters encircled me. “Caleb, your goal is to try staying inside the ring. Tiv? You get him out.”

“Why didn’t you say ‘try’ for him?” I frowned.

“Because I know you, and you’re not to going to give yourself much of a chance. Tiv is on a very short list of Adepts who can beat me,” Nai grinned.

Oh.

Had I thought Tiv was a bit closer to my level?

“Definitively?” I asked. “You would have no chance?”

“No, not definitively, I have a shot, but not a big one. But I’m one of the few Adepts who has a chance against him too. Just consider him at my level: a headliner.”

Sensibly, Tiv didn’t give me any warning we were starting.

His clone moved forward with unexpected coordination, darting toward me, keeping shockingly low to the ground. It wasn’t like a puppet or robot. It moved every bit as sharply as a real Farnata.

The ring I had to stay inside was big enough to backstep and prevent him from tackling me. But when the time came to strike back I ran into a new problem. For the first time in alien combat, I was outreached. Tiv’s frame was so tall and skinny his arms could actually reach further than mine.

He threw a few playful punches at my face, but I was quick enough on my feet to duck away again..

I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it happened, but some instinct had crept up in me. And as I put distance between me and Tiv’s clone, the hair on my neck stood up.

Without looking, I materialized my quarterstaff in flash and swiped it behind me. It thudded into the belly of another Tiv clone.

Panicking, I scrambled away from the ring’s boundary. A heartbeat longer and the second clone would have simply dragged me out of the ring with a light tug at the right moment.

“Playing dirty I see,” I said, spinning up more of my psionics. My cascade wasn’t big enough to watch out for multiple opponents, but the clones were easy to detect psionically.

And I still had my three-dimensional modeling psionics. It wasn’t as good as real sight or the radar, but I could keep a rough picture of our positions, even when the clones were out of my field of view.

“So are you,” the real Tiv called out from the sidelines. “I didn’t realize we’d stooped to using weapons.” He was casually leaning against the arena wall, practically chatting with Nai. He reminded me of a Roman watching the Colosseum, or maybe a centurion sending his troops forward while he surveyed the battle.

Two more Tiv’s, each carrying two batons, sprang into existence. The four weapons were passed around so each clone had one, and they all surrounded me.

My speed was the only thing I had working for me. My quarterstaff could strike in two opposite directions almost as fast as it could one. And as long as I psionically felt for how close the clones were, I could stay half-a-heartbeat ahead of them.

I was entirely on defense.

They stepped into and out of the ring with impunity, and all I could do was bat down their batons and look for windows to strike past their guards.

Still, even keeping me on the defensive, four clones was just barely not enough.

Even though Tiv was taller than me, I still weighed more. Unlike Nai, he didn’t seem to be augmented.

Or…at least his clones weren’t.

…At least they weren’t acting like they were.

Three of the clones came from inside the ring while the fourth was ready just outside the corner they were trying to drive me toward.

One of them tried to get clever, throwing its baton at my face. I ducked around it, pretending to look for a counterattack.

Tiv seemed to be the tricky type, and he was testing me. That meant he was going to attack from odd angles using esoteric methods.

No sound of the baton clattering against the wall or floor told me the clone behind me had caught the thrown baton, and I spun just in time. The clone outside the ring immediately threw it again right for the back of my head.

He wasn’t the only one who could catch and throw.

My hand snatched the handle mid-spin, and I pivoted further flinging the baton at the face of the one who’d first thrown it.

The clone wasn’t quite prepared to catch it like I had been, but he still deflected it from hitting his face directly.

Unfortunately for him, I followed it up by throwing my quarterstaff too.

My weapon clipped the side of his head well enough to knock him over, and I let my limbs move faster than humanly possible.

I darted straight for the fallen clone, but the other two jumped to intercept me. This wasn’t about beating them. I rematerialized my staff in my hand, contorting my body while I gripped it to badly vault over the two upright clones.

The leap left me panting in the center of the ring: a slightly more favorable position than before.

All that, just to not be in a corner.

And really, it was only going to take them a few more seconds to corner me again.

I could keep up with them, but once they coordinated more…

For now, their shorter weapons worked in my favor, and even if they switched to longer polearms, I didn’t feel like I’d suffer much.

I had more experience sparring with Nai using staves, so that might even give me a momentary advantage if I could catch him and them off guard.

The tip of my quarterstaff snaked past the clone’s attempt to chop it aside, and I connected a solid hit with the clone’s face.

‘Tiv’ went sprawling backward with a melodramatic flair added, before the clone dissolved back into nothing.

I forced myself not to think about the implications of that.

The observing Farnata soldiers were wide eyed.

Careful Caleb, I warned myself. Don’t go thinking your hot streak is untouchable just because the other Adepts are in awe…

“It occurs to me I didn’t tell you Tiv’s epithet,” Nai called out.

“That doesn’t strike me as a coincidence…” I panted.

“The Vorak call him the Stenetar.”

That was a furfish word I actually recognized without being told. It was derived from a military rank I’d heard in the Green Complex. Umtane had told me it was related to being abstractly in command of a hundred soldiers. My Centurion comparison had been close to the mark.

But when eight more ‘Tiv’s flickered into existence with no sign of stopping, it clicked for me.

Tiv wasn’t the Centurion.

He wasn’t in command of them; he was them. The whole damn Century all by himself.

He wasn’t a headliner for his ability to make a copy of himself, it was that he could make a lot of them. He could even make weapons for them! If he was capable of making something as complicated as a clone of himself, then surely he could make firearms.

Even low-level Adepts were invaluable combatants because they could arm not only themselves, but other troops. But Tiv didn’t even need the other troops.

He was literally a one-Farnata army.

My quarterstaff darted forward, smashing into a nose before whipping aside to catch another on the jaw.

Two clones toppled to the ground, but there were four more coming at me.

And yet? I realized the Century was holding back.

It wasn’t just the fact that the clone dissolved after I struck it hard enough. The fact I’d been able to land the blow at all told me everything.

I could see it in how their quasi-psionics moved their bodies. Each one was every bit as coordinated as Tiv and even capable of speech.

They were practically indistinguishable from the original. Without psionics, there would have been no way to differentiate unless Tiv signaled to give his clones away like he was now.

Instead of coming at me with all of their intelligence and skills, Tiv’s clones were going easy on me. Charging in blindly, not attempting to counter my attacks, or even avoid some of them.

And each clone was being dismissed when I scored a hit.

Except…that wasn’t quite right. Every time I eliminated one opponent, Tiv was creating a new one and marching into the ring.

But just how many could he make? What was his mass limit? Surely this meant he was an L3 in magnitude? But how could he make something like a clone of himself without his L3 category lying in intricacy?

None of that was going to help me. Nai had taught me better. It didn’t matter how his ability worked, only that he understood it, and therefore it did.

What I needed was to find a way to win!

But how could I? My only conditions were ‘stay in the ring’.

The clones could just keep coming at me.

she smiled.

Her being obfuscating aside, she hadn’t actually said I didn’t have a chance…she’d said I wasn’t going to give myself a chance…

Tiv’s clones were effectively endless. The obvious solution would be to somehow stop Tiv from making more. But I didn’t have a clue how I might do that short of killing him—something I actually had no chance of. In fact, from what Nai had told me, killing Tiv might not even dissolve his clones.

They could stick around as long as their exotic materials stayed viable.

So, killing Tiv was out of the question, so—

That… bitch.

Actually killing Tiv was out of the question, but this wasn’t an actual fight either.

I dissolved my quarterstaff, recouping the mass.

I needed the spare energy within it to summon half a dozen blinding flares in the air above the ring.

Instead of blinding everyone for a heartbeat, these stuck around for a full two seconds, burning brightly enough while they fell to give me my window.

I couldn’t see through the layer I materialized to protect my eyes, but just like before, Nai and I were the only ones to be ready. In the seconds after my lightshow flickered out, both Tiv and his clones were left blinking.

One last creation…aim…

Splat.

Orange paint dripped down the front of Tiv’s shirt.

Four clones fell on me, each one grabbing a limb and hurling me out of the ring.

Tiv blinked in surprise.

“You’re dead,” Nai said. “He got you.”

“One shot,” Tiv argued. “Not even a critical one. Non-lethal gut wound. I’m in bad shape, sure. But it’s not like he scored a killing blow.”

Nai told me.

“It was the obvious solution,” I said, flashing my materialized revolver to the Tiv-clones. “And sometimes the clever solution is the obvious one.”

“Definitely L2 in intricacy,” one of the clones remarked.

“The gun’s mechanism is pretty simple,” another clone commented. “But creating it’s pieces preassembled and the ammunition? That’s, what, a dozen pieces with at least half that many materials?”

The clones each had something to say.

“Metal for the gun body, paint and some kind of jacketing for the ammo, and propellant? Depending on the timing, you might count the flares too.”

“Flash formation,” another said. “You created the whole of the weapon, ready to use, in one single instance.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Isn’t that what all Adepts do?”

“No,” Nai explained. “Watch this.”

She stretched out her hand, and closed her fingers around a stave. It began as just a cylinder the length of her palm, but the material grew outward to almost six feet in length.

“See that?”

I nodded, and she dissolved the staff.

“Now compare to this.”

She held out her hand again. There was a faint flicker a fraction of a second before the full length of the quarterstaff audibly popped into existence.

“Flash formation is making the whole thing appear at once,” Nai explained. “While, conventionally, Vorak Adepts tend to make their creations appear gradually, like they’re being grown.”

“It’s not a strict rule though, is it?”

Nai shook her head. “More than two-thirds of Farnata Adepts are capable of flash formation. Less than one-tenth of Vorak ones are.”

“The thing to remember about flash formation is that the bigger thing you’re making, the harder its going to be to displace surrounding air,” Tiv said. “If you’re not making things gradually, the requisite emergence force hikes with the volume of your creations.”

“My force of emergence is crap,” I said.

“Maybe, but your grasp of space and distance are impeccable,” Tiv said. “You move well too. I was shocked four copies weren’t able to pin you down.”

“They were about to,” I said. “I wasn’t going to be able to keep that up long.”

“Still, even in a spar, you held your own extremely well,” Nai chided. “None of the others here would have tried to shoot Tiv with a paint gun.”

She cast a look at the Farnata cadets.

My audience of Adepts was staring at me in awe.

“You all know who I am,” she said to them. “You’ve all at least heard who he is—” she nodded to me, “—I know you were scheduled to be training with Tiv for another hour or two, but I need to steal him. You all can scram, and in return, you can expect Caleb and I to show up again and share more.”

“You heard her,” Tiv said, splitting a dozen copies of himself off to coral the Farnata. “Take another arena, set up some of your own spars. Try to learn something from what you just saw.”

The small crowd filed into the adjoining hallways leaving me alone with Nai and the Century.

“I’ll be honest, Warlock,” Tiv said once they were all out of earshot. “I’m not a fan of you dismissing my class without asking me first.”

“Sorry,” Nai said. “But you’ll understand why. Caleb needs to consult an Adept with a bit more experience than me.”

“He has more experience than you? Haven’t you been Adept for, like, ten years?” I asked.

“Yes, but Tiv is older than me,” Nai explained. “And my experience with Adeptry is mostly about fighting. Tiv’s expertise is more varied.”

“You know you’d benefit from my workshops too,” Tiv said. “It’s understandable the Human would wind up with some bad habits. But you have the tools to know better.”

“I do just fine,” Nai frowned. “But that’s not the point. Caleb isn’t any ordinary Adept, even among Humans, I suspect.”

“He’s impressive,” Tiv conceded. “I get why you thought we should meet.”

Hah.

“No, you don’t,” Nai told him, smirking. “Because, Caleb hasn’t shown you his best trick yet.”

I got a grin on my face to match hers.

Tiv frowned, sensing for the first time that something more was going on.

“Oh you’re going to love psionics,” I told him.

“Psionics?”