Antonias kept waiting for me to make a move. He locked eyes with me and breathed slowly.

“It’s on you.” I said to him, exasperated.

He still didn’t move. I shook my head. Guess he needed to get thrown into the proverbial water headfirst.

I blurred forward, leaving him just enough time to widen his eyes in shock and raise his right arm in defense. I pushed my hand into his chest and launched him backwards and just before he could leave the ring and lose the first match, I grabbed him by the ankle and swung him up over my head and then down into the ground. Surprisingly, the concrete didn’t break. It must have been made of some advanced material and chemical engineering. I supposed that would be preferable for a workout, dueling and training center for Imperators. Had Antonias’s parents expect him to use this room when they first gave it to him? Would they have used it before they gave it to him? Or had they bought it from someone? Who was it built to accommodate? Someone must have told the Servi construction workers in charge of building this estate that they wanted a combat arena in the basement.

Antonias groaned and then launched a fist at my face. I caught it and broke every finger in his hand accidentally.

“Olympus above, Adrias!” He hissed in pain.

“Let me look at it.” I said. I examined it. Good. I could fix this. “We heal fast. Here, look.”

One at a time I held the broken shattered pieces of bone material inside his hand together for five seconds and let it reseal together. Antonias fidgeted in pain the whole time.

“Calm yourself.” I told him as I finished putting his right hand back together. “Give it a few minutes for it to completely reform and restructure itself. Our bones knit together if broken and then put themselves back together. Learned that at the Brazen Chains ludus. Neat, huh? What our bodies can do given the chance.”

“Neat.” He said through gritted teeth.

“Tell me when you’re ready.” I said after the few minutes I had allotted for his recovery to go through.

“This isn’t training, this is physical abuse.” He muttered.

“What’s the difference for Imperial cultivators? We will heal anything short of instant death in seconds or minutes or hours or days. We are so far beyond the human baseline that traumatic injury that would be permanent for a Copper Foundation human is only a teaching tool for our advancement in performative physical excellence.” I said.

Antonias breathed in and out. “So, we’re in round two of five, right?”

I shook my head. “I haven’t beaten you into incapacitation or caused you to leave the boundaries of the training ring. We are still in round one of five.”

“About that,” he said and started running for the line to escape over it and get out of more combat time. I blurred forward, grabbed him by the back of the neck and dragged him back to the center.

“I’ll break a bone each time you try to do that. Don’t think I won’t when it comes to maintaining the integrity of your training and advancement to Bronze.” I said. “You’re staying in the ring until all five rounds have been successfully completed.”

“This is my damn house!” Antonias said indignantly. “I’ll leave whenever I want to.”

“And this is my damn ring while I’m your instructor. You will stay in here as long as I want you to.” I said firmly.

He charged at me, and I dodged eleven punches and four kicks before slapping him as lightly as I could, sending him spinning and then falling to his knees and coughing up blood.

“What happened to trying to lose?” He asked.

“I said that if you tried your best to win, I would try my best to lose. You’re not trying to win.” I said.

“It doesn’t matter! I can’t beat a Bronze.” Antonias said.

“Yes, Toni, but you can try to win. Try as hard as you can until your average, typical performance in a combat training ring is above that of which the other Imperators are capable of at all. You’re going to be the best victor against your peers by trying and failing a little less each time with all your effort in your heart. I’m an impossible benchmark, one you cannot meet as a Copper Imperator, but in striving for victory over a Bronze, you will become strong. Stronger than you can believe or know for now.” I said.

He feinted a blow and then kicked at me. I pushed him back and then waited for another assault. It went on like this for a while until I got bored and kicked him out of the ring.

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“Match one over!” I declared.

“Thank the gods.” Antonias said.

“Come on, get back in here.” I said as he rubbed his hip.

We took a stance across from each other and this time I took the initiative. I zigzagged forward unpredictably and, restricting my strength, punched him in the left cheek with my fist. His head whipped right and a molar popped out. He spit out a spurt of blood and glared at me.

“I just lost a tooth.” Antonias said,his angry look burning into me.

“You’ll regrow it. That or pick it up and put it back in the socket and hold it there for a few seconds.” I offered.

Antonias chose the second option and picked up the tooth, cleaned it from dirt with his shirt and some spit, and then popped it back into his mouth and held it into place.

The rest of the rounds were somewhat predictable and stuck to a routine. I would let Antonias attack and I would slowly begin evading or counterattacking, building up to a full on offensive at which point my Bronze capabilities would fully kick in and I would punch, kick, slap, or throw Antonias out of the ring, ending each match. Then I would allow him to recover for fifteen to thirty minutes, the day slowly going by as we fought. At least the matches and the actual fighting was quick in comparison to the recovery time and to how much we had left in the day.

The fifth’s match’s finisher was particularly brutal, the only time where I had beaten Antonias by incapacitation rather than technical victory by knocking him out of the boundaries of the ring. I slammed Antonias down into the super durable concrete and he stared upwards hazily, blinking every once in a while.

“You okay?” I asked him.

He said nothing.

“We’re done now. That’s five rounds.” I said.

He still said nothing. I waved my hand in front of his face. He blinked and then closed his eyes.

“Toni?” I said, beginning to get worried.

“Done. Finally.” He whispered as if he couldn’t believe it, bloody and bruised, his marble skin an ugly shade and splotchy, his features swollen and reddened.

I gave him thirty minutes and then rounded him up and dragged him upstairs and outside of his mansion and out onto his estate’s expansive and expensively manicured green lawn ringed by clipped and shaped shrubbery.

“What are we doing?” Antonias said said warily, the bruising and inflammation going down and his cuts and abrasions gone like they had never been there.

“Tag.” I said simply.

“Tag?” Antonias asked, bewildered. “You want to play a children’s game as training, Adrias?”

“Yes. More directly, I want to train your endurance, agility, and physical coordination using said children’s game.” I said. “If you ever aren’t giving your all, I’ll drag your body back down to the basement and the training ring.”

His eyes widened slightly.

“By the way,” I said. “Tag.” I slammed my palm into his chest and sent him lancing out a hundred feet out into the lawn and putting him into rolling like a ball of limbs that sent up sprays of dirt and torn up grass every time he bounced down into the ground.

I followed his roll until he stopped and started groaning and waited for him to get up and chase me. When he did, I led him on a merry ride of about ten minutes length before he started to cough up his lungs, quite possibly literally, and I let him tag me.

“You’re it.” Antonias coughed out. I let him get away a bit and catch his breath before I lightly jogged after him. A Bronze’s jog is still pretty fast for a Copper Imperator and I soon caught up to him, his pitched breathing incredibly loud to my sense of hearing as he heaved oxygen into his lungs.

I let it go on a few more times and then I ended it.

“We’re done.” I said.

“Oh my gods! We’re done? You’re finally going to leave my house?” He said excitedly.

“No. We’re done as in we’re done with tag. Now let’s go do our next objective for today.” I said.

I brought a dirty, slowly growing more murderous Antonias to his large full-sized pool behind his house.

“Swimming?” He said, almost hopefully as if he didn’t believe I could assign him something he might actually want to do. “You want me to swim? Earthshaker bless you, you merciful bastard.”

“Nope.” I said.

“Well, then what are we doing?” He said.

“Testing our willpower and focus under oxygen restriction. And stress testing your pulmonary and cardiovascular system under hypoxia.” I said. I pushed him into the pool. “You’re going to stay under the water for as long as you can.”

“Get a big gasp of air.” I advised him. I waited until he did so, I’m not completely cruel, and then pulled him down under the water.

My Bronze cognitive capabilities included a very precise sense of time. Antonias held for twenty minutes, nothing compared to how long I had held my breath during the naumachia against the sea monster Infernal Beasts in the converted Red Sands arena.

Antonias broke at said twenty minutes before rushing out of the pool and running to the house full sprint. I chased him around a bit, blocking off his exit paths before catching him.

“Got you!” I said when I finally decided to nip the race in the bud and use my full speed.

I pulled him back to the pool and after a good break, assigned him laps in the pool which he was happy to do.

“I’d like you to know that I’m plotting your death.” He said to me as he passed me on the side of the pool as he swam backstroke.

“Oh yeah?” I said.

“It will be bloody. And painful. And violent. And agonizing. And gruesome. And gory. And-“ He said.

“I get the point.” I said. “How exactly do you expect to kill me when you can’t beat me in a fight or source a poison that my system can’t process?”

“Well, when I’m a Bronze, more options of violence will be available to me.” Antonias said.

I smiled. “So, you actually believe me now that this will make you a Bronze Imperator?”

“It damn better. If I have to suffer through all of this when I could be getting high or sleeping with Junia, I will find a way to kill you, Lucion, whether I’m Copper or Bronze.” Antonias said.

“Come out of the pool and take another rest.” I told him and he came out of the water, clean of all the dirt from skidding on the lawn when I had thrown him.

A Servus handed him a towel. We waited a time and then I moved him to the front of the mansion.

“You know box jumps?” I said.

“Yeah. What, are you going to put a ton of weight on me or something?” Antonias asked.

“No. I just got you a bigger box.” I said then took a standing leap from the ground to the roof of Antonias’s estate.

I hopped back down, sending dirt and clumps of grass shooting out from under my feet as I touched back down.

“My landscapers are going to figure out a way to kill you even if I don’t.” Antonias said, looking completely serious.