Master Doss opened the door to his knock shirtless and sweating from his own private training, and looked down at Corren with an expression somewhere between annoyance and reluctant curiosity.
"What do you want, Trainee?" he asked.
"I want you to train me, Master Doss," Corren said, holding his ground despite every instinct telling him this was a spectacularly bad idea. "Beyond what the classes teach."
"That's what the classes are for," Doss said flatly. "You could be expelled for breaking curfew like this. Go back to your room and pretend this never happened."
Corren didn't move. "The best swordsman in my class won't stop challenging me, and I can't beat him learning the exact same forms he's already mastered."
Something in that answer seemed to catch Doss's genuine attention, and after a long pause, he sighed and waved Corren inside, glancing down the empty hall first to be sure no one had followed.
He led Corren up to the rooftop under a sky thick with stars, handed him a training sword, and had him run through the drills he'd already learned in class. Corren obliged, movements crisp from repetition, and Doss watched with a critical eye that narrowed further the longer he watched.
"That won't do," he said finally. "The standard form is built for larger frames. You're quicker than that, more agile. We need something that actually fits the body you've got." He introduced the WingBat form: fast, fluid, full of jumps and spins and openings exploited rather than forced, demanding stamina in exchange for the kind of speed that could overwhelm a bigger, slower opponent before they even registered the danger.
Corren listened with the total absorption he reserved for anything genuinely new, and by the time the lesson ended, his legs ached with a familiar, deep tiredness, though this fatigue, at least, cost him nothing but sweat rather than the strange hollow drain of overworked mana. That distinction mattered more to him than he expected. Not every kind of exhaustion in this world drew from the same well, and learning where the line sat between the two felt, in its own way, as valuable as the form itself.
The next real test of everything he'd learned arrived on a drizzling morning weeks later, mist hanging thick over the courtyard as a broad-shouldered man named Halloway oversaw the freshman drills in Kaldric's stead, his voice cutting easily through the wet air.
"Does anyone wish to issue a challenge?" Halloway asked once the drills wound down, scanning the circle of exhausted, rain-slicked faces.
Darvit stepped forward before the question had even fully landed, confidence radiating off him despite the humiliation of his last attempt. The crowd's initial giggles sharpened into something closer to astonishment when he proposed, once again, that the winner would claim Wrenna's hand in marriage, a wager that had somehow gotten no less absurd with repetition.
Corren accepted without a flicker of hesitation this time, and the suddenness of it visibly rattled Darvit more than any insult could have, forcing him to shake off his own surprise before he could settle into a proper stance.
Halloway watched the two combatants take position, arms folded across a chest built like a doorframe, a grin spreading slowly as he registered the difference between them: Darvit gripping his sword conventionally, both hands, front foot forward, textbook stance from a textbook student; Corren coiled backward instead, sword held high above his head like something about to strike, a posture that owed nothing at all to what Kaldric had actually taught the class.
The duel opened with Darvit lunging forward, eager to seize the first advantage. Corren met him with a burst of speed that startled a gasp out of the watching crowd, leaping into an overhead strike that Darvit only barely managed to block before Corren was already flowing into the next motion, a rapid exchange of calculated strikes and evasive footwork that left the class watching in open-mouthed silence.
He landed a strike against Darvit's ribs, not hard enough to injure, precisely hard enough to rattle, and the rattling did its work beautifully: Darvit's composure cracked into a flailing, adrenaline-fueled series of wild swings that burned through his stamina in seconds. Corren disabled his left hand, then his right, and swept his legs out from under him with a final, unhurried motion that left the older boy sprawled flat on wet stone.
"Never bother my friend Wrenna again," Corren said, standing over him, voice carrying easily across the silent courtyard. "She's under my protection."
Darvit, thoroughly humbled, offered nothing but a nod.
Wrenna found him afterward in spellcraft class, bent over a stack of ancient tomes with the same intensity he brought to anything worth understanding fully. She wrapped her arms around him from behind before he'd noticed her approach, resting her chin briefly against his shoulder.
"I heard what you did," she said quietly. "Thank you."
Corren turned enough to meet her eyes, accepted the thanks with a small, warm smile, and pressed a brief kiss to the back of her hand out of habit more than performance this time. She colored anyway, retreating to the seat beside him and hiding half her face behind a book, though her eyes kept drifting sideways toward the pages he was studying rather than staying properly buried in her own.
"Why are you reading about illusion magic?" she asked eventually, curiosity winning out over embarrassment.
"I've already got S-rank spells in destruction, alteration, and healing," Corren said. "To finish this properly, illusion and conjuration are what's left."
He didn't say the rest of it aloud, not yet: that finishing properly mattered to him in a way that went beyond ambition, that some quiet, stubborn part of him still measured his worth by how thoroughly he mastered a thing, a habit two entire lifetimes deep now and showing no sign of loosening its grip.
There was something underneath Wrenna's admiration that he'd started to notice too, in the weeks since the wolves: a faint, persistent unease that surfaced whenever he did something for her she hadn't asked for, as though every kindness landed on her like a small debt she hadn't budgeted for and didn't quite know how to repay. He filed that observation away the way he filed everything else that puzzled him, patient, unresolved, waiting for more evidence before he drew a conclusion.