The twenty-fourth round ended with my face pressed against the gym mat, chest heaving like a broken bellows, and my left arm completely numb from maintaining Wave Motion output for the better part of an hour. The golden spiral had died somewhere around rep eighteen of the final set, flickering out like a candle in a hurricane when my stamina reserves finally hit empty.

I lay there with my right arm draped across my eyes, blocking out the fluorescent lights that felt like they were drilling holes in my skull. Every muscle fiber in my body had filed a formal complaint and was threatening to go on strike. My lungs burned. My vision swam. The taste of copper filled my mouth where I’d bitten my cheek during the last few reps.

"It’s a sprint, not a marathon, Monroe."

Vale’s voice came from somewhere above me. I didn’t have the energy to look up and confirm his location. The man could have been floating upside down on the ceiling for all I cared.

"Sprint," I gasped. "Right. Noted."

Footsteps approached, and Vale crouched down beside me. His mismatched eyes came into view at the edge of my peripheral vision, studying my prone form with the detached interest of a scientist observing a particularly stubborn specimen.

"The integration work is progressing faster than I expected. Your ability to maintain dual output while under physical stress improved significantly over the past hour. That’s good. But you’re still treating your stamina like it’s fuel in a tank instead of treating it like a renewable resource that responds to demand."

"Feels like the tank is empty."

"That’s because you keep expecting it to empty. Stop approaching exhaustion like it’s a wall and start approaching it like it’s a doorway." Vale’s voice carried that casual certainty that made everything he said sound reasonable, even when he was describing impossible feats of physical conditioning. "Your body will produce more if you ask it to produce more. But you have to mean it."

I tried to process that through the fog of total physical depletion and gave up. "Sure. Ask nicely. Got it."

Vale chuckled. "Rest for two minutes. Then get up and hit the showers. You’re going to be late for Nishimura’s lecture if you stay here much longer, and punctuality is one of the few things that man actually cares about."

"What time is it?"

"Seven forty-two."

I groaned. Homeroom started at eight. Nishimura’s class started at nine. If I wanted breakfast—actual breakfast, not just whatever protein bar I could steal from the vending machines—I needed to move. Soon.

But moving required convincing my muscles to remember how to function, and they seemed to have developed collective amnesia on that particular subject.

"Monroe."

"Yeah?"

He walked toward the exit, pausing at the door long enough to add, "Two more minutes, then shower. Your squad is depending on you to be ready for Friday. Don’t disappoint them because you couldn’t manage basic time management."

The door closed with a soft click, leaving me alone in the gym with the sound of my own ragged breathing and the faint hum of the climate control system.

I stayed flat on my back for exactly ninety more seconds, counting the acoustic tiles in the ceiling and waiting for my heart rate to drop back into something resembling normal parameters. When I finally pushed myself upright, every joint in my body protested the movement with varying degrees of enthusiasm. My shoulders felt like they’d been dislocated and reattached by someone with only a theoretical understanding of human anatomy.

But I was upright. That counted for something.

I gathered my water bottle and towel, moving toward the door with the unsteady gait of someone who had just redefined their relationship with physical limitations. The hallway outside stretched ahead of me, empty and quiet in the early morning light filtering through the windows.

Then I stopped.

The gym was empty. Vale was gone. I had maybe twenty minutes before I needed to be showered, dressed, and sitting in homeroom looking like I wasn’t about to collapse from exhaustion.

Twenty minutes.

I pivoted back toward the door I’d almost exited, pushing through with enough force that it swung wide before clicking shut behind me. The training dummies lined the far wall in neat formation, their humanoid frames wrapped in reinforced synthetic material engineered to absorb Bronze-tier impacts without showing wear. Standard academy equipment, perfectly adequate for technique drills and accuracy work, but nowhere near what I’d need for a proper stress test.

They’d have to be enough.

I deposited my water bottle and towel near the entrance, then made my way to the center of the mat where Vale had just finished systematically dismantling my cardiovascular system for the past hour. My legs wobbled like they’d forgotten how joints worked. My arms hung at my sides with all the structural integrity of wet noodles. Every functioning brain cell I had left pointed out that attempting to channel abilities while my body was this compromised would earn me a one-way ticket to the medical center, if I was lucky.

But rational decisions had never been my specialty.

I needed to understand what I’d taken from Addison. Needed to see if Reaper’s Edge translated from theory to practice, or if I’d just stolen a glorified party trick that looked impressive in her hands but would sputter uselessly in mine.

Addison’s ability sat in my mental inventory like a loaded weapon I’d never test-fired. Reaper’s Edge. Copper rank. The power to manifest death-aspected weapons from condensed mana, create wounds that resisted healing, and harvest energy from killing blows. An A-rank ability stolen from someone who wielded it with terrifying efficiency, now reduced to its most basic iteration and waiting for me to figure out how to make it useful.

The System interface flickered into view when I focused on it.

◆ ABILITY LIBRARY ◆

ACTIVE SLOTS (3/3):

├─ \[Wave Motion\] - Bronze Rank

├─ \[Sensory Hijack\] - Silver Rank

└─ \[Treasure Sense\] - Bronze Rank

STORED ABILITIES (1):

└─ \[Reaper’s Edge\] - Copper Rank

Time to test out my newest toy.