The eleventh orbit came during a fight with Dorn.
They'd started sparring three days after Emptiness manifested—Dorn volunteering because he was the only one who could survive Cael's increasingly dangerous training accidents. The big man's Absorption orbit ate stray Impact blasts, wayward Edge cuts, and the occasional Binding thread that snapped like a rubber band when Cael's concentration fractured.
This session was different. The Hermit had suggested live combat simulation—real attacks, real consequences, controlled only by the mutual understanding that Cael would hold back enough not to kill and Dorn would absorb enough not to die.
"Hit me," Dorn said. He stood in the center of the transit hub, arms spread, bruises glowing like a mood ring under the bioluminescent crystal light. "Don't think about it. Don't control it. Just hit me."
Cael threw Impact. A full-force gravitational pulse that would have flattened a reinforced wall.
Dorn absorbed it. His body rocked backward, a new bruise the size of a dinner plate blooming across his chest, but he stayed on his feet. His Absorption orbit pulsed, metabolizing the kinetic energy into heat that radiated from his skin in visible waves.
"Again."
Edge. A gravity blade that sliced the air between them. Dorn caught it on his forearm—the edge cut through his skin, a shallow wound that would have severed a normal person's arm. His orbit ate the gravitational force behind the cut, leaving only the physical laceration. Blood dripped. He didn't notice.
"Again."
Binding threads, three of them, catching Dorn's ankles and wrist. He strained against them, his massive frame flexing, and broke free in four seconds. The snapped threads whipped back toward Cael, carrying residual energy.
Cael caught them. And felt something new.
The kinetic energy of the snapping threads didn't dissipate when they returned to him. Instead, it pooled—accumulated in a reservoir he hadn't known existed, a chamber in his gravitational core that collected force the way a battery collected charge. His body hummed with stored momentum, vibrating at a frequency that made his teeth buzz.
"Something's happening," he said.
"Keep going," the Hermit ordered through the comm. His voice was barely audible now—he'd been declining rapidly, each day stealing another fraction of his remaining vitality. But his mind was still razor-sharp, still reading Cael's gravitational output through the sensor network. "The orbit is catalyzing. Feed it more."
Dorn attacked. The big man didn't have much offensive capability—his orbit was designed for intake, not output—but two hundred pounds of muscle at full sprint was its own kind of weapon. He slammed into Cael like a freight train, and Cael's new reservoir caught the impact energy like a cup catching rain.
More. The reservoir wanted more.
Cael used Weight to increase his mass tenfold, then dropped from a platform ten feet up. The impact energy of the landing—a four-thousand-pound body hitting concrete—flowed into the reservoir. He could feel it building, pressurizing, a storm of stored kinetic force coiling tighter and tighter in his core.
Momentum. Sera Kane's orbit. The one she'd used to devastate him during their fight—storing the kinetic energy of every step, every blow, every vibration, and releasing it in a single, catastrophic pulse.
"I can feel it," Cael breathed. The stored energy was enormous—every hit Dorn had landed, every impact he'd absorbed during training, every footstep and jump and collision of the past six hours, all of it compressed into a single point behind his sternum. "I can feel everything that's hit me."
"Don't release it yet," the Hermit cautioned. "Momentum requires—"
Too late.
The release wasn't deliberate. Cael's body, overwhelmed by the unfamiliar energy density, expelled the stored momentum in all directions simultaneously. The blast wave rippled outward at the speed of sound, shattering crystals, flipping vehicles, turning the transit hub into a chaos of flying debris.
Dorn absorbed the wave. His entire body went rigid, every bruise flaring dark purple, his skin cycling through damage spectrums that would have hospitalized any other human being. He stood in the center of the blast like a rock in a river, eating the force, his massive frame trembling with the effort of containment.
When the dust settled, the transit hub was a wreck. Vehicles overturned. Crystals shattered. Walls cracked.
And Cael, standing at the epicenter, had eleven orbits spinning around him.
"Momentum," the Hermit said. There was awe in his voice, and underneath it, the particular sadness of a man watching something beautiful become something terrifying. "You now have Sera Kane's signature orbit. Congratulations. You're officially the most dangerous seventeen-year-old in history."
"You okay?" Cael asked Dorn.
The big man was covered in fresh bruises from head to toe. His shirt—the third one this week—was shredded. Blood seeped from half a dozen small wounds. He looked like he'd been through a war.
He smiled. "You hit harder than Sera."
"Is that good?"
"Ask me when I can feel my arms again."