Dawn arrived the way it always does here: deliberate, not apologetic. It dragged a finger of pale light over the academy spires and showed everyone what they had been hiding in the dark. I was already awake.
The training yard was mine before the rest of the school remembered it had lungs. The air tasted of iron and distant rain—good for burning and for thinking—and the wooden dummy I favored wore last week's cuts like a patient tutor. I loosened my shoulders, rolled my wrists, and let the practiced rhythm come out of me the way a river insists on finding its course.
"Would be nice to use all weapons," I muttered into the cold. It was a stupid, loud thought for a place this quiet. Spears, halberds, chains—dreams of reach and angles. The metal at my hip sang when I flexed my fingers.
"Is there anything stopping you, then?"
Shadow's voice slid out of the dim behind me, sharp as flint. I spun automatically—sword up, breath narrowed, everything the training had taught me about readiness—and found him standing there like he belonged to the darkness itself. He had that look he always did: calm, dangerous, the sort of man who made other people's plans feel foolish.
"How'd you get in?" I asked before I could temper curiosity into surmise. There are too many locks in this place; I should have given the guards credit.
Shadow tilted his head. "Maybe they're weaker than you estimate," he said. "Or I'm stronger than you think. Which do you prefer?"
"You're stronger than I thought," I said. It came out like a fact, not a compliment.
"Good." He moved to the ring and stood in my light's edge. "Never underestimate anyone. And never underestimate what distance from someone's hands can teach you."
He could have kept that at lesson-level. He didn't. That was the thing about Shadow: every correction had a purpose, every threat of contempt hid a ladder.
"You asked why your father didn't correct your mistakes," he said, as if continuing a conversation we'd begun before my birth and paused at my coming out of sleep. "You want to know why he let you break things."
I let the sword fall to my side deliberately so this wouldn't look like a challenge. "How?"
Shadow's smile was a small blade. "Because the outside world corrects differently. Corrections from love tend to borrow a person's spine. Corrections from the world teach you to build one."
We started without ceremony. Shadow's method is not kind. It is useful. He stepped into distance and made the first move a test of balance—no blade, only bone and direction. I countered in a way that was muscle, a dry refraction of a dozen hours in the void. He hit the angle, not me. Then he hit the angle again. "Your balance still drifts when you overcommit," he said. "Tuck your rib—there. Now."
Training with Shadow is always a series of tiny deaths followed by an equal number of births. He breaks what I think I know, shows the hole with a shove, and then demonstrates the stitch. He wants me to feel the fault, to taste it, because sensation ingrains lessons better than speeches.
We worked through the basics: footwork like a clock—inch, pivot, plant, explode—until the pattern glowed under my skin. He corrected my wrist angle until my parries stopped throwing the weight forward. "Hammer the world with geometry, not force," he told me once, and I repeated it in my head like a prayer that made sense.
Then we folded element into steel.
"Fire is blunt if you only want burn," Shadow said. "Use it like a whisper over an incision. Let it take what it needs to hold tissue closed. A blade that burns in the wrong place kills the holder."
I practiced drawing a short ember into the edge of the blade, not a conflagration but a thin, hot film that kissed metal and gave it a different voice. The first strikes left smudges on the dummy: clean black lines where heat met fiber, melted cork where precision beat bravado. Shadow had me push a pulse of heat into the flat and pull it back, teach the metal to remember the song of flame and the teeth of cold.
We practiced vanishing movement in pattern sequences. I learned to use the weave not as escape but as punctuation: step-slide—attack; fade—draw; reappear—seal. The weave gave me a ghost's economy, the ability to be a brief, terrible punctuation in a flow of bodies.
Halfway through, Shadow grinned and asked: "Have you wondered why top masters often leave disciples to fend themselves at the end? They call it 'release'."
I didn't answer right away. I caught my breath and let the rhythm of the drills fill the silence. "Because they must learn experience," I said finally.
"That," he said, "and because only abandonment forces invention. Instructions chain a mind. The true training is the thing the master cannot teach: decision under the knife." He shifted his stance and hit me with a real strike, a blow meant to split my balance. I stepped through, letting the blade sing on the inside of the arc and felt the rush of hot blood and calculation. "Your father didn't interfere because he wanted your work to be yours, not a copy."
There was a note in his voice I couldn't name. Approval? Challenge? It set something like a coal in my chest.
Shadow's corrections went farther than body and blade. He taught me breathwork under impact — how to hold a strike's memory without letting panic leak into motion. He taught me to braid the flame subtly into the steel so the enemy felt pain before the wound announced itself. He insisted on small things: the position of my tongue when breathing, the way my shoulders carried tension, the three-count cadence between inhale and swing.
By the time the sun had won its argument with the eastern clouds, my arms burned with the same honest ache I'd felt in the void. Shadow accepted the exhaustion as an answer. "Enough. Go to class. Don't let training hollow you; let it temper."
I wanted to ask him why he'd come. Why he'd threaded his boots through academy sleep. He didn't offer an answer, only a single, practical direction: "Attend alchemy. Don't sleep in between sessions. You signed up for all four."
Alchemy is patience welded to a knife. The lab smelled like citrus and burnt sugar, beakers clinking and burners sighing. Haruki's lesson had moved from flame beasts to catalysts: small elements fused methodically to make something that would not exist without attention. The work is quiet and demanding, a different kind of fight.
I walked in and found Estelle already there, notebook open, fingers moving like she'd set probabilities before speech. Liliana took the seat beside mine—her smile small as a dawn—and Leona Clairmont sat at the front, the saintess with eyes that watched without softening. The room was populated by the familiar voices, but both Samir and most of our magic group were not present. They'd gone to weapon drills and warrior class; the university was a place of branching rivers.
Haruki moved between benches like a conductor giving out coughs of fire when required. "We will distill, then temper, then stabilize." She sounded like someone who'd burned her own fingers and learned the recipe intimately. "I'll watch your heat curves. Burn too fast and the reagent collapses. Too slow and everything oxidizes."
I set up my station and felt the training yard's residue in my hands. The alchemy here demands the same muscles I'd honed with blade: timing, the patience to stop, and the eye to see when the color of a solution leans toward failure. The trick was translating instinct into glass — slow, precise motion, tiny shifts in flame and mixture.
Liliana watched my hands for a heartbeat before speaking. "You train early."
"Habit," I said. I kept my voice even. But inside i was worried, had she seen Shadow, i could not tell. I thought she'd expose it with her eyes, but it seems not everyone is like me—she knew how to hide her expressions.
It's funny: training is a private conversation you have with your body. Other people get summaries.
"Yes." My answer was short, careful. Shadow's presence was a tether—control and caution—so I did not invite gossip to tangle it.
Then I met Leona, who had the kind of eyes that assess before trusting, observed me with a professional gentleness. "Alchemy and swordplay don't always meet," she said, "but they should. One accidents into the other well enough. Balance work here will sharpen your hands as much as the yard."
Estelle drifted over and dropped a remark like a line on a ledger: "You are good at containment. That's what the instructor will ask for." She smiled, and it felt like a calculation.
The lab work taught me a different rhythm: bubbles counted, temperature held, a glass rod's motion almost imperceptible. I learned how to coax a precipitate into behavior instead of forcing it; a smile returned to me when a reaction held where it should. It's small victories like this that build the street-level competence a student needs before grandeur.
Between flasks and formulas, I thought about Shadow's words: masters expose disciples to teach decisions. The lab confirmed it. You can learn a hundred techniques in a lesson, but if you have never chosen when to break them you do not truly know how to wield them.
When class ended Haruki left an instruction that sounded like a dare. "Don't let politics get in your way," she snapped. "Let your work be the argument, not your pedigree."
Outside, the courtyard's noise returned to its usual shape: students laughing, merchants calling, the city moving like a creature with plans. I felt the morning's work in my limbs and the small secret heat of something else in my chest—the knowledge that the system sometimes rewarded effort in increments that mattered.
Later, back in the dorm, I pulled the status window with the practiced motion of someone who has learned to read his life on a panel.
─────────────────────────────────────
Name: Yukiharu Akio
Level: 1 EXP: 180 / 1000 Title: Scion (Sealed)
Bloodline: Asura Clan — Sealed (Legacy: Unknown)
─────────────────────────────────────
HP: 1055 MP: 0 (Sealed)
STR: 152 (+2) AGI: 122
DEX: 125 (+1) VIT: 131
INT: ?? (Sealed) DEF: 113
LUK: 46 CHA: 61
Skill Slots: 0 / 3
Ability Points (AP): 1
Hidden Trait: Accursed Soul (Dormant)
New Skill: Shadow Weaving (Basic) Lv. 1 (Secret)
Status: Awake — Fatigue 38 / 100
Notes: "Physical conditioning + alchemical finesse recognized. Continue integrated training."
─────────────────────────────────────
The point glowed like a promise. The shadow skill still hissed quietly as "secret". I kept it that way. Some things are meant for the night.
Outside my window Samir practiced wind forms, sketching air currents like a man painting invisible maps; his wolf tattoo gleamed briefly as he moved. The academy was a field of faces: nobles, commoners, secret princes disguised as merry rogues. Each one a card you could play or lose.
I am not naïve. I know this place will ask for things I don't yet want to give. I also know that the morning's hits, the small gains, and Shadow's blunt wisdom made me a little harder. The world outside the academy will test that hardness; for now, I will keep training, keep learning the small betrayals of breath and blade, and hold my secrets like tinder at the ready.
Tomorrow brings warrior drills. The day after, weapons. There is the slow stitch of building oneself into someone both dangerous and useful. I will not ask how long it takes. I will only swing, breathe, and answer when the world knocks.