The last thing he built before the exam was a way to use everything else at once.

The idea came from Erika. He had been in the archive two evenings after the Drakhound, reading through the structure of the Hunter exam — a written portion and a practical one, the practical broken into four sections: a pit course, a barrier check, a scenario assessment, and a combat demonstration against a training automaton.

"The pit is the section people underestimate," Erika said. She was shelving behind him. "It isn't strength. It's speed and route-finding. A low-Competence candidate can beat a high one through the pit if they read the terrain fast enough. The record is thirty-six seconds. A standard pass is under ninety."

"How long is the course?"

"Forty meters of constructed obstacle. Broken beams. Rope nets. A drop. A climb. Varied footing. No two runs are the same — the Guild Master rearranges the sections every cycle."

"So it's not memorizable."

"No. You read it and you move."

He thought about that for most of the walk home, and that night he put the question to ALICE directly.

"Back on Earth I played games where you could assign a whole sequence to a single key. Macros. One button, four actions, executed in the right order automatically."

[I am aware of the concept.]

"Could we do that here? For the pit — I'd fold Athletics, Intuition, and Cartography into one protocol. When I trigger it, you lay the optimal route over my vision in real time. My feet find the footholds before my eyes consciously pick them."

[That is within my processing capacity. Three competences under a single verbal trigger is feasible. Four approaches my limit. Beyond four, error rates climb.]

(Then we build the three first. The pit. Call it Pathfinder.)

They built it that night.

He tested it the next morning in the yard — a rough course of stacked logs, overturned barrels, a rope strung between two fence posts, the narrow gap between the woodpile and the wall. He triggered the protocol by thinking the word, and a luminous trace bloomed across his vision, and his feet found the route a half-second ahead of his conscious decisions. He cleared it clean on the third attempt.

The others came over the next several days, because Pathfinder had worked, and because once he could compress the pit into a single word he understood he could compress other things too.

Stone Wall was next — Combat and Intuition and SKJOLD, braided around the half-second before a hit lands. Angled stance, weight on the back foot, the shield rune pre-loaded, his whole body set to redirect incoming force instead of absorbing it. Serpent Dance followed: BRUK and THOLD and Athletics and Daggers — speed-burst in, binding chains on the joints, strike, speed-burst out. And Final Strike was the last and the hardest, four inputs at the edge of what ALICE could hold — SINN to throw a sound, target identification to find the weak point, MAKT to charge the blade, and the Stab to finish. The timing had to be perfect. The margin was effectively zero.

Four protocols. Four sequences, each the summary of hours of practice reduced to a single word.

(We're turning me into a programmable weapon.)

[We are turning you into an efficient weapon. There is a difference.]

(What's the difference?)

[A programmable weapon does what it is told. An efficient weapon does what is needed, with the minimum force required, and survives to do it again tomorrow — but it can still think past the bounds it was given. It can correct itself in the moment.]

(I prefer your version.)

[I know.]

Offense was only half of it.

The exam meant a hall full of licensed Hunters and Guild examiners, and somewhere among them — it was not impossible — a Voyeur. He had been read once already, in a market, by a woman who needed three seconds and a glance to see the thing he was. Marienne had not even tried hard. If a single examiner with that gift looked at him too closely on the wrong day, the license would be the least of what he lost.

So he built insurance.

He had flagged the recipe weeks earlier, hunting the bestiary for the thing that nearly killed him near the ruin, when he came across a passage on Duct-Worms — a parasite, rare but real, that attached itself to the mana ducts through the skin and fed on the passive mana there. For a man with a core it was lethal in days. For someone like him, coreless, it would simply persist, draining the system slowly until the victim died of a magical anemia. There was no cure in the literature. Only prevention: a mana-coagulating decoction, drunk before entering parasite ground, that blocked the ducts and left nothing for the worm to feed on.

He built it backward from Amaranthia, the binding root, through a long series of failures — one that produced nausea, one an hour of unpleasant tingling — until attempt twenty-seven came out thick and dark and bitter: Amaranthia at triple concentration, cut with a mineral filtrate Erika had mentioned once in passing. He brewed it late one night and drank it down in a single swallow.

For ten seconds, ALICE went silent.

Not quiet. Silent. Gone. The connection severed. The Sixth Sense vanished. The status window refused to open. The low background hum of his own body through the system's lens disappeared entirely, and he sat on the bed with bile in his mouth and his hands shaking — because he was alone in his own head for the first time since the cave, and it felt like losing a limb he hadn't known he had.

Then she came back.

[What. Did you just. Make.]

(ALICE?)

[My connection to your system was severed for nine point four seconds. Total blockage of mana circulation through the ducts. No readings, in or out. You were, for those seconds, a complete blank.]

The thought arrived slowly, then very fast.

(A Voyeur reads mana flow. Marienne read the stain on me because the ducts carry just enough mana for a reader to find the absence. But if the ducts are blocked completely — if there is nothing moving — there is nothing to read. Not Blessed. Not Tainted. Nothing.)

[Precise. For a mage this compound would kill — the core would pump against the blockage until the ducts ruptured. You have no core. Your ducts hold what they hold, and the coagulant freezes that stasis. Temporary. Opaque to any scan. The parasite finds no flow to attach to, and neither does a Voyeur.]

(Duration?)

[One to two hours per dose.]

He brewed three more and hid them in three places — one sewn into the mattress lining, one in the false bottom of the alchemy kit, one in the inventory.

[New Recipe: Mana Coagulant.] [Warning: Blocks mana ducts.]

(Insurance,) he thought. (Against the parasite. And against every Voyeur in that hall, until I find a better way to hide what I am.)

The night before the exam he lay on his bed and did not review.

ALICE had already given him the numbers — eighty-seven percent on the written, sixty-eight on the practical — and any more studying would only tire him. He reached under the mattress and felt the edge of the coagulant vial. Still there.

Rain began again on the roof, the same patient tapping that had threaded through the whole month. The inn below was quiet; Hector had closed the kitchen early. The only sound that carried through the walls was the settling of old timber, the small creaks and adjustments of a building that had stood longer than Dante had been alive.

He thought of his mother.

Not in words. Just the image of her hand reaching for his forehead to check for fever — a gesture from so many winter mornings of his childhood that he had forgotten it was an image until this moment. The warmth of her palm. The smell of her soap. He touched the note in his inner pocket and left his fingers there.

Then, more quietly, he thought of Vaelor. Of a servant who had wanted knowledge enough to steal the Word, and had paid for it with his voice, and had been thrown into a dark from which no report had ever returned. The five runes Dante had learned were, if the legend was true, five small pieces of defiance — traced once by a servant who could not be erased, and handed down across centuries by everyone the Eptarchy had judged unworthy to shape the world on their own terms.

(Cast-out ones,) he thought, to no one in particular. (A club I didn't know I'd joined.)

His hand closed around the note in his pocket. He closed his eyes.

He dreamed of the Twilight Peaks. He heard the roar of monsters between the mountains. He saw Erika behind the counter, green eyes bright. And then a dark shadow, much larger than him, stretched across the whole of Oakhaven — a shape he could not make out, but that filled him with a terror older than thought.

In the dream, he heard a voice.

"You — are — my —"

And then —

"HEY! WAKE UP, BOY!"