The days passed like the rhythm of a blade against a whetstone—grinding, sharpening, relentless.
Reivo's mornings began before dawn, the sky still cloaked in indigo shadows. Master Baker believed in forging warriors while the world still slept. Each day started with endurance drills—weighted runs across the fortress courtyard, balance exercises on narrow beams, and brutal repetition of strikes until Reivo's hands bled and his muscles screamed.
He never once complained.
His body, still recovering, screamed at him often. Old wounds tugged against healing flesh. Scars burned under pressure. But Reivo only gritted his teeth and pressed forward. Pain, as Baker had said, was the lesson.
"You're too stiff in your shoulders," Baker barked one morning as Reivo swung the staff in a broad arc.
The weapon met the old master's cane in a sharp crack.
"Your stance favors your right leg too much. Compensating for the fracture Lira healed?"
Reivo didn't answer. Baker snorted. "Thought so. Fix it. Or I'll fix it for you."
Correction was constant. Pain was routine. But Reivo adapted—fast.
Where others took weeks to absorb a new form, Reivo adjusted in days. His body remembered the discipline taught by his father. But now it was tempered by something darker: purpose, cold and quiet. Each swing of his staff, each strike he blocked, carried the weight of every loss he'd endured.
He wasn't just training to be strong.
He was preparing to never be helpless again.
---
Afternoons were for theory. Baker brought him books—battlefield manuals, anatomy diagrams, dungeon bestiaries. Reivo absorbed them all. Tactics. Weak points. Magic theory. He had no affinity yet, but the theory might matter one day.
Evenings were sparring. Not just with Baker, but with the young soldiers of the Reign. Some looked at him with curiosity, others with contempt—a village stray who'd been spared on a whim. Many underestimated him.
Until they fought him.
Reivo wasn't graceful. He was efficient. Blunt. Brutal. Precise. He used their own movements against them, dodging with minimal motion, striking when they opened up, always a half-second faster than they expected.
He wasn't trying to impress.
He was trying to survive.
By the third week, none of them wanted to spar with him.
Only one person continued to watch him quietly each night from the stone balcony above the courtyard.
The princess.
She never interrupted. Never approached. But Reivo could feel her gaze. At first, he hated it. The idea that she'd claimed him still made his jaw clench. But she hadn't spoken to him once since.
She just watched.
---
Weeks bled into months.
Training became the rhythm of Reivo's life—grueling, merciless, and grounding. Each sunrise saw him on the move, sweating through drills under Master Baker's watchful eye, muscles burning, breath ragged. He sparred. He studied. He bled. He learned.
And slowly, he healed.
Not completely. Never completely.
But the Reivo who had arrived broken and hollow was changing—becoming something harder, sharper. Every lesson etched itself into his bones, every scar whispered of survival.
He grew stronger, taller—towering above most of the recruits by now. His limbs moved with precision born of repetition, his green eyes tracking openings and weaknesses like a predator in the wild. He didn't laugh. He didn't boast. But he earned the respect of soldiers who'd once seen him as nothing more than a stray from a dead village.
Even Baker stopped barking at him as often, though the old man never smiled.
"You're still raw," Baker would grumble after a bout, rubbing his bristled jaw. "But you're cutting through 'em like a blade learning to love the whetstone."
Reivo said little in response.
He didn't train for praise.
He trained because he had to.
The world had taken everything. It wouldn't get another chance.
Some nights, he'd return to his room, body aching, and find small parcels left outside the door—bandages, salves, even a pair of well-worn gloves stitched by a careful hand. Lira. She never brought them directly. But he knew it was her.
Meira remained distant, formal as ever. The princess still watched him from the shadows of her high balcony, expression unreadable. No one dared speak of it.
Time passed, and the fortress settled into a familiar pattern.
Until the cold set in.
Winter crept over the land, veiling the fortress in fog and frost. Training continued—harder, if anything. Ice coated the sparring grounds. Breaths misted in the air. Pain was more immediate, more real in the cold.
Reivo trained longer.
Slept less.
Thought more.
Because his birthday approached.
The fortress knew it. Whispers moved through the barracks. The Will of the World was always watching, and when the day came—when he stood on the cusp of adulthood—it would decide.
Would it grant him a class? A skill? A rare, fabled Title?
Or… would it leave him untouched?
That was the fear he never voiced, even to Lira.
He had survived monsters. He had survived trauma.
But to wake up unchanged?
To be passed over?
That would break him in a quieter way.
And so, as the sun rose on the final day before his eighteenth birthday, Reivo stood on the fortress walls. Below, the training grounds lay quiet, the air crisp and still.
The wind tugged at his long brown-black hair, now brushing his shoulders. His body was stronger than ever, hardened by months of ruthless preparation. His frame was tall, powerful, lined with scars both fresh and faded. But it was his eyes that had changed most—green, sharp, and haunted.
He looked out over the snow-dusted mountains, the last light of day glinting on their peaks.
And for the first time in a long while, he felt uncertain.
Tomorrow.
The word struck like a drumbeat in his chest.
Tomorrow, everything could change.
Or nothing might.