Chapter 15: Training

Sigurd remained seated long after Osric disappeared through the gate, the battered booklet open across his lap and the morning sun slowly creeping over the training ground.

He did exactly what his instructor had ordered and began from the first page instead of skipping directly to the diagrams.

Severing Line contained no grand history, secret founder, or exaggerated declaration about splitting mountains.

The opening pages were almost dry. They described posture, the purpose of the circulation route, the relationship between the sword and the body, and the most common failures made by practitioners learning the technique.

Sigurd appreciated that. Whoever had written the manual had been interested in teaching rather than impressing the reader.

By the time he reached the first diagram, he understood why Osric had chosen this particular technique. It looked simple because every unnecessary movement had already been removed.

The instructional stance resembled one Sigurd had practiced thousands of times. His lead foot pointed toward the target, rear foot angled outward, knees relaxed, shoulders loose, sword held in both hands with the point slightly lowered. Nothing about it challenged him.

The difficulty began beneath the skin. According to the manual, Vis had to leave the Core only after the attacking step began, travel upward through a precise route along the torso, cross the shoulder as the hips rotated, reach the arm during extension, then enter the weapon at the instant the blade settled onto its cutting line.

The sword, body, and Vis weren’t three separate actions performed quickly after one another. Severing Line required them to become one action. A single mistimed stage weakened everything following it.

Sigurd read the passage again, then turned back three pages and compared it with an earlier diagram. His iron-grey eyes moved between the illustrations while he silently reconstructed the motion in his head.

In his previous life, Viktor had learned that complicated operations were usually solved by reducing them into individual problems, mastering each one, then reconnecting them.

The same approach seemed appropriate here, except Severing Line presented an irritating contradiction: he could practice the pieces separately, but the technique only existed when those pieces occurred together.

Understanding the instructions intellectually was therefore the easiest part.

He finished the manual once, closed it, and sat quietly for several minutes while replaying everything he had read.

Then he opened it again.

The second reading was slower. Sigurd paid less attention to what the technique demanded and more attention to why.

The circulation route wasn’t arbitrary. It followed the body’s movement so that Vis reinforced force already being generated rather than fighting against it.

The grip remained relaxed until the final portion of the cut because tightening too early slowed the blade. The attacking step wasn’t supposed to be large because Severing Line valued directness over reach.

Even the breathing pattern had purpose: exhale during the strike to prevent unnecessary tension through the chest and shoulders.

By the time Sigurd reached the final page again, nearly an hour had passed.

He rose, dusted the back of his training trousers, and walked toward one of the wooden targets near the circle.

The practice sword Osric had left for him rested against the rack. Sigurd picked it up, tested its balance, then took the instructional stance exactly as shown in the booklet.

Before attempting any Vis circulation, he performed the physical movement alone.

Step. Hip. Shoulder. Cut.

The blade crossed the target’s surface with a dull knock. He reset and repeated it. The motion felt almost insultingly familiar after two years of Basic Swordsmanship, but Sigurd continued until he could reproduce the manual’s form without consciously correcting his feet.

Only then did he involve Vis.

He became aware of the Nascent Core inside him, a concentrated reservoir that had grown increasingly stable over the previous two years.

Sigurd inhaled, initiated the attacking step, and pulled Vis from it.

The energy reached his shoulder too quickly.

His arm stiffened halfway through the cut.

The sword struck the wooden target at an ugly angle, bounced away, and sent a sharp vibration through both wrists.

Sigurd immediately released the circulation and stepped back. He stared at the shallow mark left on the wood, then at his sword.

"Too early," Sigurd murmured, flexing his fingers once before resetting his grip. There was no frustration in his voice, merely diagnosis. "I pushed the Vis ahead of the movement instead of letting the circulation match it."

He reset. On the second attempt, Sigurd deliberately delayed the Vis. His step landed, hips rotated, sword accelerated, and the energy moved through his torso more smoothly than before.

For half a heartbeat he thought he had corrected the problem.

Then the blade struck the target before the Vis reached it. The cut landed cleanly, but it was nothing more than an ordinary sword strike followed by a pointless surge of energy into the weapon afterward.

Sigurd exhaled through his nose and stepped away again.

Too late this time. Osric’s explanation sounded considerably less simple now.

The next dozen attempts were variations of failure.

Sometimes the Vis reached his arm early and altered the natural rhythm of the swing.

Sometimes Sigurd focused so heavily on circulation that his rear foot shifted incorrectly. Once he sent too much Vis forward, felt his grip tighten instinctively around the hilt, and buried the practice blade several centimeters into the target through brute reinforcement rather than proper execution.

He pulled it free and frowned at the damaged wood. Stronger wasn’t the same as correct. Severing Line demanded precision, and trying to compensate with additional energy defeated the entire purpose.

Another attempt sent Vis into the blade correctly but ruined his edge alignment at the final instant, causing the sword to scrape sideways across the target instead of biting cleanly into it.

After the twentieth attempt, Sigurd lowered the sword. His breathing had quickened slightly, though physical exhaustion wasn’t the problem. Coordinating Vis demanded far more concentration than repeating ordinary cuts.

He returned to the booklet and remained standing this time, reading the circulation section with the sword hanging loosely from his right hand.

One sentence caught his attention now that he had experienced the failures himself.

Do not send the Vis toward the sword. Allow the sword stroke to carry the Vis toward its destination.

Sigurd’s brow furrowed.

That distinction had seemed philosophical during his first reading. Now it sounded practical. Every attempt so far had involved consciously pushing Vis through the prescribed route while simultaneously performing the strike.

He was treating circulation and swordsmanship as separate tasks and trying to synchronize them afterward.

The manual was telling him to reverse that thinking. The physical chain itself was supposed to guide the circulation.

He placed the booklet safely on the bench and returned to the target.

This time Sigurd didn’t attack immediately. He closed his eyes and performed the movement slowly without Vis.

His foot moved. His waist turned.

The rotation traveled through his torso into his shoulder, then down the arm until the sword followed naturally.

Again. Then again. On the fourth repetition, he allowed a thread of Vis to leave his Core without pushing it beyond that point. He moved, paying attention to how the energy responded to his body rather than forcing it toward the weapon.

The Vis followed.

Not perfectly. It lagged behind the rotation and dispersed before reaching his wrist, but Sigurd stopped with his sword halfway through the imagined target and looked down at his hand.

"Interesting," Sigurd muttered. His eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he retraced the sensation. "So that’s what the manual means. I’m not supposed to perform the circulation beside the movement. The movement itself is part of the circulation."

He repeated the exercise at half speed. The result improved. Instead of commanding the Vis through each section of the route, Sigurd used the physical motion as a guide and corrected only when the energy drifted.

The sensation reminded him less of firing a weapon and more of learning to move silently across unstable terrain: forcing each step made the body rigid, while understanding where his weight naturally wanted to travel allowed control with less effort.

It was still awkward, but for the first time that morning, Severing Line felt like one technique rather than several instructions being performed simultaneously.

By midday, his shirt clung to his back. A servant arrived carrying water, a towel, and lunch, pausing when she noticed the cuts covering the practice target.

Sigurd thanked her and stopped long enough to eat, drink, and rest his Vis channels.

He didn’t attempt to cultivate during the break. Severing Line used relatively little energy compared with what his Core contained, yet repeatedly circulating Vis through an unfamiliar route created a faint soreness along his shoulder and forearm.

Osric’s warning about damaging his channels hadn’t been empty. Sigurd had no intention of losing several days of practice because he was too impatient to rest for half an hour.

His progress remained uneven throughout the afternoon. One attempt carried Vis all the way into the blade at nearly the correct moment, producing a thin pale shimmer along the edge before impact.

The next was terrible. Another felt physically perfect but lost half its Vis through inefficient circulation.

Twice he abandoned the strike halfway through because he could already feel the timing collapse.

Sigurd refused to count the successful moments as mastery. The System agreed. Whenever he checked the technique, the same entry remained unchanged.

[Severing Line]

[Rank: Black]

[Mastery: Unlearned]

The unchanged word irritated him more than he cared to admit, but it was accurate. Performing fragments correctly wasn’t the same as executing Severing Line successfully.

Initial Understanding required him to reproduce the complete technique under controlled conditions, not accidentally stumble into portions of it whenever everything happened to align.

If he couldn’t deliberately repeat the result, then he hadn’t learned it yet.

Still, something was changing. By late afternoon, he no longer needed to recall every diagram before moving.

His feet found the correct position naturally. His grip remained relaxed through the beginning of the cut, tightening only when necessary. More importantly, Vis had stopped feeling like an additional instruction layered over the sword strike.

He could sense the beginning of a connection between the rotation of his body and the circulation route.

Each failed attempt now told him something specific rather than merely informing him that he had failed.

Sigurd stood before a fresh target as the sun descended toward the western wall. He had lost count of how many times he had repeated the motion.

His arms were heavy, and sweat had darkened the collar of his training clothes, but he wanted one final attempt before stopping.

He planted his feet and allowed his breathing to settle. Earlier that morning, he had approached each strike with a checklist running through his head.

Foot. Core. Hip. Shoulder. Arm. Vis. Blade. Timing. Now he deliberately discarded all of it.

He inhaled.

No mental checklist. No counting. No attempt to force every stage into place.

Sigurd stepped.

His rear foot drove against the stone. His hips turned, his shoulders followed, and the sword moved with them.

Vis left his Core almost naturally, caught within that chain of movement and traveled upward. For once, Sigurd didn’t chase it.

He simply maintained the cut.

The energy reached his wrist.

Then the blade.

A thin layer of pale Vis flashed along the edge an instant before impact.

CRACK!

The practice sword carved deeply into the wooden target and stopped halfway through. It wasn’t the clean severance described in the manual.

The Vis had still arrived slightly early, and Sigurd could feel how much energy had dispersed uselessly during impact.

His front foot had also landed a fraction farther forward than the instructional form required, forcing his upper body to compensate near the end of the cut.

The System remained silent.

He had not reached Initial Understanding.

Sigurd stayed there for several seconds, both hands wrapped around the hilt while his breathing gradually settled.

Then he pulled the blade free and examined the cut. It was deeper and cleaner than anything he had produced that morning, and more importantly, he knew why it had worked.

It hadn’t been luck.

He could remember the sensation of the Vis moving with him instead of being dragged through his body by conscious force.

Tomorrow, he could reproduce that feeling.

Then he could correct it.

Sigurd rested the sword against his shoulder, looking at the damaged target as the smallest trace of satisfaction entered his iron-grey eyes.

A smile slowly spread across his face.

He was getting the hang of it.