2. Chapter 2 Physical Training
Wulden's prediction held.
Rask stood at the center of the field with his arms crossed, same boots, same scar, same jacket worn open like it was a condition of his employment. He waited for the stragglers to reach the perimeter wall. Then he pointed at the hill.
"Go."
The class started running.
Thirty students in academy gray spread up the incline in a loose pack. The hill rose at the far end of the training grounds, a packed-earth slope that nobody had ever described fondly. The morning was cool and clear and offered no excuses.
Lucien settled into a pace.
His body was fine, all of it, legs and lungs and everything between.
The mana work he'd been doing since Week 2, the quiet nightly repairs that rebuilt teenage muscle fiber into something that could keep up with three centuries of instinct, had the body running well above its natural ceiling.
He'd done the hill last week at a pace that looked like genuine effort but wasn't, and the week before that at a pace that looked like struggle but was theater.
The problem was consistency. His improvement curve had to look earned, faster than the last class by a credible margin, not faster by a leap that made a former combat instructor start asking questions.
He shortened his stride. He breathed through his mouth and let a boy with red hair pass him on the inside of the first turn.
Jossi Ashwick passed him on the outside.
She was in training gear, the jacket ditched as usual, the fitted athletic shirt showing arms that were lean and brown, faint spots visible across the backs of her hands where the sun had darkened the marks.
Her short dark hair was pushed back from her forehead and her spotted tail streamed behind her, uncontrolled, going where it wanted.
She moved through the pack without apparent effort, her stride eating ground in long easy pulls that made the hill look optional.
She passed him without looking at him.
Wulden ground up the hill two paces ahead, face tight, grinding uphill like he'd predicted every second of it at breakfast. His right shoulder hitched on the steeper section, the stiffness from yesterday catching, and he compensated by rotating his torso in a way that added effort and solved nothing.
Liora ran on the far side of the pack. She wore training gear, silver hair tied back, her tail in a controlled arc behind her.
She'd worn long sleeves. Lucien had spotted it when the class gathered: covered arms on a morning warm for running.
The coven mark on her forearm, the raised angular line the color of old blood, was one day old and she was already building the habit of hiding it.
Her running was the more interesting detail.
Liora had always kept a strong pace, her demon physiology giving her endurance that most of the class couldn't match.
Today she'd pushed past her own baseline.
The uphill section came a shade faster than usual, and the recovery at the top landed quicker, her breathing settling before it should have.
The coven bond's power share was stabilizing into her body, and this was the first visible edge of it.
She wouldn't know why yet. The bond took time to read from the inside.
Lucien finished the hill in the middle of the pack. He'd improved from last week by the right amount.
Students reached for water bottles. The breathing around the wall was heavy and ragged. A boy near the training dummies bent over with his hands on his knees. Wulden sat on the stone wall and pressed his palm flat against his shoulder.
Rask let them rest for thirty seconds, which for Rask was generous.
"Shadow drill," he said. "I pair you."
He read from no list. He'd decided the pairings before class started, or he was deciding them now.
With Rask it was impossible to tell. He called names.
Students paired off and moved to open sections of the field, fifteen-by-fifteen squares scored into the dirt from previous drills.
One person was to lead, one person would follow, and they needed to match their partner's movement and stay in the square.
Wulden got paired with a tall girl who looked relieved about it.
Liora drew a heavyset human who spent the first ten seconds figuring out what to do with his hands.
"Margrave. Ashwick."
Jossi looked up from the water station. She spotted Lucien and one of her leopard ears rotated forward. She walked over.
"Guess you're stuck with me," she said, flat and without ceremony.
"Guess so. I could think of worse things."
They took a square. Jossi rolled her shoulders, shook out her hands, and planted her feet. "Oh, really? I lead first?"
"Go ahead."
She went.
Her first direction change was sharp and fast and came with no telegraph.
One second she was moving right, weight shifting, hips turning, and then she cut left and was somewhere else.
Her speed affinity lived in these transitions: not straight-line running but the pivots between, the moments where most people's bodies needed a beat to redirect and hers didn't.
Lucien read her perfectly. He'd spent three centuries watching fighters move. Hips announcing directions before the feet commit. Shoulders loading before the cut. Weight transferring to the ball of the planted foot a fraction before the push. Every change was there in the body before it happened.
He let himself be late.
He trailed a half-step behind on the first change and a full step on the second, when she dropped low and reversed. He stayed close on the straightaways and lost ground on the pivots. He looked like a student who was trying and mostly failing.
She sped up. The cuts came faster, tighter.
Her tail went rigid during the sharp changes, the same tension he'd seen in her shoulders during Kess's diagnostic weeks ago.
She wasn't using her augmentation field, not channeling mana into the movement.
This was her body, and her body was fast for anyone in the year to track.
He stayed behind her, matching the same delay on every change. Too consistent, maybe, but he couldn't vary it without overshooting in one direction or the other.
She stopped, breathing a little harder. One ear cocked toward him.
"You're not bad at this," she said.
"You're very fast. It’s impressive."
"I know." She pushed her hair back from her forehead. "You're reading my hips, though."
"I’m trying to. It is easier said than done."
"Most people watch the feet. Feet are already committed by the time you see them." She shrugged one shoulder. "Hips tell you what's coming."
She offered it like giving directions, something useful with nothing attached.
Lucien had known it for centuries. He nodded once and rolled his shoulders out.
"Switch," Rask said. The word carried without effort.
The problem inverted. Lucien's movement patterns were combat-trained, efficient, three centuries of drilled economy in every step.
A normal student moved with a certain sloppiness: unnecessary width in the turns, overcorrection on the direction changes, the looseness of a body still figuring out where its edges were.
Lucien had to move like that. He widened his turns.
He added a hitch to his direction changes, a manufactured search for balance that a real student would still carry at Week 5.
Jossi stayed on him.
She was closer than he expected. Her speed let her recover from his changes before the gap opened, and she tracked his movement with an attention that went beyond athleticism. She was reading him too.
He cut right, a quick change softened with extra footwork to disguise the efficiency. She followed. He reversed left, adding width. She closed the distance on the return, swinging wide to counterbalance the pivot.
He cut again, sharper this time, and forgot to add the width.
The movement came clean and direct, nothing wasted.
Jossi caught it. Her focus sharpened for a fraction of a second. She followed, matched it, but the fraction was there. She'd seen a cut that didn't match the ones before it.
He added the width back and softened the transitions. He moved like a student again.
"Switch," Rask said.
They ran two more rounds each. The rhythm settled into work. Jossi's speed stayed constant, her changes sharp. Lucien kept the calibration tight: trailing when he followed, sloppy when he led.
Between the third and fourth rounds, she took a drink and looked at him sideways.
"Doesn’t your cat ever come to PT? Corvath?"
"No. He has a policy."
"What policy?"
"He doesn't do anything that involves running. He doesn’t even want to watch others run. He’s that lazy."
She laughed, short and surprised. She wiped sweat off her jaw with her wrist. "Smart cat. He was at Kess's class, first day. Sitting on the bench like he owned the building."
"He thinks he does."
"Does he?"
"I haven't checked the deed. His name may be on it."
She grinned, quick and crooked, and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. "You're funny. I didn't expect that."
"What did you expect?"
"Quiet guy, sits in the back, has a weird cat. That's about where I had you."
"That's still where I am."
"Sure." She said it like she didn't believe him and wasn't interested in arguing about it. She set the bottle down and planted her feet. "Another round?"
The next round started. Jossi led. Her cuts were sharper now, testing, and Lucien trailed her by the same margin and let her push the pace.
Ten squares over, Liora was shadowing her partner with a fluidity that hadn't been there last Tuesday.
The heavyset boy she'd drawn kept losing her on the changes, falling further behind each round, and Liora's expression gave away nothing about it.
Rask walked the pairs.
He stopped at two students on the north side and corrected the follower's spacing. He reached Wulden's pair and watched for ten seconds without speaking, which from Rask was a compliment. He moved to the next pair, and the next.
He reached Lucien and Jossi during the round. Jossi leading, Lucien following, the half-step gap holding.
Rask turned those pale eyes on Lucien alone, not on Jossi and not on the pair as a unit. The look lasted two seconds. Then he kept walking.
He said nothing. He hadn't said anything during the cross-guard test either, not until the drill was over.
"Last round," Rask said.
Lucien led the final set. He kept it loose and broad, the movements readable. Jossi matched him without difficulty.
When the drill ended, she pulled her water bottle from beside the wall and took a long drink. The spots along her jawline caught the morning light, the scattering of marks that darkened in summer and faded in winter.
"You've gotten better since the start of term," she said, conversational and flat. She ran beside thirty people twice a week and kept track. "Lot better."
"I've been working on it."
"It shows." She capped her water bottle. "See you next class if not before. I had fun today. Hopefully we have fun again in the future." Lucien was surprised by her wink that followed.
She walked off toward the south entrance, her tail swinging behind her. She didn't look back. She strutted in a way that deserved attention. Lucien gladly gave it to the beautiful beastkin.
Wulden appeared at Lucien's shoulder, sweating, his training shirt darkened across the chest.
"Who was that?"
"Jossi Ashwick."
"I know who she is. I meant what was that?" He gestured vaguely at the space where the drill had been. "You two were actually moving in there. Like, in sync. That was good."
"She's fast."
"Everyone knows she's fast. That's not what I'm talking about." He rubbed his shoulder and winced. “I saw that wink, too. I wonder if your new girlfriend saw it.”
“Nothing gets past you, Wulden. I’m sure Liora would be fine with it. She’s not the jealous sort.”
“I don’t know, I mean she is a demon. Demons can be unpredictable.”
“Wulden, is there anything you don’t know something about?”
“Probably not. I know things.”
Lucien gave a rare chuckle and they walked toward the south entrance. The sun was higher now, the shadows short. Students filtered out in pairs and clusters, the post-PT shuffle of sore legs and empty water bottles.
On the far side of the grounds, Rask stood with arms crossed and his jacket open. He watched the last students leave and went still.
They reached the gate. Lucien's body carried no fatigue, his breathing was even, and the sweat on his training shirt was from the sun, not the work.
He wiped his forehead with his sleeve and kept walking.