If I had just stopped there, I would have been fine. But after Veazey left, as the sun went down in the Zone, the old solar floodlights came on and I felt an itch, a sense of dread that I wasn’t learning fast enough or training hard enough.

I had felt this feeling before, when I was rushing on deadline or trying to impress a manager, but I had never felt it purely on my own, or for anything concerning my physical body. Is this why people trained so hard for sports? Is this what kept Olympic athletes waking up every morning before the crack of dawn?

I looked over the cars I had been kicking around and decided to try and stack them, using a combination of strength and levitation. I tried to stack them by weight, using fortitude and my warded hands, toughened like I was wearing magical gloves.

Everything went great for a while, but the other stacks were made of crushed cars, pressed tightly together after they had been reduced to cubes. My stack of five looked stable enough, but before I could turn to get the next car, the stack collapsed, and a car dropped straight on top of me from about ten feet up.

My wards absorbed some of the impact as I fell backwards into the dirt with a car on my legs, but suddenly I was alone, injured, in the dark, with a ton of rusted metal on top of me. I didn’t completely lose fortitude or my wards, but they flickered enough to let me feel something was terribly wrong.

I started panting and flailing around, trying to push the car off me, but I couldn’t focus my strength, so I was pushing with nothing but my human noodle arms. I gritted my teeth through the pain and tried to focus. I hadn’t lost the spell yet, if I could just keep my shit together for a few seconds.

Emotion. I needed a more useful emotion. What’s the opposite of fear? If I couldn’t find courage, maybe anger would work. So, I let myself get angry about the pain, angry about my own stupidity, and angry about the fucking demons who were forcing me to turn myself into something I was never meant to be.

I threw the car off me and saw that my legs were really, really fucked, with my bones clearly broken and my ankle turned in a way an ankle is never supposed to turn. What kind of idiot tries this kind of thing alone in the middle of the night? Then the pain hit, and I realized I had to do something before I passed out.

“Jeeves!” I shouted. “Pull up bookmark for bone and tissue healing from section marked Tobias!”

“Good evening, sir!” Jeeves said. “I’m showing sixty-two unread messages, eight pending voicemails, three unpaid bills and ninety entries from your premium…”

“Jeeves, shut the fuck up! Code red, display Taltorak, Healing!”

Tobias Kovach was one of the greatest healers who ever lived, a mage who combined medicine and magic to create a beautiful, layered healing spell that started as ordinary first aid and regenerated more and more as the mage held concentration.

The spell was written in stages. A caster could just do the first ten runes or so to handle basic first aid and then keep going to the next five and the next five and so forth, to heal more sensitive and complex injuries.

My broken bones only required ten runes to fix, but I was not prepared for the excruciating pain of feeling them snap back into place as I watched. The magic yanked my leg back into position, rotating the broken foot faster and harder than it should ever go, with no anesthesia between me and the pain. Maintaining concentration on wards and fortitude turned out to be a cakewalk compared to maintaining concentration on a spell that was healing my body.

I think the sounds distracted me more than the pain, squishing and crackling as I watched my legs move independently under my jeans. Finally, it was over, and I was able to gingerly rise to my feet on brand new bones. I couldn’t tell if I felt great because the spell had rejuvenated my whole body, or if normal just felt great compared to the pain that had finally stopped.

Later I would notice new tissue crisscrossing up and down my legs and abdomen, new and soft like baby skin, making me feel like a marbled steak. The damage had been healed but there was no way I could hide this from Lydia. I limped back to my building as if I was still injured, dreading the angry demon waiting for me at home.

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* * *

Lydia spent twenty minutes trying to convince me to train somewhere she could watch. This was a perfectly sane request. Lydia would be the perfect training companion, already familiar with the battles and the pitfalls ahead of me. She would have warned me about the teetering car, and she would have been strong enough to help get it off me.

The thought of training with her by my side was starting to sound… fun. A break from the loneliness of this regimen I had created for myself, on the days when I had to work without Veazey. That was Lydia’s ultimate temptation. She didn’t have to rush the next stage of my seduction. All she had to do was wait.

* * *

I had a hundred videos of Captain Cobalt training, but most of them were newsreels and PR stuff, and most of it looked absurdly old-fashioned after a childhood spent watching modern action movies. Most of it was just boxing.

The first one was just a PR stunt of the Captain smashing a line of twenty heavy bags at a school gym, sending them flying, one after the other, to titters and laughter from children. His training regimen got progressively more sophisticated through the decades, until he was dodging like a movie star and throwing in kicks with the punches.

It still looked simple compared to the kinetic, rapid-fire pace of Hollywood movie fights, but at my level, simple was good. I turned some of his basic boxing videos into training holograms and got my own heavy bag from the abandoned sporting goods store.

I broke a couple chains before I realized I couldn’t train at full strength; but I could still put wards up and get used to maintaining a spell while I was punching stuff. Wards turned out to be way better than gloves. I had never done any kind of regular exercise before, so these early sessions were exhausting, until I learned to regulate the fortitude spell, keeping the endurance and trickle of regeneration, while keeping my strength more or less human.

Training went much better after that, because I didn’t have to stop and rest. I set timers to remind me to drink water every hour or so, but after the first few days, I was able to go for ten, twelve hours a day, jumping rope, pounding on bags, lifting weights, and dodging holographic bad guys in my training room.

Veazey let me borrow his awesome self-driving truck to haul trash out of Crazy Henry’s, leaving me with a wide-open space to set up heavy bags and a weight bench. Lifting weights was tricky, because it was way too easy to cheat. I had to learn to hold my strength back and force myself to stay human, so I could strengthen my body instead of my magic and stop myself from slipping into levitation every time I tried to jump rope.

My training holograms were still showing way more red than green as I tried to copy Captain Cobalt’s fighting style. My confidence was growing rapidly, but holograms don’t hit back, and there’s only so much you can learn from punching air.

Captain Cobalt was so strong it was almost impossible to find someone he could train with. Later in his career, he learned to hold back his strength and spar with other strong heroes like Daedalus and Sonny Mao, but in the early days, it was just him.

A bunch of Bluestar technical guys started making robots for him. At first, they were just a set of moving pads on gimbals that let him stand in a sphere and punch moving targets in all directions. By the time he died, he was fighting fully autonomous training robots, strong enough, fast enough, and smart enough to put up a real fight.

I looked them up and found they were crazy expensive, hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy one outright. I finally found one I could get really cheap, but it came with a stern warning to never plug it in…

* * *

A few days later, I called Veazey to help with transportation of a five-hundred-pound sparring partner.

Veazey did robot maintenance for a living, so he was initially impressed. “This came straight from a Bluestar training room, how did you afford this?”

“I got him for a great price because he’s defective. A supervillain reprogrammed him to go berserk and kill heroes that trained with him, any time he could get one of them alone. That dent is where Sonny Mao punched him. Should be a collector’s item, but I got it for a thousand bucks, because his AI isn’t totally purged. He doesn’t always stay at the power level you set him to, and he doesn’t always stop when you say stop. I named him Freddy, after one of my bullies from grade school.”

“Tim, this thing was designed to punch guys like Minerva and Captain Cobalt. If it catches you with your magic down, it could smash your skull like a watermelon!”

“Right,” I said. “That’s the point. If he can hurt me with my wards down, then I can’t ever let him catch me with my wards down. You showed me that. Veazey, for this to work, the punches have to be real, the danger has to be real, and the fear has to be real, or I’m just playing a fucking game here.

“I have to train like this because I’m not like you and those Texas guys. I do not have the heart of a warrior. In my heart, I’m a punching bag, so the hardest part of this fight will be forcing myself to hit back.”

* * *

The first day I got him, I set Freddy to level three and spent the afternoon dodging and punching him. It felt fantastic, learning to punch like Captain Cobalt and feel it work in real time, against a real opponent did more for my confidence than anything I had done so far. I could feel myself getting stronger with each punch I threw and each punch that bounced off me.

And if Freddy quietly dialed himself to full power while we were working out, I took it as a compliment, that the files left in his memory thought I was Captain Cobalt himself.