The next morning was... rough, to say the least.
I dragged myself out from under the starchy sheets, completely failing to realize my new nervous system was currently operating with the raw, exposed sensitivity of an open nerve ending.
The moment my feet made contact with the cold floorboards, the conservation of energy reminded me who the true master of this world was. A sharp, unforgiving shock ran straight up my tibia, bypassed my nonexistent mana buffer, and slammed directly into my brainstem.
My knees buckled instantly, and I collapsed back into a pathetic heap on the rug.
Before I could even begin the long, undignified process of peeling myself off the floor, three sharp, aggressive knocks rattled the wood of the door.
"Aren, are you awake?"
I opened my mouth to respond, but before the first syllable could clear my throat, the lock clicked and the door swung wide open.
Lo and behold, it was the handler. He looked completely immaculate, entirely unbothered by the early hour, and possessed the kind of effortless posture that actively insulted my current state of spinal mutiny.
"Are you ready to go?" he asked, looking down at me on the floor without a single shred of surprise or concern.
"Go where?" I grumbled, rolling onto my side to glare at his polished boots. I hadn't been informed of any outings. And even more importantly, I was deeply, fundamentally opposed to travelling anywhere that required the use of my highly questionable lower extremities.
"To your physical conditioning assessment," the handler said, looking down at me with the detached curiosity of a scientist observing a strange new species of insect. "The Principal took one look at your intake medical report and decided an 'academic evaluation' would likely result in your immediate expiration. We are starting with baseline stabilization."
Physical stabilization. A nice, corporate term for physical therapy.
They weren't going to hand me a sword or ask me to channel a localized hurricane. They were going to make sure I could successfully transport a spoonful of soup to my mouth without fracturing my own wrist.
"I can stand," I lied, planting both palms firmly on the rug. I braced my core, channelled every ounce of historical willpower I possessed, and pushed upward.
For a glorious, triumphant three seconds, I was vertical.
Then my left ankle made a wet, popping sound, my centre of gravity betrayed me entirely, and I executed a flawless, face-first dive straight back into the floorboards.
The handler didn't even blink. He simply reached into his pocket, pulled out a small leather-bound notebook, and made a neat little tally mark.
"Patient exhibits the motor skills of an intoxicated jellyfish," he murmured, his charcoal pencil scratching against the paper. "Excellent. The training ground staff are going to love you."
Ten minutes, two humiliatingly oversized crutches, and an immense amount of silent, dignified cursing later, I was finally being managed down the sub-level corridors of the facility. Every single step required a conscious, agonizing calculation. I had to grit my teeth so hard my jaw ached just to force my trembling legs to swing forward, the wood of the crutches digging uncomfortably into my armpits. My body wasn't just out of shape; it felt actively hostile to the concept of movement.
The air grew progressively colder, thick with the scent of ozone and damp stone, until the handler pushed a pair of heavy iron doors open. "We don't do standard paperwork down here, Aren. The Principal wants a genuine biometric readout of your baseline combat instincts under pressure. Consider this your welcome package."
The doors locked behind us with a heavy, pressurized hiss.
I leaned heavily on the crutches, my chest heaving just from the walk down the hall. I blinked sweat out of my eyes, taking in the reinforced, obsidian-lined training vault. The walls were scarred with deep gouges and scorched by residual elemental magic, but the center of the arena was occupied by a single, featureless block of pale gray stone.
"The automaton in front of you is a reactive golem," the handler explained, walking toward the safety barrier. "It dynamically adjusts its output to match its opponent's technique. Of course it has limits, but you won't be able to get to those limits. Survive three minutes, and we call it a day."
As if hearing its cue, the stone block shifted. The gray mass swirled and condensed, rapidly shrinking and shaping itself into a lean, person-sized humanoid form. It hummed with a low, rhythmic magical pulse, its heavy stone head turning slowly until its blank face locked onto my tiny, noodle-spined frame.
The golem let out a grinding click. It instantly lowered its stance, compressing its limbs and stature to perfectly mirror my exact, pathetic proportions. It was a flawless, stone-faced reflection of an eight-year-old child.
An adaptive construct, I thought, letting out a slow, shaky breath as I forced my unstable knees to lock. Fine. Let's see how well your programming adapts to pure, unfiltered technique.
The golem moved with a sudden, deafening crack of stone against stone, lunging forward with a heavy, sweeping left hook meant to test my reflexes.
My mind saw the trajectory perfectly. My past-life instincts calculated the exact angle of deflection. I didn't need physical strength to win this; I just needed a single, localized burst of condensed mana around my right fist to shatter its kinetic momentum and crack its core right open.
I reached deep, trying to pull on the familiar reserves of my soul, completely disregarding the fragile reality of my current flesh. I pulled the trigger on a standard, high-tier pulse.
The technique was perfect. The execution was flawless.
And my eight-year-old tricycle chassis completely disintegrated.
The absolute lock on my core didn't even try to let up. Instead, it violently snapped backwards on me.
The moment the energy even attempted to flood through my underdeveloped neural pathways, my body flatly rejected it.
My muscle fibres screamed as they tore under the sheer friction of the backfire. The capillaries in my nose burst instantly, sending a hot streak of crimson pouring down my lip. Instead of channelling into a weapon, the blocked magical energy exploded outward from my own palm.
The shockwave of that failed attempt hit me like a physical hammer, bringing me immediately to my knees. I crumbled to the ground hard, the sheer force from my vertical failure creating a crater beneath me. I clutched my heart harder, feeling the blood rising up my throat. A single loud choke, and I vomited blood. A pool of red started to form around me as I coughed, again, and again, and again.
A deafening silence filled the chamber, broken only by the steady, heavy rhythmic humming of the child-sized golem, which had stopped mid-swing, thoroughly confused by an opponent who had managed to knock themselves out.
I lay face-down in the dust, coughing weakly as the taste of copper overrode my tongue. Every square inch of my torso felt like it had been run over by an armoured carriage. I stared at my trembling, bloody, childlike fingers through a haze of genuine, blinding pain.
I couldn't use magic. Not like this. My current vessel was made of wet paper, and forcing the issue would literally kill me before I ever reached adulthood. If I couldn't even handle a basic pulse without my own nervous system trying to quit, I had to stop trying to cheat the system with my mind. I needed an actual physical foundation.
"An interesting strategy," the handler's voice drifted down from the observation platform, accompanied by the familiar, slow scratching of his charcoal pencil. "An intentional self-detonation to confuse the enemy? Or did you simply forget how to channel?"
I pushed myself up onto shaking, bloody elbows, a cold wave of nausea washing over me as my lumbar spine violently protested the movement. I wiped the blood from my lip with the back of my hand, looking up at the handler with nothing but flat, exhausted determination.
"Cancel the magic tutors," I wheezed, my voice cracking from the strain. "Cancel the theory lectures. Bring me weights, a running track, and high-gravity conditioning arrays. I am not touching a single spellbook until my bones can handle anything."
"Up."
It was a single word, and yet it held the weight of a mountain behind it.
"You aren't done. There are two minutes and twenty-three seconds on the clock." The 'happy-go-lucky' handler who threw verbal jabs at me from not even five minutes ago had disappeared, replaced by the emotionless man who stood before me.
"I can't—" I was cut off by a wave of mana pressing me down.
I wasn't sure what was going to kill me first. The golem, the lock on my core, or the handler.
I dragged myself to my feet one more time.
My knees shook so violently I could hear the wet clicking of my misaligned joints over the steady hum of the chamber. The pool of my own blood slicked the stone beneath my bare feet, threatening to steal what little balance I had left.
The handler didn't offer a word of encouragement. He didn't even look up from his ledger. He simply raised a single finger, and the person-sized golem snapped out of its standby mode.
The stone humanoid didn't give me time to breathe. It lunged, its grey stone fist cutting through the air with a low, whistling wind.
I didn't try to use magic. I couldn't. Instead, I relied entirely on the one thing the lock on my core couldn't take from me: historical, hard-coded muscle memory.
The first attack came towards my face. It was slow, and I moved nimbly to the side.
I heard a sound reminiscent of a clock as the golem adapted to me once.
Its leg came next, clipping the back of my left ankle. I heard it crack. It was faster than I could've possibly reacted to.
This time, it opted for a right hook. Its form was bad; it overextended its body, dedicating its entire body weight into it.
I opted to rotate my torso swiftly to the left and pivot on my back foot, but the moment I tried to move, my heart tensed.
The world inverted colour for a moment, and my body locked up.
As the fist closed in, I didn't try to block it—my fragile forearm bones would have shattered like dry twigs. The golem's sweeping right hook wasn't solely targeting my head; it was threatening to take my entire upper torso with it. The compressed air ahead of the stone fist slammed into my face first, a wall of pure kinetic pressure that split my cracked lip open before the metal-hard rock even arrived.
I didn't try to step back—my mutinous ankles wouldn't allow it. Instead, the moment the core lock finally released its paralysis, I actively betrayed my own balance. I let my knees completely collapse.
The drop was so sudden it felt like falling through a trapdoor. As the massive stone fist whistled through the empty air where my throat had just been, the sheer vacuum of its passing yanked at my hair, the friction burning my scalp. My back was nearly parallel to the earth, but I wasn't falling anymore. I was trying to position myself.
I slammed both palms firmly into the slick, blood-smeared floor. The impact sent a bolt of pure agony up my wrists, but I held firm, locking my elbows and turning my arms into a rigid, structural fulcrum.
Time slowed down to the rhythm of my pounding, panicked heartbeat. The golem was still committed to its forward swing, its heavy torso leaning over my prone form, completely blind to what was happening beneath its line of sight. It was a textbook geometric opening.
I sucked in a sharp, burning breath and twisted.
Using my anchored palms as a pivot point, I whipped my hips into a violent, lateral spiral. The world flipped upside down. My spine arched into a tight, agonizing crescent as I channelled the entire torque of my falling momentum straight into my lower core. My abs screamed, muscle fibres tearing under the sheer, unaugmented stress of the manoeuvre, but the kinetic chain was flawless.
My legs shot upward like a coiled steel spring escaping its casing.
The trajectory was vertical, targeting the exact blind spot beneath the automaton's chin. My right heel led the charge, cutting through the ozone-thick air of the vault until it made contact.
CRACK.
The sound of my bare heel colliding with the reactive stone mandible echoed through the chamber like a pistol shot. It wasn't a strike born of strength—I had none. It was pure, unadulterated leverage. The upward velocity of my entire body weight clashed directly with the golem's downward forward momentum.
The shockwave of the impact was mutual. I felt the bone in my right heel break instantly, a sickening numbness radiating up my tibia, but the technique did exactly what it was designed to do.
It was a near-flawless counter, one I had spent years in my previous life mastering.
For a single, glorious second, the three-hundred-pound pile of animated masonry was airborne... suspended in mid-air by the foot of an eight-year-old child.
I didn't let my momentum stall against the floorboards. Using the torque of the inverted pivot, I coiled my spine and exploded upward from my palms. Pushing off the obsidian floor with everything my upper body had left, I tucked my trailing knee violently into my chest, compressing my mass into a hyper-tight axis.
The world blurred into a horizontal streak as my body spun in mid-air, building an impossible amount of centrifugal force. One rotation. Two.
At the absolute apex of the leap, right as my vision snapped back to the floating automaton, I unleashed the coil.
My right leg whipped outward, extending to its absolute limit like a blade snapping open. The extreme rotational torque I'd gathered multiplied my pathetic child's weight by tenfold, turning my heel into a high-velocity kinetic hammer.
BOOM.
The spinning crescent strike caught the golem dead centre in its stone chest. The concentrated kinetic energy detonated on impact, shattering the outer layer of grey masonry into a cloud of dust and blasting the construct downward like a meteor.
Gravity claimed me a fraction of a second later. I spun through the final arc of the momentum, my right foot—the very same one that had delivered the blow—slamming firmly back onto the bloody floorboards, absorbing the violent rotation in a flawless, low-profile crouch while the shockwave rattled my teeth.
The landing was mechanically flawless. For a brief, deceptive window of a single heartbeat, everything felt fine.
"And that," I began, a small, triumphant breath leaving my lungs as I started to straighten my posture—
SNAP.
It wasn't a sound I felt in my ears; it was a dull, wet pop that resonated straight through my thigh bone. The quadriceps tendon right above my kneecap parted like a high-tension cable under a chainsaw.
The mechanical brake system holding my leg straight vanished instantly. Before the actual signal of white-hot agony could even clear my neural pathways to register in my brain, my right knee violently buckled, collapsing out from under me. Gravity and my own residual forward momentum betrayed me entirely, cutting the final word out of my throat as I executed a helpless, ungraceful face-first dive straight back into the floorboards.
I lay on the floor for a few seconds, blurring in and out of consciousness.
The shock from the sheer pain everywhere on my body was enough to make me want to die.
Really? This is how I was going to die? Training? And to a golem of all things?
I gritted my teeth one more time.
A primal, frantic surge of survival adrenaline detonated in my chest. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped animal. The white-hot agony in my right knee didn't vanish, but it suddenly felt distant, drowned out by the sheer, terrifying chemical flood washing through my nervous system.
Move, my brain screamed. Move or die.
I planted my palms into the dirt, coughing up a spray of crimson as I forced my upper body off the floor. I couldn't use the quadriceps. The wire was gone. But my mind mapped the remaining anatomy in a fraction of a second.
"I..." The single syllable was spat out like a curse. "I'm not fucking done with you yet."
Putting all my weight onto my left side, I dragged my useless right leg forward. I drove my right heel hard into the obsidian floor, leaning my torso heavily forward to force the knee joint to lock straight against the bone axis. It was a horrible, unnatural leverage—relying entirely on bone friction and raw, overstimulated glute and hip tension to keep the limb from buckling.
Trembling, hyperventilating, and dragging my right leg behind me like a broken piece of lumber, I forced myself back into a vertical stance.
"Two minutes," the handler's voice droned from above.
The golem had started to recover, spinning on its heel.
I couldn't do much to avoid its attacks.
A voice in my head told me to dodge, to parry something, to redirect its momentum.
But I wasn't listening.
There wasn't anything conscious in my head anymore.
I was running on pure instinct. I couldn't see, I couldn't hear, I could only fling my ripped arms one more time, drive my upper body forward even one more inch. Every time its fist collided with my face, I wanted to drop and hit the floor, but something in me refused.
When the golem lunged, I didn't slip the line. When its stone fist cut toward my throat, I didn't drop my weight. We simply collided. Neither of us agreed to dodge a single attack. There was no defence left in the vault, no tactical geometry—simply an overlapping flurry of shattering rock, sprayed crimson, and naked fists.
Every time my bare, bloodied hands cracked against its reactive stone frame, the skin over my knuckles split down to the bone. I didn't care. The feedback loop of pain was completely drowned out by the thunder in my ears. Every time its fist collided with my face, wanting to drop me and pin me to the floorboards, that deep, ancient engine in my soul flatly refused.
Every time I moved, my muscle fibres tore further. Sweat and blood mixed, stinging my eyes, blinding me.
Twice, the golem's knuckles caught my shoulders, the sheer kinetic force whipping my tiny frame around. My broken ankle shrieked as it twisted against the stone, and I only stayed upright by blindly slamming my straightened right leg into the floor to stop my momentum before I could spin into a heap. The sound it made was agonising, it felt like the raw ends of my thigh bone and shin were grinding together like rough gravel under a millstone.
Seconds blurred, was each punch a millisecond apart? Or was it minutes apart? I didn't know, and it didn't matter to me.
Just stay vertical. I repeated it to myself like a rhythmic mantra, my lungs burning as if filled with hot ash. Do not fall. If you fall, the handler's mana will crush you.
Another stone fist connected squarely with my jaw, the impact rattling my brain stem.
At the exact same microsecond my own bloody hand slammed directly into the centre of the golem's face.
"Ten seconds."
The golem launched a final, decisive overhead strike, aiming to pin me to the cratered floor. I didn't have the strength left to dodge. Instead, I crossed my bloody arms above my head, gritted my teeth until they cracked, and let the impact drive me straight into the dirt.
CRACK.
A sharp, agonizing pop echoed through my collarbone, but I didn't lose consciousness.
I locked my jaw, holding the golem's heavy stone fist above me through sheer, stubborn leverage until the low humming inside its chest suddenly faded into nothingness.
The automaton dissolved back into a liquid-grey mass, flowing away from me and pooling back into the neat, featureless stone block in the centre of the arena.
"Time," the handler said.
I collapsed backward onto the obsidian floor, staring up at the vaulted ceiling, my vision swimming with dark, erratic spots.
The slow, rhythmic scratching of the charcoal pencil resumed.
"Baseline instincts: exceptional," the handler murmured, his boots clicking softly against the metal stairs as he descended from the observation deck. He stopped right beside my broken, heaving form, looking down at me with those same cold, unreadable eyes. "Physical hardware: utterly catastrophic. You survived on borrowed time and past-life ghosts, Aren."
He closed the notebook with a sharp snap.
"The Principal has approved your request. Starting tomorrow at dawn, your schedule consists of zero theory, zero incantations, and maximum physical conditioning. If your body cannot handle the pressure of the world, we will forge a new one. Try not to die during the first week."
I didn't answer. I couldn't. But as the handler kicked a nearby wheelchair forward and reached down to hoist my broken body into the seat, my vision faded for the last time.
A small, bloody smile tugged at the corner of my lips. I had survived the first three minutes.
Tomorrow, the real hell would begin.