Dalric had constructed quite the behemoth for his spar sessions. The main section where the spars took place stood almost eighty feet tall and still stretched a few feet further than that in width. The others had to step inside to realize that almost two–fifths of those lengths came from the compacted earth that made up its walls. Ryku noticed instantly.

  He would not be so uncouth as to call himself a peep, but he had walked along the building’s edges while paying close attention to what his ahjer sense conveyed to him. It told nothing. More accurately, it told him that the earth of the walls was not merely compacted, but also filled with ahjer that guarded the secrets within. He had a means past this defence though.

  For as compact and reinforced as the walls were, they had their imperfections; pockets, holes, and divots. They were typically tiny to the point of insignificance, but before Ryku’s technique size meant nothing at all. As long as there was darkness, he had a foothold. He had reached into the wall with his shadow–attuned ahjer, fighting through the resistance, and created an anchor in the closest of such footholds. From there he had carefully and precisely jumped from one foothold to the next closest, then the next closest, and then the next closest.

  The technique largely, but not completely, bypassed the ahjer that blocked his sense. That discrepancy wouldn’t usually matter as he could still extend his shadow more than ten feet into the wall before his ahjer became too thin and weak to travel any further and ten feet of compacted and reinforced earth would be absurd. His shadow had hit its maximum range around twelve feet. There was still more wall to go.

  Dalric had promised a completely secure dueling ring where none could spy on what occurred within and he certainly delivered. Everyone could appreciate the absurdity of a warrior somehow being capable of single handedly constructing everything around them, but few understood just how ridiculous the building at the heart of it all was. It may have been a ‘dueling ring’ internally, but externally it was a miniature fortress. Ryku had been immensely impressed.

  For that exact reason, its current state left him in shock. So many cracks featured across the outside of the walls that they could actually hear a bit of what was going on behind them. It didn’t sound anything like a spar. It sounded like a battle to the death.

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  “Hrm. Who knew he held such strength. What was his name?”

  Heitor aimed the question at Ryku, “Ha–It, if I remember correctly.”

  They were the last two left waiting. Everyone else had their go in the ring and now it was Ha–It’s turn. Like Heitor, Ryku had known little of the strange man. They had spoken to one another on a few occasions and Ryku knew a bit of his technique, but from the little he gathered there were no signs of the ferocity he could now hear cracking the walls.

  He watched a chunk of it fall off in mild awe.

  “Hey!”

  They both ripped their eyes away from the wall in front of them and turned to see Maim charging in their direction. Or rather Ryku’s as it were.

  She shouted at him as if he kept some grave secret from her, “Who in the fuck is that?!”

  None of the others who had already had their turn had left the general area. Dalric had instructed everyone to stay. Ryku and Heitor were only separated because of the others’ need for some form of medical attention. As such, though they did not hear Heitor ask a similar question moments prior, they all heard Maim’s. Many ran right behind her.

  He had to spend the next twenty minutes explaining to the crowd that he didn’t know much beyond his name, but also iterated that even if he did he would not share that information without the man’s express permission. As the ‘spar’ continued and the cracks grew in size, a few pushed for answers anyway. It didn’t help that every handful of minutes another would be released by the healers and come rushing with the same question on their lips.

  In the end, he was not saved from the questions because they stopped asking or because the ‘spar’ finished, but rather because his right hand came sprinting from the camp proper.

  “Sir Tai!”

  The list of things that would make her do so was rather short. The list of things that would make him walk away from the opportunity to spar Dalric himself was shorter still.

  “There’s a Red Eagle.”

  The code for Headquarters finally getting back to him was at the top of both.