Kyle's warning stays with me longer than almost anything else he's said. Talent gets you the first ten steps. Only work gets you the next thousand.
I decide, somewhere in the weeks following my first day at the Guild, that I'm going to walk every single one of those thousand steps myself, even the ones Basic Swordsman Skill already paid for.
It isn't a decision I make lightly, or all at once. It builds slowly, the way most of my real decisions do — a half-formed thought during morning drills, sharpened during a quiet evening watching Vereen sharpen his own blade with the same grim determination he's carried since the raid, crystallized finally on a night I can't even properly remember afterward, just the certainty that remained once the thinking was done. If Level 5 arrived without my effort, then everything past it would have to arrive with nothing but effort behind it. No shortcuts. No borrowed competence. Just the long, unglamorous work of actually becoming what the card only pretended to make me.
It starts small. After the yard empties each afternoon, I stay behind with a spare practice sword, running through the same handful of forms Kyle taught the group that morning — not because I need the instruction anymore, but because repetition feels like the only honest currency left to me. Kyle catches me at it more than once, arms crossed, saying nothing, though I notice the faint approval that crosses his face each time.
Vereen doesn't ask why I stay late, not at first. I think he recognizes the shape of it too well to need an explanation — a person choosing exhaustion over stillness, choosing motion over the quiet moments where grief has more room to breathe.
A familiar hum stirs one such afternoon, unlike any quest I've felt before — heavier, somehow, like it's announcing something meant to last.
Quest Activated: Swing a Sword 0/100000 Reward: +1 Strength, Skill: Swords Mastery
I stare at the number for a long moment. A hundred thousand. Not a morning's effort, not even a season's. A number built for years, not days.
Good, I think. Let it take years. Let every single one of them actually be mine.
The counting becomes its own kind of meditation.
I swing in the mornings before Vereen wakes, in the evenings after Lira walks me home, in the strange, restless hours when sleep won't come and the empty half of the house feels too loud to sit still inside. I count under my breath sometimes, though I lose track constantly, and I've come to suspect the System keeps the real number regardless of whether I do.
There's a particular kind of peace in repetition that I didn't expect to find. Each swing is identical to the last, and yet each one somehow isn't — a fraction more controlled, a fraction more efficient, the accumulated weight of ten thousand small corrections adding up into something that looks, from the outside, like effortless grace. I understand, doing this, why Vereen trains the way he does. There's a comfort in motion that thought alone can never quite reach. My body knows what to do even on the nights my mind is too full of grief or fear or half-formed worry to think clearly about anything at all.
Some evenings, the repetition becomes almost meditative enough that I lose track of time entirely, only realizing how late it's gotten when the light fails and my arms finally start to genuinely ache rather than simply protest. Those are the good nights, oddly. The nights when the counting swallows everything else whole, leaving no room for grief or fear to crowd in around the edges.
Toren catches me at it one afternoon, staying late himself for reasons he doesn't explain.
"You're doing extra," he says, not quite a question, watching me run through the same block-and-counter sequence for what must be the fiftieth time that hour.
"Kyle said talent only gets you so far."
"Kyle says a lot of things." Toren picks up his own practice sword, falling into step beside me without being asked. "Doesn't mean the rest of us have to take it that seriously."
"You don't have to stay."
"Didn't say I was leaving." He grins, sharp and a little competitive. "Just saying, if you're going to show off by working harder than everyone else, somebody's got to keep you honest about it."
We fall into a rhythm together, the two of us, swinging until the sun dips low and our arms ache in matching complaint. I don't tell him about the number ticking upward somewhere behind my eyes. I don't tell him this isn't really about the sword at all — that every strike is a small, deliberate rebellion against the parts of my life that arrived unearned.
But I let him stay anyway. It's easier, somehow, to carry a hundred thousand of anything when someone else is swinging beside you, even if they don't know what they're really helping to build.
The mage side of the yard offers no such rhythm.
Some evenings, after Toren's gone home and the sword forms have blurred into muscle memory too worn to need conscious thought, I wander over to where Ava's candle still sits waiting, and spend a stubborn extra hour failing at the exact same spark I've been chasing for months. There's no thousand-step counter here, no comforting number ticking steadily upward to prove the effort is accumulating toward something. Just the candle. Just the reaching. Just the same faint stirring in my chest that sometimes catches and mostly doesn't.
"You're allowed to be better at one thing than another," Ava tells me once, catching me at it long after her own students have gone home. "Nobody expects you to master fire and steel in the same season."
"I don't want to be behind at anything."
"That's not how any of this works, sweet boy." She says it gently, but there's steel underneath it too, the same quiet firmness I've started to recognize in both her and Kyle whenever they think I'm being too hard on myself. "Even the greatest mages in history were terrible at half the things they eventually mastered. Struggle isn't a verdict. It's just where you happen to be standing today."
I want to believe her more than I actually do, most evenings. But I keep coming back to the candle anyway, night after night, because giving up on it would feel like admitting some part of me is permanently smaller than I want it to be.
The strange part, the part I don't tell anyone, is that the sword's ease sometimes bothers me more than the magic's difficulty. At least with the candle, every small flicker feels like something I earned, however small. With the sword, I can never quite tell, mid-strike, whether the competence flowing through my limbs is genuinely mine or just Kyle's borrowed memory wearing my body like a glove. It's a strange kind of jealousy — envying my own failures for their honesty.
Weeks blur into months. The seasons turn once, then again.
My arms grow stronger in ways that have nothing to do with the System's careful, capped bookkeeping — real muscle, real calluses forming along my palms where the practice sword's grip wears against skin that used to be softer. I start noticing small things I couldn't before — the way Kyle shifts his weight a half-second before a strike, the way certain forms flow into others if you let your wrists relax instead of locking them the way instinct wants to. None of that comes from Basic Swordsman Skill. All of it is mine, earned one repetition at a time, in a way that makes even the smallest realization feel like genuine treasure.
Kyle adjusts my forms less and less as the weeks pass, until eventually he stops adjusting them at all, simply watching from the edge of the yard with an expression I've started to recognize as quiet pride.
"You're not swinging like a five-year-old anymore," he tells me one evening, when the yard has mostly emptied and only Toren and I remain, still working through the same forms we've run a thousand times each. "You're swinging like someone who's decided this actually matters."
"It does."
"I can see that." He studies me a moment longer, something weighing behind his eyes. "Your father know you're staying this late most days?"
"He doesn't mind. Says it's good for me."
Kyle nods slowly, though something in the set of his jaw suggests he's filing the information away for later, the way adults do when they're deciding whether a thing is actually fine or just quietly worrying underneath a calm face.
A familiar hum interrupts before he can say more.
Quest Progress: Swing a Sword 41,206/100000
Less than halfway. I don't let the number discourage me. Somewhere in the last several months, the counting itself has stopped feeling like a burden and started feeling like proof — evidence, accumulating one repetition at a time, that whatever I eventually become will have been built rather than granted.
The overflow catches me off guard the first time it happens with Strength specifically, though I suppose I should have expected it by now.
I'm running through an evening set, arms burning pleasantly with the particular ache of real effort, when the familiar chime sounds, differently shaped than usual.
Quest Completed: Swing a Sword 50,000/100000 (Milestone) Reward: +1 Strength
ERROR STAT LIMIT REACHED ADDING TO OVERFLOW
OVERFLOW STATS +1 STRENGTH +1 WISDOM
I lower the practice sword, staring at the words. Strength has sat capped at ten for what feels like my whole remembered life now — Energy and Speed and Mind alongside it, an invisible ceiling I've long since stopped expecting to break through. But something about seeing it happen here, in the middle of genuine, hard-earned effort rather than some ambient toddler milestone, lands differently.
It doesn't feel unfair, exactly. Just strange — like running as hard as I can toward a wall I already know is there, and choosing to run anyway because the running itself has become the point.
Wisdom, again. The same hidden stat that showed up months ago, back when I was still small enough to think chasing chickens counted as training. I try, as I always do, to picture what it might actually look like — some second, invisible version of myself, quietly accumulating strength nobody can see, waiting behind a locked door for whatever key eventually opens it.
I don't know what it's for. I don't know if it's accumulating toward something, or simply a place for excess effort to go so it isn't wasted entirely. I've asked the System directly, more than once, and received nothing back but the same patient silence it offers every question it isn't ready to answer.
"Something wrong?" Toren asks, noticing my pause.
"No," I say, and mean it, mostly. "Just thinking."
I decide, the way I've decided about most of the System's mysteries, that I'll find out eventually. Everything else has revealed itself in its own time. I don't see any reason this should be different.
I pick the sword back up, reset my stance, and swing again. Fifty thousand down. Fifty thousand still ahead of me, waiting patiently, the way I've learned to wait for almost everything worth having.
By the time winter closes in again, Toren has mostly stopped needing convincing to stay late — it's simply become the shape of our afternoons, the two of us swinging in companionable near-silence while the yard empties around us and the light fades gold, then grey, then gone.
"You ever think about why you push this hard?" he asks one evening, breathing hard, sweat cooling on his skin despite the winter chill.
I consider the question longer than he probably expects.
"I watched my father grieve alone once," I tell him finally, the first time I've said it out loud to anyone besides myself. "By a dying fire, thinking nobody could see him. I decided that night I was going to get strong enough that nobody I love has to carry something like that by themselves again."
Toren doesn't say anything for a long moment. When he finally speaks, his usual teasing edge has gone entirely quiet.
"That's a heavy thing to build a whole life around."
"Maybe." I settle back into stance, sword lifting for another repetition, another small, deliberate addition to a number that still has fifty thousand further to climb. "But it's mine. Every part of it. That matters more to me than it being easy."
"What about the sword thing, though?" he presses, curious despite himself. "The part that came easy. Doesn't that count too?"
I think about it seriously, the way I try to think about everything he asks, even the questions that catch me off guard.
"It counts," I admit. "But it doesn't feel like mine the same way. It's like — " I search for words a seven-year-old might actually reach for, and land somewhere close enough. "Like finding money on the ground versus earning it. Both spend the same. Only one of them teaches you anything about yourself."
"That's a strange way for a kid to think."
"I've been told."
He falls back into rhythm beside me without another word, and together, we keep swinging, long after the yard has emptied and the first stars have started to prick faintly through the winter dark.
Vereen is waiting on the doorstep when I finally walk home, arms crossed, though the set of his shoulders carries more curiosity than worry these days.
"Kyle tells me you're staying later than the other children," he says, falling into step beside me as we head inside. "Every day, near enough."
"I like the practice."
"That what this is? Practice?" He glances down at me, something knowing in his expression. "Or is this the same thing I do out in that forest most nights? Trying to out-work something you can't quite name."
I don't answer right away, caught off guard by how precisely he's seen through me.
"Maybe both," I admit finally.
He's quiet for a moment, considering that, and when he speaks again, his voice carries none of its usual sternness — just quiet, careful honesty, the kind he's only recently started offering me instead of careful silence.
"Just don't let it swallow you the way it's tried to swallow me," he says. "I've watched what happens to a person who only knows how to grieve by working harder. It doesn't fill the hole. It just gets you very good at ignoring it's there."
"Is that what happened to you?"
"Still happening," he admits, quieter still. "Every day I choose it anyway, and every day I try to choose it a little less. Some days I manage. Some days I don't."
We walk the rest of the way home in silence, but it's a different silence than the one we used to carry — less hollow, more like two people slowly, imperfectly, learning the same hard lesson side by side.
Inside, he ladles out stew for both of us, and settles across the table with the particular stillness he's carried more often lately — not the frantic energy of those first grieving months, but something closer to genuine rest.
"Your mother used to worry about me working too hard, even before," he says, unprompted, staring into his bowl rather than at me. "Said a man who never sits still is usually running from something rather than toward it. I didn't listen very well, even then." A faint, tired smile. "I'm trying to listen better now. Even if it's a little late for her to see it."
"She'd be glad you're trying."
"I hope so." He looks up at me, something soft and searching in his expression. "I hope she'd be glad about both of us, actually. About the choosing, and the trying, and all the slow, stubborn work in between."
I think about that long after the dishes are cleared and the fire's burned low — about two people, father and son, both learning the same lesson at different speeds, both choosing, night after night, to keep trying anyway.
Later, alone in bed, I whisper the old command, curious about the number's progress.
Quest Progress: Swing a Sword 52,441/100000
A little over halfway now. I do the arithmetic slowly, the way I like to sometimes, turning the number over until it means something more than just digits. If I've managed fifty-two thousand in this many months, the remaining half will take roughly the same again — another stretch of seasons, another year or more of mornings and evenings spent swinging until my arms ache and my mind goes quiet.
It doesn't discourage me. If anything, the size of the number feels like a kind of promise — proof that whatever I eventually become on the other side of it will have cost exactly as much as it should, no more, no less. I think of Kyle's warning again, turning it over one more time before sleep finally claims me. Talent gets you the first ten steps.
I'm not on step ten anymore. I haven't been for a long time.
I'm somewhere in the middle of the thousand now, walking steadily forward, one repetition at a time, toward whatever version of myself is waiting at the end of all this patient, deliberate work.
I fall asleep counting, the way I do most nights now, and dream — when I dream at all — of a version of myself standing tall enough, steady enough, that nobody I love ever has to grieve alone by a dying fire again.
It's a long way off still. I can feel the distance in my aching arms every single evening. But distance, I'm learning, is just another word for a long road you haven't finished walking yet — and I intend to walk every single step of this one myself, no matter how many more months or years it ends up taking to finally arrive.