“You,” Oliver accused Adeline, “are a cruel and evil woman.” He spoke from where he was sprawled on the cold stone floor, on his back and recovering from yet another merciless beating at his mentor’s hands.

Adeline rolled her shining gray eyes at him. “Oh, stop with the compliments,” she drawled. “I didn't even hit you that hard. You’re fine.”

“My ribs beg to differ!”

“The only thing I hurt is your pride. Sit up.”

Oliver groaned, but did so. Adeline’s witty remarks did not, in fact, make his sides protest any less from the motion.

The two were in one of many private rooms in Correntry’s most prominent practice hall. Gift abilities and attribute boosts were great, but they could never substitute for routine training and physical conditioning, as most lazy sentinels found out–around the same time their gifts alone proved insufficient to fend off a murderous outsider. Practice halls like this one catered to the more dedicated gifted, giving them a comfortable (and durable) place to practice their skills in private.

The room was little more than a stone cube, perhaps twenty feet to a side. A few plain furnishings were arranged along one side, in addition to some simple weights and other workout equipment designed for boosted attributes, but the majority of the room was dominated by a clearly marked dueling ring. Adeline once claimed there were rooms with other specialty equipment, but they always seemed to end up in one like this.

The only concession made for Oliver’s specific needs was the large window that sat open on one wall. The air flow was a necessity for his wind abilities–Adeline insisted he’d gain more fine control as his gift of wind leveled up, but for now he mostly specialized in either widespread sweeping attacks or focused bursts of intense air. In a sealed room, those same attacks were significantly less effective.

“You’re getting better,” she reassured him, despite the way her eyes sparkled with amusement and the thorough thrashing she had just given him. That had been their third bout of the day, and each had ended the same way. “Get a glass of water and we’ll go again.”

Oliver groaned louder, pushing himself to his feet as he complained. “Can we please call it a day, Adel? My everything hurts.”

Adeline nodded in mock sympathy, pointedly ignoring his best efforts to sway her. “Sure. I bet we can convince the next tribe of kobolds we find to call it good once they’ve gotten in a couple hits too, right?”

Oliver rolled his eyes, but he at least had the sense to stop complaining for the time it took him to gulp down a cup of water.

After enduring years of training to prepare him for his gifts, Oliver had thought himself fairly skilled. He knew, of course, that he’d never match up to someone with the right gifts to counter his own, but he knew how to handle himself well enough. His father may not have liked him much, but no expense was spared on his instruction, physically or mentally.

Just as Adeline had proven that his education was lacking at best and completely incorrect at worst, she had also torn apart his carefully honed fighting abilities. She incessantly needled at the way his conservative tendencies impacted his success in combat, the way he allowed the years of protocol drilled into his head to prevent him from innovating under stress, and the overall lackluster ways he used his gifts.

Growing up, Oliver was often disappointed by the idea of Novice level. The benefits were so slight, and the abilities so few, that it had always seemed like a speed bump more than an achievement by itself. Adeline had, quite thoroughly, shown him the mistake of that mindset. Conventionally trained nobles like himself or his erstwhile rival Allid were tutored in specific fighting styles from a young age, then cultivated their gift sets to enhance those techniques. Their abilities became flourishes and versatile additions to their more conventional skills.

By casting aside his father’s plans and gaining the gift of the vanguard rather than the gift of the fencer, Oliver had also given up that option. The training he had spent his preteen and teenage years undergoing had specialized in a lightning quick, precise combat style that favored slender rapiers and sabers, which most closely matched the abilities of the gift of the fencer. His new powerset, from the gifts of wind and the vanguard, was far more focused on flexibility and adaptation to different circumstances.

To Adeline, however, this was the opposite of a problem. She framed it as Oliver’s chance to rebuild his fighting style from the ground up, implementing his core abilities into every aspect of how he fought. Ideally, she claimed, it would allow him to use his abilities more effectively than a more conventionally trained fighter. By the time he reached Initiate, the difference between him and someone like Allid would, hypothetically, be stark.

However, it would be a long and painful road to get there.

Oliver finished his water and turned back to Adeline. They had both foregone armor for the day to focus on technique rather than endurance, and instead wore plain practice clothes of loose tan linen. Oliver felt like he was wearing a potato sack, but somehow Adeline still managed to make the simple ensemble look attractive, with it seeming to cling to her curves even while billowing loosely around her joints.

Recognizing the direction of his thoughts–and eyes–Oliver coughed and turned to study the fresh blue sky outside instead. His quintessence pool was nearing empty, but the fresh breeze blowing through the window still felt like the beckoning of an old friend.

“I’m starting to think I need to find you a barber,” Adeline observed absently, brushing her fingers through the mop of curls at the knape of his neck, fresh lemongrass perfume tickling his nose as she stepped closer to him.

Oliver tried very hard to keep the sudden tension from showing in his neck and shoulders. He knew Adeline would notice such an obvious tell. “Why?” he asked. To his disappointment, his voice was tight as he turned to face her.

Adeline arched an eyebrow, showing she had noticed the reaction, but didn’t press him on it. She had gotten good at that over the past few months, though she clearly held out hope he’d open up on his own eventually. “Your hair, that’s all. You’re getting sort of overgrown up there.”

Oliver frowned and lifted a hand to touch his hair. She was right–his dark brown locks had grown out to a length his father would never have tolerated. With it so long, his hair’s natural waviness always seemed to end up in a lock of curls and tangles when he was sweaty. “I like it long,” he told her, his tone slightly defensive.

Again, Adeline made a pensive face, clearly hoping for further explanation. When one clearly wasn’t forthcoming, she shrugged. “Fine, fine. But you’ve gotta at least let me tidy it up at some point, okay? Long hair doesn’t have to mean messy hair, you know.”

Oliver’s gaze drifted to Adeline’s own long blonde hair, tied back in a tail that cascaded down to her shoulder blades. It was perfectly tended as always, a smooth waterfall of golden thread. “That… sounds nice,” he agreed reluctantly.

Adeline rolled her eyes. “We really need to work on loosening you up, Oli. Now c’mon, sword up!”

Oliver started a little at her tone, then grinned. For some reason, he suddenly felt much more ready for another round. His wooden practice sword came up in a relaxed guard, and before Adeline could even say “go,” he lunged at her.

#

“That was almost not embarrassing!” Adeline congratulated Oliver at the end of their session. After half a dozen duels with the older woman, Oliver had barely managed to stagger over to one of the uncomfortable wooden chairs against the wall before he collapsed. Despite the unyielding nature of the wood, clearly made by a sadistic carpenter, he felt ready to fall asleep in the awkward seat.

“What, because I lasted five whole minutes in that last round?” Oliver asked between panting breaths, every word accompanied by a wince of discomfort.

“Almost five minutes,” Adeline corrected him without a hint of remorse. “And yes. You’re actually using your wind abilities now. There at the end, when you were using air bursts to parry my weapon without interrupting the flow of your attacks, that was actually quite excellent!”

“You still thrashed me.”

Adeline rolled her eyes. “Oliver, I’ve got a decade of experience and three levels on you. If you could beat me, there’d be something horribly wrong.”

“Can I at least have a potion this time?” Oliver asked, his voice little more than a shallow wheeze.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

To Oliver’s understanding, most guests in the practice hall’s facilities used potions during their training, to the point that the hall kept an alchemist on staff who specialized in brewing cheap and plentiful energy potions. Certain elixirs could even restore more specialized resources like Oliver’s quintessence pool, allowing him to fight as if he was fresh and rested every bout. But Adeline disdained them for several reasons.

“First of all,” Adeline had explained the first time Oliver brought it up, “those sorts of potions add up, and I’ll remind you I’m training you for free. If you want me to blow a few hundred rings every day we train, you better get a lot prettier, fast.” Adeline followed the comment with a playful wink to show Oliver she was joking, but otherwise ignored his fiercely blushing face.

“Secondly, I don’t like training under ideal circumstances.” Her face got considerably more serious as she explained, and Oliver’s blush faded. “Ideal circumstances are great. They’re what noble pups and courtiers and such train for, because it’s when they look the most impressive. Battle-gifted, especially at higher levels, can do some pretty impressive stuff when we go all out.”

“But it’s not about what you can do when you're rested, refreshed, and fighting on your best terms. It’s about how you handle yourself when you’re exhausted from a big fight, or a long string of little ones, and the enemy gets the drop on you. Or when you find yourself up against an enemy significantly stronger than you,” she gestured between them as she spoke, “and you don’t have time for a potion to get you out of it. That’s when unprepared gifted die. It doesn’t matter if you’re a knight, a sentinel, a warden, or a hunter. It’s the worst case scenarios that define us.”

Given all of that, Oliver expected his request to get shot down, despite his pain and exhaustion, but to his surprise, Adeline wavered a little bit. She bit her bottom lip thoughtfully, and Oliver let his gaze drop to the ground. Even as weary as he was, that expression, combined with the way her training clothes clung to her, was a little too much for him.

“Fine,” she finally said with a sigh. “I’ll buy you a potion–on one condition.”

Oliver’s head shot up despite himself, and he winced at the sudden pain in his tight neck from the motion. “Really?” he asked, reaching up to massage his sore muscles.

“Yes, really, “Adeline replied. “I was serious about you needing to loosen up before you break, Oli. So. I’ll give you a potion, a good one too, if you agree to come out tonight.” Adeline’s metallic eyes danced. “Correntry has a few good taverns I’d like to check out. Deal?”

Oliver sighed. Adeline had invited him out with her a few times since they arrived in the trade city, and he had always found an excuse to get out of it. There were more than a couple good reasons he didn’t look forward to the idea of going out in a loud and uncomfortable setting with his gorgeous mentor. But he also knew that Adeline had a way of getting what she wanted eventually.

“Fine,” he relented. “Deal.”

#

The tavern was loud.

Oliver wasn’t even sure where Adeline had found the place. It was an odd mixture of a high class restaurant, with fine foods and expensive, often magical, assortments of alcohol served by attractive serving staff, and a low class bar, complete with a crowded taproom and even a performing bard.

The Grime and Glory catered to a particular clientele: battle-gifted. In a trade city like Correntry, this mostly meant off-duty wardens, but there were a smattering of visiting hunters, mercenaries, guards, and even sentinels from the bastion cities who stopped to rest while traversing the heartlands.

Martially-inclined gift bearers were rare in the greater scope of the Realm, and even less common outside the bastion cities. In places like Elliven, that were dedicated to controlling the dangers of the Wastes, battle-gifted were worth their weight in gold. Only a special kind of person had the natural inclination to delve into the Wastes, the diligence to level up, and the skill to succeed and survive in combat. Sentinels were among the most respected citizens in any of the bastion cities, a respect that transcended even class–indeed, most noble families could trace their lineage back to common battle-gifted that made their name in the Wastes.

In the more settled heartlands, with monsters fewer and farther apart, there was less rigid tradition around honoring those who possessed a knack for violence. Instead, Correntry’s respect for battle-gifted was born from the simple fact that they tended to have significant expendable income. While the average hunter or mercenary couldn’t hope to stand toe-to-toe with a bastion-trained sentinel in a duel, their skills were still valuable enough to command a significant fee for their work, and Correntry’s wardens were paid even more highly.

All of which led to places like the Grime and Glory, pubs catering to those who were experiencing a lull between jobs and providing an opportunity for them to burn through their hard-earned money. As most of them came to such establishments with the express purpose of emptying their overfull purses, it tended to work out for everyone involved.

Except for Oliver, who would’ve much rather been back at his innroom, reading.

He sighed into the half-full mug of ale that he’d been sipping at for most of an hour. It wasn’t even magical, so it was only mildly able to affect him through his increased resilience. Against his will, Oliver’s eyes slowly drifted up and across the crowded room, to where Adeline was leaning against the bar, sipping an orange tinted wine, a flirtatious smile dancing across her lips as she exchanged light words with a woman he didn’t recognize.

Oliver knew that the torch he carried for his mentor was never going to be anything more than that, but watching the way she acted around the other woman only pounded the point home. He took another sip of his drink, a surprisingly light, golden brown ale. It did little to settle the twisted discomfort in his stomach.

Oliver sighed to himself. If she was so preoccupied, maybe Adeline wouldn’t notice him slipping out…

His thoughts of escape were interrupted by someone taking a seat next to him. His tucked away hightop wasn’t exactly an alluring table, and his dour expression didn’t make it any more attractive, but the two young women, both around his age, now sitting across from him didn't seem to care.

“You’re Adeline’s new squire, right?” one asked. She was the smaller of the two, a tiny slip of a girl with a mane of wild red hair that seemed to catch and reflect the firelight. Her otherwise porcelain skin was broken up by a wild scattering of freckles over her face and shoulders, exposed as they were by her loose cotton dress.

“Uhm… yeah. Yeah, I’m Oliver,” he replied, bewildered. “How do you know Adeline?”

“We’re warden recruits,” the other girl explained. She was a marked contrast to her petite friend, several inches taller than Oliver and built out of solid, defined muscle, a build even bulkier than his own athletic physique. Her skin was several shades darker than the norm for Correntry, a deep olive shade that went well with the mossy green color of her close-cropped hair. “We work with Farris,” she tilted her head to indicate the woman Adeline was speaking with.

“Oh.” Oliver looked between the two. The etiquette training he had spent years undergoing at his father’s command completely failed him in a setting so far removed from the court he had been raised in, and he found himself grasping at straws. Somehow, “why are you talking to me then?” didn’t seem an appropriate follow-up. They had seen Adeline flirting with their mentor, but he didn’t understand why that would make them interested in him.

Finally, he managed to ask, “So… what’s it like being a warden?

“Mostly boring training,” the smaller girl replied with a grin. “With the occasional bout of life-threatening danger.”

“Sounds familiar.” Oliver tried for a smile, but he couldn’t help but feel like his reply was awkward. Still, the other girl smiled back, so he must’ve done something right. She really was quite pretty…

“I’m Rose, by the way,” the first girl said, “and this is Beryl.” She delicately patted her brawny friend's arm–a gesture of casual affection that had Oliver suppressing another sigh. Maybe she was just being polite after all. Was everyone in this tavern sun-bound?

“A pleasure,” he responded with the mechanical timing drilled into him by his childhood etiquette tutors. At least those lessons did something to help him seem like less of a fool to these two. “Rose and Beryl… those are northern names, right? Are you two from the Twin Cities?”

“Can’t get nothin’ past you, huh?” Beryl asked. The larger girl carried a tankard similar to Oliver’s, but unlike him, she looked to be well on her way to draining it.

“Be nice, Beryl,” Rose scolded her friend, before offering Oliver a small, apologetic smile. “Sorry. She gets like that when she’s had a few. But yes, we’re both from Dela originally.” Rose offered Oliver a small smile, and he tried to return it, despite how forced and rigid it felt on his face.

“Do you mind if I ask what brings you all the way out here?” The Twin Cities of Cita and Dela were the northernmost settlements in the Realm, tasked with the management of the vast Verdant Wastes that defined the Realm’s northern borders. It would be a journey of months to reach Correntry, in the center of the southern heartlands, from those distant territories.

The pert smile Rose had worn since the two girls sat down soured a little. “Oh, circumstances, you know.” Her reply was as airy as ever, but some sort of pain lurked behind the words, obvious even to Oliver.

“Of course. My apologies, it wasn’t my intention to pry.”

“It’s fine.”

“Nothing worth dwelling on tonight.” Beryl’s brash tone had also faded to something more serious as she slid a comforting hand to her friend’s arm. Rose offered a wan smile before turning back to Oliver, while the brawny woman held out her tankard. “To family, by blood or spirit.”

Oliver nodded. He didn’t recognize the toast despite the ritualistic feel of the words, but it was a sentiment he could fully agree with. For once, he managed to come up with a reply that sounded good, and he lifted his own cup. “To family, bound or found.”

Beryl grinned and bumped her tankard against his. “Bound or found! I like that!”

Rose managed to revive her own smile, and added her delicate glass of dark wine to the toast.

“Welllll, look at these three! How cute!” Adeline’s drunken voice interrupted the moment, as she and the warden she had been flirting with, Farris, joined them at their table.

Oliver cringed at her volume. As serious as she was during training and in the field, he sometimes forgot that Adeline was less than a decade older than him, and she seemed much more like her twenty-some years than normal as she swayed over to the table.

“I think you might’ve had enough, Adel,” Oliver told the older knight gently.

“Boooo!” she jeered at him, taking another swig of her wine, which looked only marginally ridiculous given the elegant glass she was drinking from.

The three wardens grinned, and Adeline’s drinking companion exchanged introductions with Oliver. Farris was tall for a woman, with a body of compact curves and spingsteel muscle. Her features were striking in an unconventional way, and she walked with an easy, relaxed confidence.

“Isn’t she supposed to be your mentor? A silver knight and all that?” Rose leaned a little closer to Oliver as she spoke, arching a delicate eyebrow at his mentor’s behavior.

He groaned and slouched in his seat. “Sometimes I wonder.”

“Let’s get another round!” Adeline cheered.