While Agastya maintained his silent, telepathic truce with Theodora, the silver-haired leader finally broke the heavy silence that had settled over the physical room.
She stood up. Her movement was entirely fluid, possessing the lethal, effortless grace of a drawn blade. The ambient chatter from Dictor and the heavy, grinding breaths of the bulky Torin ceased immediately.
"Very well," she said, her voice cutting through the air like a localised frost. She walked slowly around the mahogany table, her boots clicking in a measured rhythm, stopping just a few feet from Agastya.
She looked up slightly to meet his eyes, her gaze piercing and absolute. "If High Command has deemed you necessary for the Vanguard, I will not waste energy debating it. But understand this, Astragan: survival in this unit is not a right. It is an achievement."
Agastya met her gaze without flinching. ‘So, she’s the type who leads from the front,’ he noted internally, recognising and respecting the cold pragmatism of a veteran killer. "Understood, ma'am."
"I am Captain Alice Regina," she stated, her hand resting casually on the silver pommel of her rapier. "I command this team, and you will train under me. That means your life, your death, and your conditioning now belong to me."
"Yes, Captain," he replied evenly, ensuring his tone remained completely flat.
"Good." She then turned her head, fixing a sharp glare on the grinning marksman. "Now, Dictor. You missed the operational briefing. While I acknowledge that retrieving our new asset was your excuse..."
"...A highly valid and time-consuming excuse, Captain," Dictor chimed in smoothly, entirely unrepentant as he leaned back against the plush velvet of the sofa.
"Vanguard protocol still dictates a penalty for tardiness," Alice continued, her voice hardening to talk over him. "However, since I am feeling generous today, your punishment shall be transferred." She shifted her gaze back to Agastya, the ghost of a cruel, testing smile touching her lips. "How about our rookie shoulders the burden?"
Agastya’s jaw tightened imperceptibly. ‘Of course. Welcome to the team.’
"It will serve a dual purpose," Alice announced, taking a step back to open the centre of the room. "I am punishing Dictor by punishing his recruit. Astragan, you will spar against Kael Mortis. However, there will be absolutely no Aether allowed. No structural enhancement to harden skin. No shields. No special abilities. Pure physical strength and martial arts, face-to-face. By this, we will be able to figure out your true baseline."
The massive man on the sofa, Torin, let out a deep, rumbling laugh that practically shook the floorboards beneath them. "A fistfight? Against the baker? Captain, Kael is going to fold him in half."
Kael Mortis let out a long, long-suffering sigh. The slender young man pushed his thick, black-rimmed spectacles up the bridge of his nose and slowly stood up. He didn't look angry; he just looked deeply inconvenienced.
"Captain," Kael said mildly, his voice a calm, clinical drone that lacked any trace of malice. "He is a civilian. Even without channelling Aether into my muscles, my Vanguard conditioning is vastly superior to his. If I strike him with full force, I am statistically likely to shatter his ribs or rupture an organ."
Alice crossed her arms, leaning slightly to one side, her silver eyes completely devoid of mercy. "Then he had better learn how to dodge, Mortis. Move to the training hall."
They filed out of the large meeting room, leaving their heavy coats and Aetheric weaponry behind—all except Alice, who kept her silver-scabbarded rapier firmly at her hip. And Theodora's eyes were still closed even as she stood.
The group navigated the quiet, blue-lit corridors of the headquarters. The passages felt more like the catacombs of a forgotten era than a modern military installation.
They walked in a synchronised, militaristic rhythm—except for Agastya, whose perfectly silent footsteps betrayed the ghost of his former profession. He kept his gaze fixed forward, acutely aware of the dangerous company he kept.
As they descended into a darker, narrower corridor via a steep set of stone stairs, Dictor fell into step beside Agastya. He cheerfully nudged the assassin’s shoulder, a grin plastered across his face.
"Don't look so grim, baker," Dictor whispered, his tone dropping its usual theatrical volume but keeping its playful edge. "Listen to me: just keep your hands up and block. Dodge if you can, but protect your head. Kael is a stickler for the rules; he's not going to use his full force against an unconditioned civilian. He doesn't actually want to kill you."
Agastya glanced at the marksman, his expression utterly blank. In his past life, Agastya was an assassin forged in the industrialised underbelly of the empire. He had been broken down and rebuilt into a perfect, biological engine of endurance. But this new vessel was different.
Internally, his mind was running a hundred calculations a second. He looked down at his own hands as they walked. The skin was smooth. Soft. The muscles beneath were lean, but they lacked the dense, iron-hard conditioning of his previous body. He had survived the execution in the alley, waking up in this new body. However, as he subtly flexed his fingers, he realised his initial assumption of physical weakness was a dangerous miscalculation.
The uncalloused exterior was merely a superficial veil. Beneath the deceptive softness lay a highly athletic, intricately conditioned musculature. It lacked the bulky mass of a street brawler, replacing it instead with the terrifying, elastic tensile strength of a striking viper. One thing was clear to him. Astragan had been a warrior disguised as a tradesman
"I mean it," Dictor continued, clapping him heavily on the back. "Just survive for three minutes without crying, and the Captain will call the match. Show them you have a spine, and you'll be fine."
'Easy for him to say,’ Agastya thought coldly.
He remembered the old master who had ultimately put a bullet in his head. That monster had taught him how to dismantle a larger opponent using nothing but leverage and joint manipulation. He couldn't rely on raw power. He had to rely purely on momentum, deflection, and the two decades of lethal experience buried in his soul. ‘The tricky part,’ Agastya thought grimly, ‘is defending myself without accidentally revealing that I know exactly how to snap his neck in three different ways.’
After a short walk through the dimly lit passage, Alice stopped in front of a massive, reinforced iron door and pushed it open. She stepped inside first, followed by the rest of the team, with Agastya bringing up the rear.
Inside, the training hall was vast—nearly a hundred and fifty meters across—lit by a brilliant, transparent luminescence from heavy glass Aether-bulbs mounted in the high ceiling.
The scale of the underground facility was staggering, a testament to the vast resources backing the Vanguard. The dull-grey metal on the walls wasn't just for structural integrity; it was designed to contain kinetic shockwaves and erratic Aetheric blasts that would otherwise collapse a standard building.
Carved deeply into the floorboards were large, intricate formations. It was an ancient geometric mandala perfectly fused with the schematic lines of clockwork machinery. These were Null-Yantras, formations specifically designed to completely suppress the flow of ambient Aether and render all magic utterly useless. They seemed to pulse faintly, creating a heavy, oppressive atmosphere that physically pressed down on Agastya’s chest.
On one side of the room, a steep iron staircase led up to an observation balcony. Alice, Torin, Dictor, and Theodora made their way up the steps to spectate, leaving Agastya and Kael alone on the sprawling mat to close the remaining gap between them.
Agastya and Kael moved toward the centre of the room, stopping with only a few meters of empty space separating them.
Kael methodically unclasped the heavy bronze artifact from his wrist and walked over to set it neatly on a side bench with a heavy thud. He then took off his black-rimmed glasses, carefully folding them next to the bracelet. When he turned back around and rolled his shoulders, the scholarly demeanour completely vanished. Without his spectacles, Kael’s dark eyes were terrifyingly sharp, transforming him from a quiet academic into a lethal soldier.
"I apologise in advance, Astragan," Kael said quietly, raising his fists into a flawless, textbook combat guard. "I will try to make this as quick and painless as possible. If you feel anything tear or break, yield immediately."
Agastya stood loosely, purposefully avoiding the rigid, flawless stance of an imperial assassin to maintain his cover as an amateur. He had to suppress the baker's residual memories—the phantom smell of rising yeast and cardamom—to focus entirely on the violent geometry of the impending fight. He let his arms hang just a fraction lower than they should, feigning the nervous, open tension of a civilian.
"Don't hold back on my account," Agastya replied, his voice dropping to a deadly, flat whisper.
Up on the balcony, Theodora leaned against the iron railing, her eyes closed. ‘I’ve got twenty Elartraum on Kael breaking your nose,’ her syrupy voice echoed directly in the centre of Agastya's mind, thick with amusement. ‘Don't disappoint me, Astragan.’
Agastya ignored the telepath entirely. His sharp blue eyes locked onto Kael's centre of mass, his mind already calculating the trajectory, velocity, and leverage of the inevitable first strike.
From above, Captain Alice Regina raised her hand, her silver eyes glinting in the pale light.
"Begin!"