The hardlight goblins materialized.

  They came fast - faster than Jace expected. The practice simulations during freshman year had used slowed constructs, training wheels for students who hadn't Awakened yet. These moved at full speed, and full speed for a goblin was a lurching, unpredictable sprint that covered ground with alarming efficiency. Two of them boiled out of the forward cave darkness, crude blades raised, heading straight for the party.

  "Torrin!"

  Torrin stepped forward and the first goblin hit him like a wave hitting a seawall. His maul came down in a crushing overhead swing that the goblin barely dodged - the strike cratered the arena floor, sending chips of mana-stone spraying. The second goblin veered around Torrin's left side, heading for the gap between him and the cave wall.

  Jace moved to intercept. His practice sword was a standard-issue one-hander, weighted for Strength-primary users - which he wasn't. It felt slightly too heavy in his hand, the balance point sitting an inch too far from the hilt. He swung at the flanking goblin and felt his Stamina lurch downward.

  The blade connected. The goblin's hardlight body registered the hit - and barely reacted. A [Skirmisher] with twelve Strength would have staggered it. Jace's eight Strength, filtered through the [Wayfaring] penalty, turned the strike into something the goblin shrugged off. It snarled - the simulation's audio was uncomfortably realistic - and slashed back.

  Jace dodged. Not well. The goblin's blade caught his sleeve and the hardlight edge delivered a line of searing pain across his forearm - not deep, not dangerous, but *real*. The pain feedback system was doing its job. He hissed and swung again, this time at the goblin's legs. Another Stamina drain. Another hit that felt like slapping stone with a stick.

  Behind him, Torrin was dealing with the first goblin - dealing with it *spectacularly*, in fact. The construct had made the mistake of staying in maul range, and Torrin's second swing connected clean, caving in the hardlight ribcage and sending the goblin's body skidding across the arena floor in a shower of dissolving light particles. The kill was emphatic. Absolute. Torrin hit like the mine cart he'd compared himself to, and anything that stood still long enough to receive it was done.

  But the goblin he'd killed had been the slow one. The one that charged straight.

  The flanking pair emerged.

  They came from behind the rock formation exactly as Elara had predicted, but knowing where they'd come from didn't help when there was no one to stop them. One darted left, heading for Mara. The other went right, toward Elara.

  "Mara, move!" Jace shouted, still engaged with the second forward goblin. His SP was dropping - he could feel it, a heaviness settling into his muscles like sand filling his joints. Every swing, every dodge, every moment of combat exertion was costing him triple, and he'd been fighting for less than thirty seconds.

  Mara scrambled backward. The goblin pursuing her was faster. It closed the distance with a chittering snarl, blade raised-

  -and Mara's foot caught on the uneven floor and she fell.

  The goblin struck. The hardlight blade caught her across the shoulder. She screamed - not from damage, the hit was superficial by simulation standards - but from the sight of the red damage indicator that bloomed across her uniform where the blade connected. The simulation's injury visualization was designed to approximate real wound appearance.

  It looked like blood.

  Mara's eyes went wide. Her face went grey. She made a sound like air leaving a tire - a thin, whistling exhale - and her body went limp as the vasovagal response triggered with the efficiency of a trapdoor.

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  She hit the ground. Unconscious.

  "Mara's down!" Elara's voice, sharp and clinical even with a goblin bearing down on her. She backpedaled, hands raised in the universal gesture of *I have nothing to fight you with*, her [Scribe] class offering her exactly zero options for the construct closing on her position.

  Jace killed the goblin in front of him. It took three more hits - three more drains on his Stamina pool - and by the time the construct dissolved he was breathing hard, sweat running into his eyes, his arms aching with the specific heavy exhaustion of resource depletion. He turned toward Elara.

  Too far. The goblin was already on her. Elara threw herself sideways - more collapse than dodge - and the blade missed her head but caught her across the hip. She cried out and went down, curling around the impact.

  Torrin was at the chokepoint. Holding it. Exactly as Jace had told him to. The fifth goblin - the resource node guardian - had engaged him there, and Torrin was dismantling it with the patient, devastating power of a hydraulic press. But he was *there*, twenty feet from where Mara lay unconscious and Elara lay injured and two goblins were circling for follow-up strikes.

  Jace ran. His legs felt like they were wrapped in wet rope - the SP drain turning every stride into a negotiation with his own body. He reached the goblin over Mara and swung, putting everything he had behind the strike.

  The blade bounced off the goblin's shoulder guard. His Strength wasn't enough. His proficiency wasn't enough. The goblin turned on him and he tried to dodge and his body was too slow, too drained, too *empty*-

  The hit caught him across the chest. Hardlight blade, full force. The pain was a white flash that turned his vision sideways and put him on one knee. He felt his HP drop - not a number, a *sensation*, the sudden lightness of something essential being subtracted, the way the world got slightly less solid around the edges.

  He swung from his knees. Connected. The goblin staggered. He swung again. Again. Each hit weaker than the last, his Stamina scraping the bottom of the pool, his muscles burning with the acid buildup of resources depleted past the point of function.

  The goblin didn't go down.

  From the chokepoint, Torrin roared - a genuine, full-throated sound that shook the arena floor. He'd finished the fifth goblin and was lumbering toward them, maul raised, face twisted with frustration and fury. But lumbering was all he could do. Four points of Agility meant Torrin's sprint was another person's jog, and the twenty feet between him and Jace might as well have been twenty miles.

  The two remaining goblins circled. One over Elara. One facing Jace.

  Jace tried to stand. His legs buckled. His SP was gone - not low, *gone*, a hollow absence where the energy should have been. His arms hung at his sides like dead things. The practice sword weighed a hundred pounds.

  The goblins attacked.

  Thresh's whistle split the air. The hardlight constructs froze, flickered, and dissolved into fading motes of blue light. The simulation ended. The cave environment collapsed, the ceiling projections retracting, the rock formations sinking back into the flat arena floor. Overhead lights came up, harsh and clinical after the simulated darkness.

  Jace stayed on one knee. Breathing. The arena floor was very flat and very real beneath his hands.

  "Simulation failed," Thresh announced from the gallery. His voice carried no particular inflection - not disappointment, not surprise, not satisfaction. Just the clean, factual delivery of a result. "Time: two minutes fourteen seconds. Hostiles eliminated: three of five. Party casualties: two incapacitated, one combat-ineffective. Objective: incomplete."

  Silence from the gallery. Then - not laughter, not exactly, but the soft uncomfortable sounds of students witnessing something painful and not knowing where to put the feeling. Whispers. Shifted weight. Somewhere, someone exhaled through their teeth.

  Jace got up. It took more effort than he wanted to admit. He crossed to Mara, who was already coming around - the vasovagal episodes were brief, she'd told him, a minute or two at most before the body self-corrected. She blinked up at him with glazed, humiliated eyes.

  "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm sorry, I tried-"

  "Don't." He offered his hand. She took it. Her grip was ice-cold and trembling. "Can you walk?"

  She nodded. Couldn't speak.

  Torrin had reached Elara and helped her up with a gentleness that looked strange from hands that size. Elara was pale, one hand pressed against her hip where the simulation strike had connected, her expression locked into the tight, controlled mask of someone refusing to show pain in front of an audience.

  They climbed the ramp out of the arena together. Slowly. The gallery watched. Forty pairs of eyes tracking four people who'd just demonstrated, in vivid detail, exactly why the standard party meta existed and exactly what happened when you didn't have one.