Immortal Ascension: Rise of The Forgotten Vessel

Chapter 10

The earlier matches went the way Ethan expected — efficient, mostly one-sided, occasionally interesting when two evenly matched students pushed each other to the edges of their technique. He watched from his place in the queue and catalogued what he saw out of habit, the same way he had always watched cultivation practice from the edges of the courtyard. Wind meridian disciples favoured quick lateral movement and threw their first serious strike early to establish tempo. Earth meridian students were slower to open but tried to end matches in a single exchange once they committed. Water meridian fighters were the hardest to read because their style depended on adapting to whatever their opponent gave them.

Marcus Webb, his assigned opponent, fought in the third round. Wind meridian, as Hobb had said. He was quick on his feet and confident, the kind of confident that comes from having won enough matches that losing has started to feel theoretical. He finished his round in under two minutes and came off the chalk square without breathing hard, and when he passed Ethan in the queue he looked at him the same way Cole looked at him — not hostile, just uninterested, the glance of someone who has already done the calculation and found it not worth his time.

Ethan's bracket was called in the sixth round. He walked to the chalk square and stood at his mark. Across from him, Marcus rolled his shoulders out and settled into his opening stance, and in the viewing benches Ethan could hear a pocket of laughter that had Cole's particular timing in it.

The officiating instructor raised his hand. "Assessment match, sixth bracket. Begin."

Ethan's plan was simple. He would move, he would avoid, and when he had taken enough hits to make the conclusion look natural, he would go down and stay down. He did not intend to win. Winning would draw attention he could not afford, and getting through the match without anyone noticing anything unusual was the only outcome that actually mattered.

Marcus opened with a standard wind-push — a broad, flat release of qi meant to test spacing and see how an opponent responded to pressure. Ethan sidestepped it. Not gracefully, not with any technique to it, just a straightforward step to the left that put him outside the strike's arc. Marcus adjusted and tried again, tighter this time, and Ethan stepped back and to the right and let it go past his shoulder.

He could hear the benches going quiet. He had expected that. A hollow servant dodging two strikes in a row was not what anyone had come to see, and the audience was recalibrating.

Marcus stopped moving and looked at him with genuine attention for the first time. "You've been watching the training sessions," he said. It wasn't an accusation, just an observation. He was smart enough to recognise what he was looking at — someone using knowledge rather than ability — and to adjust for it. His stance changed, lower now, more compact, the posture of someone switching from testing to finishing.

The next three exchanges were harder. Marcus was fast, and once he stopped telegraphing his attacks Ethan's ability to read the pattern in advance became less reliable. He took a glancing strike to the left forearm that went numb to the elbow and caught the edge of a wind-burst across the back that knocked him two steps forward. He stayed on his feet, which surprised him slightly. He had assumed the first solid hit would put him down.

He was considering whether this was a reasonable point to go down when Marcus stepped in close and threw a compressed strike at his chest — not a testing blow, a genuine one, the kind meant to end the match cleanly. Ethan saw it coming a half-second before it landed and knew he was not going to be able to move out of the way in time.

He didn't think about what happened next. There was no decision in it. The void energy he had spent twelve days learning to keep still and compressed simply did not stay still, the way a hand comes up to protect your face before you have consciously told it to. The pooled energy at his chest moved outward by a very small amount, maybe a centimetre of dispersal in every direction, and Marcus's strike hit it and deflected — not dramatically, not visibly to anyone watching casually, but enough. The strike caught him in the shoulder instead of the sternum, spun him sideways, and dropped him to one knee on the chalk.

He stayed down. The officiating instructor counted him out and called the match for Marcus, and that was that. Thirty seconds later he was back in the queue collecting his outer jacket, and the seventh bracket match was being called, and the benches had already moved on.

All of that was fine. What was not fine was that when he stood up from the chalk and turned to walk off the square, he glanced toward the judges' platform out of no particular reason, just the automatic scan of an unfamiliar space, and found Lord Kael looking directly at him.

Not at the square generally. Not at the match that was starting up in the bracket beside his. At him, Ethan, specifically, with the focused and completely still attention of someone who has just noticed something they were not expecting to notice and is now deciding what to do about it.

Ethan looked away and kept walking. He found his place along the wall, retrieved his jacket, and watched the remaining matches with his eyes on the chalk squares and his attention on keeping his breathing regular and his expression neutral. He did not look at the judges' platform again.

After the final match, he helped carry the chalk marking equipment back to the outer storage hall as part of the post-assessment cleanup — a task that fell to the groundskeeping staff by default — and he took longer than strictly necessary, making sure he was still busy and visibly occupied when the judges left the platform and the courtyard cleared out.

He found Mia near the annex entrance on his way back. She had waited, as she said she would. She looked him over — the arm that was still slightly numb, the set of his shoulders — and said, "Are you hurt?"

"Not seriously. The arm will be fine by morning."

She nodded, apparently satisfied with that. "You stayed on your feet longer than Cole thought you would. He looked irritated."

"Good," Ethan said, and then immediately felt tired in the way you feel tired when something you were braced for has finally passed. They walked back to the annex together and he ate the dinner he had missed, and Mia talked about something that had happened in the herb garden that afternoon that had nothing to do with cultivation or assessments or any of it, and he was grateful for that in a way he didn't express but thought she probably understood.

Later, lying on his bunk with the ceiling above him and the Academy quiet outside, he went back over the moment in the chalk square when the void energy had moved without his permission, and tried to work out what it meant for what he was doing. He had not been in control of it. That was the honest answer. When the situation turned serious enough, it had made its own decision, and he had been fortunate that the decision it made was a small one.

He needed to be more careful. And he needed to get significantly better before careful stopped being enough.

Kael had seen something. He was sure of it. Whether Kael knew what he had seen was a different question, and one he couldn't answer yet. What he could do was keep his head down, keep going to the pit, and make sure that the next time someone looked at him that closely, there was nothing left to find.