Afternoons were for training with Paul.
Since there were no wooden swords in the house small enough for my size, it was mostly physical conditioning.
Running, push-ups, sit-ups, that sort of thing.
Paul’s plan seemed to be built around the idea that “first, you get the body moving” — a reasonable enough foundation, I suppose.
When work took him away and he couldn’t supervise, he made it clear that the basic drills were non-negotiable.
Every day.
No exceptions.
I understood what he was going for.
A father’s hopes for his son.
But a three-year-old who overtrains every day won’t grow properly, and that’s a real concern in any world.
So I quietly revised his plan into something more sensible.
Only when he wasn’t around, of course.
…
One night, while I was working on magic development, sounds started filtering through the wall from the next room.
Creaking.
Groaning.
The kind of noises that leave nothing to the imagination.
“Full of energy as ever…”
I couldn’t exactly blame them.
My parents were both in their twenties, in their prime, and this world didn’t appear to have any concept of contraception.
At the rate they were going, a younger sibling would be arriving before long.
That was probably why I could never quite see Paul and Zenith as real parents.
Not in the way it should feel.
In my previous life, I’d grown up in a single-parent household, and every day had been shaped by my mother’s quiet warmth.
This life gave me a full family — gentle people, all of them — but looking up at them as elders just didn’t come naturally to me.
Mm.
Tonight, though, I really didn’t want to hear this.
We had a guest.
I hadn’t thought Paul and Zenith would still be this bold about it.
Fine.
I’d lean on the three-year-old card just this once.
The plan was simple: push open their door, blink at them with practiced innocence, and ask, “Daddy, Mommy, what are you doing?”
That would stop it.
It always works in stories.
Besides, if I could hear it through the walls, Roxy could probably hear it too.
She looked barely into her teens.
These were not sounds a girl her age needed more exposure to.
So I slipped out of my room and padded toward Paul’s battlefield.
And stopped.
Someone was already at that doorway.
The blue-haired girl was sitting in the dim corridor, eye pressed to the gap in the door, watching the room’s interior.
Her face was flushed.
Her breathing came a little too fast, though she was clearly trying to suppress it.
The hand tucked under her robe was moving in a way that left very little room for innocent interpretation.
My mouth fell open.
This was not a scene I had any framework for.
I was already beginning to turn away, very carefully, very quietly, when her eyes slid from the door crack to me.
She stared.
I stared back.
Right.
Sleepwalking.
I’m sleepwalking.
I closed my eyes, turned all the way around, and walked back to my room at a perfectly natural pace.
Well.
Roxy was a girl in the middle of adolescence, after all.
The reasonable thing to do was pretend I had seen nothing.
Tomorrow would be a normal lesson.
Normal conversation.
She wouldn’t bring it up, and neither would I.
…..
“Um.
Rudy…”
“Don’t worry.
Whatever happens, my teacher is my teacher.”
“Mm…”
The next morning, before the lesson started, Roxy looked like she was building up to an explanation.
But pretending nothing happened was genuinely the better option here, and I think some part of her knew it.
She blushed a little when she first saw me, but when I didn’t ask anything or let any reaction show on my face, she settled down and started teaching in earnest.
Good.
Because if she had pressed me, I would have had to play dumb anyway.
Roxy was an excellent teacher.
She didn’t cling to a fixed lesson plan.
She read where I was and adjusted on the fly, easing the difficulty up as my understanding caught up.
She always came prepared with reference books, drawing questions directly from them, and if I answered correctly, we moved forward.
No review for its own sake.
Just clean, steady progress.
Every day, I learned something new.
And with each lesson, this world grew a little wider in my mind.
➤ Next: Five Years Old