Chapter 61: Practice

"Roddy," Aren said, when the sun went down and they were packing to leave. "Hit me."

Roderick looked up from the rope he was coiling. "What?"

"Properly. Like you mean it. Every night, before we walk."

"Is this about the bandits?"

"It’s about the bandits."

He had lain awake in the hollow under the rock all that first day and gone over the fight in his head, slowly, the way he used to go over a bad trade. He had a technique of Grade S, a skill that could reduce anything to nothing for a second, and an instinct that could read a man’s weakness in five breaths. On the moor he had used all three, and he had won.

It hadn’t felt like winning, though. It had felt like pure luck.

Every bolt he had dodged, he had dodged because the instinct told him where it was going. Every step had been the Moonlit Step, carrying him farther than his legs could. And when he had faced Brask, a sergeant who had been taught to fight properly once, Aren hadn’t out-fought him at all. He had simply stepped inside the swing, put a hand on the axe, and thought one word.

He had a box full of tools and no idea how to build a house.

’And the next man with an axe might have been taught properly twice.’

So they trained seriously.

Every evening, in the last grey light before full dark, they found a flat place out of the wind and trained for an hour, sometimes two. Then they shouldered their packs and walked north through the night, and Aren’s whole body ached constantly, and he didn’t care.

First, always, the breath.

He sat in the frost with his eyes closed and breathed as the grey book had taught him, down past the grinding heat in his bones to the cold along his ribs. There was a real moon over the moor every night, thinner each time, half and then a sliver as they walked north. He left it strictly alone, because it had never been his.

He reached in instead, and shaped what came out. He couldn’t see the New Moon, so he learned it patiently by what it left behind. He cut it the size of a fingernail into the frost, and the frost along its edge lost its grip on the ground and slid away in a tiny perfect curve. He cut it long and thin as a needle. He made it bend. On the ninth night, for the first time, he threw it across the moor and made it turn in the air halfway across and come back toward him in a wide arc, like a bird circling. He only knew it had turned because of the line it drew through the frost.

The line ended three paces from his foot, in a long thin cut through the frost and the earth beneath it.

Roderick watched lazily from a rock. "You’re going to cut your own leg off one day."

"Probably."

"Can I have your boots, when you do?"

"No."

Three cuts. Feed the cold. Three more. Every night it tugged harder at his sleeve between them.

[New Moon (Grade S). Mastery: 55% → 58%.]

Three percent in a week! He had learned more about the crescent in nine nights on the moor than in all his weeks hiding in the old yard behind the dormitory. There was no one to hide from out here.

Then the Moonlit Step.

He had always used it to move, forward or away, half a step farther than he should go. On the moor he started using it to stop, to land without sound, to change direction in the middle of a step. That hurt his knees terribly the first twenty times, and then, slowly, it stopped hurting.

He remembered Vivienne in the white circle, back when he had carried her sword case for nine hours. She hadn’t just moved with the step. She stood with it. Whenever she was still, she was still like water, ready to go in any direction at once. He hadn’t understood it then.

He tried to stand like that, and mostly fell over.

But on the eleventh night, for three whole breaths, he stood on a slope of loose frost with his weight on nothing in particular, and when Roderick swung at him he went left without deciding to.

"Huh." Roderick blinked, swinging at empty air. "Do that again."

Aren did it again, and fell over.

[Moonlit Step (Grade A). Mastery: 38% → 43%.]

Then the skill.

This was the part he was most careful with. Every time he used Reduce to Zero, the same thing went to zero in him. He had learned that in the old yard the first night, when a dull practice sword opened his arm, and he had learned it again in the Abyss against the Bell-Eater.

So he practiced carefully on small things. He picked up a stone, reduced its weight to nothing for one second, felt his own body go light as a feather and caught himself before he floated off his feet. He touched a frozen puddle and took away its friction, and in the same second his boots had no grip on anything, and he sat down hard in the frost while Roderick laughed until he cried.

"Stop laughing."

"I can’t. You looked like a cat on a table."

But he was learning to choose. Not the axe, but the weight of the axe. Not the man, but the grip of his hand. The smaller the thing, the smaller the price. The more exact the choice, the more it mattered.

[Reduce to Zero (Lv. 2). Uses per day: 2.]

Two. He had broken a giant’s chain to get the second one. He had no idea what it would take to make it three, but he was fairly sure practice alone wouldn’t do it.

He fed every one of those small things to the cold in his side. It was always hungry now, especially in the north. Feed it well in the cold places, the merchant had said. He fed it every night and every morning, and still, on the coldest nights, he felt it shift along his ribs, restless.

And then, Roderick.

"Again," Aren said, on the eighth night, getting up off the frost for the thirtieth time.

Roderick hit him again, mercilessly, in the ribs, the shoulder, the side of the leg, hard, with the heel of his hand, the way you’d hit a door you meant to break. He was Bone stage and the Abyss had made his body like iron, and every blow went into Aren like a hammer onto an anvil.

Aren didn’t block. That was the point. Crane had said it in the basement classroom, in his bored voice, weeks ago. The bones are tempered by weight and impact. Aren had felt it in the Abyss every time he fell, every time a claw caught him. The heat in the middle of his bones grew when they were struck, and when they cracked and healed, they healed harder.

So he let Roderick strike him, forty times a night, then fifty.

"This is the strangest thing anyone has ever asked me to do," Roderick complained on the tenth night, as Aren picked himself up for the fiftieth time.

"You’re enjoying it."

"I’m enjoying it a little," Roderick admitted cheerfully.

’A little! He hums while he does it. I’ve heard him.’

Each time Roderick moved, Aren watched where his weight went before the blow came. By the tenth night, he could tell which hand Roderick would use by the way he breathed.

[Street Fighter’s Instinct (Grade A). Mastery: 58% → 62%.][Rank D: Bone Tempering. Progress: 19% → 52%.]

He never touched Write-Off. Lying in the hollow under the rock, he had worked out that a wound erased couldn’t heal, and a wound that couldn’t heal couldn’t make him stronger. Every blow he wrote off was a blow wasted, and a memory gone. So he took the bruises, all of them. Every morning his whole body was black and grey and aching, and every evening it was a little harder than the evening before.

On the twelfth night, they came to a village.

It sat on a low hill at the foot of the mountains, where the moor ended and the land began to climb. It had a ring of thick stone walls taller than three men, a single heavy gate, and towers at each corner. Smoke rose from a dozen chimneys inside, and a bell hung in a little tower over the gate.

It was the first place they’d seen with people in it since Highcrest.

They didn’t go in, naturally. Two hooded strangers walking in off the moor at night would be remembered. They found a spot on the slope above the village, behind a line of boulders, where they could watch the gate and rest before the climb.

That was where they were lying when the bell began to ring.

Something was coming across the snow on the far side of the village. Aren saw it first as a pale shape on the white slope, low and long and fast, like a river of ice running uphill. Then it came closer, and he saw that it wasn’t a river.

It was a worm, white and as long as a street, its body covered in thin plates of ice that rattled as it moved. It had no eyes, only a round wide mouth at the front lined with teeth like icicles.

[Frost Wyrm. Rank C.]

It went straight for the village wall.

The gate opened, and a single man came out of it. He was broad and grey-haired, in old armor, with a long-handled hammer in his hands. He walked out alone and stood calmly in the snow between the worm and the village, and planted his feet.

[Village Warden. Rank C: Core Condensation.][Class: Bastion.]

The worm came straight at him. The Warden raised his hammer and brought it down on the frozen ground in front of him.

The earth rose.

It came up out of the snow in a wall of grey stone as tall and wide as the village gate, cracking up through the frozen soil in a single heave. The worm slammed into it head first. The wall shook and cracked but held, and the worm reeled back with its icy teeth shattered.

The Warden didn’t wait. He went around the wall at a run, faster than a man that size should move, his hammer glowing with a dull brown light, and swung it into the side of the worm’s head.

The sound was like a mountain falling.

Behind him, archers had come out onto the village walls, five or six of them. They drew together, and their arrows lit with a pale white light as they left the bows. They didn’t fly straight. They curved gracefully through the air and found the narrow gaps between the plates of ice on the worm’s body, one after another, as if someone had led them there by the hand.

It took them less time than Aren’s training each night.

When it was over, the Frost Wyrm lay dead in the snow in front of the gate, and the Warden stood beside it, breathing hard, with his hammer on his shoulder. The archers were cheering. Somebody rang the bell again, faster and more happily.

Aren lay behind the boulders and didn’t move at all.

One village Warden with a class called Bastion, in a little stone town at the edge of nowhere, and a handful of archers whose arrows could bend. They’d killed a Rank C monster in the time it took to drink a cup of tea, and they’d made it look like an ordinary night.

’That’s what people look like when they’ve trained their whole lives. And I thought I was doing well.’

He had a technique that could cut stone and a skill that could undo the world for a second. He had never once had a teacher. He had spent his whole life hiding what he had.

"Ghost." Roderick nudged him. "You’re doing the thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you look at people weirdly." Roderick pulled his cloak tighter. "Like you’re working out what they cost."

Aren watched the Warden walk slowly back through the gate, and the gate close behind him, and the smoke rise from the chimneys.

"I’m very far behind."

He got up and brushed the snow off his coat.

"Hit me again. Before we climb."