“Three-way formation drills,” Kaede said. “Let’s see what that body does.”
Zyxel’s chin tilted. “What do you need from me?”
“Whatever you have. We’ll build from there.”
The first drill lasted ninety seconds before Kaede called a halt.
Overlapping lanes—he and Zyxel cut each other’s angles twice in the opening exchange badly enough that he had to abort a drone mid-run to avoid fratricide. Ryzen overextended right, chasing an opening that evaporated before he reached it, and the gap he left forced Kaede to abandon center and cover. Zyxel drove forward into his assigned space with startling aggression—fast, committed, clawed hands finding purchase—and then a feigned counterattack sent him backpedaling, and his balance simply... failed. Not a stumble. More like a system error. His weight shifted back and something in his body reached for an anchor that wasn’t there, his torso dipping, one knee dropping before he caught himself and righted.
Rough.His mind filed it clean.Rough and specific. Forward, he’s fine. Backward, he’s operating on instinct that no longer applies.
He called a pause—let the silence sit for two counts while he reassembled the geometry.
“Ryzen, lose the daggers.”
A beat. Ryzen’s eyes cut to him.
“You heard me. You’re no use to me at range if the gap closes and you can’t pivot. Put them away.”
Something moved across Ryzen’s face—not offense, but consideration. He reached up, and the emerald-lit blades dissolved inward one by one, drawn back into the runes along his forearms until the light died and his hands were empty. He flexed his fingers once, testing the weight of nothing.
“Hand-to-hand,” Kaede said. “You’ve got the instincts. Use them.”
He turned to Zyxel, who was watching with the focused stillness of someone measuring every variable simultaneously. “You—forward is yours. You’re fast moving in, faster than eitherof us. That’s the asset. When you see an opening, you take it, you drive through it, and you don’t stop until you’re done.” He let a beat land. “Don’t retreat. Don’t backpedal. You come through or you get clear to the side—pick a direction before you commit and don’t change it mid-move. And those hands aren’t decorative. You’ve got reach and mass. Use them.”
Zyxel’s jaw shifted. Something in the set of it said he understood exactly what Kaede had observed and didn’t love being read that cleanly. “Show me.”
Kaede ran it once—slow, deliberate. Forward commit, angle, drive, exit left. No backward motion. Ryzen held the opposite flank in a loose ready stance, hands open, weight centered. Zyxel watched with the same absolute attention he gave Selena’s every shift of mood, and then ran it himself, feeling out the shape of it.
Better. Not by much, but measurably.
The second drill held together for three full minutes before it broke, and when it broke it broke on Ryzen’s unfamiliarity with close-quarters timing rather than anyone else’s error. He was good—technically clean, footwork efficient—but he’d trained around his daggers for long enough that fighting without them required recalibration. He telegraphed. Got caught inside his own guard once, corrected hard, and earned a sharp look from Kaede that he returned without flinching.
Learning,Kaede noted.All three of us.
They ran it again.
The afternoon compressed into movement. Sweat and heat and the low hum of drones repositioning overhead, the soft impact of strikes finding guards, the occasional sharp crack of a block that landed harder than intended. Kaede held anchor at center, directing traffic with short commands and the positioning of his psydagger—a tilt signalinglane change,a drop of the blade-tip flaggingthreat incoming right. Ryzen read him faster than expected; the man had spent years interpreting silentorders in hostile rooms, and it showed. By the second hour, he barely needed the signals.
Zyxel took longer. But he was thorough.
Forward, he was becoming something genuinely dangerous—that burst speed translated in the field the way Kaede had hoped, sudden and low and committed, driving through angles before an opponent could close the response window. The clawed hands were effective at disruption; he didn’t fight like a trained combatant, he fought like something that understood physics and geometry and applied them with a scholar’s precision.
The backward problem persisted. Every time the scenario required retreat, his body hesitated for a half-beat—that phantom reach for balance that wasn’t there—and the hesitation cost him. But he was adapting. By the third hour, he’d started angling out laterally instead, refusing the backward step entirely, turning what had been a liability into a different kind of footwork. Not what Kaede would have taught him. Effective anyway.
Stubborn. And smart enough to engineer around a flaw rather than fight it.
He filed it. Revised the matrix again.
Ryzen and Zyxel built their own shorthand somewhere in the middle hours—a look between them translating asI’ve got left, you take right, a shift in Ryzen’s weight flagging pressure incoming before he’d committed to the move. Zyxel processed it the way he processed everything: completely, immediately, without apparent effort. Ryzen adapted the way a man did when explicit communication had historically been a hazard.
Communication became physical. A tilt of Kaede’s psydagger: *lane change*. A compression in Ryzen’s stance.Flank threat incoming.A sharp lateral cut from Zyxel.The opening is here, now.
Not smooth. Not elegant. Three very different combat languages finding an improvised grammar between them, rough-edged and functional in the way things were sometimes functional precisely because they’d been built under pressure rather than designed in advance.
By the time the sun started pulling amber and the Destima heat finally relented by degrees, they moved as something that resembled a unit.
Functionalwas what he’d asked for.
