The sword was too big for her.
Riku had known this before she picked it up. He'd watched her cross the training room with the particular focus she got when she'd already decided something and was simply executing the decision, both hands reaching for the practice blade he'd left propped against the wall after his morning session. It was a junior training sword — the smallest one Hiroshi kept in the rack — but it was still half her height and considerably heavier than anything she'd held before.
She picked it up anyway.
Both hands. Wide grip, slightly too far apart, the way she'd seen Riku hold it approximately four hundred times from her spot at the edge of the room. She turned to face the center of the space with an expression of complete seriousness.
Then she tried to lift it into the basic ready position.
The tip wobbled badly. Her arms shook with the effort. She adjusted her grip, tried again, got it approximately thirty degrees closer to where it was supposed to be before her left arm started losing the argument.
She didn't put it down.
Riku sat very still on the floor where he'd been stretching and watched her fight the sword for a long moment before saying anything.
"Feet," he said.
She looked at him.
"Your feet. Too close together."
She looked down. Looked at his feet. Looked at hers. Shuffled them apart with the solemn concentration of someone making a precise technical adjustment, then looked back up at him for confirmation.
He nodded once.
She turned back to the center of the room and tried again. The wider stance helped — the sword came up straighter this time, still wobbling, still clearly at the outer limit of what her arms could manage, but recognizably closer to the form she'd been watching him practice since before she could walk.
Through the soul thread came something that wasn't quite pride and wasn't quite satisfaction but occupied the space between them — the feeling of someone doing something difficult and knowing it.
He stood up.
--DxD--
"You've been watching the footwork sequence," he said, coming to stand beside her.
She nodded without taking her eyes off the middle distance, still holding the sword up through sheer determination.
"How long?"
"Always," she said simply.
He almost smiled. She was two years old and her vocabulary was still finding its edges, but she deployed what she had with a precision that was entirely their mother's. Always. Not recently. Not for a while. Always — as if there had never been a version of her life in which she wasn't paying attention to what he was doing.
He crouched to her level and adjusted her grip without asking — moved her left hand slightly inward, corrected the angle of her right wrist, the same small adjustments Hiroshi made to him without ceremony or explanation. She accepted each correction without comment, her attention completely focused on getting it right.
"Better," he said.
She tested the new grip. The sword steadied noticeably. Not stable — her arms weren't strong enough for stable yet — but controlled in a way it hadn't been thirty seconds ago.
Something in her expression shifted. The recognition of a thing clicking into place.
"Again," she said.
He blinked. Then recognized his own word coming back at him from two feet lower and felt something in his chest that was warm in a way he didn't try to analyze.
"Put it down first," he said. "We start from the beginning."
--DxD--
He kept it simple. Basic stance, weight distribution, how to hold the grip without tensing the shoulders — the foundation Hiroshi had spent months drilling into him at the same age, condensed into what a two year old could actually absorb and use. He demonstrated each piece slowly, held the position long enough for her to study it, then stepped back and waited.
She copied him.
Not perfectly — her proportions were wrong for the sword she was holding and her arms tired quickly and her footwork dissolved the moment she focused on her hands. But the shape of what she was doing was correct in a way that went beyond imitation. She wasn't just copying the surface of his movements. She was copying the intention behind them.
He corrected her stance four times. Her grip twice. Her shoulder tension once, which surprised him — most beginners didn't even know their shoulders were involved.
She didn't complain. Didn't lose interest. Didn't get frustrated when the corrections came. She just absorbed each adjustment and tried again with the same focused seriousness she'd brought to her first steps in the training room a year ago.
He ran her through the basic ready position until her arms gave out entirely, which took longer than he expected.
When she finally lowered the sword she looked at it for a moment, then at him.
"Tomorrow," she said. Not a question.
"Tomorrow," he agreed.
--DxD--
[TITLE ACTIVATED]
First Teacher
+1 INT while actively explaining or demonstrating a skill to another person.
[SKILL PROGRESS]
Mana Control Lv4 — XP: 67/100 (+12 XP)
Observation Lv2 — XP: 88/100 (+22 XP)
[QUEST UPDATED]
Soul Thread — Maintain the connection (Stable — strengthening)
--DxD--
That evening Riku found his father in the courtyard running his own solo drills in the last of the daylight. He watched from the doorway for a moment — the clean economy of his father's movement, nothing wasted, each transition completing fully before the next began. The standard Riku had been chasing his entire life in this body.
"She picked up the practice sword today," Riku said.
His father completed the sequence before responding. "I know. Your mother told me."
"She held the ready position for nearly three minutes."
A pause that meant Hiroshi was recalibrating something. "She's two."
"She's been watching since before she could walk."
His father turned. The look he used when something had genuinely surprised him and he was deciding how much of that to show. He showed a fraction of it. "And you taught her."
"Basic stance. Grip. Weight distribution."
Hiroshi was quiet for a moment in the way he was quiet when he was thinking something through properly before speaking. "Don't push it," he said finally. "Let her come to it."
"She came to it on her own," Riku said. "I just didn't send her away."
His father looked at him for a long moment. Then he turned back to the courtyard and resumed his drills without another word.
Which, from Hiroshi, was as close to you did the right thing as it ever got.
--DxD--
Later, after dinner, after Kairi had been put to bed and the manor had settled into its nighttime quiet, Riku sat with his mother at the low table. She was working through her notes from his last magic lesson, her brush moving in the small precise strokes that meant she was thinking through two things simultaneously.
"She has good instincts," his mother said, without looking up.
"Yes."
"She'll be difficult to train formally. Too much of her own opinion about how things should be done." The brush paused. "She gets that from your father."
Riku said nothing. He'd learned early that his mother's observations didn't always require a response — sometimes they were just thoughts she was placing in the room, and the correct thing was to let them sit.
She set the brush down and looked at him directly. "Yuki told Hiroshi something tonight," she said, using the careful neutral tone she used when she was deciding how much to give him. "After you went to read."
He waited.
"She sensed something in the neighborhood this week. A devil. Scouting, not settling — the kind of movement that suggests someone looking rather than passing through."
He kept his face even. "How close?"
"Close enough to notice. Far enough that it wasn't directed at anything specific." She held his gaze. "We're not telling you to worry you. We're telling you because you'd notice if we were keeping something from you and the distraction would be worse."
That was accurate. He filed the information away — a devil scouting Kuoh's residential edges, timing unknown, purpose unclear. Could be routine. Could be connected to any number of the layered arrangements that governed this city beneath its surface. Could be nothing.
He kept all of that off his face.
"Okay," he said.
His mother studied him for a moment with the look that meant she was reading something behind what he'd said. Then she picked up her brush and went back to her notes.
"Get some sleep," she said. "We have an early session tomorrow."
--DxD--
He checked his quest screen one final time before bed.
[STATUS]
Name: Riku Snow
Age: 7 years
Level: 10 (340/800 XP)
HP: 121/121
MP: 158/158
STA: 134/134
STR: 22
DEX: 29
CON: 21
INT: 31
WIS: 33
SP: 0/0 (Sealed — Level 25 required)
[SKILLS]
Mana Control Lv4 — XP: 67/100
Observation Lv2 — XP: 88/100
[ACTIVE QUESTS]
Sharpen the Edge — Reach Level 15 (Lv 10 — 340/800 XP)
Soul Thread — Maintain the connection (Stable — strengthening)
He closed it and lay back in the dark.
Down the hall Kairi was asleep, the thread between them warm and quiet and entirely at rest. Somewhere in the city a devil had been moving through streets that didn't belong to it yet, looking for something Riku couldn't name.
Not yet, he thought. The same two words. The same calculation.
He closed his eyes.
Tomorrow Kairi would pick up the sword again. He was already certain of it.