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“Unclench, hosts above. It hurts to watch you.”

A bullheaded part of Kat wanted to resist just to stick it to Mira, but if she strained herself any more, she worried something in her body was going to pop. She forced herself to take a long, slow breath instead, letting her token fall and nestle, warm, against the fabric of her shirt.

“It’s not something you can force,” Mira said.

“Alignment is only the first step, and it needs to be natural—otherwise, you can’t hope to keep multiple tokens attuned at the same time.

Becoming a seasoned Aurean is about being able to operate precisely at a moment’s notice.

You need to be honed like a fine sword so that—”

“Good morning, ladies!” a much too chipper voice called from the training field’s far side.

Kat and Mira muttered the exact same oath under their breaths.

Adrien Augustine had materialized at the edge of the field, a mug of violently black coffee held haphazardly in one hand as he waved with the other—as if there were any chance they’d miss that it was in fact the heir to the realm who had called out for them.

He was dressed far more casually than Kat had ever seen him, wearing nothing but a loose shirt and sturdy pants, though if this was an attempt to blend in among the common soldiers, the effect was somewhat diminished by the Aurean token array still worn proudly around his neck.

“Your Highness,” Mira said with the kind of brightness that could only be trained into you by high etiquette lessons starting from the age of six. “How generous of you to join us.”

“It is very nice of me, isn’t it?” he said, sauntering over. “Got a jam-packed schedule today, but I couldn’t miss out on Kat’s first day of Aurean training. Especially since the whole thing was my idea in the first place.”

“ Was it? ” Kat asked with a sharp look at Mira.

“She didn’t tell you?” Adrien looked put out.

“Yes, we had a wonderful little chat yesterday about your prospects, given that you’d be missing out on all the fun in my retinue, and I suggested that if you were feeling less than capable of doing your duty, the solution was clearly to get you competent with your token. Mira agreed.”

“I felt it was the kind of suggestion Kat would take to better if it came from a comrade, not from her prince,” Mira said mildly.

“Well, I’m glad you convinced her,” Adrien said, oblivious to the glare Kat had shot sidelong at her centurion.

It was true. If Mira had told her the idea that she should begin cultivating came from Adrien, she’d be happily curled in her bedroll and dead to the world at the moment.

She was strongly considering making a run for it as it was, and the headache needling into her skull was only underscoring the impulse.

But then Adrien’s bright grin landed on Kat. “Show me what you’ve got so far.”

“She’s struggling with the basics, so I don’t know that there’s all that much to show,” Mira said.

Kat knew she was being goaded, but it wasn’t like a cart horse could argue with the touch of a crop.

She took her token back in hand, closed her eyes, and let out a long breath.

It was simple. It had to be simple, because kids did this.

Kids casually threaded a perfect hole between planes of existence, guided only by instinct and the desire to make something new in this world.

To say nothing of the hundred tokens arrayed across Adrien’s chest. Over the past weeks, she’d gotten to know him better and had come to respect his honest effort, even if he’d been handed almost every advantage he’d ever accrued.

But the fact remained—he was a bit of a fool.

And if this numbskull could master a hundred Aurean tokens, surely Kat could master one.

She called. Somewhere out there, across the boundaries of reality and all the angels and demons sealed beyond them, there was a hole.

And if that hole was a point, there was a single linear path between it and her token, and that was the trajectory she had to draw power along.

She saw it as a thread. She pulled that thread tight.

And she didn’t have to open her eyes to know that beneath her fingertips, her token was glowing with soft, angelic light.

Someone was clapping, and it certainly wasn’t Mira.

Kat cracked an eye open to find Adrien beaming.

She almost caught herself smiling back, but then the prince turned to Mira and said, “ Truly incredible work. To take a soldier who could barely use her token and in the span of a single morning set her on her cultivation journey? I see great things in your future, centurion.”

“I do hope so,” Mira replied graciously. Kat wished she could kick her without getting court-martialed forit.

“How does it feel?” Adrien asked eagerly, his attention swinging back to Kat.

“Like I can’t breathe,” she managed through her teeth.

“Your Highness,” she added, though it cost her dearly.

The tension had crept back into her body while her focus had been honed elsewhere, and she’d returned to a balancing act that felt one wrong move away from shattering every plate stacked on her head.

“In High Training, our instructors used to tell us half the battle is figuring out how to balance the divine with the mundane, and that the real victory is in understanding them as one and the same,” he said.

Kat’s lips pursed.

“Breathe, Kat. Breathing’s part of it. The angels quite literally cannot work through you if you’re not breathing.”

It felt like ceding ground on a slope, like one wrong step would leave her sliding and vulnerable, but Kat let herself draw that breath, let it flood her lungs just as the light was flooding from her token.

The alignment held, the light unwavering, and as a bonus, Kat no longer felt like she was about to keel over.

Her next breath came steadier, if not a little too quickly.

And her light was still there when she exhaled.

“Never gets old, does it?” Adrien asked, prodding Mira with a comradely elbow in a gesture that would have had any member of her century mucking stalls for a week.

“How blessed are we to have the angels on our side, huh? Well, I’ve got a meeting about quarries on the books, but this was worth the detour.

Excellent work, can’t wait to see more!”

And just like that, the prince trotted off, swigging from his mug as he went.

Kat blinked, her token finally winking out. “Why did that work ten times better than anything you said?” she asked.

Mira glared after Adrien. “Who am I to question the will of the angels?” she muttered.