The Obsidian Hall was silent, save for the hum of the ventilation wards and the rhythmic tap-tap of Master Elrend's cane.
It was midnight. The air inside the private training chamber was cool, recycled, and smelled faintly of ozone and old sweat. This was where the elite trained, where the heirs of High Lords sharpened their edges.
Tonight, it belonged to a gutter-rat and a ghost.
'Right,' I said, my voice echoing too loudly in the vast, black-stone space. I cracked my neck, the sound sharp like a pistol shot. 'Let's verify the maths before I melt my brain. Twelve clones plus me. That's thirteen bodies doing the work simultaneously.'
I did the mental calculation, grimacing. 'One hour of real-time equals thirteen hours of experience. If we can go for eight hours tonight. That's a hundred and four hours of training compressed into a day.'
Master Elrend stood in the centre of the room. He no longer smelled like expensive wine. He was sober, and it made him look sharper, meaner. The slouch was gone, replaced by the stillness of a coiled viper.
'Do not treat this as a transaction, Murphy,' Elrend said softly. 'You are not buying skill. You are stealing time from the gods. And theft always carries a price.'
'He is right,' Ronan's voice rumbled in the back of my skull, sounding more present than usual. 'But we are not starting from zero. In a previous life, you knew how to fight.'
I paused, rubbing my chest where the core hummed. I stared at the empty air. 'Okay. And I guess asking how that is possible, or which life, or why I don't remember it is off-limits? Just like the hand?'
'Precisely,' Ronan replied, his tone clipped and matter-of-fact. 'What else is new? But know this: the foundation is buried under the rust. It means you will relearn how to fight faster than normally possible. Trust the instinct.'
'Fantastic. Amnesiac superpowers. My favourite trope,' I muttered. I closed my eyes and reached for the Core.
It was sitting at a stable Dark Blue now—a deep, bruised indigo. I pulled on the mana, not with a trickle, but with a command.
Flood.
The air rippled. Twelve figures burst into existence around me in a perfect circle.
They were exact copies of me—same messy dark hair, same sharp jaw, same scar running silver under the left eye. They wore the standard grey Academy training leathers. Twelve pairs of eyes opened simultaneously. Twelve mouths smirked.
'Alright, listen up, you beautiful, disposable bastards!' I shouted, pacing in front of the ranks like a legion general. 'I won't sugarcoat it. We are the underdogs here. We have the martial grace of a drunken giraffe on roller skates. We are about to enter the Hurt Locker, and statistically speaking, one hundred per cent of you are going to die in about fifty-nine minutes. You will pop into lukewarm mist and be forgotten.'
The clones all nodded solemnly. One winked.
'But until that glorious moment,' I raised my wooden sword, 'We fight! We grind! We make this depressing basement our bitch! Are you ready to become legends for less than an hour?!'
The twelve clones pumped their fists in silent unison.
I grinned, turning to face the empty air. 'Cue the victory track.'
I started off-key humming Eye of the Tiger as it started playing in our shared mind.
Da-DA-da-da-DA-da-da-DA-da-daaaa—
THWACK.
An open-handed slap connected sharply with the back of my head. It wasn't agonising, but it stung like hell and immediately cut off the music.
I stumbled forward a step, rubbing my head. 'Ow! Hey, I was building morale!'
Master Elrend stood behind me, lowering his hand. His face was a mask of absolute, unimpressed boredom.
'Stop scabbing around,' the Elf said, his voice dry as ancient parchment. 'Form up.'
We moved. It must have been unsettling to watch. We didn't shuffle; we flowed into a grid formation, spaced two metres apart. I took the front centre position.
'The First Kata of the Iron-Leaf,' Elrend said, pacing the rows like a drill sergeant. 'Stance only. Defensive rotation. Begin.'
I raised my sword. Immediately, I felt wrong. My elbow was too high, my weight too far back.
'No,' Ronan interjected. 'Stop guessing. Look.'
Suddenly, my vision changed. A golden figure shimmered into existence in my mind. It was a projection of Ronan, but not the voice in my head. This was Ronan as he was 1,000 years ago: tall, broad-shouldered, wearing the gold plate armour of the Dawn Guard.
The golden paladin shifted into the perfect opening stance.
'Align your limbs with mine. Match the figure.' Ronan commanded.
A literal video tutorial burned into my mind. I shifted my foot to match his. I dropped my elbow until it fit inside the ghost's silhouette.
Click.
As soon as I aligned, a jolt of recognition sparked in my nervous system. It wasn't just visual; it was somatic. My body sighed with relief, as if remembering a comfortable chair it hadn't sat in for a very long time.
'Weird,' I whispered, moving through the first cut. 'It feels… heavy. But right.'
'Keep moving,' Ronan said. 'Don't lose the rhythm.'
The grind began.
Whoosh. Thud. Reset.
Thirteen swords cut the air in perfect unison.
This wasn't just practice; it would be data processing on a massive scale. Ronan wasn't just watching; he was the active debugger.
'Your chin is exposed. Drop it.'
I tucked my chin. The golden ghost nodded.
Forty minutes passed. The physical strain on my body was real now—my shoulders burned, my thighs screamed from the deep stance. But the mental flow was electric. The movements were ceasing to be "steps" and starting to become a "dance."
I wasn't counting the reps anymore. I was falling into a groove I hadn't known I possessed.
'Hold,' Elrend barked.
The thirteen Murphys froze mid-strike.
'One hour,' Elrend said, checking his pocket watch. He looked at me with a rare expression—not impressed, but unsettled. 'You are correcting errors before I even see them. It is… unnatural.'
'It's Ronan, teach, up here' I panted as I pointed at my head, wiping sweat from my eyes. 'Video walkthrough.'
'Dispel,' Elrend ordered. 'Prepare yourself.'
I straightened up. 'Alright. Thirteen hours of data. Incoming.'
I let go of the mana.
The twelve clones didn't fade; they burst into water and mist instantly. The mana rushed back into my core.
Then came the payload.
For a second, I didn't know who I was. I was Clone 6, adjusting my grip. I was Clone 12, feeling a cramp in my left calf. I was me, sweating through my shirt.
The memories slammed into place, welding themselves to my synapses.
Thirteen hours of muscle memory. Instantly.
'Breathe,' Ronan's voice was a steel anchor in the storm. 'Integrate it. Do not fight the current. Sort the files.'
I groaned, clutching my head. 'It feels… like I've been here for days.'
I blinked, fighting through the tear-blurred haze of sensory overload. As I looked down at my hand, instinctively adjusting its grip on the wooden sword, the realisation hit me. A normal human mind would have shattered under this weight; the sudden compression of time would have driven anyone else insane. But I wasn't normal. My millennium of torture was finally paying dividends. This exploit was literally only possible because of the hell I'd survived to get here.
I didn't just hold it now. My fingers naturally found the balance point, the calluses I didn't physically have yet tingling with phantom familiarity. I twirled the blade—a complex, fluid rotation that I hadn't known sixty seconds ago.
It was perfect.
Elrend watched the twirl, his eyes narrowing.
'Get ready,' the Elf said, his voice tight. 'That was the warm-up. We have seven more hours to go.'
I used the sword to leverage myself up, my legs trembling, but my grip iron-solid. I looked at the empty space around me, the golden ghosts of Ronan still flickering in my mind.
'Round two,' I rasped, a feral grin spreading across my face.
The second hour was agony. The third was a hallucination.
By the time we hit the halfway mark, the novelty of the exploit had dissolved into a grinding, industrial repetition. We weren't training anymore; we were manufacturing muscle memory on an assembly line.
Whoosh. Thud. Reset.Whoosh. Thud. Reset.
The air in the Obsidian Hall grew heavy, thick with the exhalations of thirteen sets of lungs. My concentration began to fray.
I lost track of the Prime.
It happened subtly at first. I was surrounded by twelve perfect mirrors of myself. Everywhere I looked, I saw my own face, my own scar, my own fatigue reflected back at me. I would try to wipe sweat from my forehead, only to realise I was staring at the clone to my left doing the exact same motion.
'Lower,' Elrend's voice cut through the haze. 'His guard is drifting.'
'Which one?' I mumbled, my voice hoarse.
'Number Seven,' Elrend snapped, not even looking at me. He walked down the line, his cane clicking on the stone. He stopped in front of the clone on the far right.
Thwack.
He rapped the clone's shin with his cane. 'Widen the stance. You are fighting gravity, not the enemy.'
The clone blinked, looked down at its feet, and shuffled them wider.
'He's right,' Ronan observed in my head. 'Seven is getting lazy. He's leaning.'
He flashed an image into my mind's eye: a static mental photograph of the clone's posture, highlighting the error in red.
I adjusted my own stance instinctively, just to be safe.
'Number Three!' Elrend barked, spinning on his heel. 'You are hesitating on the backswing. Stop thinking and move.'
I glanced to my left. Clone Three was lagging by a fraction of a second. Elrend didn't wait; he stepped into the grid, moving fearlessly between the swinging wooden swords. He tapped Clone Three on the shoulder, then pointed at me.
'Watch the Prime,' Elrend ordered the clone. 'Match his tempo.'
The clone turned its head, locked eyes with me, and squinted.
It was a nightmare of narcissism. I was the model, the student, and the failure all at once.
'Again,' Elrend commanded. 'The Second Movement. The Falling Leaf.'
We moved.
I watched myself from twelve different angles. I saw the back of my own head. I saw my own profile. The dissociation deepened, replaced by a cold, creeping horror.
'Number Nine, pivot!' Elrend shouted.
I flinched, almost pivoting myself, before realising I was Prime.
'Number Four, faster!'
'Number Twelve, you are dead! Reset!'
Elrend was a whirlwind, dismantling us one by one. He treated the clones not as spells, but as recruits. He bullied them, corrected them, and moulded them. And every time he fixed one of them, I had to mentally catalogue the correction.
'Time,' Elrend called out suddenly. 'Hour Four complete. Dispel.'
I stopped, my chest heaving. The silence that followed was deafening. I looked at the clones surrounding me. They looked wrecked.
'Kill them,' Elrend ordered.
'Sorry, boys,' I rasped. 'Shift's over.'
I cut the mana flow.
POP. POP. POP.
The twelve figures didn't fade; they burst into water and mist instantly, soaking the black stone floor.
Then came the payload.
I braced my feet and leaned forward as fifty-two cumulative hours of swordplay slammed into my skull.
It wasn't a conversation. It was a data dump.
WHAM.
It felt like a physical weight, a bag of wet cement dropped onto my shoulders. I staggered, seeing stars. My brain scrambled to sort the incoming files—Elrend's voice shouting at Clone Seven, the sting of the cane on Clone Nine's leg, the specific angle of the pivot on Clone Four.
It was fifty-two hours of memory compressed into a single second.
'Guh,' I grunted, shaking my head like a wet dog to clear the static. Blood trickled from my nose, hot and metallic.
Elrend stepped forward, inspecting me closely. He lifted his cane and poked me in the chest.
'Name?' he demanded.
'Murphy,' I rasped, wiping the blood onto my sleeve.
'Location?'
'Hell. Or some place just like it.'
Elrend nodded, satisfied. 'You are drifting. I can see it in your eyes.'
'It's… weird,' I admitted, tapping my temple. 'I remember standing over there,' I pointed to where Clone Nine had been, 'and I remember standing here. The memories are layering on top of each other.'
I limped over to my water skin and downed it, the cool liquid grounding me. I looked at my hands. They were trembling, not from fatigue, but from the sheer electrical overload of the nervous system.
'Four hours real-time,' I muttered. 'Fifty-two hours of experience. Plus the first hour... sixty-five hours total.'
I picked up the pace.
I didn't have to think about the grip anymore. My thumb settled into the groove of the wood automatically. I gave it a test swing.
Hiss.
It was faster than before. Sharper. My brain expected the resistance of the air before the swing even started.
Elrend's eyes narrowed. He saw it too.
'The clumsiness is fading,' he observed. 'But your body is lagging behind your mind. Your brain knows the speed of a master, but your tendons are still those of a novice. Be careful, or you will tear a muscle trying to execute a move you haven't earned physically.'
'Noted,' I said, rolling my shoulders. The dissociation was terrifying, yes. The headache was blinding. But the power? The feeling of getting better, faster than any human had a right to be?
It was addictive.
I turned back to the centre of the room, facing the empty space where my squad had been.
'Four more hours,' I said, my voice hollow but steady. 'Let's finish the shift.'
I reached for the Core. The indigo light flooded my vision.
Flood.
The grid returned. Twelve faces looked back at me, waiting for the abuse.
'Third Kata,' Ronan projected an image of a complex, flowing disarm. 'The Willow Snaps. This one requires finesse. Do not rely on strength.'
I nodded to the empty air.
'Begin,' Elrend commanded.
And we disappeared into the drift.
'Time,' Elrend called out.
The word hung in the air like a guillotine blade.
'Dispel,' he ordered.
I didn't even have the energy to make a quip. I just let the mana go.
POP. POP. POP.
The last batch of clones vanished. The silence rushed back into the room, followed immediately by the final, crushing wave of memory.
I didn't kneel this time. I stood there, swaying like a drunkard in a hurricane, letting the experience wash over me. It wasn't painful anymore; my brain had gone numb hours ago. It was just… heavy.
One hundred and four hours.
In a single night, I had lived through nearly two weeks of relentless, repetitive sword drills.
'Status?' Elrend asked, his voice sounding like it was coming from the end of a long tunnel.
'I know Kung Fu,' I mumbled, the quote slipping out before I could stop it.
'You know how not to trip over your own feet,' Elrend corrected, walking over to inspect me. 'Do not mistake foundation for mastery. You have learned the alphabet. You have not yet written a poem.'
He pointed his cane at the door. 'Get out. Sleep.'
'Aye, aye, Captain,' I slurred.
I tried to salute.
It was a disaster.
My brain fired the signal to raise my hand. It expected the hand to move at the speed of the Master Swordsman I had spent the last hundred hours being.
But my physical arm—the one that had only actually been training for eight hours—was heavy, lactic-acid-filled, and slow.
My hand slapped my own forehead a full second after my brain expected it to land.
Thwack.
'Ow,' I said, blinking.
Elrend sighed. 'The Lag. Your mind is racing; your body is walking. Be careful on the stairs, or you will break your neck.'
I stumbled out of the Obsidian Hall, leaving the ghost of the night shift behind.
The walk back to House Argent was a lesson in humility.
I felt like I was piloting a mech suit with a bad internet connection. Every time I took a step, my brain registered the movement as complete before my foot actually hit the ground.
Step. (Brain: You have landed.)...Real Foot: Thud.
It was disorienting. I tripped over a loose cobblestone because my eyes saw it, my brain calculated the evasion, but my legs just didn't lift fast enough to match the calculation.
I caught myself on a wall, breathing hard.
'Input lag,' I thought grimly. 'My ping is terrible.'
'You must consciously slow down,' Ronan advised. 'Do not react. Act. Deliberately.'
I focused on placing one foot in front of the other, moving like an old man, until the squat, bunker-like shape of House Argent loomed out of the morning mist.
The sun was just cresting the horizon, painting the sky in bruises of purple and orange. The birds were singing. I hated them personally.
I pushed open the heavy oak door and shambled into the common room.
I expected it to be empty. It wasn't.
The Squad was awake.
Kael was by the hearth, stoking the fire. He looked massive and terrifying in the morning light, shirtless and grey-skinned. Grace was at the table, tinkering with a clockwork mechanism, goggles perched on her forehead. Finn was asleep face down in a bowl of oatmeal.
They all looked up as I entered.
I must have looked like a corpse dredged from the river. My eyes were bloodshot, my nose was caked with dried blood, and I was vibrating with a weird, frantic energy.
'Holy shit,' Grace said, dropping her wrench. 'Murphy? You look like you fought a bear.'
'And the bear won,' Finn mumbled, lifting his head from the oatmeal. He had porridge stuck to his cheek.
'Training,' I croaked. I tried to walk to the table.
My brain plotted a direct course. Step, pivot, sit.
My body executed: Lurch, stumble, crash.
I clipped my hip on the edge of a chair and nearly face-planted into Kael's chest. The big Berserker caught me with one hand, steadying me like I was a toddler.
'You are… vibrating,' Kael rumbled, his voice deep and concerned. He looked at my eyes. 'Dilated pupils. erratic pulse. Are you… unwell?'
'I'm fine,' I said, pulling away and trying to sit down. I reached for a jug of water on the table.
Target acquired. Reach. Grasp.
My hand shot out. My brain expected the weight of the jug. My fingers closed.
Too early.
I grasped empty air an inch before the handle, fumbled forward, and backhanded the jug across the table.
Clang.
Water splashed everywhere. Grace shrieked and pulled her clockwork away.
'Woah!' Finn yelped. 'Easy there, twitchy.'
I stared at my hand. It felt alien. It felt slow.
'Sorry,' I whispered. 'Calibration issue.'
'Calibration?' Grace asked, eyeing me suspiciously. 'Murphy, did you sleep at all?'
'No,' I said. 'I spent the night… studying.'
'Studying what?' Finn asked. 'How to walk?'
'Something like that.'
I leaned my head back against the chair and closed my eyes. The world was still spinning. I could still hear the whoosh-thud of thirteen swords.
'Sleep,' Ronan ordered. 'Before you damage something important.'
'I'm going to bed,' I announced to the room. 'If anyone wakes me up before noon, I will sell you to the circus.'
I tried to stand up.
I put too much force into my legs—using the strength required for a combat lunge instead of a casual rise.
I launched myself out of the chair, knees locking, and nearly headbutted the ceiling beams before crashing back down, flailing for balance.
The room went silent. Kael stared at me, a piece of toast halfway to his mouth.
'I'm just going to… crawl,' I decided.
And I did. I crawled to my room, kicked the door shut, and collapsed onto the mattress without taking my boots off.
The Lag was winning. But as I drifted into the black, I clenched my fist.
My fingers didn't tremble. They snapped shut with the speed of a viper.
'One hundred hours,' I thought, smiling into the pillow. 'Worth it.'