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Only one other event in Vander’s life struck terror into his heart like what he currently experienced. The Crucible. If that were hard, the training he was put through now was the epitome of an impossible task.

The moment he gained a skill level with a weapon, he was forced to trade off for a new one. What the point of the training was, he had no clue. But already, Tobias had shown him the difference between their levels of power. He wasn’t going to argue with the battle junkie anymore than he already had for the sake of his already bruised, battered, and beaten everything.

Vander learned quickly that Tobias’ motto of “the body learns through pain, and the body remembers” was one he didn’t fear implementing in the slightest. But the more he trained one weapon after another, the more he started to pick each up faster.

Swords varied in the application of their movements, but they were still primarily for cutting. The bigger the sword, the more likely he’d end up bludgeoning his opponent’s to death, but the motions remained similar to other large weapons. Like a greatsword and a battle ax.

Knife fighting required more precise movements but was just a smaller short sword. Some knives ranged close to the size of a sword, but the difference was in the implementation of attack. Knives were sharper, more lethal, because most weren’t meant to be used to block or withstand the impact of other weapons. In the case someone wanted to block a larger weapon, parrying daggers existed for such cases. Otherwise, knives were the tool of the deadly craft.

Once he finally got the skills for each, he’d thought a break would be in store. How wrong he’d been. The oversight cost him a thick lump that rubbed wrong with each swing of a weapon on his shoulder.

“Fight through the pain!”

“Grit your teeth!”

“Your loved one just died! Get MAD!”

“You swing like my donkey, like an ass!”

“You lack heart. Swing with your whole soul!”

“Are you trying to bludgeon them to death with that sword, or are you trying to kill them? Incompetence!”

The verbal wounds grated on Vander’s exhausted mind and body, but he knew the man only meant well. Despite that, spite fueled each movement as he imagined each training dummy and target to be Tobias. He thought he’d finished with the drill instructor bullshit back in his Delver days, but Adrian had pushed him hard. Now a battle junkie without a conscience.

Of all the weapons, Vander detested fist weapons and the clunky feel of the mace. The warhammer also didn’t suit his taste, but he couldn’t deny its practical efficiency. Most things would die from blunt force trauma given enough hard hits, and unless magical armor was as common as the trees in The Snarl, even beasts and armored men would crumple under the overwhelming force.

Fist weapons felt counterintuitive, but Tobias’ didn’t budge. “Oh, you don’t like them?! Boo hoo, you snot nosed brat! What will you do if you overexert your mana and can’t hold a weapon? Give your head to your enemy? Pathetic! I might as well kill you now if that’s the case. Save everyone some time, why don’t I?”

Smack.

The worst part of the whole thing, Vander couldn’t even argue the points Tobias made. He’d already suffered the debilitation of mana depletion once. And from what he heard, mana depletion and overdrawing mana were two extremely different experiences.

An eclectic collection of skills accumulated as Tobias worked Vander tirelessly, but all good things had to come to an end. Vander didn’t fancy himself a holy man, but he thanked whatever gods for their mercy.

“My nephew makes you look like a sick stray,” Tobias muttered, giving his final assessment. “Stop. If you haven’t learned something yet, then you’ll have to do so away from my sight. Your performance was pitiful, and that’s only if I’m being generous.”

Nothing else passed through Vander’s ears after Tobias finally said that heavenly word, freeing him from the nightmare of training. He’d been instructed to undergo the entire training without any magic augmentation to his body, only using the natural power of his body to carry out the gruesome training.

Vander wanted to be mad, resentful, fueled with spite towards the man. But when the mana flooded through his body, clarity of mind absolved the battle junkie of any wrongdoing. The training he’d agreed to had done just as Tobias said it would, and power flowed through his limbs.

“Mages and you fancy mageswords all lack discipline. You think your magic is the end all, be all solution to any problem you face. Hate to break it to you, but if a foundation is weak, so is what’s built upon it.” Tobias twirled a spear around his body at speeds Vander’s tired eyes couldn’t track, not even seeming to notice the absolute spectacle of skill he displayed. “I admit, I expected you to give up some time ago, so for at least having the tenacity of a roach, I commend you.”

Once breath finally filled his lungs and life returned to his aching limbs, Vander sat up and crossed his legs. “There’s… gotta be more than that, right?”

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The spear blurred, and the tip rested against Vander’s throat. “If I had my way, you would stay for at least a hundred—no, with your level of skill, a thousand years before I ever got close to satisfaction from your performance. If it weren’t for not having any other choice, I’d have kicked you out of my training hall after seeing your lack of fighting spirit. A disgrace, I’ll say.”

“Fighting Spirit?”

Tobias removed the spear from Vander’s neck with a scowl. “Kids these days don’t even know the basics.” He stomped the ground, and all the materialized dummies and targets disappeared into thin air. The battle junkie posing as a village instructor and drill sergeant stepped into the center of the training ground and gestured for Vander to join him. “Bring your ass!”

Hopping up, Vander grabbed the closest weapon he could get his hands on, a spear, and joined Tobias in the center. He thought the hellish training had ended, but from the look in Tobias’ eyes and the spear pointed towards him, he felt like things had only just begun.

Surely, time has to be running out. Looking around, he begged some kind of system prompt to appear and whisk him away to a land far, far away. No such luck.

Taking a defensive stance, Vander pursed his lips and prepared himself for a proper beating.

“Right there. That resignation. You have no desire to fight, to overcome challenges. The will to make the heavens bow to your will, no matter how many times it tries to stamp out the spark in your heart.” A visible aura formed a vortex of rage around Tobias. The discarded weapons slipped from their places on the ground and joined the rage, almost as if to join in agreement. “This is but a fraction of a fraction of my Fighting Spirit, but any more would leave you but a blood splatter that disgraced my training hall for the rest of time.”

“It’s not possible to defeat you, and I’d have to be delusional to think something of the sort is possible,” Vander retorted as the aura died down. Oddly, the weapons all fell into the proper locations that Tobias had pulled them from. “Okay, that was impressive.”

Despite Vander’s praise, the battle junkie looked like he wanted to gore Vander then and there. “If you can’t develop your Fighting Spirit yourself, then I will beat it into you. Even if I have to rip the system to shreds, I’ll beat it into you. Even if I have to deny the heavenly mandate, you will learn. No matter what stands in my way, my goals, desires, and spirit will not be crushed by anything. This is true willpower and something you seem to lack. You have no spine.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” Vander said, dismissing the man’s words as part of the training.

But when he met Tobias’ gaze, he realized the truth of his ignorance. Everything from the beginning, all of his comments, the beatings, the frustration directed towards Vander… Tobias genuinely disdained his very existence. The way his gaze felt like a mountain crushing against his shoulders, weighing down on his spine, and compressing him into something tiny and insignificant all came from that disdain.

“I know more about you than you do, Vander,” Tobias growled, lunging forward across the distance between them with a single step. The spearhead cut, spilling blood to the training hall’s floor. “I may not kill you, but there are things worse than death.”

A small aura spread around Tobias, even smaller than before. When he came close, just the pure force of his Fighting Spirit cut Vander like the spear had.

Acting on trained instinct, he grounded his feet, making sure his base was established, and then brandished the spear towards Tobias. Even if he couldn’t reasonably fight the man, he could stop the worst of the damage he’d receive.

No more words passed between the two. Tobias wouldn’t give Vander the chance to speak and wouldn’t speak himself. More than a dozen times, he said a true warrior spoke with their weapons and souls in a dance of death.

This seemed to be that, except this was no dance. His was an execution with no end in sight. But he gritted his teeth and poured his whole being into wielding the spear as best as he could, defending one after another just enough to keep his life.

Wounds accumulated, but Tobias’ precision was no joke. He lunged forward, adjusting the target of his attack a split second before landing and cut flesh. Tendons, he left intact. Vitals, he avoided. Everything else was fair game.

Pain wracked against his conscious mind. Even if the mana coursing through his body kept him in one piece, the weariness of the training grated on him. And the more exhausted he got, the more his thoughts slipped to another time and place. Always back to that same place he wished he’d be free of.

“You’re thinking too much!” Tobias roared in Vander’s face, an open handed smack sending tumbling against the training hall’s hard ground. He slid to a stop at the edge of the hall, his back slamming against the door into the house. Then Tobias was there, his hand wrapped around Vander's throat. “I take back what I said earlier. I can’t let you leave here. You’ll give false hope to everyone you meet and watch as they all die, lying to yourself about how there was nothing more you could’ve done. Pathetic.”

As he said, a punch to the stomach robbed Vander of what little breath remained in his body and set him to gasping. Right then, when Vander desired nothing more than to take a breath, desperately sucking in to stave off the onset of asphyxiation, Tobias squeezed the hand around his neck.

I’m… really… going to die. I’m… dying? Again? I’m dying again! Madison. She needed him, but he was dying. Tobias was killing him. The only way to survive was to kill. He had to kill or be killed. If he died, nobody would save Madison. I can’t… die here. I can’t die here. I won’t… I won’t fucking die here!

Snapping his hands up to grip the one around his neck, Vander opened his eyes and stared back at Tobias as everything he had left, every last speck of mana, every last inch of resolve, every pittance of willpower, ignited like a powder keg.

Overwhelming power flooded through his mind as he focused his everything on killing Tobias, on eradicating the crazed battle junkie with every fiber of his own existence. Vander gave, and gave, and gave until he had less than nothing left.

Black dread and the promise of eternal rest crept in the corner of his vision until nothing but a long tunnel with Tobias’ face at the end remained. I’ll kill you. I’ll fucking kill you. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll… kill… you…

Nothingness embraced him in its endless embrace, clutching him in its arms and holding him tight. Promises of sweet nothings tried to ease his soul, but no matter how sweet, no matter how hard that darkness tried, Vander refused to go silently into the night.