The five years of Alpha II's training were the kind of hell that only made sense when someone like Vastarael was the one designing it.
He trained her like someone whose body, soul, stamina and will all needed to be rebuilt from the ground up, which meant every lesson began with the assumption that she had to survive the lesson first before she could even think about learning from it. He decided almost immediately that her problem was not talent, because she had that in abundance, but endurance, energy circulation and the ability to keep moving when her body wanted to give up. So before she was allowed to focus on anything elegant or impressive, he made her work until the island itself became an enemy she had to outlast.
The first thing he gave her was a running route that circled the entirety of Modernia.
The scale of it hit her almost immediately because the island was far larger than it looked when she was still a child standing in one place. The first morning she thought she was simply doing a long exercise, then noon passed, then afternoon and she still had not completed even half the route because Modernia's coastline stretched farther than her exhausted body expected.
By the time night began falling, she was still running with her lungs burning and her legs trembling while Vastarael walked beside her with a calm expression that made her feel both humiliated and hunted.
Whenever she tried to stop, he forced her upright with a look or a gesture that made it very clear he was not done with her yet. When she tried shortcuts through the forests or along the cliffs, he somehow always found her and chased her back onto the path. She learned very quickly that he could be terrifying when he wanted to be.
That first year was nothing but running, breathing and learning how to move without wasting energy. At first she thought it was stupid because nothing about it felt like real combat training but Vastarael refused to let her see it as wasted effort and kept explaining that if her body could not keep up with her power, then her power would always remain a liability.
By the end of the first year, the change was already obvious. She could run for two full hours without collapsing and her stamina had improved enough that her Divine Energy flow no longer felt scattered whenever she moved at high speed. The improvement was so gradual that she did not notice it day by day, but when she looked back at the child she had been and compared her to the version standing there now, it became obvious that the island itself had been reshaping her through punishment and repetition. He also made her train in rain and across wet sand so that she could learn how to keep her footing even when the island tried to make her stumble.
The second and third years became brute strength hell.
Once Vastarael decided her stamina was acceptable, he immediately moved to the next weakness, and that meant forcing her to lift and drag giant sapphire rocks across the beaches of Modernia until her arms shook and her back screamed at her. The stones were huge enough to feel absurd and yet he gave her no mercy just because she was small.
In his view strength was supposed to be built through repeated struggle, not gifted through pity. She had to haul the rocks across the sand all day, every day, while the ocean wind struck her face and the heat made her sweat under the weight of the exercise.
Some days he let her stop at sunset and rest before continuing the next morning, but even then the rest was only partial because she still had to recover her energy flow, clean her body and return the next day without complaint. It was miserable, exhausting and deeply unfair, but the result was impossible to deny because the more she dragged those boulders, the more her body learned how to distribute weight, how to anchor itself and how to push through resistance without wasting motion.
When she finally became strong enough to drag the boulder for five straight hours, he changed the training again without warning and moved into martial arts, the impure version of the Plenituse technique. That part hurt the most.
Vastarael did not train her like a kind instructor or a distant expert who held back enough to preserve her dignity. He fought her as if he were her real enemy and then corrected every mistake by making the mistake hurt, which meant she learned footwork through bruises, guard positions through repeated impacts and timing through getting thrown into the sand over and over again.
At one point, he even matched his height to hers so that she would stop relying on his size as an excuse and learn how to fight someone at her own level. That decision made the training even more brutal because now she had to face his full combat experience without the usual intimidation of his frame.
Every strike she landed on him was met with a counter that taught her something and every counter she failed to read left her in the sand while he calmly told her where her weight had shifted wrong or why her hand had been too slow. He never humiliated her for failing but he also never pretended that her failures were acceptable. That balance made the training almost unbearable because she knew he expected her to improve every time he knocked her down.
Alpha II learned quickly enough that the cruelty of those years was part of the lesson.
By the time the fourth and fifth years arrived, her body had become fast enough and strong enough that Vastarael finally allowed the training to shift into the thing that mattered most for her future as a Musica. Since she was the reincarnation of Melody, she already carried a Pinnacle Tether and Vastarael had somehow integrated her into Phaenora's system so that he could actually see her growth more clearly.
That alone overwhelmed her at first, because it made her feel like she had become part of something much larger than the cave and the island and the lonely exile she had once been, but he treated it like a natural next step and immediately began testing her Music Divinity with the same precision he used for everything else.
Her main Musicum Instrumentum this time was not a violin like the previous Melody. It was a flute, and Vastarael made her understand that the difference mattered.
He also paid attention to her Boon, which was called Music Plagiarist, and that made the whole process even more dangerous because it meant she could steal other people's Musicum Instrumentum and even their Leitmotifs, the signature musical identity every serious musician carried.
Vastarael did not ignore that power or treat it as a curiosity. He made her study the sound of other instruments, recognize the emotional structure behind a Leitmotif and learn how to amplify her own flute so that she could turn ordinary performance into overwhelming force. Musica were born with the Base Tether Music Knowledge, so she already knew how to play from the moment she existed, but he taught her how to weaponize that knowledge. He had her practice with the wind, the rain, the cave echoes and even the sound of the ocean itself so that she would understand how to carry melody through hostile environments.
The fifth year was when everything finally started to click together.
By then, her body no longer resembled the weak child who had once been exiled to Modernia with dead eyes and no sense of purpose. Her running speed had risen to the point where she could cross the island without collapsing, her strength had become enough to move heavy objects for hours. Her combat instincts had sharpened to the point where she could read movements faster than most Musica her age.
She had also learned how to use the impure Plenituse Technique, which Vastarael had taught her after seeing how quickly she adapted to movement-based combat. It took her only six months to master it, which would have been impossible without the strength and stamina he had already forced into her body through years of punishment and repetition. That technique made her fighting style even more dangerous because she could now blend speed, agility and musical control into one seamless flow rather than treating them as separate skills.
And after that, he converted her into a Royal Aeterium. After all, he adopted her as his daughter once he knew she was the last reincarnation of his master.
The Music Divinity work was the last and hardest part of that five-year span, because unlike the physical training, this required her to understand herself as an instrument of power rather than just a child who happened to survive too much.
Vastarael made her meditate for long periods, listen to her own energy flow and learn how to amplify every note of her flute so that it could carry farther and cut deeper. He also forced her to understand that her Boon was not just a gimmick but a terrifying advantage if she knew how to use stolen instruments and stolen motifs properly. The more she learned, the more the Divine Energy inside her stabilized.
Because the Musica did not suffer the Ascension Curse the way other races did, her growth was shockingly fast once she actually learned how to direct it. Five years earlier she had been a First Enlightenment Divine struggling to understand exile and loneliness. By the end of the fifth year, she had reached the Fourth Enlightenment, mostly after her race change.
What made the whole thing worse was that Vastarael never once treated her growth as enough. He always looked at her like she could go further. He always expected more.
He never seemed satisfied unless she was one step ahead of where she had been yesterday and somehow, because he was the one saying it, she believed him.
By the time the fifth year ended, Alpha II was no longer just the exiled child from Modernia.