Kono’s face drooped like an old, wilting sunflower. “Please don’t take it as an… assault,” he said softly. “I meant no harm. I meant it merely as a test.”

Dorian’s blood ran cold. “A test,” he repeated. The words were bitter on his tongue. “A test.” His mind spun. He’d thrown out the question as a probe; he’d not actually expected the man to reply honestly. Was it honest? What possible reason could he have for admitting it? Dorian could feel a headache coming on.

“You’re upset,” said Kono, shrinking back.

“Very perceptive.”

“I…this conversation has not gone as I’d meant it to.” Kono bowed, deep, all the way to the waist. “I am sorry. Thank you kindly for your time.”

Looking morose, he turned and melted back into the crowd of competitors. Mere seconds after he left Dorian couldn’t pick him out anymore—it was like he’d vanished in plain sight.

“…Weird.” Sometimes Dorian thought he knew the breadth of human psychology; other times he felt humans were an alien species. Either this man was profoundly discerning and profoundly dumb or cunning enough to plaster on the appearance. Either way it made him yet another threat.

He let the spike of anger die down. At least none of Dorian’s greater secrets had been exposed. If there was one takeaway from all this, it was that he’d need to act with ever more discretion. This whole situation was an irritant, a splinter under his skin. Dorian most preferred closed systems that he had perfect knowledge of: situations that were utterly predictable and utterly tractable. This Trial had been blown open twenty different ways. It unsettled him; more unsettling was the fact he had no intelligence network nor allies here. No way to reliably gather information in the short amount of time he was given besides banal in-person inquiry. His fate too much in luck’s hands for his liking. Too many uncontrolled and unknown variables floating around; he hadn’t a clue what was happening.

He shook his head. For now, at least, he had some measure of control over his fate. How he did in this Trial was very much up to him. By now he’d ceded some ground—after all that talking half the competitors had caught up to his stage. They jostled about all around him, clamoring for position to get a closer look at the tablet. Growling in annoyance, he stepped up to survey the next set of tablets.

A conception of the overarching Martial Art hidden in these tablets was starting to congeal for him. This was a Martial Art centered around evasion, movement, and long-ranged striking; it was a kiting art, somewhat akin to the Zhoupai’s, but with more offensive potential. From the last few tablets he’d gotten the movement technique, which doubled as defensive evasion, as well as the offensive one. What next?

Only a handful of Young Masters had made it to this stage, Kono of the Xiamen, Narong, and Yalta included. Their brows were all furrowed in deep thought—save for Kono, who looked at the tablet like he was sharing an inside joke with it that nobody else understood.

Dorian dove in. This one seemed to center the mind; the first tablet diagrammed meticulous qi flows in the brain, flowing across sensory organs. The next one was a little more vague. It seemed to show a projection: a painting of a soul leaving the body. What was this implying? Possession? Flight? Evolution? None of them fit in the broader context of the Art… Dorian hunched over, pulling up all the clues in his mind as his brow scrunched tight. Footwork, Defense, Offense…

Ah. His eyes flashed and he stared at it anew. This was a perception technique. What good was a long-range shooting Art if you couldn’t accurately perceive the target? Dorian cocked his head, soaking in the specific qi flows and burning them into his memory. This was to a rare and unusual way of going about it; usually perception techniques were an across-the-board increase in sensory sensitivity. Instead, this seemed to cast the senses outside the body with qi; in effect using a strand of qi as an extension of the mind. Where the qi went, so did sight, touch, sound.

He was slightly wrong about this technique. It might have some kiting utility, true, but at its heart it was a technique for the patient, wily hunter. In effect these strands of sensory qi could be tripwires for prey.

Wait. He froze. The applications of this technique extended beyond merely archery. Wouldn’t this solve his Pearl spying conundrum? Then, a split-second after, a second thought occurred to him which drew a groan.

It might, but now Pearl knew about it too. He’d be a fool not to render it ineffective tonight. Nonetheless, Dorian filed the idea away; it was quite a useful pickup.

Now he’d run out of tablets. That was the totality of the Art. He looked around, confused. What now? To the side Narong, one of the only other finishers, had made a beeline straight for Zhang; now he was demonstrating the techniques one-by-one for him. First the footwork, then the ranged air-arrow, and last the string of perception. They weren’t done perfectly—Heavens knew Dorian could make his movements seem like a rank amateur’s—but even so, they should’ve been enough to pass this sort of Trial. Zhang didn’t bat an eye.

Dorian crossed his arms, content to observe. As far as anyone else knew—save for Kono, a strange and inexplicable anomaly—he was as stuck as the rest of them; perhaps he hadn’t even comprehended one tablet. He was determined to finish nice and inconspicuously, in a middle-of-the-pack slot. So he’d observe; let the trailblazers show the way forward.

And show they tried. Yalta soon finished, and he went to work on what Dorian had considered a second possibility: the Art was about firing long-range missiles, right? Perhaps it was about using all the tools in conjunction. Yalta chucked out a string of perception, aimed, and threw an air-arrow so fast and with such force it left a streak of white drifting behind it. It shrieked into a cactus, which splattered into fifty gooey chunks.

Yalta looked to Zhang for approval. Nothing. A cavernous frown.

Exasperated, Narong turned to the others who’d finished. Zhang’s lips wouldn’t budge. “What are we to do?” he said. “Is it a trick?”

“It would be apt,” said Yalta, squinting. His voice was deep and smooth, his eyes harsh as slate. “For a Trial of the Mind to be a setup for misdirection. Maybe the true criterion has nothing to do with the tablets. Maybe I’m meant to crush thirty-two of you.” His lips quirked up a smidge at the thought.

“Hmph. I’d like to see you try, Yalta,” snarled Narong, tensing.

“There’s no need for unpleasantries,” said Kono, spreading his hands with a wan smile. “Perhaps the answer is under all our noses.”

“And who are you?” said Yalta with a short laugh—more a bark. “Why are you worth my attention?”

“I am Kono, Young Master of the Xiamen Tribe,” said Kono, bowing low. “I’m but a man with a humble suggestion.”

“Spit it out,” snarled Narong, jutting out his chin. It was so sharp it reminded Dorian of a spearpoint.

“If this is a marksman’s art, perhaps we ought to aim for a target,” said Kono.

“I’ve tried that. It did not work,” said Yalta.

“Not simply any target. One which is chosen for us.”

Yalta swept his arms around him, tracing the curves of the dunes in a panorama. “Where, pray tell? There’s nothing to see.” Kono’s smile was enigmatic. “Precisely.”

It took a half-beat. Then Yalta and Narong’s faces lit up at once.

“Of course,” said Yalta.

“Saint’s sake,” snapped Narong at the same time.

In unison they cast out thread after thread of sense-qi. They threw them in seemingly random directions—left, right, forward, back, cascading the world in a net of qi. Dorian cocked his head at the sight. Kono was content to observe them with his haunting owl-eyes, until—

“Aha!” Narong froze. Then, in one fluid motion, he yanked out a qi-arrow, stepped into a crouch, and launched himself off the qigong technique. In the same instant he put the heft of his entire body into one concentrated thrust of a throw; he bent backwards like a taut bow and released all of him at once. The arrow vanished in a flash, up and over a dune. A beat.

Then there came a hearty thunk of air striking wood. It was muted, inaudible to the untrained ear, but all four of them were Vigors and straining their attentions.

From the side came a clearing of the throat. “The first qualifier,” said Zhang, “is Young Master Narong.”

Narong sauntered off, chin proud and high. He gave a Yalta a snide glance as he sauntered past. “Lucky,” Yalta pronounced. He sent out his own probing thread in the direction of Narong’s throw, then promptly shot his own arrow off in a lazy, half-hearted throw. Another hearty thunk.

“Young Master Yalta qualifies.”

Yalta looked over Kono and Dorian, mainly Kono, as though committing their faces to memory. Then, wordlessly, he turned and left. His body must’ve weighed three hundred pounds, but his steps barely made a sound on the sand.

“I guess that leaves me,” said Kona with a shrug; his entry followed a few seconds later. Slowly, he blinked at Dorian. “What are you waiting for?”

Dorian didn’t reply. Instead he scanned the crowd, searching for a familiar bob of hair. Their antics had gathered a small but rising audience. Found her.

Kaya was still deep in thought at the first tablet when Dorian tugged at her arm. “What?”

“Come,” he urged. He bit his lip as two other thwacks resounded—two other passing entries, accompanied by an announcement by Zhang. “No time to explain.”

He dragged her to the edge of the Trial grounds, where the rest of the competitors had gathered by now. This was the limit to which the competitors were restricted; it was also where a good half of those remaining were launching air-arrows indiscriminately through the air, trying to land a shot. The rest, Dorian guessed, were out of luck. They probably hadn’t even caught onto the task.

Unfortunately that rest included Kaya, who, for all her martial talents, never stuck much to book-learning. She was still red in the face, likely a mix of humiliations—first from her inability to glean much from the text, then from being pulled all this way with no explanation. He tuned her out as he tried to draw a plan from thin air. It’d be a damn shame for him to have dragged her this far, only for her to fail so close to the finish.

He glanced around. Tournament officials watched them all closely, on standby to report successes to Zhang.

Then an idea struck.