"Come on, Nico, pick up the damn gloves."
The gym was completely dark at 9pm. He hadn’t set foot in this room in so long that the layout felt like a stranger’s memory, something borrowed rather than lived in. His feet moved on instinct alone, brushing past shapes he could only half place in the dark.
The treadmills sat lined against the far wall like sleeping beasts, their belts still. Past them, the dumbbell rack, the bench press, a stack of kettlebells nobody ever touched.
Further in stood the mirrors that used to reflect a version of him that didn’t have to think about any of this.
Somewhere near the back, he remembered a rowing machine gathering dust, and beyond it a shelf of resistance bands curling off their hooks like sleeping snakes. None of it mattered tonight. None of it was why he’d come.
Luckily for him, he’d been too intangible to stumble into anything.
To learn all three shadowform methods, his instincts had decided that this was the right place. Heavy stuff. Things he could lift or hit that create a physical effect.
It was way better than experimenting with his phone and dropping it to the floor to crack. That had been his first idea anyway.
Nico’s training, however, did not start with the gyming. It started with something far worse, trying to kit up.
A rack of boxing gloves sat at the far end of the room, right next to where a punching bag hung still. He figured he’d start his training by testing his impact causing shadowform skills before moving on to heavier equipment.
At least, that was the plan. But then, his hands wouldn’t stop sweeping through the boxing gloves.
He’d tried so many techniques, just trying to pick it up. First, he clawed his fingers like a picker, carefully closing his hands in on the boxing gloves. It didn’t work. His hands went through instead.
He tried that a couple more times before resulting to raw force, batting repeatedly against the gloves while cursing out in anger. This lasted for minutes.
Soon enough, something responded. The mist on his hand disappeared for a split second, just in time to feel his palm touching the gloves. They curled off the rack rapidly and dropped to the floor.
Nico stared at them and sighed tiredly. His shoulders sagged as he crouched down, elbows on his knees, staring at the gloves like they’d personally wronged him.
"Seriously?"
All he wanted to do tonight was punch a bag for hours, get the hang of it, then go back to sleep. Thirty minutes in, and he hadn’t even begun phase one of the training.
He gave up trying to grab the gloves and moved towards the punching bag instead. He stood in front of it, fixed his stance, breathed in calmly, then threw his first punch.
His fist only went through.
"Come on!"
He threw the second punch, then the next, somewhat hoping that it would at least force out a second or two of his physical state. But it didn’t.
It took Nico another two hours of pure resolve and critical thinking before he landed his first physical hit in his shadow form. The bag bottled backwards for the first time, and he had just enough physical time left to deflect the impact.
His knuckles ached from the effort even though nothing should have touched them. He sat down for a moment, catching his breath, watching the bag sway gently before it went still again.
The math had been more complicated than it sounded.
Shadow form allowed him to assume the form of nothingness, but to activate the partial intangibility, he needed to learn how to deactivate his shadow form without actually deactivating it.
Which meant that he had to channel his consciousness through every part of his body, deciding which body part he needed tangible and which one he didn’t.
[Partial Tangibility: Learned] → [Selective Control]
It took more focus than Nico expected it to be.
But that was only the easy part.
The harder spectrum was the selective control, which allowed his entire body to remain in shadowform while simultaneously causing physical impacts.
For this training, Nico used a reflex bag, but with more extreme consequences. He strapped himself to the bag with a belt, so that he wouldn’t be able to dodge once the bag returned force.
He punched the bag once, harder than he was supposed to. The bag went all the way through and knocked him down through his physically exposed shoulder.
The next three hours were likewise unfavorable. Most of his tries had him expose a bit of his body due to defense reflex. The others were attacks that weren’t intangible enough.
He got knocked out over and over again, got hit in the face, even flexed his arms to block when he stopped trusting his form. Each time, he untangled himself from the belt, shook off the daze, and strapped back in without a word of complaint.
Eventually, he achieved it. At a climax point, he managed to land a blow on the reflex bag while in complete shadowform.
[Selective Control: Learned]
Apparently, however, that was his only successful attempt.
Nico glanced at the overhead gym clock. 2am. He’d been training for five hours, which was honestly way less time than he thought he’d been there.
He yawned tiredly as he pulled the belt strap off his body, rubbing at the sore patch on his shoulder where the bag had caught him earlier. He’d decided to stop there for tonight since he’d made significant progress and kept to his own words.
All that remained was perfecting the selective control. Hopefully, tomorrow wouldn’t be too late to complete the training. Until then, he was going to get some sleep.
Or at least he thought he was.
[Time spent within the darkness: 05:00:67]
[UP Gained: 123]
[Corruption: 2/10]
’Great. I totally forgot about being corrupted.’
***
The small ray of morning sunlight washing in through the windows jostled Mira out of sleep.
She yawned as her eyes opened, hands stretching as she moved away from the sunlight’s direction. Then the headache hit, a slight hungover pain in her forehead from drinking last night.
She looked beside her and saw her sisters, still fast asleep, snuggling comfortably with their pillows. Nira had a small smile on her face as she slept, almost like she was having a good dream.
Mira sat there for a moment longer than she needed to, watching the sunlight crawl slowly across the blanket, before finally forcing herself upright.
She got out of bed and went to the bathroom. She opened the closet tap and washed her face with some of the clean water before staring into the bathroom mirror.
She smiled back at her reflection as her mind drifted to Nico unwarrantably. She recalled his face from the other night, after he’d put a bandage over her wound.
Her face flushed when she remembered the kiss on the cheek.
She held her hand to her face, glancing at the finger where she’d once been cut. It was starting to heal off completely, crust replacing where an opening once was.
For a split second, she imagined what could have happened if she’d decided to make that kiss longer, or more intentional. Whether or not he’d respond positively to it.
It didn’t take too long to find her awareness again. She looked into the mirror once more, cheeks still warm, and brushed off her thoughts with a firm nod.
’Get it together, Mira,’ she thought. ’Too early for such thoughts.’
She closed the running tap and dried her face. Walking back into the room, she gave one glance at her sleeping sisters before heading downstairs to the mansion’s kitchen, still trying to shake the last of her headache along the way.
Jeff was already in there, shutting and opening cupboards, pulling basic ingredients out of them. Flour, turmeric, salt. Some other things that Mira, despite her cooking experience, couldn’t name. The smell of fresh bread already hung faintly in the air.
When Jeff saw her, he gave her a knowing smile that wasn’t really a smile.
"Not again, lady Mira." He said, shutting the cupboard. "If you keep coming here, I’m practically going to lose my job."
"You can’t force me out of the kitchen, Jeff." Mira said, walking in, already reaching for an apron hanging by the door. "Besides, I want to make breakfast today."