Vale studied me for a long moment.

The silence in the Summit gym felt calculated, the kind of quiet a predator uses when deciding whether the thing in front of it is prey or just annoying. The morning sun kept painting those gold rectangles across the floor, but Vale’s expression stayed completely unreadable behind those designer sunglasses.

"Tell me something, Monroe. What do you think combat actually is?"

"Fighting. Killing things. Using abilities to not die."

"Wrong." Vale uncrossed his arms. "Combat is what happens when every other option has already failed. Diplomacy failed. Avoidance failed. Retreat failed. Now you’re standing in front of something that wants to eat your organs, and the only question left is whether your body can execute what your mind already knows how to do. Every flashy technique in the world is completely useless if the vessel carrying it falls apart at the first sign of sustained pressure."

He tapped his chest with two fingers.

"I could teach you advanced spatial theory right now. Show you how to feel dimensional weak points and exploit them. Give you the conceptual framework for abilities that would make your spiral blasts look like party favors. Want to know what would happen?"

"I’d be awesome?"

"You’d be dead." Vale said it like he was commenting on the weather. "Because your body isn’t ready to channel that kind of output without shattering itself from the inside out. You’d fire one shot at seventy percent capacity and your arm would explode. Not metaphorically. The tendons would separate from the bone. The muscle fibers would tear in nineteen different places at the same time. You’d spend six weeks in medical recovery and lose two months of progress rebuilding what you just destroyed."

He said this like he was describing how to tie shoelaces.

"Every push-up you do, every resistance rep, every round of squats that makes you want to quit—those are building the container that holds the weapon. Right now your container is..." He looked me over. "Adequate. Getting better. But adequate doesn’t survive a B-rank gate. It definitely doesn’t survive whatever you’ve got coming down the road."

"So this is just foundation work."

"This is the most important work you’ll ever do. The most boring, too. That’s why most hunters skip it and die young." Vale retrieved his coffee and took a long sip. "The cool stuff comes after Friday. If you survive the gate."

"You say that like it’s uncertain."

"Everything is uncertain, Monroe. That’s the entire point."

I wiped sweat from my forehead with the back of my arm. Morning light had started filtering through the Summit gym’s high windows, painting long gold rectangles across the polished floor.

"Fine. Foundation. I get it." I paused. "But I’ve got another question."

"Naturally."

"Why did you put our teams together? The Foxes and Blair’s group. You could have assigned any combination. Two random first-year squads. One experienced team mentoring a weaker one. But you specifically chose us and Blair. Two teams that can barely sit in the same room without someone throwing fire. Why?"

Vale’s expression changed.

Not dramatically. Nothing about Vale was ever dramatic in the traditional sense. But something shifted behind those mismatched eyes. A flicker of something deeper than the casual amusement he normally projected. Like catching a glimpse of the ocean floor through a gap in dark water.

He set his coffee cup on the nearest equipment rack. Turned to face me fully.

"What do you think this academy exists to do?"

"Train hunters. Produce professionals who can clear gates and keep the population from getting eaten by dimensional monsters."

"That’s the brochure answer. Try harder."

I thought about it. Really thought about it, past the obvious response and into the territory where uncomfortable truths lived.

"It exists to perpetuate the system. The guilds fund it because they need fresh bodies to throw at gates. The IHC controls it because they need to maintain authority over the hunter economy. The government tolerates it because the alternative is unregulated awakened teenagers running around with the power to level city blocks."

"Better. Still incomplete." Vale leaned against the wall with his hands in his pockets, the posture of someone settling in for a real conversation rather than a training drill. "This academy produces approximately three hundred hunters per graduating class. Of those three hundred, maybe sixty will still be alive in ten years. Of those sixty, perhaps twelve will reach B-rank or above. Of those twelve, two or three might break into A-rank before their careers end through injury, burnout, or simple bad luck in a gate that decided to kill them that particular Tuesday."

He paused.

"The system you described, the guilds and the IHC and the government, they’re all playing the same game. Managing decline. Harvesting enough warm bodies to keep the gates cleared and the economy functional while accepting that most of those bodies will be consumed by the process. Nobody in that system is thinking about what happens in twenty years when the gate density doubles again. Nobody is planning for Tier V emergence events. Nobody is asking what happens when the Under decides to stop sending scouting parties and starts sending armies."

The word hung in the gym air like smoke.

Armies.

"You think the gates are going to get worse."

"I don’t think. I know." Vale’s voice dropped half an octave. "Gate frequency has increased forty-three percent over the past decade. Entity sophistication has tripled. The Reapers your squad encountered used to appear only in B-rank gates or above. Now they’re showing up in training exercises. Void Gates are appearing in locations that sensor models predicted would remain stable for decades. And every year, the gap between hunter capability and gate threat grows wider."

He pushed off the wall and walked toward me. Not fast. Not threatening. But with the unhurried certainty of someone who has seen the edge of something terrible and returned to tell people about it.

"The guilds see market opportunity. The IHC sees management challenges. The government sees budget line items." Vale stopped three feet from me. Close enough that I could see the fine silver threads in his designer jacket, the faint scar along his right jawline that makeup usually concealed. "I see extinction."