"Again," I sat up, blood-covered, bruised, and exhausted. The motion alone felt like punishment. Every muscle in this body screamed the moment I forced myself upright, and several bruises that had barely begun healing split open again from the strain.
Blood dripped from my jaw onto the fractured stone beneath me while my breathing came rough and uneven through swollen lungs.
The training hall looked like it had survived a battlefield rather than a sparring session. Entire sections of the reinforced floor had caved inward from repeated impacts, the walls were webbed with cracks despite countless reinforcement formations layered into them, and splintered chunks of stone still rolled across the ground from the latest collision.
