Five rounds.

Serena hit the ground on her hands and knees for the fifth time and stayed there for three seconds because three seconds was what her body was demanding as payment for five consecutive shifts and five consecutive de-shifts and the payment was non-negotiable.

Her nose was bleeding. A thin line of red running from her left nostril to her upper lip, the signature receipt of a body that was processing shifts as trauma rather than function. She wiped it with the back of her hand. Looked at the blood. Accepted it.

Bleeding from the nose meant the shift was still too hard on her system. Bleeding from the nose also meant she was shifting, repeatedly, in succession, which was more than her body had been able to do a week ago. Progress was bleeding and bleeding was progress and the math was ugly but the math was hers.

Tiberon had said nothing. Five rounds. Five shifts. Five de-shifts. Five returns to consciousness where Serena checked his face for data and received the same granite wall. The wall had been standing for twenty-five minutes and the wall’s structural integrity was suspicious and the suspicion was growing but the growing was irrelevant because Tiberon’s silence was Tiberon’s approval and his approval was the only metric she had.

Aurelia: I won.

The thought arrived in Serena’s head with the warmth of a wolf curling back into her consciousness after five rounds of solo operation. Aurelia was settling back in, the two of them overlapping for the brief window between de-shift and rest where both minds existed in the same skull.

Serena: Did you?

Aurelia: Five times. He went down every time. I am undefeated.

Serena was skeptical. Aurelia’s definition of “kicked his ass” and the military’s definition of “kicked his ass” were two different dictionaries, and Aurelia’s dictionary had been written by Aurelia and peer-reviewed by nobody.

Serena: What technique did you use?

Aurelia: Strategy.

Serena: Be specific.

Aurelia: I used my paw and then I ran at him. It was devastating. He was confused and on the ground and I was standing. That is called winning.

Serena: Aurelia.

Aurelia: Hey. That hurts.

The wolf’s voice carried the specific wince of a body reminding its inhabitants that five shifts in succession came with a cost and the cost was currently being itemized across every joint, every muscle, every bone that had reshaped itself ten times in twenty-five minutes.

Serena wiped her nose again. Stood. Her legs were shaking but her legs were always shaking after shifts and the shaking was background noise at this point.

“SHIFT, Serena.”

Tiberon’s command cracked across the field. His voice carried the same flat authority it had carried for five rounds, unchanged, undimmed, the vocal equivalent of a man whose battery ran on discipline and whose discipline was nuclear.

Serena closed her eyes. The command hit her chest. Her body protested. Her bones protested louder. Every cell in her body filed a formal complaint about the prospect of another shift and the complaint was denied and the denial was Tiberon’s voice and his voice outranked her cells.

White light erupted.

Four and a half seconds.

The shift completed in four and a half seconds. Down from six. A one-and-a-half-second improvement that had nothing to do with technique and everything to do with motivation, because Aurelia had heard Thor’s wolf hit the ground five times and had decided that six was a better number and the path to six required speed and speed required a faster shift and a faster shift required wanting it badly enough and Aurelia wanted to hit Thor in the face with a ferocity that was rewriting her biology in real time.

Spite was a hell of a training program.

Aurelia exploded out of the fading light and launched.

This time, Thor was ready.

Five rounds of getting tackled by the same wolf using the same move had produced a lesson and the lesson had finally, belatedly, after an embarrassing delay, arrived: she was going to sprint at him and he needed to be lower.

He was lower.

He caught her mid-launch and redirected every ounce of her momentum into the ground with a tackle that was, by every technical standard, correct. Clean. Textbook. The execution of a trained military wolf who had remembered, five rounds too late, that he was a trained military wolf.

The problem was the “quarter force” parameter.

Thor’s wolf forgot.

The tackle landed at roughly seventy-five percent impact, which on a wolf three times Aurelia’s size meant the physics were catastrophic. She went flying. Truly airborne. Her body launched sideways off the contact point and sailed through the air for a distance that was too far and hit the ground at a speed that was too fast and the hitting produced a sound that made every wolf on the sideline flinch.

She bounced. Rolled. White light erupted from her body before she stopped moving, the shift breaking on impact, her wolf form collapsing under the force of a landing that her body categorized as crisis and whose crisis response was to de-shift immediately and without consultation.

Six seconds. The longest six seconds of involuntary de-shifting she had experienced, her body forcing the transition while she was still rolling, still sliding, the light wrapping around her and reshaping her and spitting her out human on the dirt of the training field.

Serena pushed herself up.

Her palms were scraped. Dirt was in her hair. The landing had knocked the wind out of her and the wind was coming back in short, angry installments. She’d taken worse falls before. Falling off dragons, getting bucked by water serpents, hitting arena floors at velocities that would have hospitalized civilians. This was a Tuesday.

Also, she had been unconscious for the first part and aware only for the last part, which was the part where she was on the ground, so the total experience from her perspective was: blackness, ground, dirt, breathing.

She was up in three seconds. Standing. Steady. Bruised but functional.

Thor shifted.

He stood on the training field, fully human, fully upright, and instead of checking on the princess he had just launched across a military training yard at three times the approved force parameter, his arms went up.

Both arms. Full extension. Fists raised to the sky. He turned to the crowd with the expression of a man who had just won a championship bout and whose victory required acknowledgment from every living creature within earshot.

“ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?”

His voice boomed across the training field with the projection of a man who had been waiting his entire career for this exact moment.

“THAT, ladies and gentlemen, was COMBAT. Pure. Raw. Crushturn-style. She came at me SIX TIMES and I held the line on the SIXTH. That is called FORTITUDE. That is called RESILIENCE. That is called a man who gets knocked down five times and gets up six.”