Vis awakens on a riverside at night, coughing up water and discovering he is battered but alive. Diago, the massive alupi, watches from the bank; bite marks on Vis’s arm reveal Diago dragged him from the river. Vis opens his clenched fist to find the Heart of Jovan still in his palm, its earlier imbuing seemingly gone and its tracker no longer functioning. Shaken by the memory of Emissa stabbing and pushing him, and by emerging anomalies since the Labyrinth, Vis confirms on his tracking plate that his medallion’s marker has not moved and sets out for Callidus before exhaustion overtakes him.

At dawn, Vis forces his sore body toward Callidus’s position, with Diago occasionally shadowing him through the trees. Near midday, a scream draws Vis into a clearing where he finds an Anguis attacker dead with his throat ripped out, and Callidus gravely wounded with deep cuts and heavy blood loss. Vis binds Callidus’s wounds and keeps him talking; Callidus explains an angry attacker tortured him, claiming he’d been left behind, until an alupi intervened. They both infer the broader Anguis assassination plot against the safety teams and Fourths.

Vis awkwardly lifts Callidus despite his own injuries. Callidus gives Vis a white medallion; though resentful of the trial after so much bloodshed, Vis takes it because he still needs to win the Iudicium. As they stagger on, they trade fragments—uncertainty about Aequa’s fate, mention of the many Fourths and Sianus lost. Callidus asks Vis to tell his father why he was in Seven without naming Belli. Vis keeps Callidus engaged, even noting it is his eighteenth birthday, trying to hold his friend to consciousness.

Callidus eventually slips into a rasping unconsciousness and dies without Vis noticing at first. Determined and near collapse, Vis continues carrying him until the Academy comes into view. He refuses help from guards and reaches the quadrum in the final hour of the Iudicium, where Veridius addresses the school about the attack with Emissa, Indol, Iro, Aequa, and others present. Vis lays Callidus at Veridius’s feet, quietly tells Veridius and Emissa he will make them burn for this, then completes the trial by slamming a golden pyramid onto Jovan’s chest. With his task finished, he collapses into unconsciousness.