Guild Zone 4, West Central Region.
An instructor stood frozen in front of the classroom's center trace pillar. On the display board behind him, the latest simulation feed was still replaying: a second-year student had just overpowered a full-standard formation with a technique that didn't exist in the system's official archive.
The trace movement—jagged, low, reactive—was sloppy by Guild standards. It started from imbalance, staggered midway through, then launched into a back-curling arc that snapped pressure from the hips instead of the wrists.
It wasn't beautiful.
It wasn't registered.
But it worked.
And now the entire class was silent, staring not at the board—but at the instructor's face.
"What's that called?" one student finally asked.
The instructor replied too slowly. "That... wasn't supposed to be possible."
---
At Ridgewood, Lucen trained alone again.
He'd been watching replays too—private ones. Not official Guild edits. The raw footage from Donnie's last few encounters had circulated through encrypted side channels, passed from instructor to student, from skeptic to believer.
Lucen hated how natural it looked.
How instinctive Donnie's movements had become.
He remembered the boy who once tripped over his stance. Who flinched every time an instructor raised their voice. Who hesitated before speaking. That same boy now stood unmoved after knocking a Ridgewood senior to the dirt.
Lucen tightened his gloves, stepped forward, and slammed a projection into the trace dummy.
The dummy didn't budge.
Lucen grit his teeth.
> "It's not that his trace is better," he told himself.
"It's that mine is still pretending to be someone else's."
---
Back at the tower, Donnie was preparing for something new.
He didn't speak much that morning.
He walked the edge of the forest that bordered the eastern side of the ridge, eyes sharp, pulse steady, studying the wind and movement of leaves—not because he expected a scout or attack, but because he had started building a new layer of instinct.
A sense that didn't rely on sight or sound.
He called it ripple reading—a way of interpreting the air's reaction to movement. When something unfamiliar entered the field, it would ripple in the trace patterns around trees, ground tension, and wind flow.
And that ripple had started five minutes ago.
Donnie didn't rush back to the tower.
He crouched.
Pressed one hand to the dirt.
The rhythm was off. Faintly.
But intentionally.
Whoever had stepped into their territory hadn't come to fight.
They'd come to watch. Again.
But something felt different this time.
They were getting closer.
Too close.
By the time Donnie returned to the tower, Mara was already waiting at the entrance. Her arms were crossed, and a low-glow trace crystal hovered just above her palm—tracking energy levels in a wide radius.
"They've entered the field," she said before he could ask.
"I know."
"They're not scouts."
"I know."
She nodded, then let the crystal fade. "They're calling it a Collapse Test."
Donnie stopped walking. "That's real?"
"It's not official. It's not taught anymore. But it was used during the old era to purge instability inside the Guild. They send someone to break a structure—not through violence, but by injecting imbalance."
"You mean sabotage?"
"No," Mara said. "They don't have to lift a hand. They just introduce enough emotional conflict, psychological weight, and uncertainty to collapse your flow from within."
Donnie's fists tightened. "They're going to use someone close."
Mara didn't deny it.
---
It happened that afternoon.
They didn't hear the arrival.
They felt it.
The trace air shifted around the southern ridge—heavy, cautious, precise. A new figure entered the tower grounds slowly, not threatening, but purposeful. And when they stepped through the trees into full view, Donnie's breath hitched.
Because it was someone he hadn't seen in over a year.
A former friend.
Not from Ridgewood.
From before all of that.
His name was Aro.
He wasn't a fighter.
He wasn't ranked.
But they had trained together in a local hall before Donnie ever joined Ridgewood. Before formwork. Before performance. Back when movement was just instinct and curiosity.
Aro had vanished after failing out of regional qualifiers.
Now he was here.
Veera stepped beside Donnie. "You know him?"
"Yeah," Donnie said quietly. "He was my first training partner."
Aro stopped six paces away.
"I'm not here to hurt you," he said.
"I know."
"I'm not here to be saved either."
"I know that too."
"I'm here to see what broke me."
Donnie blinked.
Aro smiled, bitter. "They told me you were the reason I couldn't make it. That I had followed a path that doesn't exist. They said you created a technique with no future. I believed them."
"And now?"
"I don't know what to believe. But I watched you move last week—and it felt like something I remembered, not something I learned. So I came here, not to challenge you… but to see if I could still feel that."
Donnie didn't answer immediately.
Because part of him wanted to hug Aro.
Part of him wanted to walk away.
And part of him wanted to show him something so real, so untouchable, that no one could twist it again.
---
"Come," Donnie said. "Train with me."
Aro hesitated. "They'll report it."
"Then let them."
---
In the courtyard, the others paused their drills to watch as Donnie stepped into formation with Aro. No combat stance. Just rhythm.
Step, pivot, reset.
They moved together—unsynchronized at first.
Then slowly, they adjusted.
Not to each other's styles.
To something deeper.
A shared origin.
Lora whispered to Veera, "What are we watching?"
Veera replied, "A collapse test that's already failing.
Donnie and Aro moved like two voices from the same language.
Their steps weren't symmetrical—but familiar. Their angles didn't mirror—but they complimented. Aro still carried the signs of abandonment in his rhythm: hesitation, pressure control, trace suppression. But when Donnie slipped into his recoil stance, Aro read the intent and adjusted without flinching.
That was what made it real.
Donnie didn't have to explain it.
Aro remembered it.
He didn't copy Recoil Surge.
He harmonized with it.
By the third motion exchange, the courtyard had gone completely silent.
Kaito leaned on his elbow from the high rail. "This isn't a collapse. This is revival."
Veera didn't respond. She was watching too closely, heart pulled in a direction she didn't yet understand.
Mara stood at the inner archway, arms crossed.
And though her expression stayed calm, her eyes burned with something rare:
Pride.
---
After the motion cycle ended, Aro stood still for several seconds.
Then he stepped back and dropped to one knee.
Not as a sign of surrender.
But because he was overwhelmed.
He had never felt a trace rhythm that forgave his imbalance.
He wiped his eyes quickly and stood.
"That was real," he said. "I don't care what they name it. That was mine too."
Donnie nodded.
"You didn't collapse," he said. "You remembered."
---
Mara sent a private message through an underground trace network later that night.
She didn't sign it.
She didn't encrypt it.
She just let it flow freely into the Guild's private side channels.
> "The Collapse Test failed.
You sent a boy who had nothing left.
He found something you couldn't erase.
And now he carries it home.
Good luck stopping what moves without fear."
---
That evening, Donnie wrote just one sentence in his sketchbook:
> "They sent my past to break me.
I gave it its name back."
He closed the pad.
Walked to the edge of the tower's roof.
And let the wind pass through him without resistance.
---
End of Chapter 26
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