Maren pulled her punches for two rounds.

The Class B student across from her was a boy named Galt with a stone-type boar, and he came in heavy each exchange, telegraphing his haymakers from half the arena away.

She dodged the first.

Sidestepped the second.

Let the third graze her ribs because she was too busy keeping her temperature in check to move properly.

The fourth one caught her clean.

An earth-hammer fist crushed into her left side.

Maren’s feet left the ground for a half second. When she landed her eyes were gold.

One tail ignited behind her.

Full foxfire, bright enough to throw shadows across the training yard.

The practice dummy six feet behind her turned to slag in two seconds, metal dripping into the sand.

Six hundred students went quiet.

Vesna blew the whistle.

"Match concluded, Class B wins on points." Vesna’s voice carried across the yard. "Clear the ring."

Maren’s eyes went back to brown.

The tail pulled in.

She grabbed her jacket off the railing and walked, but the sand where she’d been standing was glass now, and everyone saw it.

◆◆◆◆

In the VIP observation box, Hira’s tablet chirped.

The readout lasted four seconds before Dani’s moth landed on the tablet’s edge.

Its wings pulsed once, a burst of bio-luminescent static that scrambled the live feed for just long enough.

The spectral data cycled past without recording.

But Hira had been looking at the screen when it populated.

She tapped the moth off her tablet with one finger and looked down at the training yard where Maren was putting her jacket on.

She wrote something. Soren couldn’t see what.

Vesna dismissed class ten minutes early.

On his way past her station Soren caught her eye and she mouthed one word without turning her head.

"Careful."

He gave her nothing back.

Vesna had been the only instructor at this academy who treated Class Z students as actual tamers instead of charity cases.

She’d integrated combat drills from the old Continental syllabus, the kind the Bureau stopped funding after the reforms because they trained tamers to fight alongside their beasts instead of hiding behind them.

The Bureau didn’t like tamers who could fight on their own.

Tamers who could fight on their own asked questions about why the Bureau existed.

He respected Vesna.

But respect didn’t mean he could trust her with what was happening.

That night, alone in his room with Grimm curled at the foot of the bed, Soren closed his eyes and reached for something he’d been feeling since the Convergence.

During the triple-channel seal in the Fracture chamber, when the Author’s presence had brushed against the Heart for those three seconds, something had stuck.

A sense that wasn’t sight or sound or any physical input.

He’d been calling it Script Sight in his head because that was the closest thing he could compare it to.

Reading the grain of the wood.

Feeling where events wanted to flow before they flowed there.

It had no range and no precision.

The system never acknowledged it because it existed outside the system entirely, a side effect of touching something that wrote the rules the system ran on.

He focused on the skirmish in three days.

Lior’s Crowned Lion.

The combat choreography he’d memorized from the novel, where Troy fought the same lion in the same arena with the same six hundred spectators.

In the novel, the lion absorbed ambient mana in Phase 1 through nodes on its mane base, then surged in Phase 2.

The counter was specific: identify the absorption nodes through Pack Sense during Phase 1, hit them with shadow pulses to disrupt the cycling, then attack during the gap between Phase 1 and Phase 2 when the lion was energy-neutral.

Soren had memorized every node position, every timing window, every angle.

He reached through Script Sight and looked at the skirmish.

The lion’s nodes were different.

Positions shifted, cycling pattern altered, the absorption sequence he’d memorized ran on a rhythm that no longer matched what he was sensing.

The combat variables had been rewritten.

His entire counter-strategy was built on data that no longer existed.

[DING! — Script variance detected. Pre-existing tactical data: DEGRADED. Estimated reliability of original novel combat knowledge: 64% and falling.]

More than a third of everything he knew about that fight was wrong.

The Author had changed the parameters around him specifically because he’d used them successfully before.

Grimm lifted her head.

Master, you’re tense.

"My playbook is dead."

Then we improvise.

"Against a Crowned Lion with restructured combat architecture in front of the auditor and six hundred witnesses?"

Grimm set her chin on his knee. We’ve done worse.

She was right, but that didn’t make it better.

A knock at the door. Two taps, pause, one tap.

He opened it and Joan stood in the corridor with her Bureau jacket buttoned wrong, which meant she’d dressed in a hurry.

She looked past him into the room, saw Grimm, and didn’t come in.

"The auditor is requesting a full-spectrum scan of every Class Z student." Joan kept her voice low. "I can delay it forty-eight hours."

"And after that?"

"Cole’s identity becomes Council property." Joan reached into her jacket and pulled out a data chip. She held it between two fingers. "Everything I have on the Author function. I was going to destroy it."

"Why didn’t you?"

"I don’t know. Figure out why for me."

She put the chip in his hand. Her fingers brushed his palm and pulled away. Then she turned and walked.

Soren closed the door. He looked at the chip.

A Continental Bureau senior investigator had just handed classified intelligence to a Class Z scholarship student because she couldn’t bring herself to burn it, so she needed someone else to carry whatever she’d found.

He put the chip in his pocket.

[DING! — Item acquired: Bureau Intelligence File — Author Function (CLASSIFIED). Contents: unknown. Tamer discretion advised.]

The skirmish was in three days. The seal had less than that.