POV - Azra'il
The wooden sword Paul had arranged was functional in the way any tool is functional when no better option is available. Local wood, reasonable cut, a balance that someone had attempted to calibrate and abandoned halfway through. It served for basic training. For anything beyond that, it was a limitation with a handle.
I picked it up.
The fit was immediate and automatic, the hand finding the point of balance without my needing to search for it, the fingers distributing themselves with the memory of a thousand different swords that had passed through those hands in other bodies in other worlds. It was far from my favourite sword, not least because it was not my Jian.
〈The wooden sword from the back of a medieval village versus the Jian that survived more than a thousand life cycles.〉
[It is a comparison that does not favour the wooden sword by any measurable parameter.]
〈But it will serve. For now.〉
My Jian would remain in the inventory. Producing a sword of oriental style and inexplicable origin in the middle of the courtyard of a medieval swordsman's family was precisely the sort of situation I preferred to avoid whilst still maintaining the cover of a reasonably normal three-year-old child. There would be time for the Jian. For now, the training sword would be sufficient for what needed to be done today.
Paul was watching me with the expression of someone who had noticed something and had not yet decided what to do with it. He had expected, I could see, that I would pick up the sword with both hands and the visible effort of a child handling something too heavy. Instead he had received a child who had picked up the sword with one hand, checked the balance with a discreet movement of the wrist, and stood in the posture of someone who knew exactly where they were standing.
He had not yet processed it. But he had noticed.
Rudeus was seated on the stone where I had spent the previous hour, chin resting on his hand, with the expression of someone who had arrived expecting entertainment of the wrong kind and was beginning to suspect he was about to receive entertainment of the right kind.
Roxy was still at the window. Naturally.
"Stance first," said Paul, assuming the demonstration position with the naturalness of someone who has done this for years. "Feet shoulder-width apart. Weight distributed. Knees slightly bent."
I assumed the stance.
Paul looked.
There was something slightly different about what I had done in relation to what he had demonstrated. Not wrong. Different. The feet at the correct angle, but with a slightly wider opening that distributed the centre of gravity lower, which in a body of my size compensated for the difference in reach more efficiently than his standard stance. It was an adjustment someone with millennia of experience in bodies of varying heights would make instinctively.
Paul frowned. "That is not quite how I showed it."
"It works better for my height," I said, in the voice of a child making a casual observation.
He looked at my stance for one more second. He did not say it was wrong, because it was not. He moved on.
"Grip," he said, demonstrating the hold on the sword. "Firm, but not rigid. If you grip too hard you lose wrist mobility."
I adjusted the grip. Paul looked. His expression was doing that particular thing of someone trying to find a problem and failing.
He continued demonstrating. Basic downward strike. Lateral block. Closed guard position. Each movement explained with the methodology I had catalogued during the previous hour: visual demonstration, minimal instruction, implicit expectation that the pupil would deduce the rest.
The difference was that this time the pupil actually deduced.
Each movement Paul demonstrated, I reproduced with an understanding of the principle behind the form. Not the form exactly, because the form was calibrated for Paul's body and my body had different specifications. The principle. The mechanism. The why behind the how.
After the fifth demonstration, Paul stopped instructing and simply watched.
From the stone, Rudeus had imperceptibly straightened. His chin had left his hand. His green eyes were on me with the different attention of someone who had arrived expecting to watch his sister learn swordsmanship and was watching something else entirely.
〈He noticed. It was inevitable.〉
"Let us try a light spar," said Paul at last, in the voice of someone who had made a decision and was still processing why he had made it. "Just to see the reflexes. Nothing heavy."
I assumed the guard position.
And waited.
Paul waited too.
There was a simple logic to what I was doing: in real combat, whoever advances first reveals intention. Whoever waits reads the other's intention. I had a small body with minimal reach and insufficient strength to compete with an adult swordsman in raw terms. What I had was reading and positioning. So I waited.
Paul looked at me. Then at my stance. Then he began to move towards the advance and stopped.
Because when he had begun to move, I had moved too. Not to attack. To reposition. The angle of my guard had shifted two degrees, the weight had redistributed, and the space that had existed for his strike had simply ceased to exist.
He tried another angle.
I adjusted.
He tried a third.
I adjusted again.
Paul was standing in the courtyard with his sword raised and the expression of someone discovering they were playing chess when they had expected draughts. Every time he found a line of attack, it disappeared before he advanced. Not because I was blocking. Because I was not allowing the line to exist.
〈Eos, I want you to note that Paul's expression is doing something interesting.〉
[Noted. He looks like a man having an existential crisis about what a prodigy is.]
From the window, Roxy's voice arrived with the genuine enthusiasm of someone who had completely forgotten they were supposed to be professional.
"Go on, Azra'il!"
I turned my head towards the window for a fraction of a second, maintaining the guard. "With a charming girl cheering for me," I said, "I cannot afford to make a poor showing."
The corner of Paul's mouth lifted. It was the kind of smile that appears when a person recognises something familiar in another, the automatic reflex of someone who had said phrases exactly like that in situations exactly like that.
Then I turned my head towards Rudeus on the stone. "Take note, chubby-cheeks. This is how you win a girl over. Observe and learn."
Rudeus looked at me with the expression of someone having very complicated feelings about receiving romantic advice from his sister.
"I don't need—"
"Observe," I repeated, and turned back to Paul.
What followed was the kind of dance that happens when two swordsmen of absurdly different levels meet and one of them does not yet know what level the other is.
Paul began to escalate.
It was not a conscious decision. It was what happens when a swordsman's instinct begins to operate independently of the rational mind. Every time he encountered resistance where he had not expected it, the automatic response was to escalate. More speed. More pressure. More commitment in the strike.
I let him escalate.
Not because I wanted to be hit. Because every level he escalated without hitting me was information about where his real limits lay. And because there was something genuinely interesting in watching a competent swordsman operating at the edge of control whilst attempting not to hurt someone who was clearly not where they ought to be on the skill curve.
The problem was the body.
[The body is responding well within current parameters. The problem is that Paul is now operating with force significantly above what he had planned, and if the next strike connects with a direct block, the physical impact will still be considerable for a frame of this size.]
〈I know.〉
[Will you let it connect?]
〈I need to know how much this body can withstand. There is no way to find out without testing.〉
[Is that scientific methodology or philosophical masochism?]
〈No pain no gain, Eos. It is a universal principle.〉
[It is a principle you have used to justify questionable choices since incarnation twenty-three.]
〈And it worked in the subsequent reincarnations.〉
[Technically you died in most of them.]
〈Death is also data.〉
Then the strike came.
It was a real strike, not the contained strike of before. Paul had escalated without realising until the point where instinct had taken over entirely, and what emerged was a diagonal strike with considerable weight behind it.
My block was perfect.
The angle was correct. The position of the sword was correct. The reading of the trajectory was correct.
What was not correct was the relationship between the force of the strike and the mass of the body executing the block.
The wooden sword blocked. For exactly one second, the block held.
Then it gave.
The sound was dry and immediate, the wood splitting at the point of greatest tension with the characteristic crack of something that had reached its structural limit and had nothing more to offer. It divided into two halves, and Paul's strike, with nothing left to absorb it, followed its natural course and found me.
The force distributed through my arm, through my shoulder, through my trunk, and then my feet left the ground with the inevitability of a physical equation that cares nothing for intention or technique. I flew backwards. Not dramatically, in an elegant arc. It was the short, horizontal flight of a small object struck by something large, sent directly towards the stone wall.
My back met the wall with an impact that echoed through the courtyard and produced a dry, unpleasant sound that was the combination of bone against stone. I was still holding one of the halves of the broken sword.
I remained against the wall for a moment, my back absorbing the full feedback of the impact with that quality of physical information the body processes before the pain itself arrives.
〈Eos, inventory.〉
[Left arm completely twisted. Shoulder: partial dislocation. Back: confirmed impact against stone at two vertebrae, nothing that compromises mobility, but it will hurt progressively more over the next few hours. Ribs: three with fractures, one complete. Generalised bruising across the dorsal region. Overall damage scale: significant for this specific body, but broadly speaking you have been through worse. I strongly recommend magical intervention before swelling complicates the healing process.]
Nothing I had not experienced in considerably more creative versions in other lives. A few broken ribs were almost nostalgic compared to what certain battlefields had produced.
But not everyone shared my perspective. Paul himself had gone completely white.
Not metaphorically. The colour had left his face with the specific speed of a man who had just understood what he had done, and he was moving in my direction before I had finished processing the situation.
"Azra'il—" His voice was different. Without the posture of a father trying to convince his daughter of something. Without the hesitation of the beginning of training. It was the direct voice of someone in a state of emergency. He reached me, dropped to his knees at my side, and took the left arm with a gentleness that contrasted entirely with everything he had done in the past twenty minutes. "Good God, the arm is—"
"Twisted," I said. "It will return to position with simple manipulation or healing magic."
Paul looked at me with the expression of someone who could not decide whether they had heard correctly.
Rudeus had arrived from the stone at a speed suggesting he had begun to move before the impact finished. He was standing behind Paul with the face of someone who had witnessed something they would rather not have seen, his eyes on the injuries with an expression I classified as genuinely disturbed. For someone who had spent decades without significant physical interactions, seeing real wounds at close range carried a different weight.
Roxy had jumped out of the window.
Literally jumped. She was landing in the courtyard with the agility of someone who had decided the door was a waste of time, and reached my side within seconds.
"Let me see," she said, in the clinical, direct voice of someone who had assessed injuries before. She examined the arm, then asked them to lift my shirt slightly to check the back.
Paul lifted it and saw my back.
The colour that had partially returned to his face left again.
"Azra'il, I—" He stopped in a panic. Started again. "I should not have—"
"Father."
He closed his mouth.
"You were careless with force control at the end," I said, with the neutrality of someone conducting a technical assessment. "But the strike was good. The trajectory was correct, the weight was committed at the right angle." I looked at him. "The problem was that you did not realise you were escalating. Next time, realise."
Paul looked at me for a moment with the expression of someone who did not know whether to apologise or be astonished.
Roxy had already begun the healing spell. The familiar greenish light filled the space around the arm, and I felt the bone repositioning with the mildly uncomfortable but manageable sensation of tissue being reorganised. The back followed, the warmth of the healing magic dissolving the red and the purple and the fractures with that efficiency I had learnt to recognise and appreciate in Zenith's hands, and which Roxy replicated with a competence of her own.
Paul remained on his knees on the ground throughout the process, hands on his own thighs, apologising at regular intervals with the expression of someone who had decided that was the appropriate position in which to feel terrible.
"I'm sorry."
"It is fine."
"I should not have—"
"I said it is fine."
"But your back was—"
"Roxy is seeing to it."
"I know, but—"
"Father."
He went quiet.
Roxy finished the spell. The luminescence dissipated. She checked the arm, then the back, with the efficiency of someone confirming their work before declaring it complete. "Everything is healed," she said. Then she looked at Paul with the expression of a professional delivering a verdict. "Next time, perhaps adjust the force when your opponent is a fifth of your size."
Paul opened his mouth. Closed it. Nodded with the solemnity of someone receiving a sentence.
I stood up.
I looked at the ground where the other half of the sword lay, and the half I was still holding, the two pieces separated with the clarity of an object that had fulfilled its function and reached the limit of it. Then I looked at Paul, who was still on his knees in the courtyard with the expression of a man having heavy thoughts about his life choices.
"You will need a more resistant sword for the next training session," I said.
Paul looked at me.
Rudeus looked at me.
Roxy looked at me.
All three had slightly different versions of the same expression: the particular expression of people who had just processed that I had said "next training session" with the same ease one comments on the weather, after having been hurled against a stone wall and had bones fractured.
"Next training session," repeated Paul, slowly, as though verifying he had heard correctly.
"Tomorrow afternoon works," I said. "If you can get the sword by then."
Paul looked at me for a long moment.
Then he exhaled through his nose with the particular sound of a man who had begun the day with an opinion about who ought to learn swordsmanship and was ending the day not entirely certain of anything.