Chapter 497: Begun
Corvin moved with the particular quality of someone for whom technique had long since ceased to be a conscious process and had become simply what his body did when it was pointed at a problem. There was no hesitation in it, no observable decision-making between intention and action, and the result was a speed that was not actually superhuman but functioned like it because the gap where normal people processed their next move simply did not exist in his body’s chain of events.
He came in fast. Nero blocked the first strike and took the second on the forearm — blunt, solid, the kind of impact that would leave a bruise — and he moved back and tried to use the spear’s reach and found that Corvin had already accounted for the reach, was already inside it, and the third strike caught him across the thigh with enough force that his leg reported an opinion about continuing this exchange.
He kept moving.
He was not going to win this. He had known that before it started. But there was a specific thing he was looking for, the same thing he had been looking for across all the pairings — the edge of someone’s range, the thing they did consistently when they were pressing, the pattern that existed because all techniques had patterns and patterns were the grammar of prediction. With Corvin the pattern was harder to find because there was less wasted motion to anchor it to, but it was there, and at two minutes and twelve seconds into the exchange Nero found it: a slight overextension in the shoulder on the dominant side when Corvin committed to a follow-through, lasting perhaps a quarter of a second, not long enough to exploit with anything requiring setup but long enough to register.
He filed it.
Vane called the session after the final rotation and the twelve of them stood catching their breath at various intensities. Nero was breathing harder than he wanted to be, his forearm was going to be unpleasant tomorrow, and there was a numbness in his thigh that would resolve into something more specific in the next hour, but he was also running through the session the way he always ran through things afterward, the full accounting of what had happened and what it told him, and finding that it told him more than any of the previous three weeks combined.
Vane looked at them for a moment.
"Better than I expected," he said, which from Vane was the closest thing to a commendation available, and several of the candidates took it with the suppressed satisfaction of people trying not to show that they were pleased. "Worse than required. You’ll spar again on Thursday."
He left. The session was over.
Garet fell into step beside Nero on the way to the corridor, turning his practice sword over in his hands in the habit he had developed of examining the blade for marks after every session, despite the blade being blunted and the marks being largely imaginary. "You did well against Corvin," he said.
"I didn’t win," Nero said.