The Sweet Spot of Three Seconds
Fate moved back to the city and sold the golden treasures, along with the silverware and other valuables. Then he went to the Academy and set a bag of water stones on the counter at the Exchange Center.
The clerk looked at it strangely. Dust motes drifted in the pale light through the shutters. She pulled out the stones and checked them one by one, systematically.
When she finished, she said, “There’s quite a lot here, but they’re all rough—we’ll need to refine them before anyone can use them safely. I can give you twelve gold coins and forty-seven silver.”
Fate looked like she’d slapped him.
“Are you kidding me? These are worth thirty gold coins, easily.”
Lara shook her head. “You realize someone has to spend days refining these. Fifteen gold. That’s it.”
“Oh, come on. We’re not in a mining town—this is the Academy. I could get fifteen gold selling straight to the owner of a water stone mine. Even in the city I’d get twenty-three, from any merchant worth their salt.”
Lara looked genuinely pained.
“You drive a hard bargain. Nineteen gold, and not a coin more. Don’t like it? Take it to town yourself.”
Fate studied her for a long moment, then let the deal go through. He could tell she was pleased with herself—she’d probably skimmed a little on the side.
Fate grinned.
“Where’s my receipt?” he asked, once she’d handed over the coins and taken the stones.
That caught her off guard. “A receipt? You actually want one?”
Fate looked at her, puzzled.
“Why would you assume I got these through illegal channels? Please. I’m an honest man who only makes honest deals.”
Lara’s expression soured slightly, though she tried to hide it. She sighed, pulled out a form, and started filling it in, then handed him the pen to sign.
He pretended to start signing, then stopped.
“How much would you have paid if I hadn’t asked for this?”
She kept a perfectly straight face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, come on. I’m not a kid. Just curious.”
She stared at him for a long moment, then finally said, “Twenty-three.”
Fate laughed.
“Knew it. Well, you owe me a date now.”
He set the pen down, winked, and left. Lara watched the door for a long time after he’d gone, arms crossed, a faint flush still on her cheeks.
Fate spent the rest of Family Days not with Pan, but locked in his room, refining the matrix built around the immortal flame. Once it was in a workable state, he fed it the freshly gathered life force.
The flame refined it into a green, liquid-seeming mist—condensing it further and further until, out of a hundred orcs‘ worth of raw life force, he was left with only a few drops.
Even so, he could feel the power packed into them. Those few drops of source ki held more strength than every scrap of ki he’d gathered before.
Not wanting to mix the two kinds of energy, Fate burned through the last of his old ki, fusing what remained into the immortal flame alongside a trickle of life force. It took him the rest of the day and the whole night to finish.
Candle wax pooled thick on the desk beside him by the time he was done. But when he stood up in the morning, he felt genuinely refreshed.
Oddly, morning martial arts training was crowded that day—every familiar beast in the class had come to watch from the sidelines. The Academy encouraged new summoners to keep their familiar close for a few weeks after the bonding, to strengthen the connection, and gave them leeway to do it.
“Look, his familiar’s just like him—no friends,” one classmate said, and half the class laughed.
Fate ignored it. True, Pan stood apart, and even the white drake kept as much distance from him as it could—but that wasn’t about popularity.
Beasts could sense things people couldn’t. On some fundamental level, they were all afraid of Pan.
Kate watched Pan for a while before giving her instructions, pairing Fate with Tivi again, to the visible disappointment of a few classmates.
“Congratulations on the drake,” Fate said to Tivi. “Not Pan-level, but she should serve you well.”
Tivi shot him an odd look, but he didn’t give her time to answer—he came at her with his sword at nearly twice the speed he’d shown days before.
It caught her off guard, but she recovered before the blow landed. Steel rang against steel, sharp in the cold morning air.
After a few minutes of exchanges, he lost, taking two hits to the body. The second round was shorter—barely two minutes before she had him cornered.
She was already resetting for round three when Fate raised a hand.
“I need to recover my ki.”
He sat down and meditated. Resting between sparring matches wasn’t unheard of, but Tivi still looked surprised—until now, Fate had never once rested, even injured.
The quality’s much finer now, Fate thought, but I still don’t have the volume to recover fast, even with the life force cutting the time down. And there’s something else—no matter how much ki I burn in one move, I don’t feel the floor. Like I could dump everything into a single strike and it wouldn’t matter.
He turned the thought over for a while, made a few adjustments, and after four minutes, stood, drew both swords, and took a slow breath.
Tivi was braced when he stood—but not for this.
He vanished from her line of sight. Only pure instinct let her block the strike that came from her left a heartbeat later, but the force behind it was too much.
Her sword flew from her hand. She tried to create distance, tried to find him again—useless. The next thing she knew, the weakest boy in the class was sitting on top of her, grinning.
“Got you again,” Fate said—same position as their first spar.
He’d poured his entire reserve of ki into a three-second burst, leaving himself completely dry, but the purity of the new energy let him spend it all at once, making him faster and stronger than even Tivi, if only for a moment.
Kate, standing beside them, understood immediately what had happened, even if she didn’t know how he’d managed it. She gave the rest of the class a break to play with their familiars, then turned to Fate without a word of explanation, expecting that he’d follow.
Fate considered ignoring it for good measure, then decided against it and moved after Kate.
She led him off the field toward a smaller tower connected to the Academy’s central spire. At the top sat the office of the Sector Head—the Light Knight Headmaster.
“Kate,” the headmaster said as they entered through the double doors, “what are you doing here at this hour?”
Fate stepped into a room easily ten metres long. The Sector Head—a striking woman in her early forties—was clearly something of a show-off; her walls were lined with magic items and weapons of varying grades, edges catching the candlelight.
Kate didn’t answer right away. Instead, she gestured at Fate.
“You remember his file. The one everyone wrote off as too weak for the Academy.”
“Kate, I’ll tell you what I tell everyone else,” the headmaster—Cassie—said. “I can’t expel a student for being weak and lazy. There’s no legal ground.”
Kate ignored that entirely. She grabbed Fate’s left hand and checked his ki, then asked, “How long can you sustain that speed boost before you burn out?”
Fate saw no point lying.
“Three seconds. I could concentrate it tighter—one second—but that’s too short to actually land a hit. Three is the sweet spot.”
Kate turned to Cassie, and there was real weight in her voice—like she was reporting something catastrophic.
“This boy can match a master-tier knight’s speed and strength for three seconds before his reserves run dry. I don’t know how, but three days ago his ki was still baseline beginner. Now the purity’s on par with mine. Maybe higher.”
Cassie’s smirk faded into something serious.
“You’re sure?”
Kate nodded. Cassie stood, crossed the room, and grabbed Fate’s hand herself, none too gently, checking his ki directly. Her eyes flashed white for a moment. Then she sat back down.
“Boy. Where did you get the refinement technique?”
They’re sitting on a technique for refining ki, Fate thought. Bastards. I’ve never even heard of something like that existing.
He didn’t much care for being interrogated like this by a stranger.
“We haven’t even had a first date.”
He flicked his eyes, pointedly, toward Cassie’s chest. Kate looked scandalized.
Cassie just smiled thinly.
“Quite a look for a boy your age. I’ll sleep with you, if that’s genuinely all you want out of this.”
This time it was Fate’s turn to look shocked.
“You think that little of yourself?”
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