Chapter 10 | Training from Hell

The alarm went off at five in the morning, which was an hour Matthias had previously understood to exist only in the theoretical sense, the way very large numbers existed, technically real but not something one encountered personally.

He existed at five in the morning. He pulled on clothes that were going to be unpleasant by six, went downstairs, opened the basement door, and found all five of them already there.

Belial had set up a small table with water and towels at the far wall with the quiet preemptiveness of someone who had provisioned training halls in previous centuries. Astreal stood in the centre of the room with her arms folded, looking as though she had been there for some time and found the wait unremarkable. Joseph had his green backpack open on the floor and was arranging equipment that Matthias couldn't immediately identify. Aki was stretching with the unhurried efficiency of someone whose body knew this routine. Yuki was sitting on the floor with her legs crossed and her eyes closed, and either meditating or asleep; Matthias could not determine which and did not ask.

"Good morning," Belial said, brightly, because Belial was the kind of person for whom five in the morning was simply morning.

"Feet shoulder-width apart," he said, by way of greeting. "We'll start with grip."

The first two weeks were fundamentals.

Joseph taught with the precision of a man who had studied the theoretical basis of what he was teaching as thoroughly as the practical application, which, it turned out, produced a very different kind of instruction than Matthias had expected. There were no dramatic flourishes. There was no philosophy of the blade delivered in memorable aphorisms. There was grip, and stance, and the geometry of where your weight was and why, and then there was doing it again until the doing of it stopped requiring thought.

Aki and Yuki watched and offered corrections when Joseph indicated it. Aki's corrections were brief and surgical: your elbow is doing extra work there, stop that. Yuki's were occasionally accompanied by a demonstration that involved her picking up her own sword one-handed and executing the correct form in a way that was technically instructive and somewhat demoralising.

At seven-thirty, Joseph said enough, and training stopped.

Matthias went upstairs. He showered, dressed, ate what Belial had already prepared, and went to work. This was the arrangement. He came back in the evening. He slept. The alarm went off at five.

The first three days his muscles informed him, with great specificity, that they had not consented to this. He had always been resilient in the ordinary sense, illness passed through him, fatigue recovered faster than it should, but he had never asked his body to do this particular kind of work, and his body was registering a formal complaint through every fibre it possessed.

The fourth morning he came downstairs moving carefully, in the manner of a man navigating a body that had become an obstacle.

Belial had anticipated this, which surprised him only briefly before he remembered that Belial anticipated most things.

The bath had been drawn. Not the ordinary kind, the water was a deep green-brown, faintly steaming, and carried a smell that was medicinal without being unpleasant, somewhere between a forest floor and warm spice. He lowered himself into it with the surrender of a man who has stopped having opinions about dignity and found the heat working into the muscle immediately, the specific relief of something prepared for exactly this purpose.

"Better?" Belial asked, from where she was sitting on the low stool at the edge of the bath, the same quiet attention she gave everything.

"Yes," he said.

Astreal came in without announcement, she rarely announced herself, and positioned herself behind him and began working at the muscle along his shoulders with the efficient precision she applied to everything. It was not gentle in the spa sense. It was effective in the structural sense, finding the knots with clinical accuracy and addressing them without ceremony. He did not complain.

Belial moved to his back with a cloth and warm water, working in the calm, unhurried way of someone who found this a natural and unremarkable thing to do.

"You're pushing hard," she said. Not accusatory. Just noting.

"I'm fine," he said.

She paused. He could feel the quality of the pause, the specific weight of a person who has something more to say and is measuring whether to say it.

"Matthias."

"The alternative," he said, before she could continue, "is an injury I don't see coming. Or something worse." He looked at the water. "I'd rather earn the soreness."

Another pause. Then the cloth resumed its movement, and she didn't push further. But she stayed until the water started to cool, and she didn't need to say anything else for him to understand that she was paying attention.

The third week, Joseph stepped back and Aki stepped forward.

The change in the room was immediate. Joseph's instruction had been architectural, foundational, carefully proportioned. Aki's was something else. He took his position at the far end of the basement, the black spear across his shoulders, and looked at Matthias with the particular expression of a man who is about to be professionally unkind on your behalf.

"Come and hit me," he said.

What followed was an education in the specific misery of fighting someone with superior reach. Every approach Matthias tried, the spear was already in the way, not dramatically, not with any excess of motion, just precisely positioned to make the angle Matthias had chosen expensive. He got poked. He got redirected. He got caught on the transitions between Aki's handling and Aki's throwing in ways that were spatially baffling until he'd been caught by them enough times to understand the geometry.

He'd expected something more cinematic.

"You don't fight like anyone I've seen fight," Matthias said, after a session that had left him on the floor twice.

Aki lowered the spear and looked at him with the mild interest of someone who has heard this before and considers it a reasonable observation. "How do movies fight?"

"More, movement. Flourishes. Things that look like what they are."

"Mm." Aki considered this for the half-second it deserved. "If I fought like a film, I would have been dead in any serious engagement. Probably the first one." He rolled the spear once in his palm, the only flash of movement he'd shown all session. "Everything I do is to end the exchange or to survive it. That's the whole brief. Looking correct while doing it is not part of the brief."

Matthias filed this.

He got up and went again.

Yuki, when her turn came, fought in a way that made Aki look like a classroom exercise.

It was not that she was faster, or stronger, though she was both in ways that defied her frame. It was that she was unreadable. Her footwork had no pattern. Her transitions between engagement and distance had no telegraphing. She held the massive two-handed sword in her right hand with the casual grip of someone holding a newspaper, and the swing that followed that grip, casual, almost lazy-looking in its windup, hit with a force that, the first time he caught it on the blade rather than dodging, traveled through his arms and into his spine and informed him that this sword is not a foam prop.

She didn't flow. She didn't have a rhythm to find. She invented her approach fresh each time, which meant there was nothing to learn except be ready for anything.

He learned this when her sweep came low and wide and he stepped back instead of over it and the force of the near-miss air displacement sat him down hard on the basement floor.

He looked up at the ceiling for a moment.

"Good," Yuki said. "You moved. Moving is correct. The direction was wrong but moving is the right instinct."

"You were aiming for the floor," Matthias said.

"I was aiming to see what you'd do," Yuki said. "The sweep does two things, it hits people who don't react and it creates distance from people who do. Both outcomes are useful." She offered a hand.

He took it.

"Now you know. Next time you'll go over."

"Next time you'll do something different," he said.

She grinned. "Correct."

He started to understand why Joseph had included her specifically.

"They don't chill very much," he mentioned to Belial one evening, with the flat understatement of a man who had been deposited on the floor enough times to have developed an opinion about it.

Belial looked up from whatever she was reading. "They're training you properly," she said, which was correct and not especially satisfying.

The next morning he said the same thing in the basement, in the direction of both Yuki and Aki.

"The ancestral obligation," she said, "has many forms." She picked up her sword. "Not attending the anime expo was one sacrifice. Thorough instruction is the other." She gave him a look that suggested she found at least one of these considerably more painful than the other. "You're welcome."

Aki said nothing. He threw the spear.

Progress arrived without announcing itself.

It was not a single morning where something clicked. It was a gradual accumulation of things that stopped requiring active thought, his grip stopped requiring correction; his footwork against Aki's reach found the right geometry without needing to calculate it; against Yuki he stopped trying to find a pattern and started simply responding, which turned out to be the only approach that worked.

Joseph watched with the attention of someone updating a running assessment.

"You're learning quickly. Faster than the benchmark I'd use for hero-line training, and that's a high benchmark." He said it the way he said everything: factually, without drama. "You have the instinct. It was always there. The training is teaching it to speak clearly rather than in emergencies."

Matthias absorbed this. Coming from Joseph, quickly meant something specific and measurable.

Then came the sparring with Belial.

The basement had been reinforced by Astreal at the outset, something in the walls and ceiling that Matthias hadn't asked the details of and suspected involved either very advanced structural engineering or something that preceded structural engineering by several thousand years. The reinforcement proved necessary.

Belial at range was a different person than Belial with tea at the breakfast table. Her staff moved in wide arcs that set off chains of energy, not fire, not lightning, something that had the quality of both and the character of neither, light-and-force combined in ways that made Matthias understand immediately why she'd been covering the civilians in the car park while Astreal covered him. Her range was enormous. The space between them was never safe regardless of the angle he tried.

He learned to move obliquely, never straight toward her, always cutting the angle, giving the leading spell nothing perpendicular to track. He learned to use debris, which in the reinforced basement was notional but trained the habit. He learned that the transition from her range to her near-range created a half-second where she was reorganising her geometry, and that half-second was the only window.

When he got inside it, he found she had not been idle about her close-quarter work. She had been training the short sword alongside everything else, and she was not easy to contest at close range.

"You've been practising," he said, during a pause.

"Joseph was not wrong," she said, simply. "I don't intend to let the gap remain."

He smiled, slightly, in spite of himself. She caught it and her expression did something warm.

Then she raised the staff and he had to move again.

Astreal was the hardest.

Not because her tomahawk had superior reach, the Sun Blade was longer, and he found he could use that on occasion. Not because her strikes were overwhelming in the Yuki sense. But because she moved through the basement the way water moved through a space, filling every available angle, never quite where he expected, arriving at positions that should not have been reachable from her last known position in the time available.

He landed the Sun Blade on her guard twice in the first week. He thought this was progress. He mentioned it to Joseph.

"She let you," Joseph said.

He did not mention it again.

What he learned, slowly, was to give up predicting and start responding, the same lesson Yuki had taught him, applied to a completely different movement vocabulary. He also learned that the Sun Blade's longer reach gave him a keep-away option that kept her from closing completely, which was not a win but was a different quality of defensive position.

Astreal never once looked exerted.

He mentioned this to Belial.

"She's exerted," Belial said. "She simply considers showing it a waste of expression."

Two months from the first morning, Joseph called an end to the regular session and stood in the centre of the basement with the backpack at his feet and the quality of someone delivering an assessment he has been composing for some time.

"Lieutenant level," he said. "You can engage and defeat a high-level enemy lieutenant. Not their commanders. Not the principals. But the people who run operations, the ones you'd encounter first." He looked around the room. "All of you have improved, to be clear. This wasn't only Matthias's training."

Belial inclined her head. Astreal gave one of her precise nods. Yuki looked quietly pleased with herself, which in Yuki's case was nearly indistinguishable from her regular expression but carried a different quality.

"The next stage," Joseph said, returning to Matthias, "is energy work. Your body can house a significant reserve, more than it currently knows it has. Offensive and defensive spells, channelling, regulation. That's a different kind of training." He paused. "But you've earned the gap."

Matthias looked around at the basement. The scuffed floor. The reinforced walls, with their faint, permanent impressions of two months of very serious sparring. The table at the far wall where Belial still put water and towels every single morning at five.

He thought about the train. He thought about the spreadsheet and the desk and the convenience store rice.

"I have a question," he said.

Joseph waited.

"You all trained me. You armed me." He looked at Joseph. "If I go full dark lord one day, you've just made that significantly more effective."

Joseph considered this for a moment. Then he smiled, a genuine one, not the scholar's focused expression or the instructor's measured approval, but something more personal. "Yes," he said.

"So why."

"Because we trust you," Joseph said. "That's the full answer." He picked up the backpack. "And because, if you ever did go full dark lord, given everything you are, it would be, as Yuki accurately put it, the strangest one in recorded history. A dark lord with a functioning day job and two people who make his meals and a Skoda in the front yard." He looked at the Sun Blade, which Matthias had not dismissed yet. "And because that sword still answers you. Holy weapons are not neutral instruments. They make a judgment every time they're called." He met Matthias's eyes. "As long as it keeps answering, and I believe it will, the probability is not one I lose sleep over."

Yuki, from the corner: "The probability of a weird dark lord who needs a mistress remains, however, at..."

"Don't," said Belial.

"Don't," said Astreal.

Matthias dismissed the Sun Blade. He looked at the basement, his basement, in his house, that had been given to him by two women who had been waiting three thousand years for him to exist.

"Same time tomorrow," he said.

"Five AM," Joseph confirmed.

"Five AM," Matthias agreed.

He went upstairs. The alarm would go off again in twenty-three hours, and he was, for the first time in his life, not reluctant about it.