Let the shadows around my hands flicker and thin as if the impact weakened them beyond easy recovery.
The gallery murmurs. Someone in the dark Nephilim section groans. Iris covers her mouth with her hand.
I get up. Slowly.
Rebuild the shield with the visible effort of a student pushing her limits — shadow re-forming around my left hand in stages, each layer taking concentration that I let show on my face.
Breathing hard. Not because I’m tired. Because tired is what a normal dark Nephilim would be after absorbing a hit like that.
Elara watches me reassemble my defense and something shifts in her expression.
Not satisfaction — frustration.
Because she threw her best provocation and got exactly the response she didn’t want.
A normal reaction. An ordinary dark Nephilim pushed to her limit and recovering with effort. No living shadows. No independent behavior. No crimson-tipped anything.
Just a student. Fighting. The way students fight.
The remaining ten minutes are uneventful.
I fight at seventy percent. Give ground when I should. Take hits I could have dodged because dodging them the way my shadows want to would require speed and awareness that my file says I don’t have.
Elara pushes. I bend. She pushes harder. I bend further.
The duel settles into the pattern she didn’t want — a grinding, unspectacular exchange between a strong Light Nephilim and a decent dark Nephilim that demonstrates nothing except that both of them can fight and neither of them is exceptional.
“Time,” Ashworth calls. “No winner declared. Result: draw.”
The gallery applauds politely.
The dark Nephilim section louder than the rest because a draw against a Light Nephilim challenger is respectable, especially against Elara, who everyone knows is the strongest light wielder in our year.
Iris is cheering. The students around her are clapping.
It looks like a win because it was supposed to look like a win — the successful defense of a dark Nephilim who held her own against a superior opponent.
In the top gallery, the four Hunters close their notebooks.
I can’t see what they’ve written from here but their body language tells me what I need to know — relaxed, uninterested, the posture of professionals who came expecting evidence and found nothing worth documenting.
Unremarkable.
That’s what they’ll write. I’d bet my life on it.
Which I am, actually — betting my life on fifteen minutes of the most disciplined performance I’ve ever given.
Elara doesn’t congratulate me.
Doesn’t look at me as she leaves the arena. Her jaw is set in the rigid line of a woman who threw everything she had at a wall and the wall didn’t crack the way she needed it to.
She wanted me to slip. To reveal something. To give her the ammunition she needs to justify the suspicions she’s been building since the first week of term.
I gave her nothing.
Fifteen minutes of nothing.
The most difficult, exhausting, soul-crushing nothing of my life.
