Auri finally let go of me.
The second the pressure of her scythe released, my legs folded under me, and I dropped hard into the grass with a breathless groan. I was too tired to even be embarrassed by it. My chest heaved, my arms felt like they'd been filled with sand, and the world had that strange wavering quality it got when I had pushed too hard, and my body was trying to decide whether to keep functioning or just shut down for the sake of self-preservation.
Auri, meanwhile, looked like she had just finished stretching.
Not a single bead of sweat. Not a tremor in her breathing. Nothing. She stood over me with the same calm she'd had before the fight even started, as if she had not just spent several minutes dismantling me and then somehow making me feel like I had almost understood something important.
I stared at her from the ground for a second, then dragged in a slow breath and tried to sit up a little.
Auri pointed at the spear lying near us. "Do that thing again."
I blinked up at her, still dazed. "What thing?"
"The thing with the spear."
"Oh." I winced as I forced myself to turn toward it. "Right."
I started to push myself up, intending to walk over and pick it up, but Auri immediately narrowed her eyes.
"That is not what I meant."
I paused halfway to my feet. "What?"
"I said, retrieve it. From there."
For a second, I just stared at her, then followed her gaze. My eyes landed on the spear, still resting where I had dropped it.
And then it clicked.
Oh.
Not with my hand.
With whatever I had done a minute ago.
I looked at Auri, then back at the spear, and a wave of uncertainty hit me so hard I almost laughed. "I don't know how I did that."
"Then do it again," she said.
That was very much not helpful.
Still, I held out my hand and concentrated on the weapon as I could somehow force reality to cooperate by sheer determination. I focused on the spear, on the idea of it coming toward me, on the feeling I had had moments earlier when it had moved as it belonged to me instead of the ground.
Nothing happened.
I narrowed my eyes and tried harder.
Still nothing.
I felt stupid just standing there with my hand out like I was trying to summon a dog that didn't know me. Auri didn't say anything. She just watched. Not impatiently, either. More like she was observing something I still couldn't see.
Twenty seconds passed.
Maybe more.
I kept staring at the spear and feeling increasingly ridiculous. My arm started to ache from holding it out. I swallowed, frowned, and gave the whole thing another desperate push in my mind.
Then the spear twitched.
My eyes widened. "Wait—"
It rolled slightly.
I froze.
Auri's gaze sharpened by a fraction.
The spear shifted again, a little more noticeably this time, rocking on the grass as if it had suddenly remembered it was supposed to be obedient. "It's moving," I said, my voice rising in disbelief. "It's actually moving."
It tilted, then rolled over. A second later, it started crawling toward me in little uneven jerks, each one quicker than the last. I could feel something in my chest tighten with the effort, like I was straining a muscle I didn't have words for. It was not physical exactly. More like I was forcing my attention into a shape so tightly that the spear had no choice but to follow.
The movement became smoother.
Faster.
The spear skidded over the grass and then shot forward the rest of the distance, slapping neatly into my waiting hand.
I actually laughed a little when I caught it.
Auri folded her arms. "Do you know how you did that?"
I stared at the spear, then at her, then down at my own hand. "I just… strained my mind on it, I guess."
Auri's expression changed slightly, just enough for me to notice she was thinking harder than before. Not because she was confused, exactly, but because she was clearly measuring whether that was safe to let me keep doing. Like she was asking herself whether my brain could take that kind of pressure or whether I would crack if she asked me to keep pulling on that thread too much.
The thought made me uneasy.
Before I could ask what that look meant, Auri said, very casually, "Do you want to learn how to throw a javelin?"
I blinked. "What?"
She turned her head toward Rina, who was sitting under a tree in the distance with her weapon nearby. Rina looked up the moment she felt Auri staring at her, rubbing at her eyes like someone who the force of being noticed had just awakened. Her expression shifted into that slow, mildly irritated alertness that people get when they know someone is about to ask them to do something they did not volunteer for.
Auri kept looking at her for a moment, then turned back to me as if that had been a completely normal exchange.
I looked between the two of them and decided not to question it.
Lunch was supposed to be the part where my body got a chance to forgive me.
It did not.
I sat there with my sandwich half-crushed in my hand, still acutely aware of the places where Auri had hit me like my bones had decided to keep a detailed grudge. My shoulder still ached. My ribs still felt weird. Every time I shifted wrong, I got a fresh reminder that sparring with her was less "practice" and more "being adopted by pain."
I glared at my food, then at Auri, then back at my food again.
"…Your punches still hurt," I said finally.
Auri looked up from her lunch like she was hearing something mildly interesting. "That's because you're fragile."
I stared at her. "It has been like thirty minutes."
She took a bite, chewed, and swallowed with the calm of someone discussing the weather. "I wasn't even using ten percent."
That made me pause.
I slowly lowered the sandwich a little. "That is not comforting."
"It's not meant to be comforting."
"Well, it should be." I winced slightly as I shifted my arm. "It still hurt even if you weren't trying at all."
Auri gave me the sort of look a teacher gives a student who has just complained that the answer sheet contained too many answers. "Good."
I blinked. "Good?"
"Yes," she said. "You will learn to look past my weak punches."
My eyes narrowed. "Your weak punches?"
"Eventually," she continued, unbothered, "your body will tolerate so much that those kinds of hits will feel like nothing."
I stared at her in silence for a few seconds, trying to process that sentence.
Then my brain took the wrong turn.
My eyes widened a little. "You're saying you're going to hurt me so badly that I get used to measly punches?"
Auri paused mid-bite.
Dorian, who had been listening from a little distance away, choked on his drink.
Tess made a noise that sounded suspiciously like she was trying not to laugh.
Rina's shoulders trembled once before she turned her face away.
Auri just looked at me.
"That is not what I said."
I pointed at her with my sandwich. "That is exactly what you said."
"No," she replied. "I said you would adapt."
I leaned back a little, suddenly very wary. "That sounds like a fancy word for getting traumatized on purpose."
Auri's expression didn't change, which somehow made it worse. "You are already traumatized on accident. This is more efficient."
I stared at her.
The others lost it after that.
Dorian actually laughed out loud. Tess had to press a hand over her mouth. Rina's head dipped so low I thought she might disappear into her own shoulders. Even Auri's lips twitched just slightly, which was probably the closest thing she had to mercy.
I looked from one to the other and slowly set my sandwich down.
"…I don't like this training," I said.
Auri shrugged. "You'll get used to that too."
I narrowed my eyes at her, absolutely certain she was enjoying this way too much.
And the worst part was that she was probably right.
I sat staring with a sandwich in my hands, listening while they compared notes, which was somehow more humiliating than getting hit.
Dorian was the first one to really lay it out. "You move like you're constantly trying to survive the next second," he said, propping his elbow on one knee. "That isn't always wrong, but it's exhausting to watch."
I frowned at him. "Thanks."
He gave me a small shrug. "I'm not insulting you."
"It feels like it."
Tess, sitting nearby, nodded thoughtfully as she chewed. "He's right, though. You make a lot of exaggerated movements."
I looked between them. "Exaggerated?"
"Yeah," Dorian said. "When you dodge, you usually move more than you need to. Sometimes way more. That can waste energy, waste time, and knock you off balance."
I stared down at my sandwich for a moment, trying to replay what they were describing in my head.
"That can be a good thing too, though," he added. "If you know how to dance with momentum, if you know how to carry one motion into another, then big movement isn't necessarily bad. Auri does it. Her scythe sweep earlier? That wasn't just defense. It was a transition. She was already setting up her next action while protecting herself."
I glanced at Auri, who was eating like none of this was about her at all.
Dorian continued, "But you don't seem like you know whether you're a dancer or a fighter."
I frowned deeper. "What's the difference?"
"The difference is control," he said. "A dancer knows exactly where every movement is going. A fighter knows exactly where the damage is going. Right now, it looks like you're trying to be both without committing to either."
That sat oddly in my chest.
Tess swallowed and added, "Also, your attacks are too obvious."
I looked at her. "How?"
She held up her hands a little as if she were demonstrating. "Most fighters have a single firing point. One place their attack starts from. A shoulder, a hip, a hand, a stance. It makes the movement hard to read until the last moment. But yours… yours show too much too early. It's like your body already announces where it's going before it gets there."
I opened my mouth, then stopped.
That actually made sense.
I just wasn't sure how to fix it.
I looked down at my lunch, a little lost in thought. My sandwich sat there in my hands while my head started trying to puzzle through everything they had said. If I were being attacked, how was I supposed to calculate how much to move in time to avoid damage by an inch? If I tried to move less, would I be too slow? If I tried to move more, would I waste energy and open myself up?
And the spear. The spear had made sense because it had given me balance. But balance alone wasn't enough. If I used the spear like a dancer, I needed poise. If I used it like a fighter, I needed force. Could I do both? Could I hide the force inside the poise? Could I make an attack look small and still hit hard?
What made an attack powerful was the wind-up. That was just logic. But how would I get force into a blow if the movement was obscured? How did I stay unpredictable without becoming weak?
I stared at my food for a while longer, thinking too hard to enjoy it and too aware of being watched to ignore the conversation happening around me.
By the time lunch ended, I still didn't have an answer.
That changed when they brought me to the dojo.
It was empty except for us. A strange, silent room with clean floor space and rows of setups for those breaking boards, the martial artists always used. Except these weren't wood. The stacked boards were reinforced with titanium.
I stopped so abruptly that I nearly blinked myself into disbelief.
I pointed at them. "Those are titanium."
Auri nodded. "Yes."
I turned to look at her like she had just volunteered me for my own execution. "You want me to break through ten plates of titanium?"
"I want you to find a way through all of them."
I stared at her.
Then at the plates again.
Then back at her.
"Are you joking?"
"No."
"That is titanium."
"Yes."
"How am I supposed to break ten plates of titanium?"
"Find a way."
I just stood there for a second, feeling the shape of the test settle over me.
It wasn't what it looked like. I knew that much. The obstacle course had started easy and gotten harder. The sparring had revealed the spear. This had to be another test with something underneath it. Maybe pain tolerance. Maybe strength. Maybe willpower. Maybe she wanted me to prove I wasn't some soft idiot who folded the second something hurt.
I stepped in front of the stand and raised my hand slowly.
Up close, the titanium looked even worse.
Cold. Smooth. Completely unbothered by my existence. It didn't look like something that could be broken—it looked like something that broke other things. My fingers twitched slightly as I hovered my hand above it, and for a second, I questioned every life decision that had led me here.
There's no way this is just brute force… right?
But then again… the obstacle course had pushed endurance. The sparring had forced instinct. Maybe this was just the next step.
Pain tolerance.
Force.
Commitment.
I inhaled deeply, steadying myself. My arm rose higher, elbow locking into position as I tried to remember the form I'd seen before—clean, direct, no hesitation. I practiced the motion once in the air. Then again. Each time a little faster. A little sharper.
I'm not human anymore.
That thought settled in my chest like something I wanted to believe.
Maybe I'm stronger than I think.
I brought my hand up one last time, holding it there for a moment as doubt crept in around the edges. My eyes flicked to Auri. She wasn't stopping me. She wasn't even warning me.
That meant something.
I clenched my jaw.
"…Alright."
One breath.
Then—
I brought my hand down.
Hard.
Fast.
Fully committed.