Dawn painted the academy windows in pale gold when Invia stirred. The unfamiliar room felt stark and utilitarian, a far cry from Rose's cramped apartment or Kleo's crimson tent.
He dressed quickly in the standard trainee gear left for him – sturdy, unadorned trousers and a tunic – and belted the plain iron practice sword provided alongside the medallion. Its weight was different from the goblin blade, balanced and impersonal, but the faint song from the pendant at his throat remained a quiet comfort.
He followed the clerk's directions to the dining hall, a cavernous space already buzzing with trainees. The air smelled of porridge, baked bread, and sweat. His eyes scanned the crowded tables, unconsciously seeking Django's distinctive wild hair and grin. He wasn't there.
The brief flicker of curiosity surprised him. He ate quickly, the food fuel rather than pleasure, his mind already turning towards the unknown demands of the day.
The Sword Hall echoed with the rhythmic clatter of wood on wood and the sharp intake of breath as trainees drilled basic forms. Mono stood near the center, his blond hair catching the light filtering through high windows, his expression as unreadable as polished stone. His blue eyes locked onto Invia the moment he entered.
"You," Mono stated, his voice cutting through the ambient noise without needing to rise. He gestured with a slight tilt of his head towards a smaller, adjacent training hall, empty save for racks of practice weapons and worn mats. "Here."
Invia followed, the door closing behind them, muffling the sounds of the main hall. The silence in the smaller space felt heavy, expectant. Mono picked up a wooden practice sword, its surface smooth from countless grips, and tossed it to Invia.
"Demonstrate," Mono commanded, his tone flat. "Stances. Basic forms. Slash, thrust, chop. Show me what Kleo's favor bought."
Invia swallowed. This was an inspection, not an instruction. He gripped the wooden sword. Instinctively, driven by years of rooftop observation and the sudden, visceral memory of his father's impossible grace.
He tried to mimic Renald. He recalled the fluid, devastating upward slash from a seemingly impossible low stance he'd witnessed years ago – the move that had somehow, impossibly, guided his hand with the glass shard against the Shatterling.
He shifted his weight, dropped low, twisted his torso, and attempted to explode upwards, his wooden blade carving an awkward, unbalanced arc. It felt utterly wrong – stiff, powerless, devoid of the effortless lethality he remembered.
He stumbled out of the stance, off-balance and flushed. He tried another fragment of memory: a seamless transition into a lateral cut that should have cleaved air like silk. His own attempt was jerky, the blade wobbling wildly.
Mono watched, utterly silent, face revealing nothing. The lack of reaction was worse than scorn.
Flustered, Invia defaulted to the clumsy approximations of the basics he'd used against the goblins: a horizontal slash, a forward thrust, a downward chop. Each movement was stiff, disjointed, thinking through every micro-adjustment.
"Defend," He picked up his own practice sword.
Invia braced himself. Mono moved. It wasn't blinding speed – deliberately slower, in fact, telegraphing the attacks clearly. A simple horizontal slash aimed at Invia's ribs. Easy to see, easy to think about parrying.
But Mono didn't hold back the power behind the blow. Invia brought his sword up, meeting the slash with a jarring crack that sent painful vibrations up his arms. He staggered, his block clumsy, absorbing the force rather than redirecting it.
Before he could fully recover, another slow, obvious thrust came at his chest. Invia tried to knock it aside, but his parry was late, weak. The tip of Mono's wooden sword thudded solidly against his sternum, knocking the breath from his lungs and sending him stumbling back a step. Pain blossomed across his chest.
A downward chop followed, slow and clear. Invia raised his sword overhead, bracing for impact. The collision was brutal. His arms buckled, the force driving him down onto one knee, the wooden blade biting into his shoulder despite the padding. He gasped, the world swimming for a second.
Mono's gaze was icy. "Terrible," he stated, the words like chips of flint. "You reach for techniques that exist leagues beyond your comprehension. Trying to grasp the summit before you've learned to climb the foothills."
"Forget the impossible. Master the fundamental."
He raised his wooden blade and executed a single, simple horizontal slash. It wasn't flashy. It was pure, distilled efficiency.
The blade cut the air with a clean, sharp sound, starting from a relaxed stance, flowing through hips and shoulders, ending in perfect balance. Every muscle, every ounce of weight, every fraction of a second was optimized. It was the unadorned essence of the slash.
"This," Mono emphasized, his blue eyes boring into Invia's, sharp with an intensity that felt personal, almost angry. "Practice the slash. Until it reaches at least this level. When it does, tell me." He turned, placing the wooden sword back on the rack with a deliberate thunk. "Do nothing else. Understand?"
Invia pushed himself up from his knee, shoulder throbbing, chest aching. Frustration warred with humiliation. This isn't teaching! He didn't correct a single thing! Just showed me perfection and told me to reach it?
The analytical part of his mind railed against the lack of guidance, the absence of specific corrections. How could he fix what he didn't know was broken?
But beneath the frustration, a spark ignited. Stubbornness. The same stubbornness that had driven him to rooftops overlooking Rifts, that had made him grasp a shard of glass against a Shatterling. He wouldn't be dismissed. He wouldn't waste Kleo's favor.
"Understood," Invia rasped, his voice tight.
Mono left without another word, the door clicking shut behind him, leaving Invia in the silent hall with the impossible task. Leagues beyond… The phrase stung, but it also clarified. He needed a foundation.
Invia raised the wooden sword. He didn't just swing. He analyzed. He replayed Mono's single, perfect slash in his mind – the starting stance, the subtle coil of power in the legs and core, the smooth rotation of the hips driving the shoulders, the arm extending not with brute force but with controlled acceleration, the wrist firm but not rigid, the blade following a true plane, the seamless transition into the ending stance. He tried to replicate it.
It was wrong. Terribly wrong. His feet were off-balance. His hips jerked instead of rotated. His arm tensed too early. The blade wobbled. The wooden sword felt heavy, uncooperative. But the craving, the Resonance, was there.
It didn't sing beautiful notes; it hummed discordantly, a physical sensation of wrongness vibrating through his arm and into his chest whenever his form faltered. When a movement felt slightly better, slightly closer to that perfect image, the discord softened, replaced by a fleeting, harmonious chime.
He adjusted. Minutely. The angle of his back foot. The depth of his initial knee bend. The timing of his hip rotation relative to his arm extension. He didn't just repeat; he listened to the sword, to the Resonance within him responding to each microscopic change. The pain in his shoulder and chest faded into the background, an unimportant noise against the intense focus of the task.
Slash.
Wrong. Discord. Adjust.
Slash.
Less wrong. Quieter discord. Adjust again.
Slash.
A flicker of harmony. Hold that feeling. Refine.
He entered a trance. Time dissolved. The hall, the academy, Collendrum, Earth – all ceased to exist. There was only the wood in his hands, the memory of Mono's perfect cut, and the constant, immediate feedback from his Resonance.
Each slash was an experiment, a hypothesis tested against the feeling of rightness. Sweat plastered his hair to his forehead, dripped into his eyes, and soaked his tunic. His muscles burned, then screamed, then numbed. He ignored it. The only thing that mattered was the next cut, the next micro-adjustment chasing that elusive harmony.
[System: Base Sword Sub-Mastery Advanced - Slash (Proficiency: E+)]
The notification flashed, unnoticed, swallowed by the all-consuming focus.
His movements became smoother, more economical. The sound of the wooden blade grew cleaner, sharper. The discordant hum lessened, the harmonious chimes grew more frequent, longer.
He wasn't copying; he was understanding, piece by agonizing piece, the physics and the philosophy bound within that single, fundamental movement.
[System: Base Sword Sub-Mastery Advanced - Slash (Proficiency: D)]
Another notification, unseen. The D-rank threshold crossed, not through repetition, but through obsessive, analytical refinement.
He didn't know if minutes or hours had passed. He didn't care. The world had narrowed to the arc of the blade and the song of his soul. His eyes, when they occasionally focused, held a terrifying intensity – determined, almost manic. A wide, unconscious grin stretched across his sweat-streaked face, born of the pure, fierce joy of understanding, of the Resonance singing truer with every cut.
[System: Attribute Increased - Endurance (Proficiency: D)]
The door opened silently. Mono stood there, framed in the doorway, his usual impassive mask firmly in place.
But as he watched Invia move – the fluidity that had replaced the initial stiffness, the clean line of the cuts, the terrifying focus etched onto the trainee's face – something flickered in Mono's blue eyes. Surprise, stark and undeniable.
It was quickly replaced by something softer, more contemplative, a look of… recognition? Appraisal? It vanished as swiftly as it appeared, smoothed back into professional detachment.
Mono stepped into the hall. Invia, lost in the rhythm, the feedback loop of slash-adjust-sing, didn't register his presence. Mono moved with a silent grace, closing the distance. His hand shot out, not to strike, but to firmly grasp the wrist of Invia's sword arm mid-swing, halting the motion with jarring finality.
The trance shattered. The world rushed back in – the ache in every muscle, the burning in his lungs, the sweat stinging his eyes, the sudden, disorienting awareness of another person. The manic gleam in Invia's grey eyes faded, replaced by confusion and then abrupt exhaustion. The fierce grin slipped away.
"Enough," Mono stated, his voice calm but carrying an undeniable edge. He released Invia's wrist. "My apologies for interrupting your epiphany. But you've been here since yesterday."
Invia blinked, swaying slightly on his feet. Yesterday? The concept felt alien. He looked towards the high windows. The light was different – softer, the gold of late afternoon, not dawn.
His body, released from the adrenaline-fueled focus, suddenly felt heavy. Every joint protested, every muscle fiber screamed in agony. He hadn't eaten, hadn't drunk, hadn't rested. He'd pushed far, far beyond his physical capabilities.
"Given your current level," Mono continued, his gaze sweeping over Invia's trembling limbs, the pallor beneath the sweat, "your body is strained beyond its limits. Continuing would cause damage, not growth. Consider it… a favor." He gestured towards the door. "Leave. Rest. Return the day after tomorrow. Same time."
Invia didn't argue. He couldn't. The sheer physical toll crashed over him like a wave. He managed a stiff nod, his movements clumsy as he replaced the wooden sword on the rack with hands that shook violently.
He stumbled towards the door, his mind still half-entranced, replaying the feeling of those last, clean slashes, the Resonance's approving hum. The pain was a distant thunder, the exhaustion a heavy fog, but the echo of that hard-won harmony pulsed within him.
He shuffled through the academy corridors, oblivious to the curious glances of other trainees finishing their sessions. The grandeur of the building, the hum of other Resonances – none of it registered. His world was reduced to the memory of the blade's path and the screaming protest of his own body.
He passed a familiar shock of wild hair. Django, leaning against a pillar, spotted him and beamed, his grin as wide and bright as ever. "Hey Invia!"
The cheerful greeting bounced off Invia's consciousness like a pebble. He walked straight past, eyes glazed, unseeing, unhearing, locked on some internal point only he could perceive.
Django's grin faltered slightly, replaced by a flicker of surprise as he watched Invia's unsteady, determined retreat.
Invia reached his room. The simple act of fumbling the medallion to unlock the door felt Herculean. He pushed it open, staggered inside, and didn't make it to the bed. He collapsed just inside the doorway, his body finally giving out entirely.
Consciousness fled before he even hit the floor, sleep claiming him instantly, a deep, healing oblivion. The silver sword pendant lay cool against his skin, silent now.
Mono stood alone in the small training hall long after Invia left. The air still vibrated faintly with the intensity of the young man's focus. He picked up the wooden practice sword Invia had used, feeling the residual warmth, the slight indentations from a grip that had been desperate, then focused, then… something else.
"Curious," Mono murmured, the word soft in the empty space. "Kleo's favor. A total newbie. An obvious lie about lost memory…" His gaze drifted, as if seeing something far beyond the academy walls. "And that sword pendant…" His usually stoic expression tightened almost imperceptibly. "Hidden sword intent so potent it makes even me wary to look at it directly. Who are you connected to, boy?"
He recalled Invia's first, disjointed attempts yesterday – clumsy, weak, devoid of any real understanding. And then the transformation he'd witnessed today: the obsessive refinement, the terrifying speed of assimilation, the way his entire being had poured into that single, fundamental movement. The maniacal focus, the fleeting grin of pure, driven understanding.
"Yesterday's flailing… today's near-obsession," Mono mused, placing the practice sword back on the rack with deliberate care. "He's either a natural genius unlike any I've seen… or his Resonance is almost entirely Slash-oriented. Focused to an extreme degree." The implications hung in the air.
He shook his head, a rare, almost invisible flicker of something complex – intrigue, caution, perhaps a sliver of reluctant respect – crossing his features before the familiar impassive mask settled back into place. He turned and left the hall, the door clicking shut on the lingering echo of countless slashes and a mystery deepening by the hour.