Caius didn’t sleep.
There was no rational way his mind could have shut down after everything that had happened, a goddess whispering in his skull about Enforcers and cosmic anomalies, a Heretic promising him a devil’s bargain, his own father suddenly treating him like an asset worth investing in rather than a stain worth ignoring.
So when the first gray light of dawn crept through his shattered window, he was already awake, sitting cross-legged on the floor amid the wreckage of his bedroom, running through everything he actually knew.
He had a System.
He had a Grimoire with two working skills and one locked behind a level requirement.
He had a dying goddess buying him time against Saint-rank Enforcers who might arrive within the month.
He had a Heretic circling him like a patient predator, and somewhere out there, decades ahead of schedule, a reincarnated God of Light was presumably still stumbling through his own early childhood, blissfully unaware that his eventual nemesis had already been activated far too soon.
None of it added up to anything except one brutally obvious conclusion.
He needed to get stronger, immediately, by any means necessary.
A sharp knock rattled his broken door frame precisely as the sun cleared the eastern wall.
“Training yard. Now,” Kaelan’s voice called through the gap, flat and businesslike, none of the murderous fury from the night before lingering in his tone.
“Father’s orders. Don’t make me drag you.”
Caius pulled himself up, wincing at the dull ache still lingering from last night’s gashes, and followed his brother down through the estate’s corridors toward the training grounds.
The Draxos training yard was exactly as brutal as he remembered from his brief, avoided glimpses over the past seven days.
A wide expanse of hardened earth ringed by scorch marks and old bloodstains that had never quite washed out of the ground, lined on one side by racks of weapons ranging from standard steel to artifacts humming with faint residual mana.
A woman was already waiting there, arms crossed, her posture radiating the particular stillness of someone who could kill you in four different ways before you finished blinking.
She was perhaps thirty, lean and scarred, her left arm wrapped in tight leather bracers that seemed to pulse faintly with dark red light in rhythm with her heartbeat.
“This is Instructor Var,” Kaelan said, gesturing toward her.
“Formerly a Captain in the border legion. Father’s assigned her to handle your combat education personally.”
Var’s eyes swept over Caius with the clinical disinterest of someone evaluating a slab of meat for freshness.
“Seventeen years old, Ash contract, zero formal combat training, and apparently important enough that a Heretic crossed a four-hundred-year wardline to introduce himself personally.” Her mouth twisted into something that wasn’t quite a smile.
“This should be interesting.”
“I’ll leave him to you,” Kaelan said, already turning to leave.
He paused halfway across the yard, glancing back at Caius with an expression that had shifted, again, into something Caius couldn’t quite categorize.
Not the contempt from before.
Something uncertain, still recalibrating.
“Don’t die in the first hour. Father would be annoyed.”
Then he was gone, leaving Caius alone with a woman who could apparently kill armies with the leather bracer on her arm.
“Show me your skills,” Var said without preamble.
“Everything you’ve got. I want to see what I’m working with before I decide how badly I need to break you down and rebuild you.”
Caius summoned Ember Lash, the condensed cinder whip crackling to life in his palm, and Var’s eyebrows rose fractionally.
“Ash-forged weapon manifestation,” she noted, circling him slowly, evaluating the whip with a professional’s eye.
“Rare application. Most Ash-blessed default to smoke concealment or corrosive applications. A weapon skill this early in your development is unusual.” She stopped circling.
“Attack me.”
Caius blinked.
“What?”
“Attack me,” Var repeated, utterly deadpan.
“I won’t retaliate with lethal force. I need to see your instincts under pressure, not your ability to hit a stationary target.”
Caius hesitated for exactly one second before lunging, snapping the whip toward Var’s exposed shoulder.
She didn’t dodge.
She simply caught the burning cinder mid-air with her bare hand, the leather bracer flaring dark red as it absorbed the impact without so much as a scorch mark appearing on her skin, and yanked hard enough to send Caius stumbling forward off balance.
“Predictable trajectory. Full commitment on a single strike with no follow-up plan,” Var said, releasing the whip and stepping back into a ready stance.
“You’d be dead against anyone above Exemplar rank in under three seconds. Again. This time, don’t commit fully to the first strike.”
They went at it for nearly an hour, Var systematically dismantling every instinct Caius had carried over from a lifetime of watching action movies and reading progression fantasy novels, replacing his sloppy, desperate improvisation with something closer to actual technique.
He was drenched in sweat, his newly upgraded Vitality the only thing keeping him upright through the sheer physical punishment of it, when Var finally called a halt.
“You have decent reflexes for someone with zero formal training,” she admitted grudgingly, tossing him a water skin.
“Your Agility stat is unusually high for a fresh Ash contract. Someone’s been feeding you resources outside normal channels.”
Caius froze mid-drink, caught off guard by how close she’d landed to the truth without actually knowing it.
“Lucky bloodline traits,” he said carefully, which was a lie flimsy enough that Var’s narrowed eyes suggested she didn’t buy it for a second, though she chose not to press the issue further. You are reading on novelping(.)com, the official source.
“Whatever the source, it won’t matter if you can’t translate raw stats into actual combat application,” Var said instead.
“We’ll train daily until your Academy enrollment. Given the timeline your father’s insisting on, that gives us considerably less time than I’d prefer to work with.”
“How much time exactly?” Caius asked, dread already pooling in his stomach.
“Two weeks,” Var said flatly.
“Your father’s moved your admission date forward. Apparently whatever happened last night convinced him waiting for the standard enrollment season was no longer an acceptable risk.”
Two weeks.
Caius’s mind raced through the implications.
Two weeks to prepare for an environment specifically designed as the Protagonist’s hunting ground, populated by the exact heroines destined for eventual ritual slaughter, all while a goddess bought him uncertain time against Saint-rank Enforcers and a Heretic circled somewhere in the shadows with an offer Caius still hadn’t fully processed.
Before he could spiral further into anxious calculation, a sharp whistle cut across the training yard, and one of the estate’s messenger boys came sprinting toward them, clutching a sealed envelope stamped with an ornate golden crest Caius didn’t immediately recognize.
“Young Master Draxos,” the boy gasped, skidding to a halt and bowing hastily.
“Urgent correspondence, delivered by Temple courier not ten minutes ago. Marked for your eyes only, by order of the Ashborn High Council.”
Caius’s stomach dropped through the floor entirely.
The High Council.
Already.
Var’s expression sharpened with sudden alertness, her earlier clinical detachment vanishing entirely.
“That’s fast,” she muttered, more to herself than to him.
“Council correspondence usually takes weeks to process, even for urgent matters.”
Caius took the envelope with trembling hands, breaking the golden wax seal, and unfolded the single sheet of parchment inside.
The elegant, formal script swam briefly before his eyes as he forced himself to focus.
[By Order of the Ashborn High Council, in response to divine sponsorship petition filed by Ashra, Minor Goddess of Ash and Embers, regarding the mortal vessel Caius Draxos:]
[Sponsorship request DENIED.]
[An Enforcement Evaluation has been authorized, effective immediately.]
Caius’s blood turned to absolute ice as his eyes dropped to the final line of the letter, and the parchment nearly slipped from his numb fingers entirely.
[Enforcer Delegation estimated arrival: Within seventy-two hours.]