Chapter 66 Supernatural Combat
Tuesday morning Professor Crane covers the Drevari doctrine in Supernatural History and it is the most uncomfortable hour I have spent in a classroom because I know things he does not know I know and I am sitting beside Rhydan and Nox is three rows back and visible today and Zael is near the window reading ahead in the text with the focused patience of someone who has known this material since childhood.
After that, Supernatural Combat.
I have been in this class for two months and it has always been peripheral to the real drama of my days at Northveil but today Professor Maren, small and sharp and built like someone who has been in actual supernatural altercations and found them instructive, pairs me with a wolf student named Callum who is broad-shouldered and good-natured and whose ability produces a physical force projection that he cannot yet fully direct.
"Control exercise," Professor Maren says briskly, moving through the pairs. "Not forced. Not power. Control. If you can't aim it, you don't have it yet."
Callum looks at me with polite uncertainty. "Uh. What do you do?"
"Witch," I say. "Tamer strand. Working on a second strand."
He blinks. "Yeah, I hear all that you've said but I don't get any of it, really. What does that mean in a combat context?"
Honestly I am not completely sure yet.
I raise my right hand and let the tamer warmth surface, gold and steady, and his wolf nature responds immediately, the force projection flickering and pulling toward me like something that recognises an anchor point.
"Oh," he says, surprised. "That's strange. I can feel where to aim."
"Your ability responds to tamer presence," I say. "It knows where to go."
"Does that mean you're controlling it?" he asks, not alarmed, genuinely curious.
"No," I reply. "I am showing it direction and giving it a reference point. You are still doing the aiming. I am just..." I think about it. "Being still enough for you to aim at."
Professor Maren appears at our shoulder.
She looks at Callum's force projection sitting steady and directed between us and then at my hand and then at my face with the specific expression of someone revising something they thought they understood.
"Calladine," she says.
"Professor."
"Your tamer ability in a combat context is not defensive," she says slowly. "It is coordinative." She looks between us. "You can make the people around you more accurate."
I had not thought of it that way.
"Can you extend that to multiple people simultaneously?" she asks.
"I don't know... I haven't tried that yet," I reply honestly.
"Find out," she says, and moves away.
I look around the training hall at the eight paired students and I open my tamer ability wider and let it reach outward past Callum to the whole room, and I feel every ability in the space respond like instruments finding a tuning note... wolf force projection snapping into focus, a witch's elemental working finding its direction, a dragon shifter's heat ability pulling into a precise stream rather than a wave.
The room changes.
Not dramatically. Just a degree. A sharpening. A settling.
Professor Maren stops walking.
Turns slowly.
Looks at me.
"Everyone pause," she says.
The room pauses.
"What did you just feel?" she asks the room.
Callum says, "Like I could suddenly see where I was going."
The elemental witch says, "My working found its particular thread."
The dragon shifter says, "The heat went exactly where I meant it to go."
Professor Maren looks at me for a long moment.
"A battlefield tamer," she says quietly. "The documentation describes them theoretically. I have never seen one in practice." She looks at the mark on my right hand. "Until today."
The training hall is very quiet.
Then from the doorway, where he has clearly been standing for longer than I knew, Rhydan says, "She has always been that."
Everyone turns.
He is leaning in the doorway with his arms folded, having come from wherever Pack Dynamics ran long today, and he is looking at me with those grey eyes and that tiny smile at the corner of his mouth.
"She has always made everything around her more accurate," he says simply. "I just did not know what to call it."
Professor Maren looks between us.
Looks at the mark on my hand.
Looks at the room full of students whose abilities all snapped into focus simultaneously.
"Calladine," she says finally. "I am recommending you for advanced combat integration assessment."
"Okay," I say.
I clearly am taken aback and don't know what else to say to that.
"Valecrest," she says, not looking away from me. "Stop lurking in doorways."
The corner of his mouth pulls up a tiny smile.
"Sorry, Professor," he says, entirely unapologetically, and he turns away from the doorway and walks away.