Harem Training System: Every Girl I Train Makes Me Stronger!

Chapter 53: 53. Six Strangers Slowly Becoming Something That Looks Like Family

Lia exhaled slowly through her nose, visibly reeling her own irritation back in by main force, and reset her stance a second time with noticeably more patience than before. William struck again, at the same altered angle, and this time she caught it a fraction of a second earlier, the redirect landing rough around the edges but functional, his blade sliding past her shoulder exactly the way it was supposed to.

"How was it?" William said. "I guess it’s starting to get better, right?"

"I’m sorry, but... It still felt sloppy to me."

"Sloppy and correct beats clean and wrong every single time," William said, sighing. "You’ll get the cleanliness back eventually, once the motion actually belongs to you instead of being something you’re borrowing from a lesson."

They ran through the sequence another dozen times before William finally called a halt, both of them sweating, Lia’s frustration having gradually given way to the quiet satisfaction of visible, measurable progress.

She retreated to the sidelines to catch her breath just as Kaela, who had apparently been waiting with the patience of a coiled spring for exactly this opening, sauntered back over.

"So," Kaela said, dropping onto the bench next to Lia with theatrical casualness, "how many times did he correct your form today? Five? Six? Or... Seven...?"

"I don’t know if you have ears or not, but I’ll answer it for you," Lia said, with a note of pride that was almost aggressive. "Once."

"Once? Girl... you’re the one who doesn’t have any ears because I heard him say the same thing to you like six to seven separate times."

"That’s what I call reinforcement, not correction."

"Sounds like correction to me, and you’re being the usual denial girl as always."

"You wouldn’t know the difference; you learned everything you know from hitting things until they stopped moving just because of how barbaric you are."

"Well, it worked, didn’t it?" Kaela grinned, entirely unbothered by the jab. "Instructor Wade says that I’m getting better at reading people now."

Kaela looked at William. "Isn’t that right, Instructor Wade? Tell her right to her face so she stops being in denial."

"Now, now... there’s no need to roast each other because to me... you’re both getting better," William said, with the weary diplomacy of a man who had learned very quickly that picking a side in this particular rivalry only ever made things worse.

"Different skills, different pace, same destination," William laughed.

"See that? Diplomatic nonsense," Kaela said. "That’s not an actual answer."

"I’m aware."

"Coward," Lia muttered, though there was no real heat behind it, and Kaela laughed outright, the two of them settling into the kind of comfortable bickering that had become its own strange form of friendship over the past several sessions.

...

Clara arrived not long after, journal tucked under one arm as always, dark eyes already scanning the training ground with the quiet, assessing focus that never quite seemed to switch off.

William ran her through a modified version of the ambush drill from the previous evening, this time layering in a third simultaneous input, a bell rung somewhere off to the side timed to overlap with two separate physical attacks.

The overload hit her immediately and visibly, her whole body locking for a fraction of a second exactly the way it always did, sensory input flooding faster than her mind could organize it into anything actionable.

But the freeze broke faster this time, her body remembering the lesson from the day before even as her conscious mind struggled to catch up, dropping low and letting the layered attacks pass over her while she processed the sound of the bell separately.

"Alright, that’s better now," William said, once the exercise had run its course. "Faster recovery than yesterday."

"But I still froze," Clara said, jotting something down in her journal without looking up.

"For about a third as long as you did before... to me, that’s not failure, but that’s precisely what progress is supposed to look like." William glanced over her shoulder briefly at the notes she was making, catching a fragment of her precise, careful handwriting before she angled the journal slightly away from view, a habit she’d developed early on and never quite broken.

"You keep doing that," William said, mild curiosity in his voice. "Writing things down mid-session instead of after."

"Say..." William held his chin. "What exactly are you tracking?"

Clara glanced up at him, something faintly unreadable in her dark eyes. "Patterns... Yours, mostly."

"How you adjust your teaching based on who’s struggling and how... It’s useful information for me."

"Huh...? Useful for what?"

"For understanding why it works," Clara said simply, closing the journal before William could press further, and there was something in the careful, deliberate way she said it that suggested the observation ran a little deeper than pure academic curiosity, though William chose not to chase that particular thread any further in the middle of a training session with an audience.

"Run it again," she said instead, tucking the journal under her arm and resetting into position before William had even fully agreed to it. "I want to see if I can cut the freeze down further."

They ran the layered ambush drill twice more, the bell timed a fraction differently each time so she couldn’t simply memorize the rhythm and coast through on anticipation rather than genuine adaptation.

The second attempt went worse than the first, her body locking for a beat longer than it had the time before, and Clara’s jaw tightened with visible frustration at what felt, to her, like backsliding.

"Goddammit! That was slower than before," she said.

"It was more like a different pattern, so you can’t call it that," William said. "You weren’t slower; you were solving a new problem instead of the one you’d already half solved."

"That’s not the same as regressing."

"It felt like regressing to me."

"Most progress feels like regressing right up until it doesn’t." William gestured for her to reset again. "You’re not trying to eliminate the freeze completely."

"You’re trying to make it short enough that it stops mattering..." William smiled. "There’s a difference."

The third attempt came out cleaner, the freeze shortened back down to something closer to her earlier performance, and Clara allowed herself the faintest exhale of relief before immediately reaching for her journal again, already transcribing something before the sensation had fully faded from her memory.

Ellie appeared partway through Clara’s session, drifting over from the healing wing with the loose, slightly frazzled energy of someone who’d had an eventful afternoon of her own.

She’d apparently been attempting a new control exercise on her own initiative, and the results, judging by the faint singe marks along one sleeve and the sheepish expression on her face, had been mixed at best.

"Please don’t ask," she said, before William could even open his mouth.

"I wasn’t going to ask."

"You were absolutely going to ask."

"I was going to ask if you’re alright, which is a completely different question."

Ellie sighed, dropping onto the bench beside Clara and inspecting the singed edge of her sleeve with mild resignation. "I tried the graduated release technique on a control dummy, the incremental thing you taught me, and it mostly worked, except the dummy is now missing an arm, and I think I might owe the healing wing an apology and possibly a new dummy."

"How much of an incremental increase are we talking about?"

"I meant to go up by ten percent like you said... I think I overshot slightly."

"Define slightly."

"It might have been closer to forty."

William pinched the bridge of his nose, though the motion carried more amusement than genuine frustration. "Ellie, the entire point of the exercise is small, controlled increases."

"Forty percent isn’t an increment... that’s just doing the thing you’re trying to stop doing, with extra steps."

"I know, I know... I got excited because the first two increases actually worked and I thought I could just keep going." Ellie’s ears drooped slightly, an expression of genuine embarrassment crossing her face. "The dummy’s arm is completely gone."

"It’s just sort of vaporized, and... I don’t even know where the pieces went."

"We’ll work on it tomorrow," William said, deciding that further interrogation of the missing dummy arm’s exact fate was probably not a productive use of anyone’s time. "Slow and deliberate."

"Ten percent means ten percent, not whatever number feels satisfying at the moment."

"Ten percent means ten percent," Ellie repeated dutifully, though her expression suggested she found the restriction personally offensive. "Fine..."

"I’ll try to be boring about it tomorrow."

"Boring is exactly what I want from you in this specific context."

Ellie made a face at him, then brightened almost immediately, apparently unable to sustain embarrassment for more than a few seconds at a time, and wandered off toward the dormitories with a small wave, leaving the rest of them to finish out the session in the gradually fading afternoon light.

By the time William finally called an end to the day’s training, the sun had dipped low enough to wash the training ground in the same warm gold it had carried the previous evening, and there was a comfortable, companionable exhaustion settled over the whole group as they gathered their things.

Kaela was still trying to convince Lia that her redirect technique was, in fact, secretly a form of dodging and therefore not real swordsmanship, an argument Lia was rebutting with the kind of icy, precise logic that only made Kaela laugh harder. Clara had her journal open again, scribbling something with a small, private smile on her face.

William watched them go, feeling that same quiet warmth settle in his chest that he’d felt the night before, six people who’d started as strangers slowly becoming something that looked, from certain angles, almost like a family.

It made the tightness in his chest about Catherine’s shaking hand feel that much more urgent.