Extra's Sign In System: The Hero's an Idiot!

Chapter 234: Chapter 234: Two Without Teachers

Chapter 234: Two Without Teachers

The underground arena was loud.

CLANG.

Elara Logcheville drove Aegon backward across the mat with a wooden spear, correcting his footwork between strikes.

SMACK.

Seraphina Vance caught Lucien in the ribs with the flat of the Requiem for the ninth time that hour.

At the far end, the blue projection of Gunther Stillbane was telling Bram exactly what he was doing wrong with his knees, loudly, at length.

Every single person in that bunker had somebody standing over them telling them how to be better.

Except two.

Nyx Vespera sat on an equipment crate in the corner with her hood down and one Shadow-Rend Dagger balanced across her knee. Estella Everdawn stood ten feet away with her arms folded, watching the others work.

Neither of them had anything to do.

"This is stupid," Nyx said.

"Yes."

"There is nobody left."

"No."

Nyx spun the dagger once and caught it.

Between them, they could level a district. Estella had put a hole through a bridge full of Cultists. Nyx commanded a thousand wraiths and had walked through a Level 200 artifact shield.

And they were standing in the corner of a training hall because there was not one living person qualified to correct either of them.

"I killed mine," Nyx said eventually.

Estella looked over.

"My teacher." Nyx did not look up from the blade. "The Phantom-Weaver Guardian. That was the trial. He was the last thing alive that understood the legacy and the only way to get it was to take it off him."

"You won."

"I won." Nyx turned the dagger over. "And then he was dead, and I was standing in a tomb holding a power that nobody had used in four hundred years, and there was no one to ask."

She held up the dagger.

"Everything I know, I worked backward out of a corpse. I watched how he moved for about ninety seconds before I killed him. Ninety seconds. That is my entire education."

Estella sat down on the crate beside her.

"You are the strongest assassin on the continent."

"I have no idea if that is true." Nyx said it flatly, without modesty. "That is the problem. I can pull a thousand wraiths out of the ground. Could I pull ten thousand? I do not know. Is there a limit? I do not know. Does using them cost me something that I will find out about in ten years?"

She sheathed the blade.

"I have never had anybody tell me there was a ceiling. So I do not know where it is. I am not powerful, Estella. I am uncalibrated."

Estella did not answer for a while.

"At least you had ninety seconds," she said.

Nyx looked at her.

"I have no lineage at all," Estella said quietly. "There is no school. There is no tradition. Nobody has ever written a book about what I do, because nobody has ever done it."

She turned her hand over and looked at her palm.

"There were priests. In a basement, under a church. They put monster cores down my throat for months, one after another, and they held my jaw shut when I tried to bring them back up."

Nyx said nothing.

"They were not teaching me. They were feeding a container." Estella’s voice stayed perfectly level. "And at some point something in me came apart and started producing light instead of dying, and the priests wrote that down as a success."

She closed her hand.

"Nyx, my power is not a discipline. It is a wound. It just happens to be a wound that puts out stars."

The noise of the arena carried on behind them.

"So neither of us was taught," Nyx said.

"No."

"We were both just made by something that happened to us."

Estella did not answer immediately.

"Try to hit me," she said instead, standing up.

The sparring lasted twenty minutes and was a complete disaster.

Nyx opened by dropping into Estella’s own shadow, which was the single most reliable move in her arsenal.

FWOOM.

Estella lit a low, sustained corona of white starlight around herself without even turning around. Every shadow within fifteen feet ceased to exist.

Nyx was violently ejected back into physical space three meters away, off balance and thoroughly irritated.

"That is not fair."

"You attacked me."

"You deleted the floor."

They reset.

Estella tried next. She built a targeting lattice, a fine web of cosmic light designed to track a fast-moving object through open space.

Nyx dropped six wraiths into the room.

The lattice immediately reported six identical targets, then eleven, then nothing at all, because the wraiths were absorbing the ambient light her targeting depended on and feeding it nowhere.

Estella lost her completely and then took an elbow to the kidney.

"Ow."

"You were looking at the wrong one."

"I was looking at all of them."

They reset four more times.

Every single exchange ended the same way. Estella’s light erased the medium Nyx moved through. Nyx’s shadows ate the light Estella needed to aim. Neither of them could train against the other, because all either of them could do was cancel the other one out.

On the seventh attempt they simply stopped in the middle of the mat.

"This is worse than doing nothing," Nyx said.

"Considerably."

They sat back down on the crate.

They were quiet for a while, which was normal for Nyx and unusual for nobody, because neither of them talked much to begin with.

"Can I ask you something," Nyx said.

"You are going to anyway."

"Why are you watching him?"

Estella went very still.

"I am an assassin," Nyx said, without any particular emphasis. "That is not a title. It is a specific skill. My entire job is knowing where every person in a room is putting their attention, and then standing somewhere else."

She looked sideways at her.

"You have been watching Draven for weeks. Not the way you used to. You used to look at him the way somebody looks at a person they are attached to."

She turned the sheathed dagger over in her hands.

"Now you look at him the way Natalie looks at ground she does not trust."

Estella did not deny it.

She sat there for a long moment with her hands in her lap.

"Eight days ago I took a road out of a man’s head because he asked me to," she said finally. "I had never done it before. I had no idea what I was doing."

"I know. I walked him to the gate after."

"He did not tell me how." Estella’s voice was quiet and precise. "He told me what would happen if the wrong person did it badly. He knew exactly how much to take and exactly what would break if you took more, and he described it in about four sentences."

Nyx waited.

"He taught Aegon where to break Neville’s guard in the training hall in our first month. Not roughly. He told him the exact opening, and Aegon had been losing to that boy for years."

"Go on."

"He taught Cole to hear metal. Cole is a God-Forge Artisan now and he learned the first step of it from a seventeen year old with no forging background at all."

Estella looked down at her hands.

"He taught me to condense a beam instead of spreading it. I had been vaporizing everything in a forty meter cone and calling it a technique, and he fixed it in one afternoon."

"That is four things."

"It is more than four. It is everything." Estella’s jaw tightened. "He negotiated with an Elder of Bastion One and he knew what price she would name before she named it. He knew the Capital would send an accident instead of a fleet. He knew a clean scan meant the enemy was not one thing."

She stopped.

"And in that hallway, when I asked him if anyone had ever taken anything out of his head, he said no."

"So?"

"He said nobody has ever taken anything out of my head. But I have been on the other side of a table like that one." Estella’s voice did not change at all. "Not in this city. Not in this life."

The arena noise carried on behind them.

"He said it like it was a comment about the weather," Estella said. "He did not even hear himself say it."

Nyx was silent for a moment.

"Every word of that is true," she said.

"You are not surprised."

"No."

"Then why does it not bother you?"

Nyx leaned back against the wall.

"Because I do not care," she said.

Estella turned to look at her properly.

"I am not being clever," Nyx continued. "I mean it exactly the way it sounds. I have thought about it and I have decided it does not matter to me."

She held up the Shadow-Rend Dagger.

"Two years ago I was a girl in a bunk at the Sunshine Orphanage with a knife she stole off a drunk. That was the whole of me. I had no name that meant anything and no future that ended anywhere good."

She turned the blade so the arena light ran along the void-steel.

"He put a dead king’s power in my hands and a rank on my shoulder. Because of what I am now, there are children in that orphanage who will never have to steal a knife off anybody."

She sheathed it.

"So whatever he is, and wherever he learned any of it, I have already weighed it. It does not come out heavier than that."

Estella looked at the floor.

"That is not the same as it being fine."

"No," Nyx agreed. "It is not. I am telling you my answer. I am not telling you it is yours."

She stood up and stretched.

"But I will give you one thing, because you are going to keep doing this whether I help or not, and you are going about it badly."

Estella looked up.

"You have spent weeks watching what he does," Nyx said. "That is a waste. He is careful and he is very good and you will not catch him doing anything."

She looked down at her.

"If you want to know what a man is protecting, do not watch what he does."

A pause.

"Watch what he refuses to teach."

Estella did not move.

She sat on the equipment crate with her hands in her lap while, twenty feet away, Elara Logcheville corrected her son’s grip and Seraphina Vance told Lucien to reset from the top and Gunther told Bram to drop his center another two inches.

Every person in that room was being taught something by somebody who had chosen to teach them.

And the one man who had taught every single technique she possessed had stood in a hallway eight days ago and refused, flatly and without explanation, to teach her anything at all.

’He said he could not,’ Estella thought. ’He said his authority is kinetic and mine is cosmic and there is nothing he can give me.’

’That was the first thing he has ever said to me that I did not believe.’

"All right," she said.

Nyx offered her a hand up.

"Then get off the crate," she said. "Because I actually can teach you something, and it has nothing to do with stars."

Estella stood.

"Not stealth magic," Nyx said, walking her out to the center of the mat. "You cannot do stealth magic. You glow. That is a permanent condition and no amount of training fixes it."

"Then what?"

"Attention." Nyx turned her to face the working half of the arena. "Being unseen has almost nothing to do with being invisible. It is about where people are already looking, and making sure it is somewhere else."

She pointed.

"There are eleven people in this hall. Walk to the far door without a single one of them registering you."

"They will all see me."

"They will all look at you," Nyx corrected. "That is not the same thing. I want you to be something none of them bother to think about."

Estella watched the room for a while.

Then she moved.

She did not use magic. She did not dim. She simply waited for Aegon’s spear to come down, took three steps while every head in the room turned toward the noise, and stopped moving before anyone’s attention came back.

She waited for Seraphina to strike Lucien.

Three more steps.

She waited for Gunther’s voice to boom through the amplifiers.

Four steps, and she was past the crates.

She reached the far door in under two minutes without a single person in that arena looking directly at her.

Nyx watched her the entire way with a flat, unreadable expression.

’That was not beginner’s luck,’ Nyx thought.

’She did not hesitate once. She read the whole room in ninety seconds and then walked through it like she had been doing it for years.’

Estella turned around at the door.

"Like that?"

"Yes," Nyx said. "Exactly like that."

She did not say the rest of it out loud.

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