Theron studied the two lines where they’d landed, the marks scraped into the dirt of the sparring floor still faintly visible in the fading light.
He studied them both for a long moment, crouching slightly to compare the depth and angle of each one before finally straightening back up.
"Tie," he said finally. "You both crossed the boundary at the same time."
Neither of them looked particularly thrilled about that.
Alex sat there a second longer, mana completely dry, his whole body carrying that hollow, scraped-out feeling that came from burning through everything he had, the ache settling deep into his limbs the way it always did after pushing this hard.
He could still call on the Aspect without mana, technically, but it wouldn’t do much of anything worth doing right now. His body had already spent whatever it had left to spend.
He climbed to his feet slowly, legs unsteady for a moment before they found their footing, and handed the sword back to Zara.
Scott was still sitting in the dirt, breathing hard, one hand braced against his knee.
"That was a good spar," Alex said, and meant every word of it.
Scott looked up at him for a moment, then let out a short breath that was almost a laugh, and pushed himself upright.
"The honor’s mine, Your Highness." He bowed his head slightly, then straightened again, and something more honest slipped into his voice than the formal line usually carried. "I mean that properly, not just as something you say after a match. That’s the closest any of the new recruits gotten to actually beating me since I came back from that mission. I went into this thinking I had it handled, and for about ten seconds I did, and then you pulled that weapon apart into something I’ve genuinely never seen before and I spent the rest of the fight just trying not to get taken apart by it."
"You’ve gotten a lot stronger since last week," Alex said. "I could feel it in the very first exchange. I wasn’t expecting the gap to be that wide already."
"So have you." Scott rubbed at the back of his neck, looking almost sheepish about it. "I don’t know what you’re doing between spars, Your Highness, whatever training regimen you’ve built for yourself, but it’s working and your technique is clearly improving."
"It’s mostly just repetition," Alex said. "Nothing clever about it. I train until something stops surprising me, then I train the next thing until that stops surprising me too."
Scott looked at him for a long moment, like he wasn’t quite sure whether that answer was modest or terrifying, and decided, apparently, that it might be both, shaking his head slightly before turning back toward the rest of the recruits still lingering near the edges of the hall.
Alex left the hall with Zara falling into step beside him, the evening air outside noticeably cooler than the packed heat of the training hall, and the moment they were through the doors she reached over, put a hand on top of his head, and ruffled his hair with far more enthusiasm than the situation called for.
"That was actually really good," she said, "using the mechanism mid-fight like that for the first time under real pressure. You didn’t hesitate once you committed to it either, which is honestly the part that impressed me more than the mechanism itself. A lot of people freeze the first time a plan actually has to work in a real fight instead of a drill. You didn’t."
"Do not mess up my hair," Alex said, trying and failing to duck out from under her hand. "You know how long it took me to get it to sit right this morning? I actually put effort into it today."
"Your hair falls apart the second you start your first exercise anyway, so I don’t want to hear it," Zara said, entirely unbothered, still ruffling. "Besides, I’m always willing to fix it up for you afterward. Properly, even. Just say the word and I’ll braid it into something that actually survives a full training day instead of whatever you’re doing with your fingers every morning, and-"
"I can fix my own hair," Alex said quickly, finally managing to duck out of range. "I’m not giving you unsupervised access to my head. God only knows what you’d turn it into. I’d wake up looking like one of those court portraits with the ridiculous powdered wig."
She laughed, low and genuine, and didn’t argue the point any further, though the grin stayed on her face the rest of the walk, the two of them falling into an easy, unhurried pace down the corridor.
"Give it some time," she said, once the laughter had settled, her voice easing into something quieter and more sincere, "and you’ll be taking down people at Scott’s level regularly. Not today. Not next week either, probably. But soon enough, if you keep going the way you have been."
"I know," Alex said. "That’s the whole plan."
As they walked, Alex reached inward and pulled up the notification that had been sitting quiet at the edge of his vision since his training ended.
***
[ Adapting... ]
[ Strength +0.01 ]
[ Adapting... ]
[ Agility +0.01 ]
[ Adapting... ]
[ Vitality +0.01 ]
[ Adapting... ]
[ Magic +0.01 ]
[ Adapting... ]
[ Will +0.01 ]
[ Adapting... ]
[ Shadow Element Synchronization +0.1% ]
[ Adapting... ]
[ The Skill Mana Absorption has improved slightly. ]
***
’Same as always,’ he thought, watching the numbers settle into place. ’Small. Slow. But it’s still climbing, and it hasn’t stopped climbing once since I started.’
’I just need to keep going. I’ll get there eventually. Consistency is the only thing that’s ever actually mattered. There’s no shortcut waiting somewhere that skips past the slow part. There’s just the slow part, over and over, until it isn’t slow anymore.’
The evening light was already sliding long and gold through the hallway windows by the time they reached his room, the corridor quiet except for the soft sound of their footsteps and the distant clatter of the kitchens somewhere below, the palace settling into that quiet stretch between training and dinner that had become as familiar to him now as anything from his old life ever had been.
And so, many years passed by.