Chapter 27. Sevenfold

In through the nose. Four. Hold. Two. Out through the mouth. Six.

I pulled [Focus] up first and felt the familiar band settle behind my eyes. The garden sharpened around me, and so did Saoren’s breathing, the wind on the upper slope, the faint creak of the suren above.

Then I pulled [Still Mind] up beneath it, and the two skills sat on top of each other in a way I had not tried before, [Focus] narrowing the world down to what mattered and [Still Mind] keeping the rest of me from reacting to any of it.

I imagined a man standing six paces in front of me. Broad shoulders, hands up, the shape Bellos used to hold when he wanted me to come at him.

First stance. Left foot forward. Hands open. I breathed in and moved.

The first strike was a low palm aimed at the ribs, and I let a thin thread of compressed air trail behind it. The air left my hand cleanly.

The second strike came off the first in a rising arc toward the throat, and I fed fire into it at the transition, a small bright line that traced the path of the forearm and guttered out at the apex.

Third strike, staff replacement, and I did not have the staff so I shaped the motion empty-handed, pushing a gust through the gap where the weapon would have been.

Fourth transition. This was where the form had always tried to break on me. The weight had to shift from the front foot to the back while the arms were still committed to the third strike’s follow-through, and the timing of it was narrow enough that my hips had always wanted to turn a beat too early.

I breathed. [Still Mind] held. The hips turned when they were supposed to turn.

Fourth strike, a hooking backhand with a wind cutter leaving the knuckles.

Fifth, a straight thrust with fire compressed into a point at the fingertips that I released into the air in front of me, and the small orange flash of it lit the flagstones for half a second.

Sixth, another staff replacement, open palm, a broader push of air that moved the dust on the stones ahead of me.

Seventh, a descending strike from above, both hands together, and I drove a sheet of fire down through the motion that hit the flagstones and spread outward in a low rolling wave before burning itself out.

I held the final position. Both hands down. Weight centred. Breathing even.

Both skills were still running.

That was the part that caught me. [Focus] and [Still Mind] had not competed with each other for a single second of the form.

[Focus] had handled the targeting, the angles, the element selection, the timing between strikes.

[Still Mind] had handled everything else: the breath, the balance, the part of my head that usually started shouting suggestions at me between the fourth and fifth transitions.

The two of them together had turned the Sevenfold Branch from a sequence I could run cleanly about seven times out of ten into something that felt, for the first time, like it had been designed to be run exactly this way.

Ding!

[Focus: Level 7 (86%) > Level 8 (3%)]

[Still Mind: Level 2 (56%) > Level 3 (11%)]

I straightened up out of the stance and let both skills drop, and the garden came back to its usual width around me while my arms were shaking again, and I did not care.

“Again,” Saoren said from the wall.

“Yes, sire!”

***

The boy ran the Sevenfold Branch forty-three times on the first day. Saoren counted.

By the fifteenth, the fire at the seventh strike had stopped guttering and by the fortieth, the fourth transition had stopped being a problem entirely.

Between the sets of forms, Saoren had him do the rest: push-ups in sets of twenty, pull-ups on the lowest bough, four laps of the full path, then the duck walks, which the boy hated more than anything else in the routine and which Saoren therefore kept for last.

Somewhere around the seventieth push-up, a very quiet fuck escaped through the boy’s teeth on the downstroke. Saoren, who was sitting on the wall about four paces away, allowed the corner of his mouth to move and did not address it.

The forms were rough. The boy threw fire and wind the way most young mages did, which was to say he threw them outward, away from himself, as separate things launched from his body rather than extensions of it.

The fire left his hands while the wind left his palms and there was a gap between the boy and the element, it cruelly lacked precision.

“What level are you now, child?”

The boy’s eyes went briefly glassy. “Twenty-four, Master Saoren.”

“Again.”

That night, after the boy had eaten with the keepers and collapsed onto his bedroll in the inner garden, Saoren sat beside him and examined the damage.

The channels were inflamed. Small hot lines through the arms and legs where the mana had been pushed too hard. He extended one of his lower hands and held it above the boy’s shoulder, feeding a thin thread of his own mana into the channels, easing the inflammation enough that the boy would wake rested instead of ruined.

The boy stirred once in his sleep and murmured something that sounded like nana and then went still.

The second day, Saoren changed the order. Meditation first, two hours, then the physical work, then the forms. The boy did not like this.

“I thought I was past this part.”

“You are past nothing. You have learned to sit still. Now you will learn to sit still after your body has been broken for six hours, which is a different thing entirely.”

So the boy sat, fell asleep twice, and Saoren woke him both times by dropping a suren petal onto his nose.

After the meditation, the physical work, and after the physical work, the forms. But this time Saoren told him to add the open-hand sequences from whatever southern set that Bellos fellow had taught him.

The combination was ugly the first three times. By the sixth, the fire and wind were starting to move with the boy’s body instead of after it, the flames trailing his arms and the air compressing ahead of his palms, and there were moments, brief ones, where the elements looked less like things being thrown and more like limbs the boy had not known he had.

“Level twenty-five, Master Saoren!”

“When did that happen?”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“During the pull-ups. The forty-third one.”

“…You were counting the pull-ups?”

“The System counts them for me.”

“Of course it does.”

That night, the boy did not go straight to sleep. He lay on his bedroll with his arms behind his head and looked at the branches of the suren above him and talked. Saoren had not invited the talking, but he did not stop it either.

“Master Saoren.”

“Mm.”

“What were the other Axioms like? The ones before me.”

Saoren considered the question for longer than he usually considered things.

“Different from each other.”

“Different how?”

“Durhain, the first, was serious. Melkor, the second, was vain. Samwel, the third one, was quiet. And Ryn, the fourth, was kind. Too kind.”

The boy was quiet for a while after that.

“Am I… like any of them?”

“No.”

The boy seemed sad.

“…That is not a bad thing. You are still becoming.”