Life inside the mansion was a bizarre, contradictory experience. For the first two days, I felt like an imposter who had sneaked into a royal palace. Hunti, the stoic head butler, ran the household with military precision. The floors were perpetually spotless, the hearths were always roaring with warm fires, and the meals were decadent displays of wealth. The maids treated me like a fragile porcelain doll, constantly trying to fix my hair or offer me silk shawls.
It was comfortable. It was safe. And I absolutely hated it.
I didn’t want to be a pampered noblewoman waiting out the war in a gilded cage. I wanted power. I needed to ensure that no one could ever drop a burning roof on my head or butcher a family in front of my eyes ever again.
I do not want that tragedy to continue happening to whoever I come to care for.
Miklas understood this perfectly.
On the morning of my third day in Shepfold, he ordered me down to the enclosed stone courtyard behind the mansion. The early autumn air was biting, and the grass was slick with frost. Miklas was waiting for me, stripped of his heavy armour, wearing only a sleeveless linen tunic and leather trousers. He tossed a heavy, blunt wooden practice sword at my feet.
"You want to learn magic, Elvit," he said, his voice stripped of all its usual roguish warmth. He was in full Captain mode. "You want an Ancestral Rune. You want to manipulate the world’s Ember. But before we even think about the assessment test, you need to understand one fundamental truth: magic burns."
He stepped closer, tapping a hard finger against the center of my chest.
"Your body is a vessel. The Ember is a raging fire. If a Magister carves a rune into a weak, fragile vessel, the magic won’t empower you. It will boil your blood, tear your muscles from your bones, and turn you to ash from the inside out. Before you can reach the Dormant Bud stage, before you can condense your internal energy, you must physically break your limits. Are you ready for that?"
I looked down at my thin, fourteen-year-old arms. They were weak. But my mind was forged in the fires of a modern war. I picked up the heavy wooden sword, feeling its awkward weight pull at my shoulders, and looked him dead in the eye.
"Break me, Captain."
And he did.
The next four days were a blur of absolute, unadulterated physical hell.
Miklas didn’t care that I was a teenage girl. He treated me exactly like a fresh recruit in the 7th Legion, perhaps even worse. My mornings began before the sun even crested the high walls of the noble district. I was forced to run laps around the perimeter of the sprawling courtyard while carrying a canvas sack filled with river stones on my back. When my lungs burned and my legs gave out, causing me to collapse into the frosted grass, he would stand over me and bark orders until I dragged myself back to my feet.
"Again! If you stop running, the barbarians catch you! Again!" his voice would echo off the brick walls.
After the running came the physical conditioning. Push-ups, core exercises, and lifting heavy wooden logs until my arms shook so violently I couldn’t hold a spoon. Then came the combat drills. He made me swing the heavy wooden sword hundreds of times, correcting my posture with a swift tap of a stick against my shins whenever I slouched.
By the end of the second day, my hands were a mess of ruptured blisters and bleeding calluses. Every muscle in my body screamed in agony. The maids watched from the windows, whispering in absolute horror as the "young miss" of the house was dragged through the mud and beaten with training sticks.
But I never complained. Not once.
My body was failing constantly, betraying me at every turn. But my mind—the mind of a thirty-year-old veteran—refused to break; I did not wish to be powerless again. I knew the difference between pain and injury. Pain was just weakness leaving the body. Every time I fell, I gritted my teeth, tasted the copper tang of blood in my mouth, and pushed myself back up.
I could see the shift in Miklas’s amber eyes. Initially, he had pushed me hard to test my resolve, fully expecting the "naive village girl" to cry and quit by noon. But as the days bled into each other, his harshness turned into genuine, profound respect. He stopped treating me like a traumatised orphan and started treating me like a soldier.
However, the training wasn’t the only thing occupying Miklas’s time.
Every afternoon, right after my drills ended, he would wash, don his polished scale armor and the white mantle of his rank, and leave the mansion. He was tasked with rebuilding the 5th Cohort. Five hundred men.
Through the large windows of the dining hall, I would watch him walk down the hill toward the military district. When he left, his posture was immaculate—the proud, arrogant Knight-Mage of the Empire. But when he returned late at night, often smelling faintly of cheap ale and stale pipe smoke from the recruitment taverns, the mask slipped.
One evening, I found him sitting alone in the dark study, staring blankly at a thick leather ledger. I limped in, my muscles aching with every step, and placed a cup of hot tea on his desk.
"How goes the recruitment, Captain?" I asked softly.
Miklas rubbed his face with both hands, looking ten years older. "It is a nightmare, Elvit. The Commander expects me to just snap my fingers and conjure five hundred elite heavy infantrymen out of thin air. But the men volunteering... they are farm boys. Desperate refugees looking for three square meals and a pair of boots. They don’t know how to hold a shield wall. If I march them to the border against the Coalition, I will just be leading them to a slaughterhouse."
Survivor’s guilt, I noted silently. He is terrified of losing another five hundred men.
"You will train them," I stated, my voice firm, devoid of pity but full of absolute certainty. "Just like you are training me. You will break them down and build them into a wall of steel. Because you are the Captain of the 5th."
Miklas looked up at me. He took in my bruised face, my bandaged hands, and the mud stained on my trousers. A slow, tired smile spread across his face, and some of the heavy darkness left his eyes.
"You have a terrifyingly pragmatic way of looking at the world, little girl. Go to sleep. Tomorrow is your final day of hell before the assessment."
The sixth day of my stay in Shepfold—the day before the resonance crystal test—was the hardest. Miklas pushed me until I was entirely empty, forcing me to spar with him using the wooden blades. I couldn’t land a single hit. He moved like a ghost, casually sidestepping my desperate, exhausted swings, lightly tapping me on the ribs or the head to show me where I would have been gutted.
When the sun finally began to set, casting long, fiery orange shadows across the courtyard, I fell to my knees, gasping for air. My wooden sword slipped from my bloody, wrapped hands and clattered onto the cobblestones. I couldn’t lift my arms. I had nothing left.
Miklas stood over me, his breathing perfectly even, not a single drop of sweat on his brow. He looked down at me in silence for a long moment. Then, he tossed his wooden sword away and extended a scarred, calloused hand toward me.
"Get up, Elvit."
I stared at his hand. I commanded my arms to move, but they simply refused. So, using my core and my legs, I awkwardly shifted my weight, stumbled, and finally managed to stand upright on my own, ignoring his offered hand.
Miklas’s lips twitched upward into a proud smirk.
"Look at you," he said softly.
I looked down at myself. I was covered in dirt, sweat, and bruises. My knuckles were split. But as I took a deep breath, I realized something. My posture had changed. The frail, slouching village girl was gone. My shoulders were pulled back. My core was tight. The lingering pain from my broken ankle was a distant memory. My body felt denser, grounded, like a coiled spring ready to snap.
"You are nowhere near the physical threshold of a Dormant Bud," Miklas said, crossing his arms. "That takes years. But you have built the foundation. Your vessel is no longer glass; it is raw iron. Whatever happens at the Magister’s court tomorrow, whatever the crystal says about your potential to manipulate the Ember... you are a survivor."
A strange, unfamiliar warmth bloomed in my chest. For the first time since waking up in this chaotic, brutal world under a pile of burning rubble, I didn’t feel entirely helpless.
"Thank you, Miklas," I breathed out.
"Don’t thank me yet," he grinned, his roguish, shameless humor finally returning. "If the crystal glows tomorrow, the real training begins. Now go take a bath. You smell worse than the refugee camps."
As I limped back toward the mansion, a mix of anxiety and thrilling anticipation knotted in my stomach. Tomorrow, I would face the crystal. Tomorrow, I would find out if I was destined to be a commoner in a world of monsters, or if I had the spark to become a monster myself.