Chapter 09 | You Must Train

Joseph Marco arrived on a Thursday afternoon with a dark green backpack slung over one shoulder and the particular look of a man who has been on a very long series of connecting flights and has made his peace with it. He was taller than Matthias had expected from Yuki's description, leaner than Aki, without that broad-shouldered solidity, but with a fitness that sat quietly under the scholar's impression, the kind that came from years of field work rather than any deliberate programme. His hair was long and black and had the relationship with order that most things did when the person responsible for them had more pressing concerns.

He shook Matthias's hand in the entrance hall with the directness of someone who had been looking forward to this specific meeting and was not interested in the usual conversational scaffolding.

"The sword," he said. Not hello, it's good to meet you, or thank you for having me. Just: the sword.

"Good to meet you too," Matthias said.

"Yes, and the sword."

They gathered in the living room, all five of them, Belial having produced tea with the reflex of someone who considers the provision of tea a baseline social responsibility, Astreal positioned at the edge of the room in the way she always was, covering the angles out of habit. Yuki had claimed the armchair. Aki leaned against the far wall with the ease of someone who had found the load-bearing position in the room and taken it.

Matthias manifested the Sun Blade.

Joseph set down his tea, reached across, and took the sword with both hands. He turned it. He held it at different angles. He ran one thumb along the flat of the blade, not the edge, the way you ran your thumb along the flat of something you were reading rather than using. His expression was the expression of a man doing arithmetic.

Then he set it carefully on the table, reached into the green backpack, and drew out his own.

The resemblance was immediate and exact. Same straight single edge. Same simple cross-guard. Same quiet gold at the blade, the same quality of light, the same settled warmth that was not quite sunlight and not quite fire. Joseph held the two side by side, measuring them against each other with the focused attention of someone who has just found a second fingerprint at a scene that was supposed to have only one.

"The Sun Blade," he said, after a long moment, "was forged from the lava of Mount Etna. The process took, a considerable amount of time, and the materials were singular. There is one." He looked at the two swords. "There should be one." He looked at Matthias. "I cannot explain this. The metallurgy alone should make a perfect copy impossible, and a forgery would not carry the light." He set his own sword on the table beside Matthias's. "I need more time with this. What I can tell you now is that whatever you are holding, it is not fake and it is not a coincidence. Beyond that, I don't know yet."

"Yet," Matthias said.

"Yet," Joseph confirmed, with the easy assurance of someone who considers yet a complete and satisfying answer.

He returned his sword to whatever dimension the others kept theirs in when not in use, and looked at Matthias with a different quality of attention, less the scholar assessing an artefact and more the instructor assessing a student.

"You need to train," he said.

Matthias waited for the elaboration.

"Not because Belial and Astreal are insufficient," Joseph said, with the measured clarity of someone who has organised this argument in advance. "They are clearly not insufficient. But self-sufficiency matters. There will be moments, there will be moments, this is a certainty, when they cannot cover you. A gap in the field. An approach vector nobody accounted for. A second threat arriving while the first is being managed." He looked at Matthias steadily. "You have the instinct and you have the blade. The rest is training."

Matthias thought about the skeleton in the car park. He thought about the three seconds before the sword appeared in his hand, and what would have happened if it had taken four.

"Agreed," he said.

Joseph nodded once. He looked around the room.

"Belial," he said.

Belial looked up from her tea with the polite attention of someone who has been listening carefully and is ready to respond.

"Your range coverage is excellent," Joseph said. "Support power, area denial, long-range engagement, you are well-suited to all of it. The staff is the right primary weapon for that role." He paused. "But if something gets inside your reach, if someone closes the distance before you can prevent it, the staff becomes a problem. At knife range it is too long to manage."

Belial was quiet for a moment. Then: "You're correct."

It was said without defensiveness, which told Matthias something about her, that she had known this, had filed it, and had simply not yet addressed it.

"A short sword as a sidearm," Joseph said. "Something you can transition to cleanly when the engagement goes close. It won't replace the staff's role; it covers the gap the staff leaves."

Belial nodded. "I'll train with it."

Joseph looked at Astreal.

If Astreal had an opinion about being assessed, she gave no sign of it. She met his gaze with the composed attention she gave everything.

"Your close-quarter work is the best in this room," Joseph said. "Probably better than that. The agility, the pressure you put on at close range, those are not things anyone here is going to match." A beat. "But a sustained engagement depletes you faster than it should, given your skill level. You win quickly or you run the risk of the fight outlasting you."

Astreal's expression did not change. She said nothing.

"Restorative magic. Support casting. You have the holy affinity for it, it's the same foundation as the attack work, different application. Building that out means you can sustain yourself through longer engagements, and cover Belial and Matthias as well when the situation calls for it."

Another moment. Then Astreal inclined her head, precisely.

"I agree with the assessment," she said. Which, from Astreal, was the equivalent of enthusiastic endorsement.

Joseph looked at Aki, then at Yuki.

"Both of you will train with Matthias."

Yuki's response was immediate. "I have an anime expo next weekend."

"You want to be his mistress," Joseph said. He said it with the complete absence of investment of someone deploying a known fact for logistical purposes.

Yuki opened her mouth. Closed it. The colour that moved into her face was brief but thorough, and entirely unlike her usual unshakeable composure. She looked at the far wall. Then at her tea. Then at a neutral point in the middle distance.

"That's..." she said.

"I assume you'd prefer to be useful to him," Joseph said, returning to his backpack. "Train with Matthias."

Yuki said nothing further. She appeared to be having a private conversation with herself about the acceptable boundaries of being outmanoeuvred and arriving at no satisfying conclusions.

Aki, who had watched this exchange with the silent appreciation of a man witnessing something rare, straightened from the wall. "I'll run him through engagements against long reach," he said. "Fighting someone with a spear is a specific problem, closing the distance, controlling the head, not getting caught on the transitions. The Gungnir's return mechanic adds another layer." He glanced at Yuki. "And she'll put him through something harder."

Yuki had recovered enough of herself to look moderately fierce. "I fight wildly," she said to Matthias. "You will not be able to read me. That is the entire point." She seemed to find this somewhat consoling as a return to known ground.

"Which means," Aki said, "that if he can function against her, he can function against most things."

"High praise," Yuki said. She still had not quite reassembled the full expression, but she was working on it.

Joseph looked at Matthias. He had the quality, Matthias was noticing it now, of a man who had been the eldest and most experienced in many rooms and wore it without making it a performance.

"What happened at the mall was a probe," he said. "Sylvia wanted to assess what you were and what stood around you. Now she knows. The cult will not repeat the same approach." He set the backpack down. "The version of your life where you were a normal office worker who took the train and filed reports, that version ended when she opened those portals. There will be others who benefit from your removal. Some of them more dangerous than what you faced." He looked around the room. "All of you know this. I'm saying it plainly so that the training starts without ambiguity about why."

The room held it.

Matthias looked at his hands. The Sun Blade was gone, dissolved back to wherever it went when he wasn't holding it. He thought about the train. The convenience store lunches. The same desk, the same reports, the particular quality of a life that had been so reliably unremarkable that he'd never examined whether it was the life he'd chosen or simply the life that had been available.

He thought about the basement.

"I know the training ground," he said.

Everyone looked at him.

"The basement," he said. "Beneath the house. It's empty. Astreal said she didn't know what to do with it." He looked at Astreal, who was already, he suspected, calculating dimensions and structural load. "Now we do."

Astreal glanced at Belial. Belial was already thinking about something, the particular inward focus of someone planning logistics.

"I can have it fitted within a week," Astreal said. As though it were the most ordinary sentence.

"Of course you can," Yuki said, which was close enough to admiration that she seemed mildly annoyed at herself for it.

Joseph picked up his tea, found it had gone cold, and held it anyway. "Good," he said, simply.

Outside, the city continued its afternoon. Inside, something had shifted, not dramatically, not with any of the theatrical signals that shifts were supposed to arrive with. Just a quiet, collective acknowledgment that the coordinates had changed, and that from here, the work was different.

Matthias looked at the table where two identical swords had sat side by side twenty minutes ago.

He thought: normal office worker.

He thought: probably not anymore.

He reached for his tea, which was still warm, because Belial had made it and Belial knew exactly how long tea stayed warm and had timed it accordingly.

Some things, at least, remained reliable.