51
The beatings continue. But once Lis decides I am no longer entirely hopeless, she shifts from merely dismantling me to actively teaching mewhyI am being dismantled. Which, as it turns out, is somehow worse.
“Again,” she says after knocking me down for the third time in under a minute.
I reset my stance, breathing hard.
“You are watching my hands,” she says. “Why?”
“Because they are trying to hit me.”
“They are not what kills you.” She taps two fingers against her temple. “Intent kills you. Weight transfer. Hip alignment. Shoulder rotation. Learn to read the body before the strike comes.”
I grit my teeth and circle her again.
She attacks.
This time I watch lower and see the subtle shift of her weight before her shoulder turns.
I duck half a second earlier than I would have before. Her strike whistles over my head. For one glorious heartbeat, I think I succeeded in dodging it.
Then her knee drives into my stomach and I double over in pain.
“Better,” she says as I collapse to one knee, wheezing. “Still terrible. But better.”
That becomes the rhythm of our days.
Morning begins with pain.
Afternoon continues with pain.
And by evening, I am so battered that walking back to our quarters feels like a triumph in itself.
Yet beneath the bruises, something undeniable takes shape.
I am getting stronger.
Not merely faster or more powerful—those things had come with time and soul energy already—but sharper, more strategic.
My domain sees an improvement, too as my shadows obey with increasing precision. Where once they lashed outward wildly and crudely, now they form thinner, denser, more deliberate constructs.
I learn to split them between multiple targets without losing cohesion. To summon objects from their shadows and maintain control over them for a small period of time.
Lis teaches me to think before I strike; to see a second as a stretching expanses of time where Ithinkrather than aimlessly react.
And though she never says it outright, I know she sees the improvement. Because every week she has to try a little harder to beat me.
By the time training ends each day, Moe is waiting with food.
She has made it a habit of setting up near the practice grounds beneath the partial shade of broken ruins, building a small cooking fire while Lis brutalizes me in the background.
The smell of whatever she is making usually reaches me right around the time I begin questioning whether death might be preferable to another sparring round.
The first time Lis stays to eat with us, it is because I blurt out an accidental invitation. Where Moe had always asked her to join us for a meal, she’d always refused.
I never gave it much mind then, but now it dawns on me that maybe…just maybe, she was waiting for me to extend the invitation?
As she accepts, she grumbles something along the lines of, “He’s always bragging about your food so I might as well taste it.”
