The rock face was the second item, and Alex approached it the way he approached everything new, by looking at it for a full thirty seconds before touching it at all, letting his eyes do the first pass of work so his hands wouldn’t have to learn the hard way.
’No ropes. No assistance. Bare hands.’
He traced the visible handholds with his eyes, mapping a route before committing to it, the way he might plan a sentence before he said it.
’Grip strength, balance, spatial awareness. This isn’t about getting to the top fast. This is about not falling, which means every single hold has to be tested before weight goes onto it. One bad assumption here and I’m not climbing anymore, I’m falling, and those are very different activities.’
He reached for the first hold.
The stone was cold and rough under his palm, and he felt the slight give of his fingers struggling to find purchase, the muscles in his hand simply not yet strong enough to commit fully to the grip the way an adult’s would have.
He pulled anyway.
His feet found a lower hold almost by instinct, the body compensating in ways his conscious mind hadn’t planned for, and for a moment he hung there, suspended a few feet off the ground, recalculating with the particular focus of someone who’d just discovered his plan needed revision in real time.
’This is different from the running,’ he thought, reaching for the next hold and testing it before trusting it.
’Running is repetition. You can run badly and just be slower. This is precision. Every single placement matters because there’s no recovering from a bad one except falling, and falling from up here is going to hurt regardless of how gracefully I do it.’
He climbed slowly and methodically.
Testing each hold with two fingers before committing his full weight, the way a man checking ice before walking on it, unwilling to trust his own enthusiasm over his own caution.
Behind him, Zara had gone quiet in the specific way that meant she was watching closely rather than not paying attention, a silence with weight to it.
’She thinks I’m going to fall,’ Alex thought, finding the next hold.
’She’s probably right that I might. That’s fine. Falling here, from this height, onto cleared ground, is the entire point. Better to learn what falling feels like now, with consequences I can survive, than later, when the consequences won’t be so forgiving and the ground won’t be cleared for me.’
His hand slipped on a hold near the halfway mark.
For one half-second his body weight shifted entirely onto the other hand, and his fingers screamed in protest, tendons pulling tight in a way that felt distinctly unfriendly, and he genuinely thought he might go down.
He didn’t.
He found his footing, readjusted, and kept climbing.
By the time he reached the platform at the top, his forearms were burning in a way he hadn’t experienced before, an honest, deep ache that told him exactly which muscles had done the most work and which ones still needed development, like his body had handed him a very specific and unflattering report card.
He sat at the top for a moment, looking down at the clearing, at Zara watching from below with her hand shading her eyes against the sun.
’Spatial awareness,’ he thought.
’I can see the whole layout from up here. The running track, the water channel, the sandbags, the way the hills curve around toward the river. This is useful for more than just the climbing. This is how you learn to read a battlefield, by getting high enough to see the shape of it instead of just the piece directly in front of you.’
He climbed back down with significantly less caution than he’d climbed up with, which was, he reflected on the way down, possibly not the wisest decision he’d made today, but his confidence had grown with every successful hold and confidence wanted, badly, to be tested against something.
He landed at the bottom with a slight jolt through his knees.
Zara was there immediately, scanning him for damage with the particular efficiency of someone whose entire job depended on noticing injuries before they became problems worth reporting.
"Your hands," she said, nodding at them, not bothering to soften it into a question.
He looked down.
Both palms were raw, a few small scrapes where the stone had bitten harder than expected, thin lines of red beading at the worst of them.
"They’ll toughen up," he said, flexing his fingers experimentally.
"They will," Zara agreed.
"Eventually. In the meantime you’re bleeding slightly on my watch, which I want noted, in case anyone asks me later why I let the third prince climb a rock face barehanded like he was trying to prove something to nobody in particular."
"Noted, My lady." Alex said theatrically, and moved toward the water channel, already shaking the sting out of his palms.
***
The water channel ran fast, faster than it looked from a distance, the current visibly dragging at the surface in a way that promised real resistance the moment a body entered it.
Alex stepped in.
The cold hit him first, a sharp shock that ran up through his legs and settled somewhere in his chest, stealing the breath right out of him, and he had to consciously stop himself from gasping out loud in front of Zara.
’Full-body resistance,’ he thought, wading deeper, feeling the current start to pull at him in earnest, tugging at his ankles like something with opinions about where he should stand.
’This works muscle groups the running and climbing didn’t touch. Core stability. The kind of strength that doesn’t show up in a single dramatic movement but shows up in everything, eventually, the way a foundation shows up in a building that doesn’t fall down when the storm finally comes.’
He started swimming against the current.
It fought him immediately, the water pushing back with a stubbornness that no amount of determination could simply override, and he found himself making slow, grinding progress where he’d expected something faster, something that rewarded effort the way running had.
His arms burned.
His legs, already tired from the run and the climb, screamed louder this time, a chorus of complaint that had clearly been saving up its energy.
’Don’t fight the water like it’s an enemy,’ he thought, adjusting his stroke, finding a rhythm that worked with his exhaustion rather than against it.
’Fight it like it’s a teacher. It’s not trying to hurt me. It’s just bigger than me right now. That’s a fact, not an insult, and getting offended at a fact has never once made the fact smaller.’
He pushed forward another length.
The warmth of his Aspect sat quietly in the background of his mind, still active, still drawing the small steady trickle of mana that kept it running, and he wondered, not for the first time, what exactly it was cataloguing while he forced his five year old body through resistance it had no business surviving without complaint.
Zara walked alongside the channel on the bank, keeping pace easily, her eyes never leaving the water for more than a second at a time.
"You’re going slow," she said, teasing but not unkindly.
"I’m going as fast as the water allows," Alex said between strokes, water splashing into his mouth on the last word, forcing him to spit it back out with significantly less dignity than he would have liked, the taste of river mud lingering unpleasantly.
Zara didn’t laugh, but something in her expression suggested she was working very hard not to, her mouth pressed into a thin line that twitched twice before settling.
He finished the length, climbed out shivering and gasping, and immediately understood why cold water plunges were further down the list. His body had already discovered, secondhand, exactly what that particular agony would feel like, and it was not looking forward to the formal introduction.
"Ten items," he muttered, water dripping off him onto the dirt, forming a small dark patch that spread outward.
"I have ten items and I’ve done three."
"You wanted this," Zara reminded him, holding out a dry cloth she’d apparently produced from somewhere, because she always seemed to have exactly what he needed exactly when he needed it, like the universe had assigned her the role specifically.
"I did," Alex agreed, wiping his face, the rough texture of the cloth a welcome relief against his skin.
"I’m allowed to be tired about wanting it, but I guess wanting something doesn’t mean the wanting comes free of complaints."
"You’re allowed," she said.
"Just don’t expect sympathy because I warned you two days ago this was going to be a lot, and I distinctly remember you nodding like you’d already thought of everything I was about to say."
"You did," he admitted.
"I chose not to listen properly, I mean I heard the words but I just didn’t let them land."
"Story of every stubborn person’s life," Zara said, and there was something almost fond buried under the dryness of it, a warmth she clearly wasn’t planning on admitting to out loud.