Gazef's POV
Tim was the most frustrating person he had ever trained alongside, and he had spent eight years training alongside some genuinely difficult people.
The frustration was not personal. Tim was, by any and all measure was a good person to know, steady, honest, without the ego that exceptional ability usually generated in people with Power. He helped the younger students when they were hurt. He trained without complaint over and over through failures, his willpower was one of the highest I ever seen. He had never, in eight years, said a single word designed to make another person feel small.
But he was *incomprehensibly strong, in a way that I had spent years trying to find the edge of and kept not finding, and the combination of that strength with what appeared to be mediocre technical skill was a puzzle that had occupied a significant portion of my thinking for most of my training.
I had beaten the other students. One by one, over the course of the past years, I had worked through the challenges of every other student. Not out of cruelty, the fights were clean, the wins acknowledged properly. But I needed to know where I stood, and knowing where you stood required testing yourself against the best available comparisons.
Which brought him, inevitably, back to Tim.
They had fought before, several times, across the years, and the result had always been the same. Tim won. Not through technique, which Gazef had long since surpassed him in, and not through Swordsmanship, which Gazef had developed to a level that most adults in the kingdom couldn't match. Tim won because Tim's base capability was something that existed outside the normal categories, a foundation so large that technique and swordsmanship differences couldn't bridge the gap from the other side.
But I was not the same fighter he had been at their last serious match years ago.
I had spent the past year doing something he hadn't done before, not just practicing what Vesuchā had taught, but integrating it, combining the martial arts in sequences that the individual techniques hadn't been designed for but that worked together in ways that multiplied their effect. Boost Speed into the entry, Boost Strength loaded for the strike, the Sixfold Slash of Light into a spin, which I had completed before anyone else in the current cohort, as the delivery system.
It was the best he had. He wanted to see what Tim did with it.
He found Tim in the yard on a late autumn afternoon, training like normal, on the same spot.
"I want a Rematch, Tim," Gazef said.
Tim turned his eyes to me. The look he gave Gazef was not the look of someone dismissing the request. It was the look of someone calculating whether the request was worth engaging with.
"Why?" Tim said.
"I've been training," Gazef [level 27] said. "I've beaten everyone else, even our teacher. I want to know where I actually am."
"You Nothing's going to change," Tim [level 42] said. "I'm way too strong for you."
This was delivered not with arrogance but with the same tone Tim used for factual statements. Which somehow made it more provoking than arrogance would have been.
"I've learned everything our teacher taught us," Gazef said. "I'm a lot stronger than the last time. So fight me."
Tim looked at him for another moment. Then he stood up.
Gazef's POV. continued.
I attacked first, because Tim was always going to wait, and waiting against someone faster than you was just bad tactics.
He loaded Boost Speed before the first step and felt the familiar acceleration, the world reorganising itself. Tim was watching him come with the calm attention of someone observing a demonstration rather than receiving an attack, which was simultaneously deeply irritating.
Boost Strength engaged as Gazef closed the distance. The Sixfold Slash of Light initiated, the sequence he had drilled ten thousand times, the movement pattern so deeply embedded now that it required no conscious direction, just intention and execution running together in the way that true mastery felt.
The sixth slash was aimed at Tim's right side, the terminal strike of the combination, the one that carried the accumulated momentum of everything preceding it.
Tim's left hand moved.
Two fingers. Index and middle, closed together, intercepting the blade at its tip.
The sword stopped.
Gazef's arms kept trying to drive the strike forward. He put more force in. The sword did not move. He tried to pull back and disengage, the tactical pivot to create distance and reset, and found that the blade was held as firmly as if it had been driven into stone.
He had time to process this, *Did he get even stronger than before, but how?, before Tim's right fist connected with his chest.
Than Tim said. "normal punch."
Gazef's feet left the ground.
He hit the wall back-first and slid down it and sat in the sudden total comprehension of someone who has just received unambiguous information about the gap of power.
Blood in his mouth, the pain of ribs that had been introduced to a force they weren't built to receive.
Tim was already crouching in front of him, hands raised, the golden warmth of *Light Healing* spreading from his palms into the damage before Gazef had fully assessed how much there was.
Tim's POV
The ribs were cracked, not broken, a meaningful distinction at this level of force I applied, meaning I had calibrated correctly, though the margin had been narrower than I would have liked. I ran the healing through twice to be certain, feeling the fractures close under the spell's attention, the internal bruising addressed layer by layer.
Gazef sat against the wall and breathed carefully while the healing worked, with the focused patience of someone processing several things simultaneously.
"How... how did you just this strong?" he said, when the worst of it had eased.
I sat back on my heels. "Everything I can do," I said. "Non-stop trainging, at everything. Even the things I'm bad at. Especially the things I'm bad at."
He looked at me.
"The stronger I get, the more I can train," I continued.
"The more I train, the stronger I get. It compounds.
"There's no trick to it. It's just the loop, running continuously."
He was quiet for a moment, absorbing this with the seriousness look on his face. "You make it sound simple."
"The concept is simple," I said. "The execution, not so much."
He nodded slowly. Not convinced exactly at all.
The next morning he came to find me before breakfast.
He was packed. Travel bag, road clothes, the look of someone who had made a decision.
"You're leaving.?," I asked.
"I've learned everything I can learn here," he said.
"There are other teachers. Other martial arts I haven't found yet." He paused for a second. "I want to know where my ceiling is. I can't find out by staying in here."
"You'll find it," I said. "And don't die, on the way."
He considered this, and nodded once.
Then he said his goodbyes to Vesuchā and the other students as he left the dojo, and I watched him walk down the street until he turned a corner and was soon gone.
I went back to the yard and began training again.
Vesuchā dragged the new student in on a morning three months into the eighth year, which was unusual enough in itself, Vesuchā had never, in the eight years I had been here, forcibly recruited anyone. He had refused nobles and gold and pleas and credentials. He waited for talent to present itself.
The boy he was hauling through the door was fighting the hauling with every gram of adolescent energy he had, which was considerable. Kicking, twisting, the furious indignation of someone who had been grabbed without consent and was making his feelings comprehensively known.
"Teacher," I said. "What's with the kidnapping?."
"This one," Vesuchā said, maintaining his grip with the ease, "is the most talented person I have encountered in all my years of looking."
The boy in his grip directed his furious gaze at me as the nearest available audience. He was perhaps twelve, lean, with blue hair.*is that blue hair dye.?*
Than it hit me.
*Brain Unglaus.*
The hair was the confirmation.
He was going to spend the next several years being extremely annoyed by my existence, which I could already see happening.
"He'll live here form now on," I told Vesuchā.
Brain looked at everyone with the expression of someone who had just acquired a new grievance. "Go eat shit and die."
"that's the spirit," Vesuchā said, releasing him but positioning himself between the boy and the door.
By the end of that year he was the second strongest student in the dojo.
He challenged me six times in those months, each challenge preceded by the specific expression of a person who had been working on something and was now ready to test whether it was enough. Each time I beat him with whatever minimum force was appropriate. Each time he absorbed the loss and went back to work with the burning focus of someone who wanted pay back.
The annoyance he gave me was genuine and I found it, privately, somewhat endearing.
The Sixfold Slash of Light completed in the last month of my eighth year, the fifth and sixth slashes arriving in the same session, the final refinements of a technique that had taken me years to begin and more to finish, the full sequence now available as a single flowing movement.
Worth it.
I packed my things on a clear morning , Vesuchā watched me pack my things, as he wished me the best, as I left.
Tim's stats.
LeveL: [44]
Swordsman: [6/10] [updated]