Chapter 27: Training

Roen was the first to react.

“How the hell would you train?” he asked, his brow furrowing beneath the scarred dome of his skull. His eyes dropped pointedly to my bound wrists. “You can barely scratch your nose.”

Ghost and Brandt watched me without interrupting.

I didn’t look at the ropes.

I looked at the three of them, one at a time, and forced myself to speak the way I’d learned to speak during the loops.

“Let me be straightforward about where I stand,” I said. “I used to carry a sword, but I can’t last more than five minutes in a real fight before my lungs give out and my arms turn to dead weight. My technique is amateur at best. My strength is pathetic. I have no conditioning, no endurance, no foundation.”

“Even if we reach the capital tomorrow,” I continued, “as I am right now, I’d be useless to you. Whatever evaluation you’re planning, I probably won’t pass it.”

I let that sit.

Brandt’s jaw shifted. The corner of his mouth twitched, just barely.

Ghost gave a small nod.

Whether it meant he agreed with my self-assessment or simply believed I wouldn’t pass, I couldn’t tell. Both interpretations led to the same place.

“Most of my life was spent studying,” I added. “If your evaluation includes a written component, I might have a chance. Maybe. But I doubt that’s all it is.”

Roen snorted.

“Writing?” he said. “Knights don’t spend much time worrying about writing.”

He flexed one hand, cracking knuckles that sounded like snapping twigs.

“If it doesn’t swing, stab, or bleed, it’s not really our area.”

“Then I need to get better at the things that swing, stab, and bleed,” I said. “I have seven days to do it.”

I straightened on the bench. The ropes bit into my wrists, but I kept my hands still.

“Three training blocks,” I said. “Every day until we arrive.”

I’d thought about this during the fight. While watching Brandt through the window slit.

“Mornings,” I began. “I run alongside the carriage. On foot. The full morning march, or as much of it as my body can handle before it collapses.”

Brandt’s eyebrow rose.

“You’d slow us down,” he said.

“I would,” I admitted. “But not by much. The horses aren’t galloping. A steady trot is manageable, at least for the first hour. When I fall behind, I’ll join you on the carriage.” “Afternoons,” I continued. “Whenever we stop, I train strength. Rocks, logs, whatever’s available. Bodyweight exercises if nothing else. Push my muscles to failure and then push past it.”

Roen’s eyes lit with something I could only describe as professional interest.

“Then,” I said, “once I’ve recovered enough to stand, I want to spar.”

The word landed differently than the rest.

Brandt’s gaze sharpened.

Ghost’s head tilted by a fraction.

“With some of you,” I clarified, though they’d already understood.

Brandt leaned forward, his steel hand resting on the pommel of his bastard sword.

“To spar,” he said slowly, “you’d need your hands free.”

I held up my bound wrists.

“I could fight like this,” I said. “But it wouldn’t teach me much. I can’t grip a weapon properly. The training would be worthless.”

“You’re asking us to untie you,” Ghost said.

“I’m asking you to let me train,” I corrected. “The untying is a prerequisite.”

Ghost’s pale eyes didn’t blink.

I pushed forward before the silence could harden into refusal.

“There are five of you,” I said. “I spar with one. The other four watch. If I run, four Knights chase me across open terrain with horses and carriages at their disposal.”

I paused.

“How far do you think I’d get?”

Nobody answered, because the answer was obvious.

“If I run,” I continued, letting my voice flatten into the cold, transactional register I’d heard Ghost use, “you catch me. And if you catch me, you don’t have to believe another word I say. Tie me to the roof. Leave me there until we reach the capital. I won’t argue. I won’t complain.”

Brandt looked at Roen.

Roen shrugged his enormous shoulders.

“I like him,” Roen said simply.

Brandt’s mouth twitched again. That almost-smile. He turned toward Ghost.

Ghost hadn’t moved.

He stood with his arms crossed, his pale gaze fixed on me.

Several seconds crawled past.

“Fine,” Ghost said. “I agree. But understand something.”

He stepped forward.

“If you try to run,” Ghost said, and his voice was barely above a whisper, “I won’t just catch you. I will beat you so thoroughly, so comprehensively, so creatively, that you will spend the remainder of this journey wishing the elves had finished the job.”

His pale eyes held mine.

“You will beg for the mercy of the blade that went through your chest. You will dream about it fondly. The memory of being stabbed through the lung will feel like a warm bath compared to what I will do to your body.”

He let the words settle.

“Are we clear?”

I raised my bound hands in a gesture of surrender. Palms up. Fingers spread.

“Crystal clear,” I said. “When do we start?”

I shouldn’t have asked that.

 

---

 

The bucket hit me before dawn.

Cold water.

I came off the carriage floor gasping, water streaming from my hair and running down my neck into my collar.

“Morning,” Roen said.

I opened my mouth. A sound came out that wasn’t a word.

“Up,” He said. “You run.”

They tied a rope to my waist.

The other end went to the rear axle of the second carriage. Not short enough to drag me if I fell, but not long enough to let me slack.

The whip cracked. The horses moved.

I ran. Or tried to.

It was already the third day we’d kept up that pace. I had nothing left to squeeze out of myself.

My legs felt like they’d been filled with wet sand. The first hundred meters were a stumbling, graceless jog that sent jolts of pain through my ankles and knees. My lungs protested immediately, each breath a raw scrape against the inside of my chest.

The carriages didn’t slow down.

We had finally left the ruined city yesterday and returned to the open fields.

The road scrolled beneath my boots at a pace that felt manageable for exactly four minutes. Then the burn arrived. Calves first. Thighs, right after. Then the deep, suffocating pressure in my lungs that said stop, stop, you’re going to die.

I didn’t stop. I was not afraid to die.

I ran until my vision narrowed to a tunnel. Until sweat poured into my eyes so fast I couldn’t blink it clear. Until my legs turned to rubber and the ground came up to meet my face and I ate a mouthful of packed earth.

The rope dragged me three meters before Roen called the halt.

I lay in the dust, chest heaving, hands clawed into the dirt, trying to remember what breathing felt like when it didn’t hurt.

Roen appeared above me.

“Twelve minutes,” he announced, tapping a small magic-watch he’d produced from somewhere. “Not terrible. You’re improving”

I tried to respond. What came out was a wheeze.

“We’ll work on it,” he said, and walked away.

 

---

 

The only mercy was the monsters.

When something emerged from the brush, the Knights would halt the carriages and engage. Those brief, violent interludes were the only moments my body was allowed to rest.

I sat in the dust, chest heaving, and watched.

Every encounter was different.

The first morning, a pack of wolves emerged from the treeline. Not natural wolves. These were wrong in ways I couldn’t have imagined before arriving in this world. Their fur was patchy, revealing skin beneath that was scaled rather than smooth. Their eyes glowed with a green light. Their jaws were distended, hinged too wide, packed with teeth that grew in layered rows.

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Brandt killed four before the rest scattered.

The second day, wild dogs. Leaner than the wolves, faster, with elongated limbs that gave them an insectile quality when they ran. They attacked in a coordinated rush, hitting from three angles.

Ghost handled those. He moved between them like smoke, his blade appearing and disappearing from sight so quickly that the dogs seemed to simply fall apart mid-stride.

The third day, a creature that defied easy classification. The size of a horse, with the body of a boar and three heads that swung independently on thick, muscular necks. Each head had its own set of tusks, curved and yellowed, long as my forearm. It charged the lead carriage with a scream that came from all three throats at once.

Roen stepped into its path.

He didn’t dodge. He planted his feet, raised the iron slab, and swung.

The impact was the loudest thing I’d ever heard that wasn’t magic. The creature’s momentum carried it forward even as Roen’s blade caught it across the junction of its necks. It skidded across the road in a shower of dust and gore, leaving a wet trench in the packed earth.

Roen turned around and walked back to the carriage without comment.

I watched every fight.

Each one was a lesson I couldn’t afford to miss.

 

---

 

The second kind of mercy came when we crossed paths with other travelers.

The first time it happened, I almost missed it. My face was in the dirt. Roen had called a halt to my exercises mid-set and I’d collapsed onto the roadside with the grace of a dropped sack of potatos.

The sound reached me before the sight did. The creak of axles under heavy loads. The jingle of harness fittings and the low murmur of voices approaching from the north.

I pushed myself up onto my elbows.

A caravan emerged from the tree line. Three wagons, canvas-covered, drawn by draft horses. Armed men walked alongside the lead wagon.

“Who are they?” I asked Roen, who was standing over me with his arms crossed in his usual supervisory posture.

“Traders,” Roen said. “Running supplies to the front. Weapons. Provisions. Alchemical goods. Anything the garrison can’t produce locally.”

For a muscle-bound brute whose primary intellectual pursuit seemed to be inventing new ways to make me suffer, Roen knew this world with a depth that continually surprised me.

“Why are we only seeing them now?” I pressed. Not out of genuine curiosity. Out of the desperate wish to stretch this pause. “The route to the capital should be well-traveled. Heavy traffic.”

Roen’s eyes narrowed. He wasn’t stupid. He knew exactly what I was doing.

But he answered anyway.

“We don’t take the same routes they do.” He jerked his chin toward the merchant caravan. “They loop wide. Circle around the towns, stick to the cleared roads where the garrison patrols keep the wildlife thin. It’s safer, but slow and boring.”

He looked down at me with a grin that belonged on a predator.

“We cut through the middle. Through the high-density zones where the mana concentration pulls every mutated thing with teeth and claws.”

Of course we did.

A few minutes of negotiation followed. Brandt walked to the lead wagon and spoke with someone inside the canvas cover. Coins changed hands. Words I couldn’t hear were exchanged.

Then the caravan moved on, its wheels churning fresh ruts in the road, and the sound of it faded into the southern trees.

Brandt approached.

He carried a heavy brown sack in one hand. He didn’t bring it to me. He brought it to Roen and dropped it into the larger man’s arms without ceremony.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The solution to our problem.” Brandt reached into the sack and withdrew two glass vials. The liquid in the first was dark, almost black, with a viscous consistency that clung to the glass as it tilted. The second vial held something amber and oily.

Brandt uncorked the first vial.

Before I could react or form the word *wait*, he upended it over my head.