Where the initial day in the North Court had provided a brutal acclimation to exhaustion and surface trauma, the remainder of the days were an induction into a fresh level of physical and mental suffering. Kenji's training was brutal, unforgiving in its ferocity, directed not so much towards exhaustion as towards battering resistance into submission.
All of the dawns were the same: the run around the serrated rocks' perimeter. Sora soon mastered not to stop, to stumble in a motion that was longer than three seconds to come back from. Weakness was too quick and painful to allow vulnerability. His feet in the beginning were a bloody mess of burst blisters and torn skin, but later developed a callused layer of resistant flesh, but the dull ache in each step remained. His lungs partially acclimatized so that he was able to run longer before suffocating was too much to take, but the exercise always left him on the brink of falling over.
Then ensued the endless reps of physical drills that were intended to push him to his limits and beyond: push-ups to the point where his arms gave out, squats to the point where his thighs seared with hot acid, sit-ups to the point where his muscles shrieked with searing cramps. Kenji (or sometimes another wordless, even more depersonalized instructor named Rykor, a wiry, thin man with empty eyes) monitored every movement and corrected posture with a swift jab of the rod or a disapproving kick if slovenliness and lack of effort were detected.
And the real horror started the second week, when combat was introduced.
It wasn't the kind of practice Sora was accustomed to—movement practice, teaching method. It was being hit. Kenji (Rykor) would stand in front of him on the dirt and earth courtyard floor. They'd toss Sora either a blunt wooden practice dagger or sometimes nothing at all. And attack.
Not to kill, not yet, but to hurt with intent, to learn through pain and fright and reflex reaction. Kenji's punches were sledgehammers: swift and tight and brutally effective. He never gave Sora notice of his intention. One second he'd be standing there watching with his characteristic blankness, and the next Sora'd experience a fist crunch against his jaw and stumble backward in a wrench of pain and the metallic leap of blood into his mouth. Or a swift elbow to his ribs that took the wind from his lungs and left him double over and gasping. Or a low sweeping kick that removed his legs from under him and sent his body crashing painfully onto his side or back onto the unkind earth.
Rykor was a variation, but a less pleasant one. He was quicker, nimbler, his blows snakebite-swift, seeming to home in on vulnerable spots with unholy precision: a swift push to the solar plexus to cut the wind from the lungs, a brutal kick to the instep, a swift grab and turn that sent searing pain through a joint.
"Defend yourself, boy," Kenji would growl by way of response to having knocked him down for the nth time. "Don't just stand there like a sack of meal ready to be spilled. Block. Dodge. Do something. Passivity is death here."
But how was he to defend? Sora had never fought. He swung at his assailants in futile attempts to parry, his wild blows easily parried away. His evasions were clumsy and slow to be of any value, and left him reeling and more exposed to the next blow. Each misadventure was met with more pain. He soon discovered that sometimes the least painful thing to do was to curl up and shield his head and torso to the best of his ability and wait out the storm of blows to pass, humiliating though that was.
It was during one of these lessons, perhaps during the second week of the regimen's end, that the initial serious injury occurred. Rykor was practicing with the wooden dagger. The instructor crept in with the stealth of a ghost, his feints a blur of mock stabs and slashes. Sora was having trouble keeping the blunt dagger between his body and his assailant and was retreating. Rykor rushed forward and feigned left before landing a rapid low thrust to Sora's right side. Automatically, Sora raised his arm to parry, but was too slow and mismeasured the angle.
The wooden edgeless tip of the blade burst flat and with incredible force against the lower rim of his right ribcage. No clean fracture, but Sora felt a foul crunch from the inside out, a foul, sickening feel of something buckling under pressure, and pain so hot and so wild that it robbed his lungs and clouded his eyes. He folded over double like a broken door hinge and clutched at his side with a strangled shout ripped from his throat. Each attempted catch of air sent searing white pain radiating from the spot where the blade struck. He felt his ribs crunch in agony with every little motion.
Rykor stood frozen watching Sora thrashing around on the floor with a look of complete disinterest. He didn't help.
"Miscalculation," he stated in a lackluster voice. "You lift your block too high. Leaves the low flank exposed. A live blade would've perforated you or speared your liver. Stand up."
Get up? It was not possible. Even breathing was torture. Sora's face was streaked with tears that were not of mourning, however, but of raw, unbearable pain. He attempted to roll over onto his side, but a cramp of pain forced him back, breathing shallowly.
Kenji, having been watching from the sidelines, moved in closer. He knelt next to Sora, ignoring his moans and probed the site of the injury with unexpectedly professional but utterly unfeeling fingers. Sora yelped with pain as the fingers landed squarely on the broken ribs.
"Cracked. Possibly broken clean through. Nothing to kill him," Kenji diagnosed, rising from where he was sitting. "Glad it was Rykor and not me. My punches break cleaner." He glanced over at Rykor. "No more combat today. Get him doing resistance exercises in his legs. Leave his torso to settle. Don't want him impaling a lung before we can use him."
And that was that. No doctors, compression bandages, and painkillers. He was simply left there with the implicit order to go ahead with some other form of torture involving the searing, jolting pain of cracked ribs.
The next few days were personal purgatory. Morning jogging was torture, each inhalation of air radiating jolts of pain through his chest. Exercise involving his torso was out of the question. They focused on his legs—continuous squats, lunges, jumping over low hurdles—until his thighs pulsed with the sensation of being ripped in two. Pain in his ribs was a shadow presence, a gruesome companion that prohibited slumber, movement, and even breathing in and out. He was forced to learn to breathe shallowly, to move in stiff unnaturalness to get some respite from the pain. No one showed the least sympathy. The injury was a hassle in his training program, a weakness to be ignored or accommodated.
Weeks passed. The stabbing hurt in his ribs had gradually turned into a dull, chronic ache, especially upon taking a deep breath or twisting his body. He was sure that they hadn't healed right, that they had likely come together in the wrong way. It was going to be a chronic ache that stayed with him forever, one of his many unseen marks.
As soon as his torso was in good enough shape, combat practice resumed. Sora was more cautious, quicker to defend his flanks, and learned the hard way. And there were yet more bruises to come. His finger dislocated in his hand from a mismeasured block against Kenji—Kenji ripped at it with enough power to hear bone meet joint with a sickening crack that Sora was retching over and ordered him to continue. An ankle twisted painfully from rolling in the wrong direction after a swipe from Rykor.
All of his injuries met with the same brutal unconcern. Wound washing was primitive—ice-cold well water and perhaps a rough cloth—healing was a thing that lay in his own battered, starved flesh. He developed to recognize the different pains: the surprise of a fresh injury, the throbbing soreness of a working muscle, the searing throbbing of an infected abrasion, the dull aching numbness of a poorly mended bone. They were the constant terrain of his life.
The cost to his mind was as bad as to his body. Expectation of the next blow, expectation of pain, indignity of being treated like something less than animal—everything wore at his spirit. There were nights curled up in the cold darkness of his new cell in the training wing (the same type of cell that his initial one shared with the cold silence or spasmodic screams of other trainees in nearby cells) that the depression was so overwhelming that the thought of letting himself die, of not rising to one more morning, was a comforting, almost inviting option. For what was the purpose of living on? To become one of those hard, hollow things that closed in around him?
But something—perhaps a glimmer of obstinacy in his heart, perhaps the fading memory of his past life, perhaps just the urge to survive—compelled him to get up every dawn. To face the rocks, the blows, the pain. To learn from need and not from lack. He learned to read the almost imperceptible cues in the posture of Kenji or Rykor that prefaced an attack. He learned to fall to deaden the blow. He learned to defend automatically his most exposed targets. He learned to muffle the shriek of pain, swallow fear, and adopt a look of forced stoicism that may protect him from a blow.
He wasn't getting stronger in the traditional way. He was getting resilient. Resilient like a weed that grows up through gaps in the pavement, battered and unbroken. His body was filling with scars, visible and otherwise, a souvenir of pain inflicted and suffered. And in the depths of the wreckage of his self, part of him counted each blow, each degradation, each wound, not just as pain, but as debt. Debt that, somehow, improbably, eventually, he hoped to be repaid. But in the meantime, there was only getting through the next blow, the next sprint, the next scar. The breaking continued, remorseless as the colourless Kurogane tide.