The next morning, I led Faelar to a different training yard. This one was a grim replica of a fortress wall, complete with crumbling battlements, a reinforced gate, and a series of structural buttresses marked with chalk. The air was cool and smelled of damp stone. My plan was to start simple. Teach the force of nature how to be a focused tool.

  “Alright, Faelar,” I began, pointing with the tip of my spear. “This is a tactical demolition exercise. The goal is a controlled diversion. You see that specific buttress, the one with the circle on it?”

  The dwarf squinted, then nodded. “The big sticky-out bit. Aye. What about it?”

  “The objective,” I explained, trying to keep my voice in the calm, authoritative tone of my instructors, “is to strike that point with enough force to create a loud, attention-grabbing noise and a significant cloud of dust. It is a feint. We draw the enemy’s attention here, while the rest of the team moves in elsewhere. We are not trying to bring the wall down. The structural integrity of the main wall must remain intact. Is that clear?”

  Faelar stared at me, his expression one of profound confusion. He slowly rubbed his beard. “So… you want me to hit the wall… but gently?” He said the word ‘gently’ as if it were a foreign curse he was trying to pronounce for the first time.

  “Not gently,” I corrected, trying to keep the exasperation from my voice. “Precisely. Hit the target. Only the target. It’s about control. About applying force to achieve a specific, limited outcome.”

  “Control,” he repeated, testing the word. He looked at his axe, a monstrous piece of iron and sharpened steel that looked like it had been forged to end arguments permanently. Then he looked back at me. “Right. Control. So I hit it, but I hold back? Like I’m just… tickling it with my axe?”

  “No! Don’t tickle it!” I snapped, my patience already fraying. “Hit it hard! Just hit the chalk circle. Don’t hit the wall next to it. Don’t hit the tower behind it. Hit. The. Circle.”

  “Ah!” he said, his face clearing. “Deception! A dishonorable tactic, leading the enemy to believe we are attacking one place when we are, in fact, only… hitting it a bit. But if it’s for a good cause! Right. Got it.”

  I had a very bad feeling about this. I moved to what I hoped was a safe distance. “On my signal.”

  I watched him. He took a deep breath, planted his feet, and gripped the handle of his axe. He wasn’t looking at the buttress. He was looking at the center of the wall, his eyes gleaming with a familiar, manic light, a predator sizing up its prey.

  “Faelar, the target…” I started to say, but it was too late.

  With a roar that seemed to shake the very foundations of the Citadel, he charged. He moved with the unstoppable momentum of an avalanche, a blur of muscle and fury. He completely ignored the chalk-marked buttress. He didn’t even seem to register its existence. His target was the wall itself, and his plan was, as always, a glorious rampage.

  His axe hit the stone with a sound like the sky cracking open. It wasn’t a tactical strike; it was a geological event. The wall didn’t just breach; it exploded. A shockwave of dust and shattered rock erupted outwards, and the entire structure groaned in protest. A web of cracks spread from the point of impact, and with a final, agonizing screech of tearing mortar, the whole section of the wall collapsed into a mountain of rubble. As if for an encore, an adjacent and entirely unrelated training tower, its foundations shaken by the impact, slowly crumbled and fell in on itself with a dramatic, final crash.

  Silence fell, broken only by the gentle patter of falling pebbles.

  I stood there, covered in a fine layer of grey dust, staring in utter disbelief at the carnage. Faelar stood in the middle of the newly created hole, his axe resting on his shoulder, beaming with unrestrained pride.

  “See?” he boomed, his voice echoing in the sudden quiet. “Controlled! I controlled my axe right into the whole bloody thing! Now that’s a diversion!”

  I took a slow, deliberate breath, tasting grit. “Faelar,” I said, my voice dangerously calm. “That tower… that was our designated exit route for this scenario.”

  His face fell. “Oh. Well… nobody’s perfect.”

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the training grounds, Liam, Elmsworth, and Willow stood before a heavy iron door. Its surface was covered in a complex matrix of glowing, angry-looking magical runes. It was a practice ward, designed to test an agent’s ability to handle magical defenses.

  “Right,” Liam said, tapping the door with a dagger. It hummed ominously. “So, how do we turn off the glowy, ‘do not enter’ sign? I’ve got places to be, preferably somewhere with less… ambient disapproval.”

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  Elmsworth stroked his beard, his eyes scanning the runes with academic interest. “A fascinatingly crude ward matrix! A classic Eldrian design, if I’m not mistaken, though the thaumaturgical grammar is atrocious. It’s like it was written by a semi-literate goblin. The counter-spell requires a precise incantation and the focused channeling of ambient mana through a quasi-thaumaturgical resonance frequency. It will take approximately seventeen minutes.”

  Liam stared at him. “Seventeen minutes? I could have a nap, steal the guards’ boots, and be halfway to the next town in seventeen minutes. Can’t you just… I don’t know… poke it with your staff and turn it off? Give it a good whack?”

  “One does not ‘whack’ a Class-Four containment ward, you illiterate hooligan!” Elmsworth huffed. “This is delicate, arcane science!”

  “Oh, it feels so angry,” Willow said, placing a gentle hand near the runes. The glow intensified slightly. “All those sharp, pointy runes. It’s very defensive. It feels very insecure. Maybe if we sang it a nice song? A lullaby, perhaps? Nothing wants to be angry when it’s sleepy.”

  Elmsworth scoffed at both of them. “It does not have ‘feelings,’ child! It is a complex magical equation! Now, silence please. I must concentrate.”

  He began to chant in a low, guttural language, his hands weaving complex patterns in the air. Liam sighed dramatically, leaned against the wall, and began cleaning his fingernails with the tip of his dagger. The air grew thick with the smell of ozone as Elmsworth’s spell began to take shape. The runes on the door began to glow brighter, pulsing in time with his words.

  Then, something went wrong. Elmsworth coughed mid-syllable, a dry, dusty little sound. The pulsing rhythm of the runes faltered. Instead of fading, they flared with a violent, crimson light. The door shuddered, and with a wet, squelching sound, dozens of thick, purple tentacles sprouted from its surface, wiggling blindly in the air.

  Willow gasped. “Oh, the poor thing! It’s scared!” Seeing the writhing appendages, she decided they must be lonely. “Don’t worry, little door-friends! I’ll help you feel pretty!” She began her own soft chant, and a green aura enveloped the door. The tentacles didn’t vanish. Instead, they sprouted beautiful, but very thorny, pink roses all over their suckered surfaces.

  The door was now an impassable, wiggling, thorny, tentacled monstrosity.

  Liam looked from the door to the mages and back again. He didn’t say a word. He just shook his head slowly, holstered his dagger, and took a few steps back.

  “Right. Brilliant,” he finally said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “You’ve made an angry, grabby, pointy door. My infiltration skills, extensive as they are, do not cover horticultural monstrosities. I’m going over the wall.”

  With an effortless grace that was almost insulting, he ran a few steps up the wall next to the door, found a handhold, and was up and over in seconds, disappearing from view.

  Elmsworth looked at the door, then at Nugget, who had used the seventeen minutes of chanting to lay a perfect, light brown egg on a nearby crate. “I told you the atmospheric humidity was suboptimal for complex spellcasting!” he declared, as if that explained everything.

  That evening, the common room was thick with tension. Faelar was loudly recounting the tale of his wall-slaying prowess to anyone who would listen, which was mostly his own reflection in a pewter mug. Liam was perched on the arm of a sofa, complaining about being partnered with “magical liabilities who couldn’t unwitch a door without turning it into a Kraken’s rose garden.” Willow was sitting by the fire, happily sketching the “pretty tentacle-roses” in a leather-bound journal.

  “I’m telling you, it was a perfectly good diversion!” Faelar boomed, slamming his mug down for emphasis. “Did it divert attention? Yes! Mission accomplished!”

  “You demolished our only way out!” Liam shot back, not looking up from sharpening a dagger. “That’s not a diversion; that’s just bad planning! My five-year-old nephew could plan a better diversion, and he thinks the moon is a giant cheese wheel!”

  “My calculations were flawless!” Elmsworth interjected, his voice indignant. “It was the atmospheric humidity and a slight miscalculation in the ward’s resonant frequency! It could happen to anyone!”

  “It only ever happens to you, old man!” Liam retorted.

  I sat at the table in the center of the room, staring down at the pristine, perfectly gridded mission plan I had spent half the night creating. It was now covered in crossed-out sections and angry doodles of crumbling towers and what looked suspiciously like a tentacle. I wasn’t angry. I was past anger. I was in a state of profound, hollowed-out despair. My entire life, my entire training, was built on a foundation of order, discipline, and predictable outcomes. I was taught to lead disciplined soldiers. I was forged to be the perfect spearhead for a perfectly formed spear.

  But the Celestial Guard hadn’t given me a spear. They had given me a battle-axe, a dagger, a garden trowel, and a chicken. And they had told me to lead.

  Marcus’s words came back to me, clearer than ever before. Become the calm center of their storm. For the first time, I understood. I couldn’t stop the storm. I couldn’t control it. That was the mistake I had been making all day. The storm was going to do what it wanted. All I could do was give it a direction. All I could do was aim the hurricane.

  Slowly, I stood up. I walked over to the fireplace, the others falling silent as they watched me. I looked down at the useless, perfectly written plan in my hands, and then I tossed it into the flames. It curled, blackened, and vanished into ash.

  I turned to face them. I looked directly at Liam.

  “Forget the plan,” I said, my voice quiet but clear. “Tell me what you actually need from them to get you through a wall.”

  His eyebrows shot up in surprise.

  I then turned my gaze to Faelar. “And you. If you were going to make a hole in that fortress, forget the feints and the diversions. Where would you make the biggest one?”

  The dwarf’s slow, wolfish grin was my answer. The entire team was staring at me, their expressions a mixture of shock and dawning curiosity. For the first time since I had met them, I wasn’t trying to force them to speak my language. I was finally starting to speak theirs. The language of chaos.