Chapter 31: Future title: The Berserker.
Tessira was still asleep when I left.
I stood at the door and looked at my hands in the morning light. The split knuckles from last night had closed overnight. I flexed the fingers once, felt the Ether Authority.
Then I went to train.
The training room stopped me at the door.
***
Packed. Knights everywhere—dueling, drilling, rotating between stations.
I always trained in silence. Crowds just distract the focus.
I was already turning to leave when someone stepped into my path.
Young knight. Maybe my age, maybe a year older. He looked up at me.
"Can we duel?"
No nerves. None at all.
Around us a few heads turned.
I looked at him for a moment.
"Sure."
We waited for a free stage.
One pair ahead of us was still going. Then another started. Then a third.
An hour passed.
A vein appeared on my temple.
Not from the waiting. I had patience for waiting. It was the knight standing beside me who was the problem.
He had not stopped talking since we left the door. I counted at some point. Thirty-something questions in forty minutes. He answered all of them himself.
"Do you have a preferred grip? I’ve been developing an overhead variation, took about three months, though the stance requirements are specific so it doesn’t work for everyone do you train daily?
What about footwork drills, I find most people neglect footwork drills, I personally do them for the first twenty minutes of every session though I recently extended that to thirty, do you stretch beforehand?
I used to not stretch but then I pulled something in the third week of advanced sparring and now I stretch religiously, anyway what sword do you use?"
He stopped. Finally Stopped.
I thought he was waiting for an answer.
I was wrong. He was just breathing.
"I use a standard estate blade," I said.
He nodded rapidly. "Right, yes, I actually have three, the balance is slightly different on each and I rotate depending on what I’m working on, speaking of which I wanted to ask about your footwork because from what I can see you’re doing something unusual with your back foot..."
Why do I always end up next to the strange ones.
I recognized him the moment he’d stepped into my path.
Reinhardt.
Future title: The Berserker.
In the novel he became a monster. Not because he was born one. Because someone he loved betrayed him. The hero needed three full arcs to deal with the aftermath.
Hard to believe, looking at the person currently explaining his stretching routine.
"...and that’s why I think the overhead grip is underutilized at our level, do you have a preference?"
Our turn came.
We stepped onto the stage.
The room had thinned by then. Still watched, but not packed. Enough eyes to matter.
We bowed. Drew.
He came in fast.
The first strike hit my guard hard enough that my wrist went numb.
I took two steps back before I decided to.
Oh.
So that’s what he actually was.
The talking stopped the moment his feet hit the stage and something else occupied the space where the talking had been. Weight low, transitions clean, footwork immaculate. The combinations arriving without gaps.
Under my feet I could feel it faintly through the Ether mana gathering around his ankles before every explosive step. Not much. Just the trace of it, consistent, a tell he probably didn’t know he had.
I filed it and kept moving.
We tested range. Neither of us committed.
He feinted left, cut right. I stepped back and let it miss by a margin I chose rather than scrambled for.
He noticed. Adjusted immediately.
Smarter than the talking suggested.
Second exchange harder. He pressed combinations high, low, high, precise, no gaps. I matched them, sword only, no mana, and he caught me with a half-step I hadn’t tracked and the flat of his blade connected with my forearm. Clean. Solid.
The numbness in my wrist from the first strike hadn’t fully gone yet.
I gave him a nod.
He grinned.
First real expression I’d seen from him. Easy face from before. Sharper.
So there’s someone under all that.
I pushed the pace. With pressure closing distance before he expected it, forcing his guard up, then not being where his counter aimed. He adapted fast. Changed his weight distribution mid-step and came back with a low sweep I cleared by a margin I wasn’t entirely comfortable with.
Back to neutral.
His heartbeat hadn’t changed. Not once through any of it.
Mine had.
He looked at me differently now. That stillness I recognized from the novel sat just behind his eyes.
We went again.
This time he committed earlier, reading that I wouldn’t back up the way I had before. He drove forward in a four hit sequence and on the third I stepped inside his reach instead of away from it. His fourth strike had no target.
My elbow found his guard, my knee found his stance, and for one second he was off his axis.
He recovered faster than he should have been able to.
Turned the recovery into a backwards pivot and came out of it in a stance I hadn’t seen him use before. Lower. Wider. Blade held differently.
The overhead grip.
The one he’d spent forty minutes explaining.
I almost laughed. The specific angle it created at that stance cut off three of the responses I’d been rotating through. I switched to the fourth. He’d accounted for that too.
I switched to something that wasn’t part of any routine. Nobody had taught it to me. I’d figured it out after three weeks of hitting walls and watching rivers. The angle caught him off guard.
He pressed anyway. Adapted mid-sequence. Found a new line.
We were both running things that hadn’t been in the original plan anymore.
The mana trace around his feet changed pattern. More frequent. Smaller bursts. He was starting to push.
I felt the Ether twitch under everything and kept it down. Not yet. Sword only. I wanted to see the ceiling first.
He ran the overhead sequence from a different entry point and it landed differently from the first time tighter, less warning, the adjustment made mid-fight rather than pre planned. Three months of work deployed in real time and calibrated on the fly.
My forearm was going to bruise from the second exchange.
His stance had shifted four times trying to account for me.
We stepped back at the same moment.
He’d been watching me since the door.
The talking had been watching.
We stood there for a breath. Neither of us having gotten the ending. Both of us knowing we weren’t going to get it today.
He sheathed.
I sheathed.
He put his hand out.
I shook it.
"You’re strange," he said.
"You talk too much."
He laughed. Loud and completely unbothered,
"Same time tomorrow?" he said.
"Yeah."
He nodded once and walked off the stage.
Before he’d reached the edge he was already talking to the nearest person about something, the conversation starting mid-sentence, as if it had been happening the whole time and the other person had simply stepped into the middle of it.
I watched him go.
I’d expected to meet the Berserker today. The thing the novel had built across three arcs. The stillness and what lived inside it.
Instead I’d met someone who had spent three months building a grip technique, then spent another hour explaining it to a stranger he intended to use it on, then used it.
Someone who loved the work.
Somehow that was more dangerous than the other thing.
I stepped off the stage.
My wrist was still slightly numb.
***
[Hidden Quest Completed: Secure A gay]
[300 Ink]
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