The training yard of the Lord Protector’s palace was not like the training yards of the Guilds or the Academy. It was older, and there were many mysteries inlaid in its stones.

Usually, it was filled with the cries of men and women, but for the last few months, a section of the training yard was left alone for a single person to use.

There were no spectators here, no benches for the old soldiers to watch, no galleries for the young nobles to preen. There was only stone, and steel, and for today, the men that were waiting in the pit at the center of the yard.

The pit was twenty feet deep, fifty feet across, with smooth walls and sanded floors, and yet it was impossible to hide the fact that so much blood had been spilled inside this pit that it had turned the walls, which were as hard as profound iron, black.

Tarian Arathor stood at the edge of the pit, watching the five figures who waited below. They were Amber Exiles, every one of them.

They were the soldiers who had served his father for decades, and in time they would serve him as well, but for now they were here to kill him... If they could.

He smiled.

His father had set this test years ago, when Tarian was still a boy, and had first begun to show what he could do. The Lord Protector had taken him to the pit and told him that the weak died, that the strong survived, that the only thing that mattered was what you could do when the world was trying to kill you.

It was a particularly hard lesson for one so young, as others of his age were playing and enjoying their childhood, but he had been brought to this place that reeked of blood and old ghosts.

Tarian had lost his first match, and his second, and his third... He had not lost a match in four years.

He stepped off the edge and fell, and the wind caught his blue hair, causing it to billow behind him. His cloak was swept away from his body, revealing his rather simple armor underneath.

Tarian did not slow himself as there was no need to; he allowed the stone to rise to meet him, and at the last moment, he called the lightning.

It came from nowhere and everywhere, from the stone beneath his feet and the sky above the pit and the blood that ran hot in his veins. It wrapped around him, lifted him, and set him down in the center of the pit as gently as a mother setting down a child.

The five Amber Exiles did not move; they had seen him do this before. Flight was a power that was given to Void Sentinel, but Tarian at the Mist Phantom level was special.

Tarian did not know the name of these soldiers; he knew that he should, but he did not care. What he wanted from them was their combat prowess and not their names. If they did not reach the Void Sentinel stage in the future, then in a few centuries, they would be dead, and Tarian did not care for memorizing the names of those who would not live past a few years.

"Begin," he said.

They exchanged glances for a moment before they attacked him from five directions, as their training dictated.

A woman with a sword, fast and precise, her blade coated in the cold fire of her talent, was the first. The second was a man with a spear, his reach long, his thrusts aimed at the places where Tarian’s armor was thinnest, which was not saying much because Tarian only wore armor due to the militaristic influence of his father, and so his armor was usually decorative.

This was the one bit of personal choice that he was not going to change, not even for his father.

The third and fourth attackers were a pair of twins, their talents intertwined, one controlling the stone beneath his feet, the other bending the air around his lungs.

And the last was the most dangerous, and he was also the oldest; he had been an Amber Exile since before Tarian was born, and up till this moment, Tarian did not know his talent, but he usually fought with his bare hand and had a frustratingly blank face.

Tarian did not wait for them to reach him; he took a step forward, and lightning erupted from his body.

His lightning was not the lightning of the storm that fell from the sky and burned whatever it touched. It was something older than the Arathor family, which had been passed down for generations to the most talented among their bloodline.

It was the lightning that lived in the blood and moved through the nerves, the lightning that was there before there was a sun to warm the world or a sky to hold the stars.

When he was a child, he threw this lightning, but now he was a man, and he became it. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

His body dissolved into light and heat, and Tarian moved through the sword-woman’s guard before she could bring her blade up, reformed behind her, and drove his elbow into the base of her skull, accompanied by a burst of lightning that would have melted a five-foot block of profound metal to slag.

Even with all the power of an Amber Exile, she crumpled. In an instant, he had just defeated a battle-hardened Amber Exile, and Tarian did not even look back; he was already gone before she hit the ground.

After years of combat, Tarian knew that hesitation was the enemy, and he was already calling upon one of the talents of his Heaven Grade Art, Lightning Body, and his form that resembled a man made from lightning, separated into seven parts at precisely the moment the man with a spear thrust at where he had been, and Tarian was there, was not there, he was seemingly everywhere.

The man with the spear was a bit confused, and he began flooding his eyes with Lumina while sweeping his spear in a wide arc so he could catch all of the lightning body of Tarian, but he felt an obstruction, and his spear could not move.

He looked back only to see that the first target that he had attempted to stab, which turned out to be a phantom, had re-solidified, and Tarian was standing in front of him and had caught the spear with his right hand.

The man grinned and, touching the core of his Lumina Space to release as much energy as possible, he poured his flames through the shaft of his spear.

This spear was a rune weapon that was a great conductor of energy, and it instantly exploded with a golden radiance that caused the entire air in the pit to explode, as the temperature suddenly exploded to nearly a thousand degrees, and the walls and the floor of the pit suddenly turned red.

The golden flames poured across the spear and covered Tarian’s body, and he... he began to laugh.

In his lightning state, the last thing that Tarian was afraid of was energy-based attacks, and in fact, the flames were only fueling his lightning.