Tilly finished out that evening's training by meditating... well, he tried to meditate.

As he tried to find that same state of calm he had up on the mountain, he discovered that meditation on the edge of a parade ground hosting thousands of drilling recruits wasn’t nearly as productive as his first attempt had been. He spent most of the time trying to maintain his breathing while chewing through the Alliance's chances as a new Faction versus whatever the System was about to throw at them.

Ichiro eventually called it a night once he noticed Tilly’s face devolving from focused to disgruntled. He reached out to help Tilly up off the ground as Tilly tried not to scowl over at the noisy training that looked like it would continue well into the night.

"Meditating in such environments will assist you in gaining the Battle Trance skill despite the short-term challenge they prove to be," Ichiro added, patting Tilly on the shoulder as he tried to shake off his dismal performance.

"After earlier, I thought I could dive right back into it..." Tilly replied sheepishly.

“I highly doubt you will ever be a man who finds much comfort in silence… So instead of training in seclusion, we will lean into your nature as a strength. Do not fight against your environment. Instead, let it wash through you, and as it passes, only quiet will remain.”

Meditation out of the way, they had grabbed dinner and Tilly found his small shack newly sandwiched between two large timber walls. They now supported structures that dwarfed his room, yet no one had touched the spot that the lapins had reserved for him. With a rueful shake of his head, Tilly entered his new home and collapsed in bed, barely remembering to shut the door behind him. He had pushed himself through another day of radical changes, demanding that his battered psyche adapt once again as the stakes around him were raised to new heights.

Lying there fully clothed, he desperately reached for unconsciousness, but some part of him stubbornly lingered in that place between waking and dreaming for a few more rebellious moments. He was changing, transforming into something totally different from what he had been, and too much of that change was happening beyond the boundaries of his comprehension.

He floated in that in-between, where time spirals and space returns to its beginning. As he transitioned out of wakefulness, his whole consciousness joined together, allowing belief and identity to supersede flesh and blood for a moment. A faint musical note echoed through the space, ringing over him, marking his progress and sealing it over him.

As his deeper consciousness rose to the surface, it attempted to follow the note to its source and saw a riot of color continuously bursting forth into wild patterns, reaching out to and through all things. Yet this song did not expand endlessly, it was surrounded by a crashing, hungry silence.

Tilly's deepest self watched as the screeching of a broken record twisted at the edges of the song, attempting to unravel it from the outside in just as it consumed him from the inside out.

…

8 hours later.

Tilly awoke to the industrious sounds of sawing and hammering just outside his thin walls. He rolled over, swallowing through the dryness in his mouth, and grinned as he found water and a simple meal of rice and eggs on a tray next to his bed.

He chowed down and guzzled the water, before slipping out into the early morning to find that he was once again far from the first one up in the city. Everywhere he looked he saw people hurrying, but not in the same way he had seen in the capital during its final hours. The people he saw moving through the slowly filling streets, walked with purpose. Their slack looks of hopelessness had been replaced by determination and in some cases Tilly even saw eagerness to attack the day's work.

Carpenters were shouting at Masons to hurry and lay stone for foundations, while behind them fishermen hauled in early morning catches in heavily laden baskets. It was clear that the entirety of the Three-Fold Alliance knew about the Boons and was intent on getting as much out of them as possible.

He hopped into the stream of people and headed through the burgeoning city to the parade grounds. His pace increased to a jog almost subconsciously as the energy of the surrounding populace lightened his steps. Minutes later he arrived at the agreed corner of the parade ground to find Ichiro already kneeling in meditation. Tilly’s face unknowingly turned down in a frown as he hurried over to take a position opposite the lapin in the dawning light of the day.

Ichiro’s breathing remained unchanged, but a small smile tweaked the corners of his mouth as Tilly studiously got into the breathing pattern and began to focus intently on his visualized flame.

Soldiers trickled onto the field around them, clanking along in unfamiliar gear. They cursed their own clumsiness and teased each other in turn, preparing for another intense day of training. Tilly breathed in their presence and breathed it out again. Taking Ichiro’s words to heart, he tried letting all the sensory input he was receiving move through him instead of trying to wall it out.

Commanders began bellowing out orders and harassing any stragglers. Formations were established, and drills began. Nearby someone tripped and the sound of a dusty thunk reached Tilly. His right leg began to cramp and the annoying muscular pinch demanded his attention for a long few minutes.

All these things and more flooded Tilly’s senses, and he did his best to take them in and let them go again, trying to find that deeper place he had touched in front of the temple.

But his flickering flame had only grown a small amount by the time Ichiro broke their meditation,

“That is enough for now, Jonathan Tillman, I can tell you are improving tremendously.”

“Yeah, not sure about that.” Tilly snarked as he got to his feet and shook out his sleeping lower extremities.

“What was found, can be found again. Do not be disappointed that all of your progress is not blindingly fast.” The lapin admonished, his stern expression looking out of place on his relatively young face. Or maybe he just looked young when Tilly compared him to his father, who seemed to be made out of granite marked by the long lines of the burden of leadership.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

The younger lapin's stern look, however, remained until Tilly relented,

“Oh, Alright! I just hate the thought that I’m doing less than I could be.” Tilly sighed, rolling his shoulders, and loosening his back.

The lapin nodded in solemn understanding before stepping back a few feet and clearing his throat,

“Now as your skill advances, your footing, hand placement, and form will all improve incrementally. Our best understanding of skill leveling is that as you take steps toward improving your natural capability in an area, the System supplements that improvement. So, for every level you advance a skill, you must take a significant step forward on your own, and the system adds to that improvement with a portion of its vast store of experiential knowledge. Knowledge gathered throughout the many Epochs this Land has seen.” Ichiro lectured, clearly reciting much of this by rote, and if Tilly didn’t miss his guess, he knew exactly who Ichiro’s tutor had been.

Tilly broke into the lecture with what he hoped was a clarifying question,

“But that is not the whole story with Martial skills. The System will not ‘supplement’ improvements there without you facing serious risk…Why is that?”

“Excellent question! It is actually for our benefit.” Ichiro answered excitedly, choosing not to pick up on the slight whine that may or may not have entered Tilly's voice at the tail end of the question.

“Can you imagine what the truly powerful would be able to do if they could advance such skills in the safety of their strongholds? Power would be perpetuated endlessly without challenge or change.“ He continued passionately,

“No, even the inheritors and great powers of this world must put themselves at risk to advance. In fact, the kind of training we are doing here would not typically be enough to significantly grow your skills, due to your knowledge of the non-lethality of our encounters. But with the boon in place, this loss is balanced out. Giving us the luxury of advancing our capability as combatants without risking our lives.” At this point, Ichiro’s expression was so enthusiastic that Tilly almost felt bad about the dread that was once again building internally at the thought of being cut and stabbed for a couple of hours.

“The only thing that will not improve with this training is your sense of what will be effective against different enemies. In this, you already have good instincts, but we will sharpen you as much as possible over the next weeks until you are operating at the full potential of your build.” He concluded, his gaze growing more serious as his hand moved to rest ominously on his sword.

“Now, I want you to try the same opening strike you used against me initially yesterday. I will respond by countering exactly how I did last time… anticipate my movements and see if you can’t produce a different result.”

…

The rest of the morning was a slog of painful repetition, as Tilly grew familiar with just how fast and capable Ichiro was with his sword, drawn or sheathed. They moved through the same close combat opener and his method for closing the gap on any enemy who had a counter for his ranged throws.

Ichiro struck Tilly with numerous painful but superficial cuts, stabbed him a few times, and even broke Tilly’s hip. Every injury was a shock to Tilly’s system and kept him on a razor edge every time he reset to face the calm swordsman. Every couple of exchanges, Ichiro would send Tilly to rest for ten to twenty minutes or until he was capable of full range of motion.

Even with Ichiro's occasional slips into distracted, far-off staring, it was still a brutal lesson in combat. The lapin’s inborn battle reflexes were more than enough to match Tilly even when he was disadvantaged by his condition. In one of these exchanges, when Ichiro’s face suddenly went slack, Tilly swore Ichiro's sword jerked the lapin's arm into a fanning block that intercepted both of his strikes without its wielder even realizing what had happened.

By the end of the session, Tilly found himself unable to repeat his feat of surprise from yesterday. Hundreds of blows taken and not a single one given in return...

It was grueling, both mentally and physically.

It reminded Tilly of some of the hardest gear workouts he had ever done; 75lbs of wet protective equipment doing its best to drag him into the ground as he carried dummies, climbed stairs and advanced a charged hose. That level of physicality, but with the abrasive mental element of facing constant injury from a violent opponent. Tilly’s fight-or-flight instinct took a beating along with his body suffering from decades of peacetime living.

Even his close familiarity with the pressures of a life-and-death profession fell far short of what he needed to develop to survive in this world of subsonic sword strikes and fists that could break through stone walls.

When Ichiro called an end to the spar, Tilly was unconsciously flinching away any time Ichiro brought his sword around to bear, his battered subconscious barely coping with the trauma.

With the sun sitting high in the sky, Ichiro considered his student's state carefully, measuring opportunities for further progress against risk,

“That is enough for today. I believe continuing will do more harm than good.” He finally said, sheathing his sword, and bowing to Tilly,

“You have shown incredible resilience for one new to this world, I am honored by your courage.” He declared coming up from his bow with something more solemn replacing his typical serene expression.

“Thanks… That means a lot, actually.” Tilly replied attempting to slide his hatchets into their loop several times before actually getting them in.

“Make sure to drink some water before you start meditating. I want you to take time to feel your way around the mental and emotional obstacles you are facing,” he said, his eyes softening, even as his tone remained heavy.

Tilly nodded along absently, moving slowly towards the water troughs as a limp in his right leg slowly resolved itself, the pain fading but its memory still affecting his movements mentally.

He absently cupped the water in his hands and splashed it over his face and sweat-soaked hair. As his mental fog began to clear he opened his blinking notification log to a sea of detailed injury logs. Wincing, he mentally invoked the damage notification filter once again, leaving only the numeric evidence of his progress.

Beginner Hatchet Level 12 > Level 14

Dual-Wielding (Hatchets) Level 8 > Level 11

Axe Throwing Level 15 > Level 16

A thrum of satisfaction reverberated through the numbness that accompanied continuous trauma. The whispers telling him to give up, to ask for a break, or even to run away were ruthlessly smothered by the proof of some sort of improvement. If he could show similar gains over the next weeks of training, he would more than double his current martial skill levels.

It wasn’t just his skill levels going up, he felt himself gaining a better understanding of the flow of combat itself. Sure, he hadn’t been able to come up with meaningful counters to the lapin’s speed or skill, but over the course of the morning, he had slowly developed a certain feel for where to attack. Instead of mindlessly following his skills' guidance, he found himself actively looking for the most effective places to push and mentally noting where it would be pointless to attempt a strike.

As those three notifications glowed in front of him, he squeezed every bit of hope and encouragement he could from them. He would do this again tomorrow... and the day after…

However many days it took, he would do what he had to. They all had to become stronger if they wanted to survive...

He had to survive and he had to get the Corrupted Seed out of him,

Whatever it took.