The half-second came when the giant overextended.

It had been swinging in patterns — horizontal, vertical, horizontal, crush — and she had been timing the gaps between each. The crush was always the longest commitment. The limb came down, the construct’s mass followed it, and for the two seconds it took to reset, its upper body was forward and low and the sightline between Sawn and the mages was briefly, cleanly open.

She accelerated.

Full output — she pushed Timeweave through her body at the highest rate she’d held all corridor, and the world outside her own movement slowed to a smear. Her feet left the floor in a sprint that covered the remaining five meters in a fraction of the time it should have taken. The mages were already registering the movement, already beginning the muscle response of raising their hands, already starting the intent of a counter-cast.

None of that mattered at this speed.

She drew her blade.

It came out clean and quiet, the way she’d been holding it all corridor — still, unremarkable, uncatalogued. The nearest mage had been watching her left hand, her pulse output, the geometry of her fields. It had not been watching the blade because the blade had not done anything worth watching.

Until now.

The cut was short and precise. She didn’t swing wide — no arc, no drama, just the shortest possible line between the blade’s edge and the gap between the mage’s hood and collar. One stroke. The mage dropped.

She was already moving.

The deceleration came off the full corridor as she burned her attention on the two remaining mages — she couldn’t hold the field on the spawn and act offensively at the same time, and she had made the choice. The giant began to recover at full speed behind her. She registered this and filed it and kept moving forward.

The remaining two mages separated.

Smart. They went in opposite directions — one left along the back wall, one right — creating an angle problem. She couldn’t close on both simultaneously. Whichever one she went for first, the other would have time to complete a cast.

She slowed them both.

The cost was immediate and significant — she had already been running expensive for the entire corridor, the deceleration of the giant and the spawn and the sustained acceleration of herself adding up to a total she hadn’t been asked to pay all in one engagement before. Her reserves dipped below the threshold she preferred. Her vision didn’t swim, nothing so dramatic, but there was a new weight to each decision, a sense that she was spending from a balance that was getting harder to ignore.

She held the fields on both mages.

They moved through slowed time — their robes dragging, their reaching arms extended in the long arrested motion of people trying to run and finding the air had thickened around them. She watched them and picked her angle.

She went right first.

Accelerated into it — the burst of speed contrasting violently with the slowdown around the mage, creating the largest possible gap between her velocity and its ability to react. It was still trying to complete its reaching motion when she arrived. The blade came up low and finished the same way the first one had: short, precise, committed.

She spun immediately.

The left mage was still in the deceleration field but the field was thinning — she’d taken her focus off it for the two seconds of the closing sprint and the mana maintaining it had burned without renewal. The mage was accelerating back toward real-time. Its hands were almost in position.

She moved.

Not quite full acceleration — she didn’t have it cleanly available, the reserves too taxed for a second full burst in as many seconds. What she had was partial. Enough. She crossed the distance at something between her usual speed and the mage’s slowed state, and the gap was uncomfortable and close and she felt the beginning of the mage’s cast discharge as she arrived — a wash of raw mana output that caught her across the left side and spun her half-step sideways.

She planted her foot and let the spin become the motion.

The blade came around with it.

The third mage went down.

Sawn stood at the back of the corridor and breathed.

Behind her, the giant was recovering. She turned to look at it — enormous, cracked through the midsection from her sustained pulse work, its mana-construct body beginning to destabilize now that the mages sustaining the combined cast were gone. Without the five casting in concert, the thing that had assembled from the ceiling was starting to unassemble. The crack widened. The mana bled outward from it in visible waves.

The giant collapsed.

Not explosively — it came down piece by piece, the structural integrity failing in stages, each section dropping to the corridor floor in heavy succession until what was left was a pile of mana-dense debris slowly dissolving back into ambient dungeon energy.

The spawning had stopped the moment the last mage fell.

The corridor was quiet.

Sawn checked her blade — clean it, sheath it, return the hand to neutral. She checked her body — the mana burn across her left side was superficial, no structural damage to her casting capacity, just the kind of surface-level hit that would ache later and mean nothing now. She checked her reserves.

Lower than she would have liked.

Significantly lower.

She had fought the entire corridor, managed a giant, decelerated a sustained spawn wave, and taken out three mages in a sequence that had asked more of her timing and her reserves than a single engagement should have. The math of it was straightforward and the conclusion was unwelcome.

She was going to need to be more efficient going forward.

She rolled her neck. Took the corridor’s length back in one glance — the debris, the ice from where her pulses had interacted with the stone floor, the marks left by the spawn that wasn’t anymore. Twenty meters of contained destruction.

She turned to the door at the far end.

It was smaller than the entrance door. Low-framed, plain, the kind of door that a castle put between one problem and the next without ceremony. She pushed it open with one hand.

The second corridor opened in front of her.

It was wider than the first.

She registered this immediately because width meant room for more, and more was what she saw the moment her eyes adjusted to the torchlight. Mages — not five this time. More. She counted quickly, recounted, accepted the number.

And behind the mages, already visible because the corridor was wide enough to show them clearly: summons. Not dungeon-spawn emerging from walls. Fully formed, standing ready, the mana signatures of things that had been brought specifically rather than generated. Larger than the wolves. Larger than the bipeds.

Larger than a lot of things she’d fought today.

She stood in the doorway and looked at the length of what was ahead of her.

Her reserves were below where she wanted them. Her left side ached with the shallow burn of the mage’s parting cast. The mages at the far end of the new corridor had already registered the open door and were beginning to move their hands.

Sawn reached up and adjusted her hair tie.

She yawned.

It was a real yawn — deep, involuntary, the kind that arrived when the body wanted acknowledgment for what it had already done. She let it finish. Blinked once, slowly.

Then she stepped into the corridor and pulled the door shut behind her.

******

Despite her disinterest she knew she would have to power through it.

This was her responsibility.

No.

Well not exactly.

It’s more so not a choice.

She’s lucky she didn’t get something as crazy as her own personal tower but this is still an examination.

If nothing tests her then the exams would have served no purpose.

She does the same and sweeps the corridor clean.

She wondered how the others would fair.

She was particularly equipped to handle large masses of monsters in large quantities too because of her vessel skill.

Sawn’s ability to accelerate and decelerate time came with almost no flaws.

It wasn’t high output like the other vessels but it came with a rare balance of offense and defense.

Something no other vessel seemingly has over Sawn besides Xander.

Xander has the makings of something beyond talent.

A once in a lifetime skill like his . The seats and council have high expectations of him.

What the vessels are yet to realize is ascertain how to evolve their skills beyond it’s quota.

Not just class change at will.

Not just evolve and assimilate talents at will.

Or multiply talents infinitely.

What’s next.

Cause there’s definitely something else. A whole other dimension to the skills, all of them noobs are yet to uncover.

The countdown is on.

Who will be the first to uncover this parallel state of the skill .

Most of the seats already have their bets.

Yours?