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The combat room was bigger than Landen expected. High ceilings, padded floors, the smell of rubber and old sweat baked into the walls. Punching bags lined one wall, practice dummies stood in the back, and along the right side sat a rack of weapons — swords, axes, spears, training blades made from wood so dense it looked almost black.
Landen drifted toward them like he was being pulled by something.
He reached for one of the swords. Then suddenly, a pressure settled over the room. He turned around, and Drex was right there, somehow, looking down at him like a tower.
He grabbed Landen by the shirt and threw him across the room. "Weapons are off-limits until I say otherwise." He looked at the rack, then back at Landen like he was reconsidering something. "The last thing we need is another baboon running around, swinging steel, and killing somebody."
Landen sat up on the padded floor, rubbing his head. "You could've just said no."
But like a phantom, Drex was already gone.
— — —
Maledic found a bag near the end of the row, and Landen took the one beside him.
"Alright." Landen rolled his shoulders. "What are we starting with?"
"A punch."
"Right, but which — combo? Hook? I'm pretty flexible."
"A straight right. Because you don't know how to throw one."
Landen opened his mouth. Closed it. "Fair."
Maledic set his feet — nothing dramatic about it, just shoulder-width, back foot angled out, knees easy — and then his arm moved.
BAM!
The bag bent and shook. It happened so fast, Landen couldn't even see it. But he got his full attention.
"Right cross," Maledic said. "Some call it the rear straight." He tapped his fist. "Power doesn't start here." He tapped his back foot. "It starts here."
BAM!
A few students down the row glanced over.
Landen closed his eyes, ran the replay in his head, and nodded. He stepped up, set his legs, and swung.
Thud.
A pained look crossed Maledic's face. "You look like you're throwing a spear."
"That's not a compliment, right?"
Maledic just looked at him.
"I'm going to take that as a no." Landen reset. "Walk me through it again."
Maledic broke it down, slower this time. "Floor through the foot. Hip rotates first. Torso follows. Shoulder rolls. Then the arm." He paused. "In that order. Not all at once."
Landen went through it piece by piece. Foot. Hip. Torso. Shoulder. Arm.
The bag moved less than if he'd shoved it with his palm.
"This is genuinely hard," Landen said.
"Yes."
"I feel like I'm worse than when I started."
"You are." Maledic crossed his arms. "That means you know what you're actually doing wrong."
Landen considered this. "That's either profound or you're just covering for bad teaching."
"You remember the bench press?"
"Elbows out. Lower ribs. Bar path straight."
"This is the same. Every cue connects to the next one. The punch is just the end of a chain." Maledic did the motion slowly. "Don't let the wrist break at the end. That's where people lose it."
Landen started over — not trying to punch, just executing the sequence. It looked like a man trying to remember dance steps. But now the logic was there. He could feel where each piece was supposed to go, even when he missed it.
He started breaking it down the way he'd break down a game. Where was the power leaking? The hip was generating force, but he was losing it in the shoulder. He adjusted. Too far. He adjusted back.
Thud.
He adjusted again.
Thud.
More adjustments.
Thud.
At some point, Maledic stopped correcting and just watched, arms crossed.
Landen ran it again. And again. Narrowing the gap between what he was doing and what he'd seen.
Then one rep where everything happened at once — no windup, no wasted movement, every link in the right order. He didn't throw the punch so much as let it happen.
POP!
"Okay." He turned around, pleased. "A pop's better than a thud, right?"
A fist came flying at his face. The force from it moved his hair, and his eyes went slightly crossed trying to focus on it.
Maledic held the fist there a beat too long. Then lowered his arm and let out a quiet, disappointed breath. He grabbed his shirt from the bench and headed for the door.
Landen watched him stop at the threshold, not looking back.
A beat passed.
"Same time tomorrow." And he was gone.
Landen stared at the empty doorway. Then shrugged it off and turned back to the bag.
Foot. Hip. Torso. Shoulder. Fist.
POP.
He went again.
— — —
Maledic left with a quiet, nagging feeling that he was wasting his time.
Though they were brothers, he questioned Landen's talent against his own. There had been flashes of something real. The wisp tag placement had been sharp, and the way he'd read the field wasn't something you could fake. But one good read didn't make a player. The rest of what he'd seen was mediocre at best, and mediocre wasn't something Maledic had ever made room for.
His standard was simple: be the best, or get out of the way. He pushed himself harder than anyone around him and held the people he kept close to the same standard — not out of cruelty, but out of necessity. Dead weight didn't just slow you down. It buried you. He'd learned that early, and he hadn't forgotten it.
— — —
His personal session with Halvek that afternoon didn't leave much room for thinking about anything else.
When Halvek had first taken him on as a personal student, Maledic had assumed it was an honor. After the third session, he revised that assumption. Halvek wasn't nurturing talent. He was stress-testing it. Their sessions followed a brutal and largely one-sided pattern: Halvek attacked, and Maledic survived — or tried to. There was something almost personal about the way the man came at him, like Maledic had insulted his ancestors, and this was the sanctioned response.
Today, Halvek had him carry the man on his back through an hour of lunges. No explanation. No commentary. Just Halvek's considerable weight pressing down on his shoulders while his legs screamed, and the clock moved at its own unhurried pace.
By the time it was done, Maledic didn't have the energy to think, process, or feel anything about Landen. He went back to his room, fell into bed, and was unconscious before he finished the thought.
— — —
He slept through the morning.
When he finally woke, the room was quiet, and the light coming through the window was the flat gray of late afternoon. Landen's side of the room was already made. Wherever he'd gone, he'd been gone for hours.
Maledic showered, ate, attended Combat Theory on autopilot, and let his mind drift back to the question he'd been avoiding: what exactly was he supposed to do with Landen today?
He turned it over for a few minutes before setting it aside. He'd already given him everything he had to give. The fundamentals, the footwork, the mechanics — it was all there. Either Landen had taken it and done something with it, or he hadn't. If today didn't show some kind of progress, that was his answer. He'd let it go and stop pretending obligation was the same thing as potential.
— — —
The Training Center was quiet when he arrived.
Or almost quiet.
Boom.
He stopped just inside the entrance. The sound rolled through the empty corridors like a slow, deliberate pulse — not chaotic, not frantic, just steady. Rhythmic.
Boom.
Boom.
Maledic followed it deeper into the building, past the empty equipment bays, toward the combat rooms in the back. The closer he got, the louder it became.
When he arrived, there were people already there. A crowd gathered outside the entrance, standing in complete silence, their backs to him, watching something inside.
He worked his way through until he reached the front.
Then, the sound hit him full in the chest.
BOOM!
BOOM!
BOOM!
Maledic rarely showed surprise. No matter what he encountered, his expression remained calm and unreadable. Yet the look on his face now was something entirely new—even to him.
"Landen," he yelled.
The rhythm broke.
Landen turned around. His hair was matted flat against one side of his head. His shirt had gone dark with sweat from collar to hem. His eyes were open, but they had the quality of someone who'd been staring at the same point for so long their vision had given up trying to focus.
The heavy bag behind him was destroyed. The canvas had split along the seam, and sand had spilled out in a wide, rust-colored pool across the floor — stained dark where the blood from his hands had soaked into it. More blood ran in thin lines down what remained of the bag's side.
"Oh. Hey." Landen blinked at him. "You're here." He waved him over, sending a thin arc of blood across the floor. "Come look at this. I figured something out."
He turned back to the bag, widened his stance, tucked his fist, and swung —
SNAP!
Maledic had already moved, kicking the bag aside a half-second before impact. The punch landed on empty air with everything behind it. The sound echoed through the room. Blood misted from his knuckles.
He fell forward into Maledic's shoulders.
Maledic caught him and propped him up. "How long have you been here?"
Landen gave this serious thought. "Ever since we came in together. Why?"
Maledic made another face he had never made before.
Landen had never left.
He looked at the bag. At the blood on the floor. At the crowd that had gathered in complete silence to watch his brother punch sand for the better part of a day.
"Can you walk?"
Landen seemed to consider it. "Yes, of course I can." He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Maledic held him upright. Said nothing for a moment.
Then, quietly: "Well done, brother."
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