The buckets were exactly as miserable as they’d been yesterday, and Alex found, somewhere around the second trip up the hill, that misery had a strange side effect he hadn’t accounted for.
’Boredom makes the bond easier to find,’ he thought, water sloshing dangerously close to the rim with every uneven step.
’The rock face needed all of my attention. The buckets don’t. There’s nothing complicated about carrying weight up a slope. My hands know exactly what they’re doing. Which means the rest of my head is free to go looking for something else.’
He reached for the thread again.
It came almost immediately this time, steadier than before, and he held it through the entire second trip, all the way to the crest of the hill, before it finally slipped loose the moment he set the buckets down and his focus scattered with the relief of finally being allowed to stop.
’There,’ he thought, chest heaving.
’Longer. Every single time, a little longer.’
Zara had wandered closer during the bucket runs, close enough to watch without needing to shout, and he caught her watching him with an expression that had shifted somewhere in the last twenty minutes from casual interest into something more deliberate.
"You’re doing it on purpose," she said, not quite a question.
"I told you I would," Alex said, picking the buckets back up for the third trip.
"Sensing and awareness, same as anything else. Sufficient exposure, sufficient intensity, sustained across sufficient intervals. That’s not just for combat. There’s no reason it can’t apply here too."
"And it’s working?"
"It’s working a little," Alex said.
"Which for day one is exactly as much as I expected."
She didn’t ask anything else, but he noticed she’d started reaching for it too, quietly, without announcing that she was doing it, the way he’d noticed her flinch slightly every time his end of the thread pulsed against hers.
The sandbags came next, and this time Alex threw himself into the strikes with the same methodical patience as before, form first, power later, but kept a corner of his attention permanently angled toward the bond, the way he’d learned to keep a corner of his attention on a room full of armed men even while doing something else entirely, back when doing that had mattered for very different reasons.
The rope crawl tested him differently.
Low to the ground, his whole focus needed on not catching the rope against his back, there was almost no room left over for the bond at all, and he lost it completely somewhere in the middle of the obstacle, only picking it back up once he’d cleared the far end and stood, brushing dirt off himself.
The falling drills gave him more room.
Tuck, roll, come up ready, his body already knew the shape of it from yesterday, and with the technique no longer demanding his full attention, he spent the whole sequence reaching for the thread between rolls, finding it, losing it, finding it again, the rhythm of falling and rising becoming its own strange metronome for the practice.
By the balance logs, something had changed.
He stepped onto the first log and reached for the bond without even meaning to, the motion arriving almost automatic now, muscle memory built in the space of a single morning, and this time it didn’t slip the moment he crossed onto the second log.
It held.
Thin and fragile, but present, humming quietly at the edge of his awareness the entire way across, and he stepped off the far end of the log with something that felt suspiciously close to triumph settling into his chest.
Zara felt it too, a longer, steadier pulse than anything before, warm and unmistakable, and she actually stood up from her stone without meaning to, one hand pressed flat against her own chest like she could physically feel where the thread connected.
’That was longer,’ she thought.
’That was much longer. Is he getting better at this by the hour?’
The rope bridge swayed under him the way it had yesterday, and he crossed it holding the bond the entire time, all the way to the far end, the connection humming steady and warm the whole distance in a way that made the crossing feel almost easy despite the bridge’s constant, unhelpful motion.
The cold plunge was worse this time, not because the water was colder but because he deliberately reached for the bond the moment he lowered himself into the basin, forcing his focus to split between the shock of the cold and the thread at the same time, testing whether real discomfort would break his concentration the way it had two exercises ago.
It nearly did.
The bond flickered violently, thinning almost to nothing, and he had to fight to hold onto even a trace of it through the full sixty-second count, climbing out shivering and gasping with the specific satisfaction of a man who’d just proven something to himself the hard way.
"You’re pushing yourself in a new direction today," Zara said, wrapping the towel around him, her voice carrying less teasing than usual, more genuine curiosity underneath it.
"I’m pushing myself in the same direction," Alex said, teeth chattering slightly.
"Just with a second thing to chase this time."
The weapons work went the same way.
He held the Viper’s Spine through his grip drills with the bond sitting quiet but present in the background, and when he moved into the Amethyst Paradox’s figure-eight, he found the thread rose and fell in time with the chain’s rhythm, as if the repetitive, flowing motion of the weapon gave the bond something steady to hang onto.
By the time the sun had started sliding toward orange, Alex had lost count of how many times he’d reached for it and found it, lost it, found it again.
But the pattern was undeniable.
Every single time, it took less effort to reach. Every single time, it lasted a little longer before it slipped.
He looked toward the palace, toward the training hall waiting on the other side of the grounds, and felt something settle into place that had nothing to do with the bond at all.
’Alright,’ he thought, rolling his shoulder, feeling the familiar ache settle into muscle that was already starting to recover faster than it should.
’One more thing left today.’
’Let’s see if Scott’s improved as much as I have.’