Chapter 162: Round 3

It was Atlas who spotted her first.

Mira came through the treeline at a jog, her eyes scanning the field until they landed on the two of them standing across from Tongen. She slowed as she took in the scene — the cracked and disturbed earth, the dust still settling around Jelo’s knees, the way neither of them looked particularly confident.

She came to a stop beside them.

“I heard movement and followed it,” she said, looking between Atlas and Jelo. Then she looked at Tongen, and at the red ball in his hand. “How long has this been going on?”

“Long enough,” Atlas said.

Jelo glanced at her. “We’ve tried twice already. Two angles at once. He reads it every time.”

Mira studied Tongen for a moment without speaking. Their master hadn’t reacted to her arrival at all. He just stood there in the same unhurried way, turning the red ball slowly in his fingers, waiting to see what they’d do next with the same patience he brought to everything.

“Then we don’t do two angles,” Mira said. “We do three.”

Neither of the others argued. It was the cleanest logic available to them right now.

They spread out without discussing it further, each of them moving to a different position around Tongen — Jelo straight ahead, Atlas to the left, Mira drifting wide to the right until the three of them had him in a loose triangle. Tongen tracked the movement with his eyes but didn’t turn his body. He didn’t need to. He never did.

Mira moved first this time.

She exhaled and split — a second version of herself stepping out from her body and breaking off to the right, both of them advancing on Tongen simultaneously from different angles. Two Miras. Two separate threats. She pushed them both forward at the same time, one cutting low toward Tongen’s right side while the other came in high from further out.

Tongen’s attention shifted to the clone. His hand moved, and the momentum behind the high approach reversed hard, sending that version of Mira stumbling backward before dissolving — the clone breaking apart the moment the force behind it collapsed. He turned toward the real Mira a fraction of a second later.

That fraction was what they’d been waiting for.

Atlas slammed both palms into the ground the moment Tongen’s focus pulled away from him, and a thick, fast column of earth drove upward directly beneath Tongen’s feet, angled to throw him sideways. At the same time, Jelo came in hard from the front, closing the distance fast, hand outstretched for the ball.

Tongen brought his weight back and absorbed the column’s momentum cleanly — the earth pushing up against nothing, slowing and stopping without managing to shift him an inch. He turned to face Jelo at the same time, raised one hand, and Jelo felt his own forward motion snag and reverse. He braced for it this time, twisting so the redirect sent him into a roll rather than a skid, and came up on his feet breathing hard.

Still empty-handed.

Mira pulled her clone back and repositioned. Atlas pushed up from the ground, jaw set, clearly running through the math of what they had left to try. For a moment the three of them stood scattered across the field, catching their breath, looking at a man who still hadn’t moved more than a few steps in any direction since any of this started.

Jelo felt something shifting in his chest. Not frustration exactly — deeper than that. The kind of feeling that came from hitting a wall enough times that the wall started to feel personal.

He let it surface.

The air around his right arm warmed first, then flickered. Orange light gathered between his fingers, climbing upward, and by the time he fully extended his hand the flame was solid — not a flicker but a real, controlled burn coiling around his forearm and concentrating at his palm. Dragon fire. He hadn’t reached for it yet during this session because fire near the ball was a risk. But he wasn’t aiming for the ball.

He threw it wide — a broad, low wave of fire sweeping across the ground between them, not directly at Tongen but spreading fast in both directions, eating up the empty space on either side of him. The goal wasn’t damage. It was restriction. Fire moved differently than a strike. It spread on its own momentum, branching and expanding, and the question was whether Tongen could absorb something that didn’t move in a single direction.

Tongen stepped backward twice. It was the most he’d moved since the session began.

Mira went immediately. Both versions of her broke into a full sprint from opposite sides, the real Mira angling hard for the ball while the clone came in to the opposite flank and grabbed at Tongen’s arm — or tried to. He caught the clone’s wrist and the moment he touched it the momentum holding it together collapsed, the copy coming apart in his grip. He turned to track the real Mira.

She was already reaching.

Her fingers grazed the red ball.

Tongen closed his hand around it half a second before she could grip it properly, and the momentum behind Mira’s reach reversed — not violently, just enough to push her arm back and step her sideways. She stumbled, caught herself, and stood there for a moment with her hand still half-extended, staring at the ball that had been two inches from her fingers.

That was the closest any of them had come.

The fire had burned out. Jelo’s arm cooled slowly. Atlas lowered his hands from the stance he’d taken, the ground around him going still.

Tongen looked at all three of them. He still wasn’t breathing hard.

Then, after a long moment, he lowered the ball to his side.

“That’s enough for today.”

The words landed simply, without ceremony. He wasn’t dismissing them because they’d done well. They all knew that. But there was something in his tone that wasn’t disappointment either — something more considered than that, like a man who had watched something and taken note of it.

He nodded once toward the far end of the training grounds, in the direction of the road back. “Head to the academy. We’ll continue tomorrow.”

None of them moved immediately. Jelo looked at the ball. Atlas looked at Jelo. Mira exhaled through her nose and rolled her neck once, letting the tension out of it.

Then they started walking.

They didn’t say much on the way out. There wasn’t much to say yet — the session was too fresh, still sitting on all of them in the specific way that losing to someone who was barely trying tends to sit. But somewhere between the treeline and the road, Mira glanced down at her hand. The one that had grazed the ball.

She held it out slightly and split — but this time something was different. A second clone stepped out. Then, before she’d fully registered what she was doing, a third flickered into shape beside it. Unsteady, half-formed, barely holding together, but there.

Three versions of her standing on the road.

She stared at them. The third clone lasted only a few seconds before dissolving, collapsing inward like a reflection in disturbed water. But it had been there.

Jelo noticed. He looked at her.

Mira closed her hand slowly. She didn’t say anything about it out loud, but the look on her face was the particular quiet of someone who had just found something worth thinking about later.

The academy road stretched out ahead of them, long and familiar under the late afternoon light. Behind them, the training grounds settled back into silence, and somewhere in it, Tongen was already gone.

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