"He isn't," Dean murmured back, eyes fixed below. "That's the problem."
Because Nero was not fighting like a student proving himself.
He was fighting like a man deeply inconvenienced by the fact that the assessment had been scheduled at all.
The trainer came in hard again, abandoning the polite opening logic of evaluation and stepping fully into pressure. His shoulders turned. Weight dropped. A low strike feinted into a higher one with enough force behind it that any ordinary candidate would have had to choose between retreat and bruising.
Nero did neither.
He slipped inside the angle with infuriating ease, caught the trainer's wrist just long enough to redirect the force harmlessly past him, and used the borrowed momentum to turn the older alpha half a step off-line. It was barely visible if one did not know what to look for.
The effect, however, was humiliating.
