CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: New Challengers, Training, and Shifting Shadows
Part I — The Match Everyone Watched Differently
Location: Amity Colosseum | The Following Afternoon
The arena reconfigured itself into desert terrain and ocean sections and the specific visual logic of a tournament that had been running long enough to have developed its own momentum, and Team SSSN took their positions with the particular energy of people who had been waiting for this specific stage of things.
Ruby was watching the match.
Blake was watching the match with additional attention on Sun, which she would not have described it as.
Weiss was in the process of realizing that Neptune's casual "Ladies" directed at his opponents, delivered with his characteristic mixture of charm and complete absence of social awareness, had evaporated her earlier goodwill more efficiently than any deliberate insult could have managed.
"Break his stupid face, NDGO!" she called out, the sweetness she'd been cultivating for exactly zero minutes giving way entirely.
Yang snorted.
Blake looked at her with the expression of someone choosing words.
"Neptune," Blake said, "has his own relationship with subtlety."
Several rows back, where Team NDTSA had arranged themselves, Daikon heard every note of Weiss's initial enthusiasm and the speed at which it had reversed, and felt the specific mix of emotions that occurred when you were a person who had been developing feelings for someone and who was currently watching that someone react to a different person with the full range of their emotional register in the space of thirty seconds.
He returned his attention to the match with the focused precision of someone who had decided to be professional about this.
Scarlett, sitting beside him, did not look at him.
She did not need to.
The match developed with the specific logic of tournament matches that went exactly as far as the terrain permitted before becoming something else. Sun's acrobatics found their register in the desert sections. Neptune, who had been actively engineering his position away from the ocean's edge with the careful attention of someone pretending very hard not to be doing that, attracted the crowd's curiosity without their understanding why.
"He's afraid of the water," Nova said, keeping it low.
"Obviously," Aiko confirmed. Her ears had been tracking his heartrate since the terrain settled.
"Is he going to—" Ruby started.
"He'll either face it or lose the match," Turuk said. "That's how these things resolve."
Blake said nothing, which was its own form of engagement.
What happened when Neptune finally committed — when he drove his weapon into the water's edge and let the electricity run — had the quality of an action that had been building long enough that the execution was almost anticlimactic. The NDGO members went down. Team SSSN advanced. The crowd gave them the ovation a well-engineered comeback earned.
Sun found Blake in the stands, because Sun always found Blake in the stands, and offered his characteristic double-gun gesture from the arena floor with the unguarded enthusiasm of someone who had not yet learned to moderate his sincerity.
Blake's ears went pink at the tips.
"Subtle," Yang said.
"Can we please focus on literally anything else," Blake replied.
Daikon stood when the group began to move toward the congratulations portion of the afternoon. Neptune looked up from the arena floor during the standing-up process, and his gaze found Daikon's with the specific quality of recognition that came not from knowing someone but from correctly reading a situation.
The Haven student looked away first, which was information.
Part II — Mercury's Fragments
Location: A Corridor, Team CMEN Quarters | That Evening
The memory that came back most often was not the clearest one.
It was the one where he was small — genuinely small, not yet trained into the specific posture that being small and in Marcus Black's house required — and someone with wolf ears was crouching beside him in the dark behind a storage cabinet, and they were both very still, and the stillness was the kind of stillness that children learned when being still meant not being found.
He couldn't make out the face.
He could remember the warmth of proximity. The specific quality of someone who was as frightened as he was and was choosing, despite that, to stay next to him rather than stay alone.
"Stop it," he told himself, in the corridor, pressing two fingers to his temple.
The door opened.
Emerald stepped out with the specific alertness she brought to situations where he was doing something she couldn't categorize. "Headache?"
"Something like that." He kept his face neutral. "The wolf faunus from Beacon. Team NDTSA. Do you have anything on her?"
The pause was a fraction of a second too long.
"Why would I have anything on a random student?"
"Because you have things on everyone," Mercury said. "And because you've been sitting on something about her since the opening ceremonies. You get a particular expression when you're managing information you've decided I shouldn't have."
Emerald's eyes moved away from his, which was itself an answer.
"Mercury." Cinder's voice, from inside, carrying the quality it always carried — not loud, not threatening, simply absolutely present. "We have work."
Mercury straightened.
The door behind him had the specific pull of decisions he hadn't made yet, and when he walked through it, he did so with the focused certainty of someone who had decided to table the question rather than answer it.
But he took the feeling of the memory with him.
He couldn't have explained why that felt important.
Part III — Aiko's Window
Location: Team NDTSA Dormitory | That Night
The window gave her the city, which was doing what the city did — keeping its own counsel, entirely indifferent to what was happening in the specific dormitory of the specific person watching it.
Aiko's ears moved through the frequency range of the night with the automatic quality of someone whose hearing was always doing something even when the rest of her was trying to rest. She could hear her teammates breathing, all three of them in various stages of sleep. She could hear the festival sounds still drifting up from the lower city. She could hear, if she concentrated in the right direction, the specific texture of the building that Team CMEN had been assigned, though it told her nothing concrete.
It had been the eyes.
She had known it immediately — that recognition that happened below the level of thought, before the brain had sorted out whether the information made sense. Silver eyes in a face she couldn't place in any memory she was sure was real, and the feeling of there you are that arrived alongside it.
"Can't sleep," Nova said, from his bed, which meant he had been awake too.
"Not really." She didn't move from the window. "Nova, do you ever have memories that feel real but don't fit anywhere?"
"More lately," he said, which was honest. "Why?"
She had been deciding how much to say. She decided on most of it.
"The boy from Team CMEN. Mercury Black."
"I noticed you watching him."
"When our eyes met, it was—" She tried to find the word that fit the experience and couldn't find one that was precise enough. "Like remembering something I didn't know I'd forgotten."
From the third bed, Turuk's voice arrived, measured and alert. He had also been awake. "What kind of memory?"
"A boy with silver eyes," Aiko said. "Hiding. Being frightened together. A promise that felt like it mattered before I understood why promises mattered." She turned from the window. "I don't know if it's real. I don't know if my memories from before I came to Beacon are real. They fit together too well, like someone arranged them that way."
"Memory manipulation," Turuk said. "It's specific enough to be a real thing rather than a general concern."
"Yes," Aiko agreed.
Nova sat up in the dark. "His too, you think."
"The way he looked at me," she said. "He recognized something and then immediately put it away, the way you put something away when you've been trained to. When keeping it out costs you too much."
"Which means whoever he's working with has an interest in keeping that recognition buried," Nova said.
"Which means investigating it directly makes him a risk."
"For both of you."
They sat in the specific quiet of three people who have reached a conclusion they don't like and have nowhere else to take it tonight.
"Get some sleep if you can," Nova said. "We'll think about it properly tomorrow."
Aiko looked at him. "Is that what you're going to do?"
"Probably not," he admitted. "But it's good advice."
She turned back to the window.
Somewhere in the building that held Team CMEN, a light went out.
She noted it the way she noted most things — without deciding what to do with the notation yet.
Part IV — What Salem Was Beginning to Understand
Location: Salem's Domain | That Night
Watts's instruments had picked up nothing that the instruments of a civilization that had never encountered gods were equipped to pick up, which meant the instruments were telling her what she already knew — that they were insufficient for the question she was asking them.
"Conservative estimate would put it at planetary-level threat capacity," he said, with the tone of someone who has run the numbers twice and is uncomfortable with both results.
"Doctor," Salem said, "what I felt yesterday was not planetary-level. The scale of it makes planetary-level feel like a domestic concern."
She moved to the window.
The Grimm below were still off. Not frightened of her — they were never frightened of her; she was the warm dark center of their world — but carrying a residue of something they had been frightened of, in the way that animals carried weather in their behavior before it arrived. The fear had already passed. The behavior remained.
"It came from Beacon," she said.
This was not new information. She had known since the moment the presence arrived where it was centered. What she was deciding was what that information meant for the shape of everything she had built.
Hazel stood near the door in the specific way he stood when he knew better than to interrupt. Good instinct, tonight.
"Ozpin's kept secrets before," she said, mostly to herself. "Relics. Maidens. His own reincarnation." A pause. "But if he has access to something of this magnitude, the question isn't whether to oppose him. The question is whether the tools I've been preparing are adequate for an opponent who can call on beings of that order."
She did not say the word she was thinking, because spoken words had a way of becoming real things, and she was not ready to give this particular word that weight.
She had spent millennia as the most powerful thing on Remnant.
The afternoon had revised that.
Revision was something she was capable of, given time.
The question was whether she had the time she assumed.
Part V — Qrow and Two Nieces
Location: Team RWBY Dormitory | That Evening
Qrow Branwen played video games the way he did most things — with the confidence of someone who knew he was better than the current result would suggest and was waiting for the current result to catch up.
"And that's when I jumped off the moving bullhead," he said, executing a combination that the game rewarded generously. "With no dust, no semblance, no backup."
"The story gets longer every time," Ruby said.
"The truth gets longer as people are ready for more of it."
Yang's character performed a finishing move. "What actually happened after that."
"I landed fine. They were very grateful. There was a celebration." He took a sip of something that was probably not the water he'd described it as. "The important parts remain consistent."
The comfortable domestic texture of this — three people who shared blood playing games in a dorm room while the festival wound down outside — had the specific quality of things that were also managing other things underneath. Qrow's ease was real. The shadow beneath it was also real.
"You said all criminal activity in Vale stopped," Ruby said, pausing the game. "After Roman."
"Did I say stopped?" Qrow set his flask down. "I said went quiet. Those are different."
"How are they different?"
"Stopped means there's less crime. Quiet means the people running the crime got better at not being visible." He looked at his nieces directly, which was the tell that the conversation had shifted registers. "When a power vacuum appears that fast and fills itself that quietly, it means someone was ready to fill it. Prepared. Waiting."
Yang's hands were still on her controller, but she wasn't looking at the screen. "You think Roman was a distraction."
"I think Roman was useful to someone and has now been used as far as his usefulness extended," Qrow said. "Which is a different thing."
Ruby thought about the specific quality of the past months — the White Fang connection, the Paladins, the breached wall, the Council session, each piece arriving as though it had been placed rather than found.
"Team STRQ," she said, because she'd been wanting to ask it for a while and this felt like the conversation that had room for it.
Qrow went still in the way of people who have been asked the question they've been expecting and are deciding what to do with it now that it's arrived.
"We thought we were the best thing that had ever happened to this world," he said. "Four people with extraordinary abilities, absolute certainty, and not nearly enough wisdom to know what we were doing with any of it." He looked out the window. "Summer, your mother — she had this quality of conviction. Of being sure, right down to the bone, that what she was doing was right. It was beautiful and it was terrifying in equal measure."
"Was it right?" Yang asked. Quiet, careful.
"Mostly," Qrow said. "But mostly doesn't protect the people who are in the place where it wasn't."
He picked up his flask again.
"Being strong enough to win and being wise enough to know what victory costs are not the same thing," he said. "I spent a long time learning that. I'd rather you both learned it faster."
Yang's tail moved in the small, involuntary way it did when she was managing something. She had been managing the revelation about her mother since the plaza. The specific quality of managing it alongside Qrow, who had known Raven, who had fought beside her, was a different kind of managing.
She did not ask about Raven tonight.
She decided, without saying so, that she would get there eventually.
Some questions wanted the right container before they could be asked.
Part VI — Weiss and Winter
Location: A Garden Pavilion, Vale | That Afternoon
The pastries were excellent, which was the kind of detail that was true and also slightly irrelevant to the weight of everything else on the table.
Winter sat with the precision of someone who had made correct posture into a habit for long enough that it was no longer distinct from simply sitting. The military bearing was real and was also, Weiss understood, a thing Winter had built on purpose out of materials that did not arrive pre-assembled.
"You're leaving today," Weiss said.
"The Paladins were the assignment," Winter confirmed. "Atlas Command expects me back."
The disappointment was real and was also fine, which was the specific quality of feeling things when you had grown up in a house where feeling things was primarily useful as information about yourself rather than claims you made on other people's time.
"Show me what you have," Winter said, nodding toward the open space at the pavilion's edge.
Weiss stood.
The glyph came up with the specific evenness of someone who had been practicing the mechanics for years. The Dust channels were cleaner than they had been two months ago — her Saiyan-enhanced aura had deepened their capacity in ways that were visible even to someone who didn't know what they were looking for. She pushed toward the summoning and felt the familiar resistance, the place where the technique hit its ceiling and stayed there.
The construct flickered.
Dissolved.
"Technical execution is improving," Winter said. "But summoning requires understanding, not just precision."
She rose, and the glyph she produced was considerably more complex, and what emerged from it had the quality of something that had been genuinely called rather than technically assembled — the Beowolf construct pacing once around the pavilion before dispersing into frost and light.
"Echoes," Winter said. "Not trophies. You call them by understanding what made them formidable in the first place."
Weiss looked at the place where the construct had been.
"There is something else," Winter said, returning to the table, and the shift in tone was the shift of someone who has been building to something and has arrived at it.
They talked about the name.
About what the name cost, and what it provided, and the difference between those two numbers. Winter spoke about two years without it — two years of proving she could succeed without the weight of it catching her or the weight of it pressing down on her. Two years of discovering that Weiss Schnee as a concept was separable from the Schnee Dust Company as a power structure.
"What would it mean?" Weiss asked. "Forging your own path, in specific terms."
"Discovering who you are when you're not performing for your father's expectations or against them," Winter said. "Which is a different task than it sounds like."
When they embraced before Winter left, Weiss noticed that it was the embrace of someone who had made a decision about showing affection and was executing it, which was its own kind of warmth.
She found, after her sister had gone, a fragment of white energy on the stone where she'd attempted the summoning — the blade shape of it, brief and dissolving, the way things dissolved when they were real enough to manifest but hadn't yet been called long enough to hold.
Her scroll buzzed on the walk back.
Her father's name on the display.
She put it in her pocket, still buzzing, and kept walking.
The decision to decline it arrived after exactly three seconds of consideration, which was two fewer seconds than she had expected to need.
Part VII — Yang and Weiss vs. FNKI
Location: Amity Colosseum | That Afternoon
The terrain revealed itself as a mixed landscape that combined lava flows with rocky outcroppings in the specific way that suggested the terrain roulette had opinions about consequences.
Flynt Coal pointed at Weiss before the match started, which was his prerogative, and what he pointed with was a legitimate grievance dressed in tournament-context clothing.
"Schnee Dust Company," he said. "Your family's practices put my father's shop under."
Weiss kept her expression controlled in the way that required actual effort.
"My family's business decisions are not my own," she said, which was the true answer and also the insufficient answer, and she knew it was insufficient while she said it, and said it anyway because it was all she had.
Neon Katt deployed herself via roller blades and a running commentary that found Yang's specific sensitivities with surgical accuracy.
"Someone's been hitting the protein shakes," she observed, zipping past at a velocity that made the observation effectively unanswerable.
Yang's eyes went gold around the edges.
Weiss put one hand on her partner's arm. Not stopping her — advising her. They want this. Don't give them this.
Yang breathed.
The gold pulled back.
The match had the quality of a lesson delivered while other things were also happening.
Neon's skate-mobility made her effectively untouchable for Yang's direct style — she was fighting someone who had made evasion into an art form and had the terrain for it. Every time Yang closed the distance, Neon was somewhere else, commentary arriving from the new location before Yang had finished processing the old one.
Flynt's quadruple sonic clone assault overwhelmed Weiss's glyph barriers through sheer geometry — four simultaneous attack vectors with distributed power didn't care about defenses built for fewer angles.
"She's being systematic," Nova observed from the stands, watching Weiss recalibrate between exchanges. "Not reacting. Assessing."
"She's going to do something risky," Blake said, which was how Blake announced that she could see where this was going.
Weiss launched herself at Flynt.
Not defensively. Not tactically. She threw herself directly at the source of the problem in a motion that abandoned the protected position she'd been maintaining and bet everything on the collision.
They went into the lava biome together.
The sonic attack fired at point-blank range.
The lava biome added its opinion.
When the aftermath cleared, Weiss was standing at the edge of a superheated section she had very deliberately guided both of them into, and Flynt's aura was significantly below what it had been.
"Yang," Weiss called, her voice carrying the specific clarity of someone who has done the difficult part and now needs the simple part to work.
Yang had been waiting for the opening.
The opening was now.
Neon, deprived of her tactical support and navigating terrain that had become less forgiving, found that her roller blades had opinions about geothermal vents that she had not consulted before the match began. Yang's pursuit, released from the obligation to be restrained while FNKI was operating at full coordination, arrived at Neon's position with the enthusiasm of something that had been waiting for exactly this.
The match ended with both opposing auras below threshold.
Port described it as "a spectacular display of adaptive strategy." Oobleck described it as "evidence of exceptionally fluid mid-combat tactical revision."
Flynt shook Weiss's hand afterward with the specific quality of someone who had come in looking for an argument and found something that made the argument less interesting.
"Respect," he said. "Taking that hit to create the opening — that was real."
"You fought well," Weiss said, and meant it without performing it.
Neon offered Yang a wave that had approximately half the condescension of her earlier commentary and considerably more of something genuine.
"You're actually fast when you're angry," she observed. "Like, impressively fast."
"I'll take that," Yang said.
Walking back, Weiss was quiet in the way of someone processing several things in sequence. The match. The gamble. The fragment of summoning she'd left on the pavilion stone. The unanswered call on her scroll.
Daikon fell into step beside her as the group reformed.
"That was a significant risk," he said.
"Yes," she agreed.
"It worked."
"Most significant risks that work look obvious in retrospect."
He looked at her. "Was it calculated or instinctive?"
She considered the question honestly. "Both, I think. I understood the math. I just had to be willing to trust it."
He nodded in the way of someone who has received an answer they find specifically interesting.
She noticed.
Neither of them said anything else immediately, which was its own form of conversation.
Part VIII — Cinder's Evening
Location: Team CMEN Quarters | That Evening
The data streams that the virus was producing had the specific quality of information that exceeded the purpose it had been deployed for — like casting a net for one kind of fish and pulling up something categorically different.
Cinder reviewed Penny Polendina's schematics with the focused attention she brought to things that had just rearranged the geometry of a plan she'd considered settled.
"She's not just an android," she told Emerald and Mercury, who had learned to interpret her thoughtful pauses. "She's Atlas's most advanced AI housing. If we can access her systems during the right moment—"
"You're changing the plan," Emerald said.
"Adapting it," Cinder corrected. "Which is what competent people do when new information arrives."
Mercury sat with the specific quality he'd had since the tournament began — present, professional, and carrying something behind the professionalism that Cinder clocked and filed without examining further. He was useful. He was reliable. Whatever was going on in his interior geography was secondary to those two facts for the moment.
She closed the scroll.
"There are also the enhanced students to consider," she said. "Emerald."
Emerald leaned forward. "I attempted to probe Nova's mental state during the ceremony. My semblance couldn't find purchase. The depth of power underneath his surface made the attempt—" She paused. "Irrelevant."
"Immune to you?"
"Not through resistance. Through scale. It was like trying to create an illusion inside something too large for the illusion to have a meaningful footprint."
Cinder stood and moved to the window, which was what she did when she was thinking about things she needed to look at obliquely.
"Then we don't fight him directly," she said. "Raw power without direction is still raw power. If we can ensure that whatever triggers his awakening points it away from our operations, or better yet, toward something we can benefit from—"
"He fights for people he cares about," Mercury said.
Both women looked at him.
"It's not a complex psychological observation," he said, with the tone of someone covering a slip they hadn't decided was a slip yet. "It's just accurate. People who fight for protective reasons spike hardest when the thing they're protecting is threatened. If you want to control where he aims, you control what he believes is in danger."
Cinder studied him for a moment.
"Yes," she said. "That's exactly what I mean."
She returned to the window.
Mercury looked at his hands.
He was aware of what he had just done — provided tactical analysis that would eventually point at people he was beginning to remember he cared about. He was also aware that not providing it would have produced the same analysis from Cinder, just more slowly.
He did not know what to do with that calculation.
He tucked it away with the other things he didn't know what to do with, which had become a large collection.
Part IX — The Pavilion with Pyrrha
Location: Ozpin's Office | That Evening
Ozpin's coffee was untouched for the second time in two days, which Glynda was beginning to find more alarming than anything else.
Qrow, who had returned from his nieces' dormitory, was occupying a chair with the particular relaxed tension of someone who knew more than he was saying and was choosing the right moments for each piece.
"James's fleet makes me nervous," he said.
"General Ironwood has legitimate security concerns," Ozpin replied. "The question is whether those concerns and our students' evolving circumstances are going to produce friction at an inconvenient time."
"Define inconvenient."
"Any time in the next several days."
Rhubar, by the window with Sala, looked at the Atlesian ships visible at the edge of the festival skyline with the expression of someone doing threat assessment by habit. "A military force positioned near a location where cosmic-level events recently occurred, commanded by someone who doesn't know what those events were — that's a specific kind of dangerous."
"He knows something changed," Sala said. "He doesn't know what. People with resources and incomplete information tend to do things with those resources."
"Which is why," Ozpin said, "we need to manage our own information carefully. And address certain other matters that have been pending."
The elevator announced its arrival.
Pyrrha Nikos stepped out with the particular composure of someone who had been called to a meeting she'd been half-expecting for weeks and had spent the walk here deciding how to receive it.
She read the room in approximately three seconds, with the rapid accuracy of a champion who had learned to read rooms in the specific way that people who were often the most dangerous person in a space learned to read them — not to find threats, but to find truths.
"Professor Ozpin," she said. "You wanted to see me."
"Please sit down, Miss Nikos," Ozpin said. "What we have to discuss will require your full attention and, I suspect, more courage than any match you've won here."
Pyrrha sat.
Her hands were folded in her lap with the stillness of someone who had decided, before entering the room, that whatever this was they were going to meet it clearly.
Sala, watching from the window, thought about the specific quality of young people standing at the edges of things much larger than they knew, and about what it cost them, and about what it made them.
Outside, Vale's lights came on in the ordinary way of lights that did not know anything special was being decided near them.
Part X — Mercury and Aiko
Location: A Courtyard, Beacon Academy | That Afternoon
He found her because he had looked up her tournament registration and told himself he was doing it for professional reasons and had stopped pretending that was true by the time he was halfway across the campus.
She heard him coming, which she always had, apparently — which was the fragment that surfaced from the memory when he got close enough.
"Aiko Reinhardt," he said.
"Mercury Black," she replied, looking up from a book she had not been reading.
They sat across from each other with the specific weight of two people who share something they can't locate.
"This is going to sound strange," he said.
"You knew someone with wolf ears," she said. "You used to hide together."
He went very still.
"Yes," he said.
"And I knew a boy with silver eyes," she said. "Who kept a promise I can't remember making."
The pieces came together with the particular physical quality of things that had been separated and were recognizing each other — not dramatic, just certain.
"We knew each other," he said.
"Before," she confirmed. "What happened to the between?"
He was quiet for a moment. Honest in the way that required deciding to be. "In my case, I think I know some of it. My father — what he was — wasn't compatible with things like friendship that existed outside his control. Memories that gave me somewhere to go were inconvenient to him."
"I don't remember before Vale," Aiko said. "I have memories of growing up there that feel real, but underneath them something doesn't quite fit. Like the memory of the texture without the actual experience."
Mercury looked at his hands. The mechanical legs below him kept their own counsel. "The people I work with would not be comfortable with this conversation."
"I know," Aiko said.
"Which means I shouldn't be having it."
"I know that too."
He met her eyes.
The wolf faunus who had hidden with him in the dark, whose name he had not been able to find in any memory that was reliably his — she was here, real, watching him with the patience of someone who had already decided that whatever this was worth, it was worth waiting for.
"I wish I could tell you more," he said. "I wish I even knew more myself."
"Mercury," she said, and the way she said his name had a quality it didn't usually have from other people — like it was describing a specific person rather than a designation. "Whatever you're in the middle of, I'm not asking you to undo it today. I just—" She stopped. Found the sentence. "I just needed to know I wasn't making it up."
"You weren't," he said. "I wasn't either."
He stood before the conversation could go further into territory he couldn't manage yet.
"Be careful," he said. "At the tournament. Just — be careful."
She watched him go.
Her tail had been very still throughout the conversation, which was unusual for her tail, which generally had opinions about everything.
Some things, apparently, were too significant for the tail to comment on.
From a different angle, in the shadows of an archway, Emerald watched the exchange.
Her scroll was in her hand before Mercury was out of sight.
She held it for a moment.
She thought about what she was about to send, and what would be done with it, and whether the word quietly meant what Cinder usually meant it to mean.
She sent the message.
She did not think about Aiko Reinhardt's expression as Mercury left.
She made a deliberate decision not to think about it.
The decision required more effort than it should have.
Part XI — Nova's Night
Location: Team NDTSA Dormitory | That Night
The footage from the evaluation match had been reviewed enough times that reviewing it again was not going to tell him anything new.
He stopped it at the moment where the silver had come through the gold — where the door had opened the fraction it had opened — and looked at his own hands on the keyboard.
"You've been at that same sequence for twenty minutes," Turuk said.
"I know."
"What are you actually thinking about?"
Nova looked at the paused frame. "During the evaluation, I touched something. Brief, but real. The silver energy — it felt like it was showing me the edge of something, but not the thing itself. And since then it hasn't gone back to wherever it was before. It's just—" He gestured in the approximate direction of his own chest. "Still there. Waiting."
"For what?"
"That's the part I don't know."
Turuk was quiet with the patient quality he had when he was thinking rather than not thinking. "Beerus told you to master the green-hair form first. The full-powered base."
"I know."
"He said it would give the silver somewhere stable to grow from."
"I know that too." Nova looked at his brother. "What worries me isn't the power itself. It's the gap between what I can access and what I can control. I've been managing the door by keeping it closed. But I don't think the door is going to stay closed indefinitely just because I want it to."
"Then we train it open," Turuk said. "Carefully. With Tarro."
"Yes," Nova said. "Eventually."
"Why not now?"
"Because right now there are things happening at this tournament that aren't about the tournament," Nova said, "and I need to be able to think clearly about those things before I introduce a new variable."
The lights of Vale came through the window at an angle that meant the festival was still running, which meant a portion of the city was still celebrating the thing that had almost not existed anymore.
"Get some sleep," Turuk said.
"Probably," Nova agreed.
Neither of them indicated when this would happen.
Outside, Remnant continued its ordinary business, which it had been doing for longer than anyone currently living could account for, and which it would presumably continue to do, given good outcomes and reasonable decisions and the specific willingness of a small number of people to stand between it and the things that wanted to make it stop.
The lights stayed on.
The night passed.
★ END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE ★
Next: Chapter Thirty — "Fall: Cinder's Saiyan Miscalculation"