Chapter 135 - Eleven Minutes Is Not Enough

“Fifteen minutes.”

Etzel looked across the metal briefing table at Renn.

“The stability window was eleven minutes and forty-three seconds.”

“Correct.”

“So eleven forty-four is victory.”

“Fifteen.”

“I dislike safety margins.”

“Safety margins are why you are currently sitting in a chair instead of a medical bag,” Renn replied without looking up from his tablet.

Renn did not care about Etzel’s dramatic pacing.

That was one of his greatest strengths.

Between them on the polished steel surface sat a sealed transparent evidence case. Inside it rested the corroded R-17 rescue tag retrieved from Marker One the afternoon before. Even beneath seven years of gray oxidation, the hand-scratched initials—E.V.—caught the harsh fluorescent light of the operations room.

Someone had carried that piece of stamped metal across a boundary that did not obey Earth’s geometry and dropped it onto the road.

And when it hit the asphalt, something at the far end of a seven-year-old bond had recognized Rook.

Neither fact changed the physical entry requirements by a single second.

If the Authority was going to authorize a controlled approach during the next stability cycle, Etzel needed to prove he could survive full cross-world pressure for fifteen continuous minutes.

Not stand still on a rubber mat.

Not hide behind Orsik’s shield while his nose bled.

Function.

Fight.

Make tactical decisions under sensory distortion.

And walk back out under his own power.

That last distinction had actually been Etzel’s idea during the midnight debriefing.

Renn disliked that it was necessary.

Orsik approved wholeheartedly.

Which probably meant the afternoon was going to hurt.

The first full combat simulation proved everyone correct.

They ran it inside the reinforced Soul Realm projection while Tessa and Maerin monitored Etzel’s physical vitals in the annex.

Etzel triggered Cross-world Pressure Simulation at the same level recorded during the Rejoined’s breach.

The invisible lead weight descended over the Foundation instantly, trying to shear the gray stone in two directions at once.

Orsik moved on the first second.

He did not give Etzel time to settle his feet or adjust his breathing. The knight lunged across the stone platform, the Greatblade sweeping in a wide, flat arc aimed at Etzel’s collarbone.

Etzel raised his spear to parry.

Too slow.

The simulated Kestrel drag made the ash shaft feel as if he were swinging it through wet cement. His forearms lagged half a beat behind his eyes.

The flat of the Greatblade stopped dead against the side of his throat, cold steel pressing a millimeter into his skin.

Twenty-one seconds on the wall clock.

Etzel stared cross-eyed at the gray blade hovering beside his carotid artery.

“That seemed enthusiastic.”

“You asked me to pressure you as an active hostile would,” Orsik said, not lowering the sword.

“Emotionally would have been acceptable. Maybe some harsh criticism about my footwork.”

“Again.”

The second attempt lasted slightly longer.

This time, Etzel distributed the structural load across the platform the moment the simulation started, using the exact triangulation they had practiced the day before.

Orsik carried the dense outer weight along the northeastern rim, even while advancing.

Saeva darted low across the floor, her fluid resonance moving with the white stress lines to keep the stone flexing.

Rook remained curled beside the central block, his quiet presence holding the Realm’s identity steady around the pebble and the stolen washer.

Etzel kept just enough conscious attention on the architecture to stop the seams from locking up.

Then, as Orsik feinted left and drove his shield forward, Etzel activated Predator’s Interval to read the opening.

Bad decision.

Catastrophic decision.

The world sharpened into hyper-focus.

So did everything else.

With the perceptual filter wide open on top of three active Soul Links and cross-world distortion, every piece of raw data slammed into Etzel’s cortex at the exact same volume.

Orsik’s micro-adjustments in his greaves.

Saeva’s rapid flight vectors across six different stone seams.

The grinding tectonic pressure of the Foundation floor.

The echo of Rook’s distant, frayed thread stretching into the dark.

The simulation’s foreign weight trying to convince his inner ear that down was sideways.

Etzel lasted fourteen seconds under the combined load.

Then his vision split into four overlapping frames, his stomach revolted, and he cancelled every active function at once—snapping back into his physical body just in time to roll off the training cot and vomit into a plastic medical basin on the floor.

Saeva materialized in the air above his head a second later, peering down into the basin with clinical interest.

“Bad?”

Etzel wiped his mouth with the back of a shaking hand and leaned his forehead against the cool steel frame of the cot.

“Excellent training. Ten out of ten.”

She stared at him, unimpressed.

“Very bad.”

“Also true.”

Orsik appeared beside the equipment rack, crossing his armored arms over his breastplate.

“You are stacking perception before you can carry it,” the knight said.

Any site showing this text other than NovelPhoenix is hosting a stolen copy.

Etzel knew.

That irritated him more than the nausea.

He had spent months winning fights against stronger opponents by finding the hidden mechanical layer of a problem—stacking Witness, Predator’s Interval, and bond coordination until he saw the one angle the enemy couldn’t cover.

Now the problem was that he had accumulated too many layers.

Foundation stability.

Physical body mechanics.

Three-way Soul Link routing.

Perceptual acceleration.

Spear work.

Environmental distortion.

His brain was still a human brain inside a Level Twenty frame. He could not run every single system at maximum conscious attention without blowing a fuse.

Not yet.

So he sat on the floor for ten minutes, drank half a bottle of water under Tessa’s disapproving gaze, and changed the goal.

The third attempt was not about defeating Orsik or reading every muscle twitch in slow motion.

It was about remaining dangerous while the Foundation carried pressure in the background.

When the weight dropped over the stone this time, Etzel stopped trying to watch everything himself.

He delegated.

Saeva handled the strain changes on the western side without waiting for his micro-corrections. She knew what a stressed seam looked like now; he didn’t need to supervise her.

Orsik’s heavy presence became both opponent and structural ballast at once—every step the knight took across the platform anchored the stone beneath his boots even as he swung at Etzel’s head.

Rook held the center simply by resting where he belonged.

Etzel trusted those three facts completely and let them drop out of his active thoughts.

Then he just fought.

The difference was immediate.

Not a sudden surge of magical power.

Space.

His mind had room to breathe again.

Orsik attacked with a high, crushing overhead cleave.

Etzel parried on an angle.

Still slightly too late—the cross-world drag was real—and the flat of the Greatblade skidded down his shaft to rap hard against his left ribs.

Pain flared across his side.

He did not panic or reach for Predator’s Interval. He tucked his chin, rolled with the momentum across the gray stone, and came up cleanly on one knee with his spear point already aligned.

Orsik followed immediately, pressing the advantage.

Etzel kept the System acceleration closed. Instead, he watched the things an ordinary fighter could read without asking a status window to make the world slower.

The angle of Orsik’s pauldrons.

The lead foot planting before a shield bash.

The subtle tightening of gauntleted fingers around the leather grip.

Etzel snapped his spear point up toward Orsik’s right wrist.

Blocked by the crossguard.

Etzel did not fight the steel-on-steel bind where Orsik’s superior strength would crush him. He changed his grip angle and let the point slide.

Orsik’s shield caught the redirection and pushed forward like afalling wall.

Etzel yielded instead of bracing, pivoting on his heel to let the shield boss graze past his jacket, using the knight’s own forward pressure to spin inside the guard.

The butt of his ash spear shaft whipped around and struck Orsik squarely under the left armpit plate.

No real damage against heavy armor.

But clean, undeniable contact.

Etzel grinned through the sweat stinging his eyes.

Orsik’s gauntleted elbow came back in a short, compact arc and hit Etzel in the center of the chest hard enough to erase the expression and slide him six feet across the stone.

“One,” Etzel wheezed, regaining his footing.

“Do not count hits in survival drills,” Orsik said, already advancing.

“One.”

They continued.

Three minutes passed on the annex clock.

Five.

Etzel’s breathing turned ragged and hot in his lungs.

Beneath their boots, the Foundation remained completely stable—no white fractures, no crystalline snaps.

At seven minutes, the simulated Soul Link interference began, static buzzing across the directional awareness between them.

Etzel adjusted the load distribution on the fly without breaking his guard stance.

At eight minutes, his spear felt as if it had been cast from solid iron, his shoulders burning from the constant resistance of the air.

At eight minutes and nineteen seconds, he pivoted away from a low sweep and his healing left knee buckled, touching the gray stone.

The simulation terminated automatically as his stance failed.

Etzel stayed down on one knee on the mat.

Chest heaving.

Hands braced on his spear shaft.

Angry.

Eight nineteen.

More than double yesterday’s combat time.

Still nowhere near fifteen.

The old instinct arrived right on schedule, hot and stubborn at the back of his neck.

Run it again. Immediately. Push through the knee lock until the clock obeys.

He looked down at the gray stone of his Foundation, where the last repaired fracture from two days ago showed as a faint, healthy ridge.

Then he looked toward the center block, where Rook’s dim outline was watching him quietly.

Survive the road before solving it.

No.

“Tomorrow,” Etzel said aloud.

Orsik lowered the Greatblade and nodded once.

Saeva dropped down onto the central stone and smiled brightly.

Etzel pointed a trembling finger at both of them.

“Do not look proud of me. It encourages terrible habits.”

That night, back in his bedroom, Etzel sat quietly beside Rook inside the Foundation before sleeping.

No pressure tests.

No simulations.

No questions about the road or the Rejoined.

In the physical world, his right hand rested on the bedspread, fingers closed loosely around a replica of the corroded R-17 tag Maerin had 3D-printed for his files. Inside the Realm, he simply sat against the central stone and let Rook’s quiet presence settle beside his knee.

“I’m going to get him,” Etzel said softly into the quiet space.

Rook’s translucent head lifted an inch from his paws, ears shifting toward Etzel’s voice.

Etzel stopped himself.

Thought about the promise he had made after the Rank Evaluation—to separate observation, assumption, and hope into three different boxes.

He corrected the sentence out loud.

“We’re going to find out if there’s someone left to get.”

Rook looked at him for a long moment, then let out a silent breath and settled his chin back down beside the pebble and the metal washer.

That correction mattered.

Etzel could want Edran Vale to be alive with everything in him. He could want the seven-year vigil of a loyal dog to end with a reunion rather than a grave marker.

He could not build a Kestrel rescue plan on wanting. Wanting was how Jalen had taken three steps down an empty road toward a dead father’s voice.

As Etzel withdrew his awareness from the Foundation and settled into his pillows, a quiet System notification appeared in the dark above his bed.

Etzel read the line twice before dismissing it.

No new combat skill.

No Level twenty-one.

No sudden Rank jump.

Good.

His physical nervous system and his spiritual architecture were simply learning how to stop fighting each other when the world pressed down on both of them at once.

Eight minutes and nineteen seconds.

He needed fifteen.

For the first time since Renn had written the number on the board, the gap did not feel like a wall built to keep him out.

It felt like distance.

And Etzel was becoming very good at crossing distance.

Over the next four days, the fifteen-minute requirement changed how everyone in the Authority annex trained him.

Once Etzel pushed his pure combat endurance past the ten-minute mark on day two, Renn stopped measuring duration alone.

Every single minute inside the simulation now required a specific cognitive or operational function under stress.

At minute four, while parrying Orsik’s shield combinations, Etzel had to correctly identify and tag a false soul signature Maerin injected into the perimeter sensors.

At minute seven, with simulated road static screaming across the frequencies, he had to redirect Saeva through three sequential recon points without using spoken words or dropping his spear guard.

At minute ten, when fatigue began numbing his fingers, Orsik was instructed to break rhythm and attack exclusively from Etzel’s visual blind spots.

On the fourth afternoon, Etzel cleared all three checkpoints cleanly, his lungs burning, sweat soaking through his padded training vest as the wall timer ticked past twelve minutes.

At minute thirteen, Renn introduced an external audio trigger over the annex speakers—an acoustic distortion wave identical to the low, grinding frequency the Kestrel road had made the moment Jalen’s distance shifted.

Etzel failed there.

His conscious mind knew he was in the Authority training hall. His body reacted to the memory of the trap half a second faster.

His concentration snapped toward the speaker bank.

The moment his internal focus split, the simulated cross-world pressure folded sideways through the Foundation, the load balance slipped off Orsik’s rim, and Etzel’s right leg went completely numb from hip to ankle. He hit the mat shoulder-first.

Renn killed the emitters immediately.

“Thirteen minutes, twelve seconds,” Renn called from the observation booth.

Etzel lay on the rubber floor, staring at the ceiling while sensation prickled painfully back into his calf. He hated the number thirteen.

Orsik extended a gauntleted hand and pulled him upright.

“Good,” the knight said.

Etzel rubbed his hip. “You have a deeply concerning definition of good.”

“We found the failure here,” Orsik replied calmly.

Here, on rubber mats with Tessa standing ten feet away holding a medical kit. Not inside the Kestrel Exclusion Belt. Not while carrying Rook’s fragile echo toward an active spatial seam. Not while something tall and stitched-together waited behind a familiar silhouette for Etzel’s focus to slip.

Etzel sat on the bench with that truth until his irritation cooled into agreement.

The sessions over the next two days went further.

Renn and Maerin introduced voices into the thirteen-minute fatigue zone.

Veydan calling him from the workshop.

Ismera telling him dinner was getting cold.

Neris’s exact, annoyed voice asking what he had done with her charger.

They were standard Authority audio recordings spliced from mundane phone checks—never psychic imitations pulled from private memory—because Renn refused to play games with mental contamination. Even so, hearing his family’s real voices shout his name while his heart rate was at one-seventy and his Foundation was groaning under cross-world load made Etzel’s nervous system flinch before his judgment could catch up.

He stopped trying to pretend the flinch didn’t exist.

Instead, he learned to name the physical reaction the instant it hit his chest.

Fear. Protect. Turn.

Acknowledge the impulse, let it pass through his shoulders without moving his boots, verify the Soul Link, and then choose the next strike.

By the sixth session at the end of the week, Maerin played Neris’s voice shouting "Etzel, behind you!" from the left corner of the chamber at minute fourteen while Orsik drove a heavy thrust toward his right ribs.

Etzel did not turn his head toward the speaker.

His spear line did not waver by a millimeter. He deflected the Greatblade, stepped inside the guard, tapped the shaft against Orsik’s breastplate, and held the Foundation steady until the digital clock on the wall chimed once and locked at 15:00.

The simulation pressure lifted.

Nobody in the annex cheered. Saeva didn’t even throw a rock.

Etzel simply leaned on his spear, catching his breath while sweat dripped from his chin onto the mat.

Behind the observation glass, Renn looked down at his tablet, took the stylus, and wrote two words in capital letters beside the timestamp:

FUNCTION MAINTAINED.

Etzel looked up at the window and nodded once.

He preferred that to a celebration. Kestrel did not care how impressive his training montage looked. It only cared whether he broke when the road spoke.

And now, for fifteen minutes at a time, he didn’t.