After Eclipse finally left the room, the maid came in to collect the plates and dishes, bowing once before slipping back out with the tray balanced against her hip.
Alex turned toward Zara.
"Let’s go," he said. "I have some important improvements to make in today’s weapon training."
Zara looked at him and raised an eyebrow. "Is this because of what I think it is?"
"I don’t even know what you are thinking," Alex said, though it wasn’t really the full truth, as he had an inkling that she would know exactly what she was thinking.
"Because the new recruits are finally leveling up," Zara said, "and there are no new recruits right this moment for you to spar and, let’s say, win as easily as you have won till this point." She said it like she’d been sitting on the observation for a while, waiting for the right moment to hand it back to him.
"Well, you are not wrong. That is one of the reasons." Alex moved out of the room, and Zara fell into step beside him, the way she always did.
"One of the reasons?" she repeated.
"Yes. One of the reasons."
"So what are your other reasons? Mr. I-Don’t-Want-To-Lose."
"...To improve my weapon handling," Alex said. "It’s only the basics that I’ve been practicing." He kept walking, the words coming more naturally now that he’d started. "I cross-referenced every weapon and training book I could find before I made the decision to build both my training schedule and the weapons themselves. And I’m still just at the point where I’m learning to hold them properly. But if I want to actually improve, I need to start using the specialty of my weapons. That’s what separates them from any normal weapon."
"I see." Zara studied him for a moment, eyes narrowing slightly. "But I still don’t understand how someone your age manages to do all this. I’ve heard of children with extraordinary learning and problem-solving capacity, sure. But you really do top the chart in almost everything."
"Almost everything?" Alex said. "What am I missing?"
He shamelessly ignored the first half of the sentence like he hadn’t heard it at all.
"Well," Zara said, "if only you used that cute little face to actually act like a kid, instead of some seven-hundred-year-old king with the weight of a kingdom on his shoulders, you would definitely top it."
"Hey! Don’t compare me to my father!" Alex said. "I am a very enthusiastic person, I’ll have you know. I’m only acting this serious because I’m still figuring things out. If not, you would see me in my full glory."
"Well, if that’s really true," Zara said, "then I will definitely be waiting for you to reach your glory." She grinned, already picking up her pace as the treeline came into view ahead of them. "Now let’s go continue our Mission Baby Fat Reduction!"
The clearing greeted him the way it always did now, familiar rather than intimidating, a landscape of obstacles that no longer looked like punishment so much as routine, every log and rock and stretch of rope so thoroughly memorized by his body that his mind was free to wander somewhere else entirely while his legs carried him through it.
Alex moved through it the way he’d moved through it every morning for a week, weighted bands dragging at his legs through the dawn run, the resistance a dull, familiar ache rather than the fresh burn it had been on the first day.
His palms found the rock face’s holds with the ease of memory rather than discovery, each groove and outcropping already catalogued somewhere in the back of his mind, his hands moving to them before his eyes had even finished scanning the route ahead.
The river current fought him the same stubborn fight it always fought, cold water dragging at his legs with the patient, indifferent strength of something that had been doing this far longer than he had, and he pushed through it the way he’d learned to, leaning into the resistance instead of fighting it head on.
Buckets sloshed up the hill, water spilling over the rims with every uneven step, the muscles in his forearms burning by the third trip in a way that had started to feel almost satisfying rather than simply exhausting.
Fists found the sandbag’s center with cleaner form than the day before, each strike landing with a fraction more precision, a fraction less wasted motion, the kind of improvement too small to notice in the moment but unmistakable when he thought back to where he’d started.
The rope crawl and the falling drills and the balance logs and the swaying bridge all blurred together into a single practiced rhythm, one obstacle bleeding into the next without any real pause between them, his body finding its footing on instinct in places where a week ago it had needed to think through every single step.
And the cold plunge at the end of it no longer stole his breath the way it once had, the shock of it settling into something closer to bracing than punishing, his body having finally learned how to absorb it instead of simply enduring it.
Then came the quieter work, sitting motionless while he reached for the mana in the air before ever trying to move it, letting his awareness spread outward first and settle before attempting anything more.
He held a single droplet of water steady above his palm through pressure alone, the smallest miscalculation sending it trembling, forcing him to recalibrate again and again until the trembling stopped.
He synced the rhythm of his breath to the ambient current until the two moved as one, in and out matching some rhythm he couldn’t have named but could feel clearly enough once he stopped trying to force it.
And finally he pressed his fingers to stone and root and leaf, feeling for the faint, distinct signature each one carried, the stone cold and steady, the root patient and slow, the leaf quick and restless in a way that always surprised him slightly no matter how many times he felt it.
By the time he straightened from the last exercise, sweat-soaked and satisfied, the sun had barely finished climbing past the treeline.
’Now for the part I actually look forward to,’ Alex thought, rolling his shoulder once.