Chapter 44 | The Weight of What’s Coming

Chapter 44: Chapter 44 | The Weight of What’s Coming

The visiting schools left in the morning.

Corbyn watched from the second-floor corridor window as the last of the Ashveil coaches rolled through the front gate. Burgundy and grey flags folded. The academy groundskeepers pulled the Summit banners down from the eastern wall one by one, efficient and expressionless, like men who had done this after every Summit for thirty years and had stopped finding meaning in any of it.

The courtyard below looked strange without the crowd. Bigger. Emptier.

Eleven operatives, he thought. Eleven, and three of them still walked out.

He turned from the window and went to find Cole.

—-----------

The training annexe was empty at this hour except for Cole, who was seated on his low wall with a cup of something hot, reading from a thin document. He didn’t look up when Corbyn walked in.

"You’re early," Cole said.

"Couldn’t sleep."

Cole set the document face-down on the wall beside him. "Show me the third interval from yesterday. Left side."

Corbyn didn’t argue. He moved into position and ran the sequence — footwork, redirect, the close-range exchange Cole had been drilling into him for the past three weeks. His left side ached on the third beat. The rib from the corridor, not fully settled.

"Stop." Cole was beside him before Corbyn had registered him moving. He pressed two fingers against the specific point below Corbyn’s floating rib. "Here?"

"Yes."

"You’re compensating. Your weight shifts right every time it fires, which means your left side is open for a full second on the redirect." Cole stepped back. "Again. Don’t compensate."

"It hurts when I don’t compensate."

"Yes," Cole said simply. "Again."

Corbyn ran it again. The rib screamed on the third beat. He didn’t shift his weight.

"Better." Cole returned to his wall. "The body learns pain tolerance faster than technique. If you coddle it now it’ll still be compensating in six months."

Corbyn stood in the training ground breathing through the ache. The morning air was cold enough to see his breath. Somewhere across the academy wall, the last coach wheels faded south along the gate road.

"Professor."

Cole looked up.

"The Covenant knew about Lyra before the Summit." He said it plainly, the way Cole had taught him things were worth saying — without softening, without qualification. "They knew she’d bonded. They knew she qualified for their ritual. That means someone inside this academy with access to awakening records fed them that information." He paused. "You already knew."

Cole was quiet for a moment.

"Yes," he said.

"Are you going to tell me who?"

"Not yet."

Corbyn nodded. He’d expected that. "Then tell me what you’re doing about it."

Cole picked up his cup. "What I need to." He looked at Corbyn steadily. "Focus on what you can control. Your mana capacity is a problem. At the Summit you burned through everything in what — four minutes of integration?"

"Three. Maybe three and a half."

"Three and a half minutes." Cole set the cup down. "And Sekhmet’s bond went cold the moment your reserves hit empty." He let that sit. "If the Covenant comes back — and they will come back — what happens when they arrive at minute four?"

Corbyn didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

Sekhmet fading mid-stride. The bond going cold. Standing in the archive corridor with empty hands and three operatives who hadn’t decided to quit.

"Your mana capacity grows with use," Cole said. "The same way the body builds muscle. You push to the limit, recover, push further. Right now your limit is three and a half minutes of partial integration." He stood. "That’s not enough. Not for what’s coming."

"How do you know what’s coming?"

Cole picked up the document from the wall and held it out.

Corbyn took it.

It was a single page. Academy seal at the top. Below it, a list of gate activity reports — dates, locations, classification levels. His eyes moved down the column.

Three Class Three gates within forty kilometres of Valdenmere in the last two months. One Class Four gate, twenty kilometres south, active for eleven weeks and climbing.

At the bottom of the page, in Cole’s handwriting: Escalating. Pattern consistent with deliberate cultivation.

"Someone is feeding those gates," Corbyn said.

"Someone is making sure the threats around this academy keep growing," Cole said. "Eleven Covenant operatives walked through our walls during the Summit. They had inside help. They had intelligence on our students, our security layout, and our mana suppression schedule." He took the document back. "This isn’t a group that makes one attempt and retreats."

The training ground was very quiet.

"They’re going to come back stronger," Corbyn said.

"Yes."

"And the gates are part of it."

"The gates are the mechanism. The Covenant doesn’t fight battles they haven’t already won on paper." Cole folded the document. "They cultivate threats. Build pressure. Wait until the academy is stretched across three crises simultaneously then move." He looked at Corbyn. "The Summit was a probe. They learned what we have. Now they’re deciding what to bring next time."

Corbyn stared at the worn stone of the circuit path.

Three and a half minutes.

It felt like nothing.

"So I need more mana," he said.

"You need more mana," Cole confirmed. "And you need your body to hold integration longer before it starts to break down. Those are two different problems that require two different solutions." He sat back on the wall. "The first one is straightforward — push your reserves every session until they expand. The second one is harder. Integration puts divine pressure through a human body. The body needs to be conditioned to carry it." He paused. "That’s what the 5am sessions have always been for. You just didn’t know the full reason yet."

Corbyn looked at him. "How long until I’m ready?"

"For what?"

"For whatever’s coming."

Cole was quiet for a moment. The morning light was coming over the eastern annexe wall, long and pale, catching the dust still suspended in the training ground air from the circuit intervals.