Ayla lay on the bed with her eyes open. The pale light of the morning filtered through the windows, warming her face. One thing she loved about the outside world was this warmth.

With a soft knock, Sarah entered the room with a tray of tea and fresh fruit. She was a bit surprised to see Ayla awake in the bed.

"Baby, you awake already?"

Sarah smelled different now. Ayla called it a morning smell. There was the freshness of the new day in it.

Ayla sat up slowly. Her hair fell over one shoulder. Sarah caught herself looking for a moment.

’So beautiful.’

She resumed her task briskly before the look showed on her face.

"Do you know what you will do today?" she asked.

Ayla blinked at the question. How could she know?

Sarah did not tease her further as she exclaimed, "Your training begins this morning."

Ayla’s eyes brightened. After two days of doing nothing, Ayla had been bored. Knowing she was going to do something productive improved her mood further.

Sarah led her through corridors of the estate Ayla had not yet seen. The household was larger than she had assumed.

A wing of the building opened into a glass-roofed courtyard. Beyond the courtyard was a separate structure entirely.

The structure was round. Black stone. Wider than the main house. It was tall enough that Ayla had to crane her neck to see the top.

"The Hayashi family training facility," Sarah said with an offhand tone. "Damien built it twenty years ago. Kenji learned here. You will too."

Ayla filed the building away. It was the largest single space she had been inside since the brain chamber.

The architecture suggested it had been designed to contain damage rather than to be admired.

Kenji was not present.

"Where is he?"

"Your brother does not need these classes. He has tutors of his own. You will see him at lunch."

Ayla nodded as they entered the facilities.

A man waited in the center of the training floor. Mid-thirties. Lean. He was calm and dangerous.

"Kareem," Sarah said.

"Silver-rank Crusader. He has taught in this household for eight years. The best tutor in Old York for early-stage trait development. He has cleared his calendar for you for the week."

Kareem inclined his head. The gesture was precise. He did not bow.

"Lady Hayashi."

The address landed in the air. Ayla blinked at it. She had not yet registered that the staff would call her by the family name now.

Sarah left them to it. Her last gesture was a small tap on Ayla’s shoulder before she walked back through the courtyard.

Kareem did not waste time on preliminaries.

"Tell me your trait."

Ayla considered the question. The Twin Lens read him without effort.

His mind was open and observant, without any ulterior motives. Sarah had explained on the way that the trainer would ask about her trait.

Ayla had already chosen which trait to present. Pyromancy. The simplest of the ones she was willing to display.

"Pyromancy."

Kareem nodded. He did not believe she had only Pyromancy.

’This little girl is hiding a lot.’

He did not voice the suspicion. He had been hired to teach. He would teach what she showed him.

He led her to the far end of the training floor. A row of straw and wood dummies stood against the wall, mounted on metal frames designed to absorb impact.

"Show me what you have. Begin with whatever your most basic application is."

Ayla raised a hand.

A Fire Bolt formed in her palm. She had not used the skill in days, but the warmth of the room sat where the warmth always sat.

She pulled from the air around her and shaped the bolt without effort. She let it fly.

The bolt struck the first dummy and burned through the chest cavity in a single clean line. The straw inside the chest caught and smoldered.

"Good. Continue."

She shaped the next attack. Heat Surge. The wide-area technique she had created in the spider chamber.

The wave of heat rolled down the dummy line. Three of them combusted at once. The metal frames began to glow.

Kareem’s eyebrow lifted a fraction.

"Not bad. Already mastered using nature for your own."

Then his face changed.

"But."

The word hung in the air for a beat.

His aura unfolded.

The training floor cooled. The smoldering straw stopped smoldering. Frost crawled up the metal frames of the dummies.

The warmth Ayla had been pulling from the air retreated inward, condensing into the bodies of every living thing in the room. The chamber registered winter.

A thin layer of ice spread across the stone floor in a slow, deliberate ring around them.

"Attack now."

Her eyes brightened.

’I want to eat his brain.’

The thought arrived with genuine enthusiasm. Ice manipulation was new.

The taste of a Silver-ranked Crusader’s brain had been a curiosity she had filed for later, and Kareem had just demonstrated himself worth moving the trait up the shelf.

The sparkle in her eyes caught Kareem off guard. He misread it as the natural delight of a student watching a high-rank technique for the first time.

’She is excited by the demonstration. Good. The excitement will help her focus.’

Ayla decided not to correct his interpretation.

She raised her hand. A Fire Bolt formed again.

The bolt was smaller than the first one. The flame was paler. The heat she pulled from the air arrived thinner because the air no longer held heat.

She had to spend her own mana to make up the deficit.

The bolt struck the dummy and charred only the surface. The straw beneath did not catch.

She tried Heat Surge.

The wave rolled outward and dissipated within three meters. The frost in the chamber drank the heat faster than she could produce it.

Two dummies smoked faintly. None of them ignited.

She lowered her hand.

Kareem nodded slowly.

"The environment is a double-edged sword. Some environments will amplify your trait. The chamber a Pyromancer learns to fight in is rarely the same as the chamber the enemy will pick. Inside a frozen field, your fire arrives at half strength. Inside a humid cave, half again. Inside an open desert at noon, you are untouchable. Inside a snowstorm, you are barely a Runner."

Ayla filed this away.

Inwardly, she considered her catalogue.

’I have other traits. Pyromancy is only one. If the field is wrong for fire, I bring blood. If the field is wrong for blood, I bring shadow. If the field is wrong for shadow, I bring acid. The environment cannot debuff me if I can choose my trait.’

The thought was correct. She did not say it aloud.

Kareem continued, unaware that his student had already routed around his lesson in her head.

"But there is a way to nullify the environmental debuff."

Ayla’s attention sharpened. The sentence was the first thing he had said that contradicted her internal solution.

"What is it?"

Kareem’s aura drew back into him. The frost began to retreat from the floor.

"Martial arts."

The word landed. Ayla tilted her head.

"Martial arts is not a trait."

"Correct. That is the point. A trait depends on the environment that feeds it or the mana inside the body it burns. A body trained in martial arts feeds itself. A Crusader who cannot fight without their trait is half a Crusader. A Crusader who can fight without their trait is whole. The body must be ready to fight in any chamber, with or without the system’s gifts."

Kareem picked up a wooden practice blade from the wall. He turned toward the dummy line.

He did not use his trait.

He moved.

The first dummy came apart at the chest seam. The second dummy’s head separated at the neck.

The third dummy split diagonally from shoulder to hip. The fourth dummy collapsed without an obvious cut, the wooden blade having struck a structural point that disassembled the frame entirely.

Four dummies in three seconds. No mana. No heat. No frost. No skill window.

Only the wooden blade and a body that knew exactly where each strike would land before the swing began.

Ayla’s gold pupils widened.

’I want to eat his brain very much.’

Kareem returned the practice blade to the wall.

"We will spend an hour each morning on trait theory and trait application. Three hours each afternoon on the body. By the end of the week, you will not yet be ready for the Spire. You will, however, understand what readiness looks like."

He gestured to a rack of practice weapons.

"Choose one."

Ayla approached the rack slowly. She filed the blades, the staffs, the curved knives, the long polearms, and the short sticks.

Her hand paused over a short sword. Then a staff. Then a pair of paired knives.

She turned to Kareem.

"Can I choose more than one?"

Kareem almost laughed. He did not.

"Choose one to begin. The others will come later."

Ayla picked the short sword. The grip was too large for her hand. The blade was too long for her arm. She did not care.

The motion of holding it was new.

Behind a one-way observation window above the training floor, Damien stood alone with his hands clasped behind his back.

He watched his daughter pick up a sword for the first time.

His face did not move.

His mind did.

’Sixteen years late, and she is already further along than Kenji was at her age.’

Below, on the training floor, Ayla turned the short sword over in her hand and looked at her own reflection in the polished blade.

Two pupils stacked inside each iris stared back at her.

’It is going to be so fun.’