One moment he was standing several feet away. The next, he'd collapsed the distance between them to nothing, almost like he removed the space that separated them entirely.

Casmir's hand shot forward, fingers splayed, as the air around Finn's chest rippled with compressed spatial force.

Finn recognized the spell immediately. It was the kind that Osmund had used against him when they sparred back on the island. Incapacitating, yes. But non-lethal. Finn didn't intend on letting it land anyway.

[Frame Skip].

The world stuttered.

Finn's body flickered, leaving a ghost-image of himself standing in place while his actual form shifted four steps to the left. The spatial compression struck empty air where he'd been a fraction of a second ago.

Casmir's eyes widened fractionally — the first genuine surprise Finn had seen on his face.

His head whipped around, tracking Finn's new position, trying to understand the mechanics behind Finn's movement that had nothing to do with space. Then his expression shifted from surprise to something sharper. More focused.

He moved again, and this time Finn could see the calculation behind it. Casmir was adjusting, preparing another approach, determined to land something to gauge Finn's limits properly.

But Finn's [Frame Skip] had brought him in close — much closer than the Space holder had probably anticipated. Finn was within arm's reach, raising his fist for a quick jab at Casmir's midsection.

But Casmir registered this in the same instant and adapted smoothly. He immediately willed the space between them to widen further than Finn's reach.

Yet Finn also reacted, throwing the punch regardless as he activated a watered-down version of [Error Vision].

The world exploded into threads.

Possibilities branched out before him like a spiderweb of light, every potential movement Casmir could make, every spatial manipulation, every defensive option. Highlighting where the flaws were, where the errors existed in the pattern of Casmir's move.

Pain spiked through Finn's skull immediately. Even this limited version — focused as narrowly as he could manage, restricted to just the next second or two — strained his mind to its breaking point. The sheer volume of information tried to overwhelm him, to drown him in the branching paths of possibility.

But he'd practiced this. Over his two years here, he'd practiced this every now and then, trying to build up his tolerance however excruciatingly slow it was. Learning to ground himself against the tide.

He locked onto the clearest thread — the one where his fist connected — and committed to it.

The entire exchange took less than two seconds.

Casmir sensed the incoming strike and doubled his efforts immediately. The space between Finn's fist and his face widened, stretching like elastic, creating distance where none should exist.

It should have worked… Should have turned Finn's punch into an overextended miss…

But Finn's fist kept coming.

Because he'd seen the flaw in the expansion, the angle where Casmir's spatial manipulation had a gap, a microsecond delay in the weave. And by adjusting his trajectory by bare millimeters, following the error-thread he'd identified, his punch somehow bypassed the expanded space entirely.

As if the widened distance simply didn't include his fist.

Casmir's eyes went wide with genuine shock—

"Enough."

Thalia's voice cut through the chamber, carrying a weight that made the air itself go still.

And then Order crashed down on both of them.

Space snapped back into place with an audible pop and Casmir's manipulation unraveled instantly. The expanded distance collapsed as reality reasserted its proper geometry immediately.

Finn's arm, which had been moving at an impossible angle, following an error-path that shouldn't exist, suddenly found itself subject to normal physics again. The careful trajectory he'd been maintaining disappeared, and his punch reverted to a straightforward linear strike.

Both their bodies jerked violently.

Casmir stumbled as his spatial anchor dissolved. Finn's carefully calculated approach became an overextended lunge. His fist grazed Casmir's cheek instead of landing solidly, the angle all wrong, and the momentum carried him forward into a stumble.

They slammed into each other in a tangle of limbs.

And fell to the ground in an undignified heap.

The Truth holder — Deacon, Finn's mind supplied from the earlier introduction he'd missed — let out a genuine laugh.

"Well," he said with amusement in his golden eyes. "That was certainly... something."

Finn felt disorientation wash over him in waves. The abrupt cessation of [Error Vision], combined with Thalia's order enforcement literally correcting his error-based movement mid-motion, left his sense of balance scrambled. His head pounded and his vision swam turbulently.

But he didn't let it show.

He pushed himself up from where he'd landed half on top of Casmir, and his mind was already racing through analysis even as his body protested.

She dismantled my Error spell completely, he thought, reassessing Thalia with new eyes. She just imposed Order and unmade everything he had been doing entirely.

But it wasn't that her Order was absolute over his Error. The backlash he'd felt told him something important.

It was a matter of levels.

Thalia was simply that much more advanced as a Transcendent. Her mastery over Order was developed enough that she could effectively counter his rudimentary Error manipulation. She'd targeted his spell enforcement and unraveled it at the fundamental level.

Case in point, Casmir didn't look as affected as he was. The Space holder stood up smoothly, brushing dust from his clothes. He looked irritated and there was a faint red mark on his cheek from the glancing blow, but otherwise, he was unaffected. Thalia's intervention had dismantled his spatial manipulation without causing him any backlash.

But Finn felt like he'd been shaken inside a box. The error-threads he'd been following had been forcibly severed, and the feedback had rattled through his consciousness like a bell.

She's stronger, Finn concluded grimly. Much stronger. If we actually fought...

He filed that assessment away for later consideration.

Casmir was staring at him as they both regained their feet, and there was something new in those sharp eyes. Not quite respect, but... recognition, perhaps. Acknowledgment that Finn was more than he appeared.

"Never," Casmir hissed with a cold, quiet certainty to his voice, "call me a child again. The next time it happens, I won't hold back at all."

He turned without waiting for a response and walked toward one of the darkened corridors. As he approached, a section of the wall shifted — some kind of artifact mechanism — and opened to reveal a doorway.

Lyris, the red-haired girl, followed him. But instead of the angry glare Finn had expected, she simply looked at him with an assessing expression. Studying him carefully. Then she disappeared into the corridor after Casmir, and the door sealed behind them.

Finn took a slow breath, forcing his equilibrium to settle, and turned his attention to the others.

Thalia had already moved to a corner of the chamber where a shelf of books stood against the wall. She was methodically paging through one of them, her gray eyes scanning the pages, searching for something.

The Truth holder — Deacon — remained where he'd been, with that easy smile still on his face. But his golden eyes were watching Finn with unconcealed interest.

Finn decided to break the silence and try for conversation... Information gathering.

"What's his deal?" he asked, gesturing toward where Casmir had disappeared.

"Casmir?" Deacon's smile widened slightly. "Well, for starters, he's twenty-four."

Finn blinked. Processed that. Then reassessed everything he'd just witnessed.

Twenty-four...

The implications were obvious. Some kind of condition probably affected his physical aging. Which meant Casmir had probably spent his entire adult life trapped in a child's body, being underestimated and dismissed…

No wonder he's so sensitive about it, Finn thought.

But that didn't quite explain the rest of it.

"If he's twenty-four," Finn said slowly, "why is he still so... bratty? And haughty?"

Deacon actually laughed at that. A genuine, delighted sound. Even Thalia, still absorbed in her book, cracked the faintest smile.

"You'll understand as you spend more time here," Thalia said without looking up. She turned a page. "None of us will simply accept you just because you arrived. That's normal. But Casmir takes it to another level."

She paused, considering her words.

"He's likely the smartest person I've met," she continued. "Aside from Deacon, that is. Though Deacon's intelligence works differently."

Deacon gave a little half-bow, clearly pleased by the assessment.

"Casmir knew you were goading him," Thalia said. "He understood exactly what you were doing. He even knew the logical response was to ignore you and not give you the reaction you wanted."

Finn frowned. "Then why—"

"Because he's aware of his ego," Thalia interrupted. She finally looked up from her book, meeting Finn's eyes. "And he values it over logic. In his worldview, nothing he doesn't acknowledge truly exists. If he doesn't acknowledge something, it's beneath him. So when such a thing acts out of hand..."

She gestured vaguely toward where Casmir had left.

"He disregards what he knows is happening and lets his ego take over. It's not that he's stupid. It's that he's chosen how he wants to interact with the world, and he refuses to compromise that choice even when it would be wiser to do so."

"So it wasn't just a hazing?" Finn asked. "He wasn't just trying to put me in my place?"

Deacon answered this time. "Not at first. That sort of petty dominance display is beneath Casmir. He only acted because of Lyris's reaction to you. She's his girlfriend, and when she got irritated..." He shrugged. "He felt compelled to respond."

Finn absorbed this information, filing it away in the mental folder he'd labeled as Casmir – Space Holder – Future Escape Route.

Understanding the man's psychology would be crucial if Finn ever hoped to leverage his spatial abilities to return to his proper timeline.

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