Whether Keisuke was indeed having fun was up for debate.

During the first week of training, he’d oftentimes wished that somebody—anybody—would’ve warned him about what he was getting himself into. Maybe an informative flyer? Perhaps a tour of the guild and how it operated would have sufficed. But somehow, he doubted anything could've prepared him for the pain and suffering he was going to be put through.

“—Dodge! —Parry! —Lunge!" Koto barked instructions at him, but Keisuke did not know how to do any of those things, so he got smashed with a wooden sword right across his face.

“Nurgh…!” He fell to the ground, having had the daylights knocked out of him.

Koto sighed. "That's no good, you know? If you're going to block, do it with your sword, not your face."

“I… I wasn’t trying to block, though…”

Blood was dripping from his nostrils, and the pain was excruciating. His nose didn't feel right, either. When he tried touching it to examine the extent of the damage, the pain shot through his entire body and stung even more.

It was broken. His nose was broken. One hit from Koto had shattered the bridge of it. The pain was so great that Keisuke's eyes were watering.

“What are you doing? Get up, we aren't done,” Koto said.

“Ah… My nose. I think it's broken.”

“And?”

“And…well… Shouldn’t we pause so I can stop the bleeding, at least…?”

Koto pointed her sword at him. “Do you think an ogre will give a damn about your bloody nose? Hm? Or maybe if you ask nicely for a truce, a gang of goblins will be kind enough to let you bandage all of your wounds. Perhaps they will even lend a hand. Is that what you think?”

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“No,” Keisuke said. He spat out a sputum of blood, the salty and metallic taste lingering in his mouth.

“Exactly. Enemies will show you no mercy. If something as paltry as a broken nose is enough to stop you, then you’re as good as dead. Out there, the fighting does not stop until all of your enemies are defeated. And here will be no different. Now, wipe it off, get on your feet, and raise your guard.”

Keisuke bit his lip in frustration. He wanted nothing more than to give up right there and tell Koto off. Things had been going on like this for the past couple of days, with her hurting him, breaking his bones, and refusing to heal him until after their training session had ended. Sometimes, if he performed too poorly in training, she wouldn’t let the clerics heal him at all. If Koto was trying to make Keisuke despise her, she was doing a very good job at getting there. He had absolutely no fighting experience, not even the basics, and yet she hounded him incessantly trying to drill all of it into him in such a short amount of time. It was insufferable.

Keisuke tightened his fists around the hilt of his sword and slowly stood up. The blood from his nose had dripped onto and around his mouth now, sticking to his face like warpaint. Taking a deep breath, he wiped his nose with the underside of his sleeve, and then raised the sword in his hands and pointed it defiantly at Koto. He stared at her, and perhaps because of his growing ire, did not waver.

“Good,” Koto returned his gaze like a predator stalking its prey. Her lips curled upwards, flashing her teeth, and Keisuke would come to fear that smile. “Here I come.”

There was a flash and a blur, and Koto was on him. Keisuke could not block any of her attacks in time and was riddled with a flurry of blows all over his body.

—Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!

Keisuke went to bed that night bruised and bloodied. And every night after that, he would add a new scar to his tally. Yet even as he lay in bed, sleepless from the pain, writhing in his sheets, he would not give up. Even when his body begged for him to stop, that they could not do this any longer, Keisuke forced himself to wake every morning. It wasn’t stubbornness or willpower that fuelled him, nor was it some faux form of desire to get one in over Koto. It was something else. Something Keisuke himself could not explain or put his finger on.

But it was there. Somewhere within him and somewhere around him, following him, clinging to him like a shadow. It was there when Keisuke dreamed and it lingered when he woke. Something. That was the only way he could describe it. Something.

And whenever Keisuke closed his eyes or whenever he was on the verge of giving up, he could feel it.

I hope Mahiro and Fumiko are doing okay... he thought to himself as he drifted off into sleep.