The hill wasn’t tall.
That was the deceptive part.
From a distance it looked almost gentle, the kind of slope a person might walk up without thinking about it, without breaking stride or breathing pattern.
Carrying two full water buckets changed the math entirely.
Alex picked them up, felt his arms drop slightly under the unexpected weight, the handles biting into his palms in places already raw from the rock face, and started walking.
’This is one of the oldest training methods in existence, as that book mentions, and for good reason,’ he thought, adjusting his grip as water sloshed dangerously close to the rim with every uneven step.
’It’s not glamorous. Nobody’s ancestor became a legend because they carried buckets up a hill really well, no songs get written about it, no statues get carved of a man mid bucket carry. But it builds posture, it builds the kind of endurance that doesn’t show off, and it teaches you to keep moving even when something is actively making you miserable and offering no reward for the misery beyond more misery later.’
The water sloshed with every uneven step, threatening to spill, demanding a kind of careful control over his own movement that running hadn’t required, a precision laid on top of exhaustion that felt almost unfair.
Halfway up, his arms started shaking.
He kept walking.
’Spill it and you start over,’ he told himself, which wasn’t even a rule anyone had given him, just a standard he’d decided on the spot because the moment demanded one and nobody else was going to hand him a reason to keep going.
’Make the rule and follow the rule. That’s the whole game. The rule doesn’t have to come from outside. It just has to be enforced.’
He reached the top, set the buckets down with the careful relief of someone whose arms had just been informed they were allowed to stop, and looked back down the slope at Zara, who was watching with an expression that had drifted, somewhere in the last hour, from amused observation into something closer to quiet, surprised respect.
"Again?" she called up, cupping a hand around her mouth.
"Again," he confirmed, and picked the buckets back up, his arms protesting the decision in language that would have been impressively colorful if arms could talk.
By the third trip up the hill, his legs had entered a state of fatigue that felt almost philosophical, the kind of tired where his body had stopped negotiating and simply started complying out of habit, like it had given up arguing and decided sulky cooperation was the path of least resistance.
He moved to the sandbag dummies next.
The first hit landed wrong.
His knuckles met wet, weighted canvas with a dull thud that sent a jolt of pain up his arm and taught him, immediately and without ambiguity, that hitting something heavy with bad form hurt the person throwing the punch more than the bag itself.
’Okay,’ he thought, shaking out his hand, the sting traveling all the way to his elbow.
’Form first. Power later. Power without form is just self harm with extra steps, and I’ve apparently just demonstrated that personally for anyone who needed proof.’
He adjusted his stance, watched how his body wanted to twist through the hit rather than just throw his fist forward, the small mechanical lesson hiding inside the pain, and tried again.
Better.
Still not good. But better.
Zara had moved closer to this part of the training, arms still crossed, watching his form with the particular focus of someone who’d seen a thousand fighters develop and could already tell which habits would matter in five years and which ones wouldn’t matter at all.
"Your hips aren’t following through," she said.
"I noticed," Alex said, adjusting again, rolling his shoulder to loosen something that had gone stiff.
"You noticed after I said it or before?" she asked, one eyebrow climbing in a way that suggested she already suspected the answer and wanted him to admit it anyway.
"Before. I just hadn’t fixed it yet." He threw another punch, hips rotating properly this time, and felt the difference immediately, the impact landing with a satisfying solidity that hadn’t been there a moment ago, the bag swinging back with real conviction. "Now I have."
Zara raised an eyebrow but didn’t argue the point, just watched, her silence carrying its own kind of approval.
He worked through a dozen more strikes, the sand weighted bag swinging and settling, swinging and settling, each impact teaching his body something new about angle and distance and the specific physics of hitting something that was allowed to hit back, theoretically, in a real fight, in a way the bag currently wasn’t but would, eventually, force him to account for.
***
The rope obstacles came next, strung low between posts, demanding a kind of movement Alex hadn’t used yet today, something that felt less like training and more like surrender to gravity on purpose.
He dropped to his stomach and started crawling, the rope brushing against his back close enough that any carelessness would catch him, and felt almost immediately how different this was from everything before it.
’This isn’t about strength,’ he thought, pulling himself forward with his forearms, keeping his profile as low as he could manage against the dirt.
’This is about learning to move when you can’t stand up. Reflexes, low-center movement, the kind of instinct that matters when you’re pinned or grounded and standing isn’t an option anymore because someone or something has made sure of it.’
The rope caught at his shoulder once, a sharp tug that reminded him exactly how much margin for error this exercise allowed, which was, as far as he could tell, very little.
He adjusted, kept moving.
By the time he cleared the obstacle, his front was caked in dirt and his arms ached in a new configuration of tired that the rest of the session hadn’t touched yet, a low, dragging burn that sat differently than the burn from the rock face.
He stood, brushed himself off as best he could, dirt smearing more than it cleared, and moved to the falling drills.
***
The falling drills were, he decided almost immediately, the most counterintuitive part of the entire day.
’You’d think the lesson here is how to not fall,’ he thought, watching Zara demonstrate a basic roll across the cleared dirt, her body curling and unwinding with the practiced ease of someone who’d done this thousands of times until it stopped being a technique and just became a thing her body knew how to do without consulting her.
’But that’s not it at all. The lesson is how to fall and get back up without breaking something important.’
He tried it.
He hit the ground wrong the first time, his shoulder taking the brunt of an impact his body hadn’t known how to distribute, and the resulting jolt of pain made him grunt despite himself, a short, undignified sound he immediately wished he hadn’t made out loud.
"Tuck your chin," Zara said, crouching beside him to check he was still in one piece before continuing. "And roll through the shoulder, don’t land on it square. You’re not a sack of flour, even though you’re currently doing a very convincing impression of one."
He tried again.
Better this time, the impact spreading out across his back instead of concentrating in one unfortunate point, and he came up out of the roll in something approximating a ready stance, a little wobbly but upright.
"That’s it," Zara said, and there was real approval in it now, not the dry observational tone from earlier. "That’s actually it."
He did it again. And again. Each repetition smoothing out some small inefficiency, his body slowly learning the shape of a fall that didn’t hurt as much as the last one had.
’This is the kind of thing that saves your life later,’ he thought, climbing to his feet for the sixth time, dirt clinging to him from collar to knee.
’Nobody remembers learning to fall safely. Everyone remembers the one time they didn’t know how and it cost them something they couldn’t get back.’