Mr. Oceayne stepped through the hole in the wall.
And the courtyard became a warzone.
They came together so fast that neither seemed to move — one instant apart, the next there, fists meeting in the centre with a detonation that blew the remaining dust outward in a flat ring. The ground beneath them didn't just break. It sank. A depression three inches deep formed in a circle around them, the stone compressing under the weight of two mana-saturated bodies pushing force into each other at point-blank range.
Mr. Oceayne broke right — feinted low, came high. A palm strike aimed at Rowan's throat. Rowan tilted — barely — and the strike grazed his collarbone instead. He answered with an elbow to Mr. Oceayne's jaw. Connected. The man's head snapped sideways, and for the first time, his stance shifted — one foot sliding backward involuntarily, betraying the force of a hit that his face refused to acknowledge.
— He's faster than before. Every time I break something, the healing rebuilds it tighter. His body is adapting mid-fight. That's not the technique. That's not the ability.
That's just him.
Mr. Oceayne buried a fist in Rowan's stomach. Felt the ribs give. Heard the crack. The green light rushed to repair it — and this time, Mr. Oceayne was waiting. He struck the same spot before the healing finished. Then again. Then again — three consecutive hits to the same three square inches of Rowan's body, each one landing before the last one healed, each one driving deeper than the one before.
Rowan's mouth opened in a silent scream. His knees gave. He dropped —
— and caught himself on one hand. The green light blazed — furious, desperate — and dragged his broken ribs back into shape by sheer force. He pushed off the ground and came up swinging.
His fist caught Mr. Oceayne in the mouth.
The man tasted blood. His own blood. For the second time in one fight.
Irritating.
"You know what's annoying?" Mr. Oceayne said, catching Rowan's follow-up and redirecting it past his shoulder. "I keep breaking you—" He drove a knee into Rowan's thigh. "—and you keep coming back." A palm to the chest. "Like a stray dog—" An elbow to the shoulder. "—that I can't get rid of."
Rowan staggered. Healed. Came forward.
"Then hit harder," he said.
Mr. Oceayne hit harder.
The next exchange lasted four seconds and contained more violence than most men experience in a lifetime. Mr. Oceayne threw a seven-strike combination — jaw, ribs, temple, sternum, hip, jaw again, throat — each one landing with mechanical precision, each one carrying enough mana to crack a training dummy in half. Rowan took every single one. His body broke in seven places. The green light chased the damage like a man trying to plug holes in a sinking ship — fixing one fracture as the next one formed, healing one organ as another bruised, running out of time and energy and still refusing to stop.
Rowan answered with three hits of his own. Just three. But they landed where it mattered — sternum, floating rib, the soft space beneath the ear where the jaw meets the skull. Each one released its mana on contact, and each one made Mr. Oceayne's body remember what it felt like to be genuinely, honestly hurt.
They separated. Came together. Separated again.
Mr. Oceayne caught Rowan's right fist — Rowan headbutted him. Mr. Oceayne's vision flickered. He hooked Rowan across the temple — Rowan's knees buckled, but he grabbed Mr. Oceayne's coat on the way down and dragged him into a knee strike that caught the man square in the diaphragm. Mr. Oceayne doubled over — only for an instant — then straightened and drove both palms into Rowan's chest. The boy flew. Hit rubble. Bounced. Rolled.
Got up.
Always gets up.
Mr. Oceayne pressed a hand against his own ribs and felt the ache there — real, stubborn, refusing to fade.
This boy is going to be terrifying. Not today. Not tomorrow. But soon — very soon — he's going to be something this world hasn't seen before.
And I'm enjoying every second of watching it happen.
They fought for two more minutes. Silent now. No comments. No taunts. The words had been used up and what remained was pure — fist to fist, will to will, two bodies communicating in the only language that mattered anymore. The courtyard gave up being a courtyard entirely. It became a pit — a bowl of broken stone and mana-scorched earth, cratered so deeply in places that the foundations of the building beneath lay exposed. Every wall had fallen or fractured. Every pillar was dust. The training ground would need to be rebuilt from nothing.
And still they fought.
Until they didn't.
—
Fifteen paces apart.
Evening gone. Night here. Stars above a courtyard that looked like a god had stepped on it.
Rowan stood — barely. The green light was gone. Not fading. Gone. His eyes had shifted back — dark, human, emptied of everything except the will to remain vertical. Blood ran from above his left eye. His shoulders hung like broken wings.
Across from him, Mr. Oceayne breathed hard. Coat ruined. Bruise across half his jaw. His ribs ached in three places, and his legs — for the first time in longer than he could remember — were genuinely tired.
But his back was straight.
It was always straight.
He looked at Rowan. Saw the trembling legs. The locked knees. The fists that still hadn't opened — even now, even at the end.
"You haven't learned it yet," he said quietly. "Your own ability. You have no idea what it is." A pause. "And you still pushed me this far."
Rowan said nothing. His lungs were still negotiating with the air.
Then — slowly — Mr. Oceayne smiled.
Not warmth. Not kindness. Hunger. The look of a predator that had finally found something worth chasing.
"You have something in you that shouldn't exist, boy. An ability that breaks every rule I've ever learned about how mana works. But right now, you're swinging it like a child swings a sword he found in his father's room. No form. No understanding. Just instinct and the stubbornness to not die."
He raised one hand. Touched two fingers beneath his own right eye.
The air changed.
"You want to know what your ability actually is?" His smile widened. Not cruel. Not kind. Inevitable. "Let me show you."
His eyes changed.
Not the way Rowan's had — sudden, desperate, ripped from the depths by pain and survival.
This was a door opening.
The colour didn't flash. Didn't flicker. It bloomed — starting at the edge of each iris and spreading inward with the slow, absolute certainty of nightfall. The natural colour didn't fade. It was replaced.
Purple.
Not Rowan's purple — young, raw, flickering like a candle in a storm.
This was the storm.
Deep. Vast. Absolute. A purple so complete it didn't look like a colour — it looked like a state of being. Windows into something that existed outside of time, outside of the body, outside of anything Rowan had ever been taught to understand. No flicker. No instability. No struggle. Just certainty — ancient, endless, and terrifying in its stillness.
The wind stopped. The dust stopped. The stars held still.
Mr. Oceayne lowered his hand.
The purple gaze found Rowan. It held no pity.
"This," he said — and his voice was the only thing left moving in the world — "is what a Singularity Ability looks like."
Silence. Total. Complete.
And in the dark of a ruined training ground, under stars that had stopped moving — Rowan understood, for the first time, the distance between what he was and what he could become.
It looked like two purple eyes.
And it was smiling at him.
To be continued…