7 – Assessment
Assessment week meant the Vice Admirals came down from the upper floors, and the upper floors meant a different quality of person walking through the academy halls than Kael was used to seeing.
The recruits who'd been lounging through drills straightened up. The ones who'd been sloppy about their uniforms suddenly remembered how buttons worked. An entire barracks worth of Chore Boys went from sluggish to military-grade presentable in under an hour, which proved they could do it and had been choosing not to, and Kael found that funniest of all because he was one of them. He buttoned his collar. It itched.
The assessments were individual. One recruit at a time, called into the private training annex behind the main hall, observed by whichever Vice Admiral had drawn the rotation. Kael's name was in the second group, afternoon slot. He spent the morning drilling with Isuka, who was in the first group and spent the entire session hitting him harder than usual because she was nervous and converting nervous into violent was how she processed everything.
"You're being extra today," Kael said from the dirt after the third knockdown.
"Get up."
He got up. She hit him again. The bandage on her cheek had fresh tape. She'd re-wrapped it for the assessment, which she'd never admit.
Isuka went in at ten. She came out at eleven. Her jaw was set and she wasn't talking, which meant it had either gone well and she was processing or gone badly and she was processing. With Isuka the external indicators were identical.
Kael's name was called after lunch. The annex was a room at the back of the training complex with wooden floors and a weapon rack along one wall and high windows that let in afternoon light in long slanted bars. There was a calligraphy scroll on the far wall with a character he didn't recognize. A wooden bench near the door. The room smelled like old wood and floor polish.
He heard her before he saw her. Heels on hardwood, an even measured rhythm, and the door at the far end of the annex opened.
Vice Admiral Gion walked in and the room got smaller.
It was a presence thing. Kael had been around competent officers and strong recruits for three weeks and he'd gotten used to reading the relative weight of people in a room. Gion didn't have relative weight. She had absolute weight. She walked in and the air pressure changed and his Observation fuzz, the thing that usually ran in the background like a fuzzy AM signal, sharpened to the clearest it had been since the one clean hit on Isuka. Every nerve ending he had pointed at the woman crossing the annex floor.
Curly black hair past her shoulders, loose and thick. Red lipstick. A mole just below the left corner of her mouth. She wore a pink ruffled shirt under the white Marine coat that hung across her shoulders, and she wore heels, actual heels, in a military training facility, and they clicked on the hardwood with the confidence of a woman who could fight in them and had. A sword hung at her hip, the handle wrapped in white silk. Konpira. He knew the name because he'd read it. One of the finest blades in the Marines.
She stopped in the center of the room and looked at him and Kael's brain ran its two tracks at the same time.
Track one: Vice Admiral Gion. Code name Momousagi. Admiral candidate, one of two considered for the position that went to Fujitora and Ryokugyu. Top five swordswoman in the Marines. All three Haki types confirmed. Tsuru's protégé. The kind of fighter who made other Vice Admirals careful.
Track two: there was a spider tattoo on her left thigh, visible where the coat parted, dark ink on skin that looked like it had never been touched without permission.
He looked at the calligraphy scroll on the wall.
"Vance, Kael." She read his name from a folder. Her voice was low, unhurried, with an elegance that belonged in a tea ceremony and landed in a training annex like silk dropped in sawdust. "Chore Boy. Three weeks. Flagged for anomalous reaction-time scores and one confirmed combat incident during transport. Hand-to-hand specialization." She closed the folder. "Interesting file for three weeks."
"I've been busy."
The corner of her mouth moved. The lipstick was precise and the movement was small and it was impossible to tell if it was amusement or assessment. "Show me."
She drew Konpira. The blade came out smooth and silent and she held it loosely at her side and Kael realized he was supposed to fight a Vice Admiral with his fists and no weapon and this was either a test or a formality and either way he was going to lose.
He put his guard up.
She moved. One step, a lateral shift, and then the blade was coming at him from the left and his Observation screamed and he got his arm up. The practice annex had wooden training swords on the rack and she was using the real one, flat-side, but the force behind it was enough to make his forearm go numb from wrist to elbow. He stumbled back.
She came again. Overhead this time, dropping the blade down toward his shoulder, and he read it a full beat before she committed and sidestepped. The blade caught air. Her eyes tracked his movement and her stance recalibrated, a change so subtle he only caught it because his Observation was running hot.
Third strike. She feinted low and came high and he blocked with both forearms crossed. The impact drove him back two feet and his guard held, which was wrong, which was impossible, because a Vice Admiral's casual strike should have folded his arms like cardboard and the fact that it didn't meant his Armament had flickered, somewhere between intention and impact, the same half-second of dark iron he'd gotten against Alvida's mace.
Gion stepped back. She looked at his forearms. He looked at his forearms. They were red from the impact and his wrists ached and there was no visible darkening on the skin.
"Again," she said.
She struck twice more. He blocked one, dodged the other. On the dodge his foot placement was wrong and he stumbled and caught himself with one hand on the floor. She didn't follow up. She sheathed Konpira and stood with her arms folded and studied him, head tilted, evaluating.
"Come here."
He walked to the center of the room. She put her hand on his forearm, the one that had blocked the overhead strike, and pressed two fingers against the skin. Her hand was warm. The red lipstick was close enough that he could see where it feathered at the edge of her lower lip.
"Extend your arm. Make a fist. Now push."
He pushed. He didn't know what he was pushing or where but he concentrated on the same feeling he'd had when his knuckles went dark against Alvida's mace, the sense of his will compressing into his skin, and his forearm got heavier under her fingers. She pressed harder. The heaviness flickered and died.
"Armament," she said. Quiet. She wasn't talking to him. She was cataloging.
Then she did the wrist thing.
Her thumb moved to the inside of his wrist and pressed into the vein there. Firm pressure, right over the pulse point. She was counting his heartbeats. The pad of her thumb, the edge of her nail, the warmth of her fingers curling around his wrist. Her eyes were on her own hand and he couldn't see what she was reading from his pulse but she was reading it, clinical and precise.
She held it for three seconds. Then four. Then five. The clinical precision hadn't changed but the duration had and three seconds was a pulse check and five seconds was longer than a pulse check and neither of them was pretending otherwise.
"Interesting," she said. She let go. Her thumb left a warm circle on his skin that faded slowly. She picked up his file from the bench and wrote a note in it with a pen she produced from somewhere inside the Marine coat. The pen was black and the ink was blue and the handwriting was so neat it looked printed.
"You have potential, Recruit Vance. Your instincts outpace your technique by a significant margin, which is unusual. I'll be selecting four recruits for a supplemental mentorship track. You're one of them." She put the pen away. "Training begins next week. Don't be late."
"Yes, ma'am."
She walked out the way she'd walked in, heels on hardwood, measured and even, and the room got bigger again when she left. Kael stood in the center of the annex with his forearms aching and the warm circle on his wrist and the knowledge that Vice Admiral Gion had held his pulse for longer than a check required and said "interesting" and left.
A recruit was waiting outside with a mop and a bucket. He'd been cleaning the corridor and had apparently been listening because he gave Kael a look that was half awe and half "what just happened." Kael walked past him.
Tashigi was waiting by the mess hall with Isuka. Her glasses were on straight, which meant she'd adjusted them recently, and she was holding a cup of tea that she offered to Kael before he'd said anything.
"How did it go?"
"I got picked for mentorship. One of four."
Tashigi's face opened. Eyebrows up, mouth widening, genuine pleasure visible from the eyes down. "Kael-san, that's wonderful! Vice Admiral Gion doesn't take students often, she's very- that's, um, that's really impressive."
Isuka was standing next to Tashigi with her arms crossed. Her jaw was tight. The muscle along the side of her face had that jump in it that Kael had learned to read as Isuka Processing and not Isuka Angry, though the two looked identical to anyone who didn't know her.
"You didn't get it," Kael said.
"I wasn't selected." Flat. Controlled.
"You will be."
"I wasn't asking for reassurance." She looked at the mess hall entrance, at the recruits filing in, at anything that wasn't him. Her rapier handle was in her right hand, grip tight enough that the scar on the back of her hand whitened. "Was she good?"
"She barely tried and I could barely keep up."
Isuka's jaw shifted. The tightness didn't leave but it rearranged into something closer to hunger than frustration. "Good."
That was all she said. She walked into the mess hall. Tashigi watched her go with the worried crease between her eyebrows that Kael had started to recognize as Tashigi's "should I say something" face.
"She'll be fine," Kael said.
"I know." Tashigi adjusted her glasses. "She just doesn't like being told she's not the best."
"Who does?"
Tashigi considered this. "I don't mind being told I'm not the best. I mind being told I don't care enough." She paused. "That's different."
It was different. He drank the tea. It was lukewarm and slightly too sweet and Tashigi had put sugar in it because Tashigi put sugar in everything.
They went into the mess hall. Isuka had already sat down at their table. She didn't look up when they arrived. She ate fast and left early and the rapier handle tapped her hip hard with each step and Kael watched her go and didn't say anything because there was nothing to say that she wanted to hear.
The warm circle on his wrist was still fading.