Chapter — 23 Instructor's Sin
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The training ground of the Octrablade Palace did not forgive weakness.
Hard stone underfoot. No shade from the morning sun. The kind of open space that made every stumble visible and every failure echo. The clang of weapons carried across the entire yard. There was nowhere to hide what you were.
Which was why Fark Luxro loved it.
He moved through the two of them like water through a broken dam — not forcing, not overpowering, simply finding every gap they left and passing through it before they understood it was there. Ivan came from the left with a thrust that had genuine speed behind it. Sherlock came from the right half a heartbeat later — the timing they had practiced, the timing that had worked against every other instructor they had trained under.
It did not work against Fark.
The space where he had been standing was simply empty when their weapons arrived. Then his spear was behind both of them simultaneously — the flat of the blade tapping Ivan's shoulder, the shaft pressing lightly against the back of Sherlock's knee. Not hard enough to injure. Precisely hard enough to make the point.
Both of them went down.
They looked up.
Fark stood over them with the spear tip moving slowly between their faces. The morning sun was behind him.
"Surrender."
Ivan exhaled. "We surrender, Instructor."
Fark held the point a moment longer then pulled back and planted the spear.
"Long way to go," he said. "Both of you. Brats."
Ivan dropped onto his back and stared at the sky with the expression of a man who had been absolutely certain his plan would work this time.
Sherlock sat up slowly. Quietly. He was always quiet — not the quiet of emptiness but the quiet of someone who listened more than he spoke, who watched more than he moved, who stored everything he saw in a place he never let anyone else access. Timid on the surface. Something else underneath. His eyes were on Fark. They were always on Fark during these sessions.
"Instructor."
Fark looked at him.
"That dodge." Measured. Careful. "We had every angle covered. We mapped your footwork from the previous three sessions. We timed it perfectly." A pause. "Did you use a technique back there?"
Fark looked at him for a moment.
"No," he said.
Sherlock held his gaze. "Then how."
Fark crouched down to their level — something he rarely did, something that meant what he was about to say was worth sitting still for.
"There's no technique for what I did," he said. "There never was and there never will be. Every technique tells your body what to do. What I did is different." He tapped the side of his head once. "You spread your observation range until you're not reading movements anymore. You're reading *intentions.* Before the body moves the mind has already decided. Feel the decision and you'll be gone before the movement even starts."
He stood.
"That's instinct. You can't learn it from a manual. You build it or you don't."
Ivan propped himself up. "So how do we build it?"
"By getting hit enough times that your body gets tired of it and figures out a better option." Fark picked up his spear. "On your feet. Time for battalion lesson."
"Ohhh," Ivan said.
Sherlock was already standing.
He was always already standing.
---
New recruits at the Octrablade Palace had two responsibilities.
Training — practice technique, formation discipline, battlefield tactics. Everything Fark drilled into them from sunrise until the sweat stopped being voluntary.
And patrol. The city at night. The narrow routes and the wide ones. The eastern junction, the old quarter, the market district after the stalls closed. Routine. Necessary. The kind of duty that built vigilance in soldiers who hadn't yet learned what vigilance was actually for.
Sherlock always preferred the narrow routes.
Nobody asked him why.
---
Thirty minutes into battlefield tactics the footsteps crossed the far end of the training ground.
Fark registered them before he turned. He had been cataloguing those footsteps for three months without fully admitting to himself that he was doing it.
Maria — Knight of the Imperial Order — crossed the ground with the efficiency of someone who had allocated exactly the right amount of time for exactly this task. Her armor caught the morning light. Her expression gave nothing away.
It never gave anything away.
Fark found that unreasonably interesting.
"Vanguard Instructor Fark Luxro." Even. Professional. "His Majesty will arrive to observe training within the hour. Ensure your unit is prepared."
Fark turned to face her fully. Behind him Ivan and Sherlock had gone very still with the poorly concealed interest of recruits who had noticed something their instructor hadn't officially acknowledged.
"Yes, my lady." His voice carried its usual weight — serious, unhurried — but something underneath moved differently when he spoke to her. Like water finding a new level. "Our training proceeds as the flow of water. It finds its way. It cuts the stone." A beat. "We will be ready."
Maria held his gaze for exactly one second longer than necessary.
Then she turned and walked back the way she had come. Every step exactly what it was supposed to be.
She had covered perhaps twenty feet when — very quietly, to no one in particular —
"Idiot."
Her face, had anyone been positioned to see it, was completely flustered.
Behind Fark Ivan converted something into a cough.
Sherlock said nothing.
He was watching Fark's expression instead.
---
Magnus Alaric Shrigan was twenty years old and already carried kingship the way some men carry old injuries — not a burden exactly, but something that had reshaped how he moved through the world, present in every gesture whether he intended it or not.
He came onto the training ground with the Knights of Imperial Order flanking him and every recruit came to attention without being told. Not from fear. From the specific gravity of a person who had been given enormous responsibility and had decided — quietly and completely — to be worthy of it.
"BY THE RULE OF KING — RISE OF ARGHABAN."
Magnus let it settle. One hand raised. The ground went silent.
He looked at them. Actually looked — the exhaustion in their stances, the bruises from morning drills, the way the ones who had been there longest stood differently from the ones who had arrived last month.
When he spoke his voice carried without being raised.
"In the last few years we have been targeted. An organisation called the Hunter Squad. They disrupt our borders. They test our resolve." He paused. "I have watched your training since sunrise. I have seen your exhaustion. Your bruises. Your determination."
His eyes moved across the ground slowly.
"Many believe strength is born only on the battlefield. They are wrong. Strength is born here. In every drop of sweat. In every moment you continue standing after your body begs you to stop."
Complete silence.
"The Hunter Squad grows stronger every year. Other kingdoms sharpen their blades while waiting for weakness from us. Should Arghaban grow complacent?"
"*No.*"
Every throat. One sound.
"A kingdom survives because its soldiers refuse to become weak. Talent may create a strong fighter. Discipline creates an unstoppable army." He found the front row. Young faces. Some past fear. Some not yet. "Train harder than your enemies. Endure more than your enemies. And when the day Arghaban calls upon you finally comes — stand proudly knowing you were forged into true soldiers long before the war ever began."
He let the silence sit one final moment.
"Continue your training."
The cheer shook the morning air.
"RISE OF ARGHABAN — RISE ARGHABAN—"
---
Afterwards Magnus walked to where Fark stood at the edge of the ground.
"Vanguard Instructor Fark Luxro. How goes the growth of our future wall of the kingdom?"
"Like water, sir. They find their way. Given time — they cut the stone."
Magnus looked at the recruits still drilling. "Hmm. Discuss the merit of this training with Army Commander Garion. Have Knight Maria receive the report and pass it through Lord Silas."
Maria stepped forward and bowed. "Yes, Your Majesty."
Fark turned to her after Magnus left.
"My lady. The training merit. I'll have the report ready by evening."
Maria didn't look at him directly. "I'll expect it."
She turned to leave.
She walked away without looking back.
Behind Fark Ivan made absolutely no sound.
He was learning.
---
The palace cafeteria had been under maintenance for three days. A pipe problem — the kind that starts small and becomes everyone's inconvenience by Thursday. The official notice had gone up on the board with the apologetic tone of administrative language that means *you're on your own until further notice.*
Most soldiers went to the main street stalls. Fark went where he always went — a small restaurant two blocks east of the eastern gate, the kind of place that had been there long enough to stop trying to impress anyone and had accidentally become good because of it. He came here three times a week. The owner knew his order before he sat down.
It was seven in the evening.
He was almost at the door when he saw her.
Maria — Knight of the Imperial Order, composed, professional — standing in front of the restaurant with the specific expression of someone who has just realized they have no idea where else to go.
Fark stopped.
"Miss Maria." He kept his voice even. "Do you come here often?"
She turned. A very small startle — the kind a trained knight allows herself in a genuine moment of surprise before composure reassembles. Her face did something brief and flustered before settling.
"Oh — Vanguard Instructor Fark Luxro."
"Just Fark, ma'am." He held the door open. "How about dinner. It's on me tonight."
Maria looked at the open door. Looked at him. Calculated something.
"Hmm." A pause. "Okay."
---
*THUD.*
The beer glass hit the table with the specific confidence of a woman who had left professional composure somewhere around the third round and had not gone back to look for it.
Maria was talking.
Not the measured professional cadence of a Knight of the Imperial Order. Not the careful even tone from the training ground. This was something else entirely — words arriving faster than they were being organized, one thought connecting to the next with the cheerful disregard for structure that a certain number of rounds reliably produces.
Fark sat across from her with his drink and said very little.
He was finding this unreasonably enjoyable.
"—the captain," Maria was saying, leaning forward with great emphasis, "the captain of the Imperial Knight Order — that moustache—" she pointed at the table "—that moustache is so long he always — always — applies ten types of products to take care of it. Ten. I have seen the shelf. There is a dedicated shelf for the moustache."
Fark said nothing.
"Here I am." Maria gestured broadly at herself. "A lady. Not applying that many products." She picked up her glass. "Zero products. Full knight. Meanwhile the captain is in there right now with his little shelf and his little bottles going—" she made a vague grooming gesture with her free hand.
"Hahaha — is it!"
The laugh came out genuine and sudden — the real thing, unguarded, the kind that surprised him by existing at this particular moment with this particular woman who was making a very serious argument for her own low maintenance grooming habits at nearly midnight.
Maria pointed at him. "You're laughing."
"I am."
"I'm being serious."
"I know you are."
"*Ten products*, Fark." She drank. Set the glass down with another *thud.* "Ten. For a moustache."
"The moustache requires what the moustache requires."
"It's *hair on a face!*" She sat back. Crossed her arms. Looked extremely vindicated. "I have been a knight for six years. Six years. Not one product. Zero."
"Zero," Fark confirmed.
"Zero." She nodded with great satisfaction.
---
The rounds kept coming.
Somewhere around the fourth Fark was telling a story about a training exercise gone catastrophically sideways involving two recruits and a goat that had absolutely no business being in the restricted zone. Maria was laughing so hard she had to set her glass down and press both hands over her mouth.
Somewhere around the fifth she was telling him about her first week as a junior knight when she had accidentally addressed Lord Silas as "sir" three times in a row before anyone corrected her and Lord Silas had let it happen all three times without expression. Fark was laughing so hard the owner looked over with concern.
Somewhere around the sixth the restaurant had emptied considerably and the owner was giving them the look of a man who respected his customers and also had a family.
Fark raised his glass.
"It's been a pleasure eating with you, ma'am."
Maria raised hers with approximately seventy percent of her usual precision. "Likewise."
She set the glass down.
Looked at the window.
At the very committed darkness outside the window.
"It's midnight," she said.
"It is."
"You have training at sunrise."
"I do."
Maria applied serious cognitive resources to the logistics problem in front of her. The distance from here to her house near the palace. The current state of her navigation ability. The general situation.
She straightened with great dignity.
"I have an extra room," she said. Very professionally. "If an Imperial Knight orders you — you cannot refuse. Consider yourself ordered." A pause. "I am your escort. My lady."
Fark looked at her for a moment.
"My lady," he agreed. Very seriously.
---
Sunlight came through the window of Maria's house.
Her eyes opened.
She lay still for a moment. Stretched. Sat up slowly pushing her hair back from her face.
Then she looked down.
Her face went completely red.
She snatched the blanket up immediately clutching it to herself and looked around the room with the wide eyes of someone whose brain was working very hard and very fast and arriving at conclusions she was absolutely not prepared for.
The other side of the bed was empty.
She stared at it.
*What.*
*What happened.*
*What—*
Then she saw it on the small table beside the bed. A folded piece of paper with her name on the front in precise unhurried handwriting.
She reached for it with one hand while keeping the blanket firmly in place with the other.
She opened it.
---
*Hello Miss Maria,*
*I had morning drill this morning so I had to leave early.*
*Please rest properly because of last night.*
*Also — that is not a mushroom.*
*Please stop calling it that.*
____ ____
//// _ ////
*Fark Luxro*
---
Maria stared at the letter.
Read it again.
Stared at it a third time.
The color that arrived on her face had no name in any official Imperial register.
**"KYAAAA—!!!"**
---
The Knights of the Imperial Order were bound by a law that had stood for hundreds of years.
No romantic relationship. No personal entanglement. No attachment that could compromise the absolute loyalty the order demanded.
The law was not cruel. It was not arbitrary. It existed because a knight whose heart belonged to someone could not belong completely to the kingdom.
There was one provision. A formal request submitted to the council. Reviewed. Permission could be granted.
Maria had not submitted a request.
Not because she hadn't known. But because what happened between her and Fark had not been a decision. It had been an evening and a food stall and six rounds and a letter about a mushroom and a morning that arrived before either of them had fully processed what the night before had meant.
An accident.
Except that when the doctor told her what the accident had produced — when she sat with that information for three days before telling anyone — she found that she wanted it.
Not despite everything. Not reluctantly.
She wanted this child.
She told Fark first. He was quiet for a long time. Then he looked at her with something that had no military application whatsoever.
"We'll figure it out," he said.
They didn't get to figure it out.
The law was clear. The violation was clear. Maria had not submitted the formal request to the council. A pregnant Knight of the Imperial Order who had broken her oath of undivided loyalty was not something the council could quietly set aside regardless of circumstance or feeling.
Magnus heard about it and was silent for a long time.
He showed mercy in the way kings show mercy when they cannot show forgiveness — he let them keep each other.
Fark was stripped of the Vanguard Instructor title. Demoted. Stationed at Silphor as a normal spear instructor — a border village, unremarkable, far from everything he had built.
Maria was stripped of her title as Knight of Imperial Order.
Not demoted. *Stripped.* The armor, the post, the identity that had been hers since before Fark existed in her life — gone. Completely.
She accepted it without appeal. She had broken the oath. She had known what she was doing when she chose to keep the child. She accepted the consequence the way she accepted everything — cleanly, completely, without asking for anything she hadn't earned.
They were given a house. A yard. Two horses under a tall tree.
It was not what either of them had planned.
Neither of them said that out loud.
---
Then a few months later sai was born.
Fark held him once and immediately began thinking about how to train him.
He was demanding about it. Not cruel — Fark didn't have cruelty in him — but demanding in the way that doesn't account for the fact that the person being demanded of is four years old and just wants his father to sit down and eat dinner with him.
Maria watched it go on longer than it should. Then she stopped it.
"He is just a kid." Not a request. A fact being delivered to someone who had temporarily forgotten it. "I will teach him swordsmanship."
Sai looked between his father's spear and his mother's sword.
He chose the sword.
Not because the sword was better. Because his mother had never once made him feel like he was failing a test he hadn't signed up to take.
Fark said nothing about it.
The distance it opened between them never fully closed. It became part of the architecture of the house — present in every room, never named, accumulating over years into something that looked from the outside like stubbornness and felt from the inside like a door that kept almost opening and then didn't.
Sai left for Gradient Academy and the goodbye that should have happened didn't. Another argument. Another silence too heavy to speak through. He walked out the door with his mother's embrace still on him and his father's last words still unfinished in the air.
Fark watched him go from the doorway and didn't call after him.
Some things you carry because putting them down would mean admitting how heavy they were.
---
The night Mirha changed Sherlock Brias had been on patrol for six hours.
Ivan split off at the eastern junction. Routine. The kind of division they had done a hundred times on the city patrol routes assigned between training sessions.
Sherlock took the narrow route through the old quarter.
He always preferred the narrow routes.
The wind over Mirha carried no warmth.
The torch wavered between visibility and shadow as the empty street seemed to narrow around the two figures. The black-cloaked man stood still — studying Sherlock without urgency, without threat, with the patience of someone who had done this before and already knew how it ended.
Sherlock's expression held no hesitation. Only intent.
The stranger noticed immediately.
A quiet laugh escaped beneath the hood.
"…Good."
He took a slow step forward. The air responded — heavier, denser, pressure layering itself into the space between them.
"Most people lie to themselves about what they want." Another step. "They call it duty. They call it loyalty. They call it honor."
He stopped just a few feet away. Sherlock didn't move back. Didn't adjust his stance. The spear steady — not defensive. Focused.
The cloaked figure tilted his head. "But all of it is just a mask for desire."
His voice lowered. "Power is the only truth that never changes."
A subtle crimson tint flickered beneath his sleeve — something reacting to his words like a living thing responding to its name. Sherlock's eyes tracked it without blinking.
"Kings want it to rule. Soldiers want it to survive. And those who deny it—" A faint controlled smile under the hood. "—are usually the easiest to break."
Silence.
Sherlock spoke. Calm. Measured.
"Then stop talking."
The wind faltered. The torch flickered even more.
The cloaked figure went still. Not offended.
Interested.
Sherlock took one step forward. "If everything you say is true — then prove it." Colder. Sharper. "Don't explain power. Demonstrate it."
The stranger's presence deepened.
A quiet laugh. Satisfied. "…Good."
He raised his hand. The air around it warped faintly.
"You're not resisting anymore."
Sherlock didn't respond. The silence between them was no longer confusion.
It was alignment.
The cloaked man stepped closer. "People spend lifetimes running from what they are. But you didn't run." A brief pause. "You're already looking at it."
The torch flickered violently across Sherlock's face. He didn't flinch.
"Welcome to Power Hunting."
A pause. Then like a formal declaration into the night —
"Welcome to Hunter Squad."
The words didn't echo. They sank.
Into the street. Into the silence. Into the decision Sherlock had already made before he walked down that lane — possibly before he had ever picked up a spear on a palace training ground and watched an instructor move like water through every gap they left and felt something he had never found a name for.
Now I have a reason.
Cold. Clear. Certain.
Now I have a reason for being powerful. No one can stop me. If he was not powerful enough to make me — I will become what he never could.
The next morning they found the patrol uniform. Folded. Precisely. The spear laid beside it.
The blood was everywhere.
The report was filed. Commander after commander reviewed the evidence and arrived at the same conclusion.
Sherlock Brias. Declared dead.
Ivan stood at the site long after the others left. He picked up nothing. Said nothing. Just looked at the spear on the ground — the one an instructor had put in Sherlock's hands on a palace training ground — and walked away.
He never talked about it. Not to anyone. Not ever.
The years between that night and this street were a long distance.
Fark had never known how far until now.
They came from every direction at once.
Not rushing. Coordinating — the specific patience of people told exactly where to be and exactly when. The Hunter Squad spread across the ruined street in a formation that covered every exit, every angle, every space a man with a spear might try to use.
Fark counted them in the time it took to exhale.
Twelve. Fourteen. Seventeen.
His left hand had a hole through it. His chest was doing something irregular. Third Beginning had been spent once already and the cost was sitting in every muscle he owned.
He stood up anyway.
The first wave hit with elemental techniques — fire condensed into pressurized projectiles, wind blades faster than the eye preferred to track, earth constructs rising from the cracked street to cut off movement. Not individual attacks. A pattern — overlapping, calculated, designed to consume every possible defensive response simultaneously.
Fark read it.
Not with his eyes. With the thing he had tried to describe to a quiet timid recruit on a palace training ground twenty years ago.
Expand your observation range until you're not reading movements anymore. You're reading intentions.
The spear came up.
"Third Beginning — Second Form: Structural Erasure Grid."
The spear mapped the battlefield like a cartographer maps terrain — every coordinate, every trajectory, every point in the air where an attack existed or was about to. The kinetic cone that followed was not a wave. It was a grid — expanding outward along calculated lines, each intersection a place where offensive energy met something that refused to let it continue.
The fire projectiles came apart mid-flight. The wind blades scattered. The earth constructs fractured from the inside.
Hunters went down. Bodies hit rubble. Weapons clattered against stone.
Fark stood in the silence with his vision doing things he didn't like and his chest doing something irregular and his left hand past reliable information.
He didn't sit down.
One hunter remained at the far edge — positioned back deliberately, waiting for exactly this moment. Six blades left the hand in a single motion. Fark deflected four. The fifth caught his right shoulder. The sixth opened a line across his ribs.
He staggered but held his feet.
The Hunter Squad reformed. Patient. Methodical. The way you handle something dangerous when you have numbers and the target has neither time nor reserves.
Fark looked at the formation. Looked at his hands. At the spear he had used to teach Ivan how to plant his feet. To teach Sherlock how to read intentions. To train Sai in drills the boy had eventually walked away from.
He gripped it.
"Come on then," he said quietly. Not to the Hunter Squad. To himself. To the twenty years. To everything.
The second wave hit harder.
Fark moved through it — finding gaps, reading intentions, spending what remained with the precision of someone who knew exactly how much was left. Three down. Then two more. Then the formation adjusted again and the math became what it had always been going to become.
The numbers found him.
He went to his knees.
Both hands on the spear. His chest rising and falling with the deliberateness of someone choosing each breath individually. Blood from his ribs meeting the stone beneath him.
He looked up.
Through the settling dust a figure walked — unhurried, hands loose, the ease of someone arriving somewhere they had been planning to arrive for a very long time.
Sherlock.
The smile was already there.
He stopped a few feet from Fark and looked at him — at the spear used to stay upright, at the hand, at the afternoon written into every part of him. The way he had looked at everything on the training ground twenty years ago. Studying. Cataloguing.
"I wanted you to see it," Sherlock said. Not quietly. Clearly. The voice of someone who had been waiting twenty years to say something out loud and was finally saying it. "Everything I became." He gestured broadly at the ruined street, the burning village, the Hunter Squad scattered across the ground. "All of this. Without you."
Fark met his eyes from the ground. Breathing rough but controlled.
"You were never my failure," Fark said. "You were always your own choice."
Something moved behind Sherlock's eyes. The specific quality of a man who had waited twenty years for an answer and found it smaller than the question had been.
The smile held.
Fark looked at his spear. One thing left.
He exhaled slowly.
"Third Beginning — Final Form—"
Sherlock moved.
One motion. Precise. Clean. The single strike of someone who had spent twenty years learning what came after the technique an instructor taught on a training ground.
His spear found Fark's at the exact point of maximum stress.
The crack was clean. The blade dropped.
Sherlock caught it before it reached the ground and drove it into Fark's chest in the same unbroken motion.
Blood came to Fark's mouth. Sherlock caught him before he could fall — one hand gripping his collar, pulling him close, holding him at eye level.
He brought his mouth to Fark's ear.
"This is what I get after seeking power," he said. "You should never have come here."
He held him there one more second.
Then he let go.
Fark hit the ground and lay still.
Sherlock looked at the blood on the blade in his hand. Then he crouched and touched the blood pooling on the stone beside Fark's mouth — brought it to his lips.
He stood.
"What a waste of power." Loud. Easy. Like commenting on bad weather. "All that strength and this is where it ends, Fark Luxro."
He turned.
Maria was standing fifty meters away.
She had just made it to the street. Still moving when she saw it — Fark on the ground, the blood, Sherlock standing over him like none of it cost him anything.
She stopped.
The communicator slipped from her hand and hit the stone and she didn't hear it.
She didn't hear anything for a moment.
Just Fark's hand open and flat against the ground. The hand that had been on Ron's head a hundred times — heavy, warm, there and then gone.
Still now.
The tears came without asking permission — cutting through the dust on her face. Her jaw tightened. Her teeth found her lip hard enough to draw blood of her own.
Her sword came up.
Sherlock saw her and his face opened into something completely genuine — the expression of someone who just received an unexpected gift on a day that was already going extremely well.
"Oh! The former Knight of Imperial Order herself!" He spread his arms wide, weapon in hand, looking at her across the smoke like he genuinely couldn't believe his luck. "You actually made it here! Heeheehee!"
He pointed his weapon directly at her.
"Come on then! Show me everything you have — I want to feel every bit of it!"
Maria's eyes found his face.
Everything she was — Knight, wife, mother, the woman who had stood in a yard every morning for four years teaching a broken child how to become something — gathered into one direction.
She screamed.
"HYAAAAAAA—!"
Sherlock's grin widened as she closed the distance.
"YES! THAT'S IT! COME ON!!! ".
-----------------
Chapter End
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