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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The lye soap smelled atrocious, like burnt fat and chemicals, and it stung the soft, uncalloused skin of her hands almost immediately.
Maya gritted her teeth, scraping the stiff bristles of the brush against the pitted steel of a heavy broadsword. Flakes of orange rust and hardened grime sloughed off, turning the water in her iron bucket into a murky, reddish-brown sludge.
Thirty minutes. It sounded like nothing. A television episode. Half a commute. But ten minutes in, her shoulders were already screaming. The sword was impossibly heavy, designed for a man with biceps the size of tree trunks, not a modern office worker wearing a teenager's healthy—but entirely untrained—body.
She paused, dropping the brush back into the bucket with a splash, and wiped a line of sweat from her forehead with the back of her wrist. Her knuckles were raw, pink and protesting. She let out a long, shuddering breath, the reality of her situation finally bypassing her shock and hitting her squarely in the chest.
Yesterday, she was Arthur. She had paid her rent. She had complained about the rain. She had a favorite coffee mug.
Now, she was Maya. She had died in a screech of tearing metal, only to wake up suffocating in a hospital bed, staring into the tear-streaked face of a woman who loved her desperately.
"You're a fighter. You always have been."
The mother's voice echoed in her mind, tight with an exhaustion that came from months—maybe years—of watching her child slowly fade away. Maya squeezed her eyes shut. The guilt was a heavy, ugly thing sitting in the pit of her stomach. She felt like a thief who had broken into a house only to find out the owners were throwing a welcome-home party for her. It wasn't fair to that poor woman. It wasn't fair to the original Maya.
But what was the alternative? Just let the body die? Give up?
"No," she whispered to the empty courtyard. She wasn't going to lie down and let this second chance slip away, no matter how terrifying or bizarre the terms were. She had a strong sense of right and wrong, and dying to spare a grieving mother the lie of her survival felt inherently wrong. She would live. She would figure out how to be Maya, and she would make sure that woman didn't have to bury her daughter.
"You talk to yourself often, or is the steel particularly good conversation?"
Maya flinched, nearly dropping the broadsword. She had entirely forgotten about the massive, imposing figure of Sir Percy. He was sitting on a wooden barrel a few yards away, using a whetstone on a dagger, his icy blue eyes tracking her every movement.
"Just reminding myself why I'm scrubbing ancient cutlery instead of losing my mind," Maya snapped back, her tone carrying more bite than she intended. She picked up the brush again and attacked a stubborn patch of rust near the crossguard.
Percy chuckled, a low, rumbling sound that seemed to vibrate against the cobblestones. "You fight the blade. You hold it like you're trying to strangle a snake. Relax your grip, girl. The soap and the bristles do the work, not your anger."
Maya stopped scrubbing and glared at him. "I'm not angry. I'm... overwhelmed. Two days ago, magic didn't exist to me. Aliens were in comic books. Now I have a glowing menu in my retinas threatening to stop my heart if I don't play squire."
"Survival is rarely convenient," Percy said calmly. He didn't offer pity. He didn't seem to care about her emotional state, only the facts of it. "And magic is just a word for the rules you don't understand yet. You say you are overwhelmed. Good. That means you are paying attention. The fools are the ones who arrive in Avalon thinking it a dream. They die quickly when the nightmares wake up."
Maya swallowed hard, the chill of the courtyard suddenly feeling much sharper. "Nightmares?"
"The realms are vast, Maya," Percy said, sliding the whetstone down the dagger's edge with a rhythmic shhhhk. "Merlin built this system to forge a protector. You think he did that because the universe is safe? You are standing on the edge of a precipice. The things coming for this world will not care about your heart condition or your confusion."
He stood up, sheathing the dagger at his hip, and began to walk slowly toward her. "So, you can wallow in the unfairness of it all. You can cry for the life you lost. Or you can scrub the damn sword."
Maya's jaw tightened. She hated that he was right. She dipped the brush into the murky water and set back to work, adjusting her grip as he had instructed. It still burned her hands, and her back ached from hunching over, but she forced a rhythm into her movements. Scrub, rinse, wipe. Scrub, rinse, wipe.
By the time she reached the end of the rack, her tunic was soaked with sweat and dirty water, and her palms were covered in angry red blisters. She dropped the last weapon—a wicked-looking mace—back into its slot with a loud clatter.
Before she could even turn around to face Percy, the golden light flared in her peripheral vision.
[Task 2 Complete: Armaments Maintenance.] [Reward: +5% Durability to all equipped items for 24 hours.]
Maya let out a ragged breath, leaning against the wooden rack for support. "Done," she rasped.
Percy didn't applaud. He simply walked over to a different rack, one holding dull, wooden training swords—wasters, they were called. He picked one up, tossing it in his hand to test the balance, and then abruptly threw it at her.
Maya's reflexes, sluggish and uncoordinated, flared too late. She raised her hands to catch it, but the heavy wood slipped through her wet, blistered fingers and slammed directly into her shin.
"Ah, shit!" she yelled, dropping to one knee and clutching her leg. Pain, hot and entirely real, flared up from the bone. Her eyes watered as she glared up at the knight. "What the hell is wrong with you?!"
"Task one," Percy said, his voice dropping into a hard, unforgiving bark. "Physical conditioning. Two hours. Pick it up."
Maya stayed on the ground for a second, fighting the urge to throw the wooden sword back at his head. She was tired, she was hurting, and she was so incredibly out of her depth. But the golden text was still hovering in the back of her mind, a ticking clock threatening the fragile body waiting for her in the hospital bed.
She let out a frustrated growl, grabbed the hilt of the waster, and dragged herself to her feet. The wood was heavy—much heavier than she expected for a practice weapon. It felt like holding a small tree branch.
"Stance is everything," Percy said, ignoring her glare entirely. "A strong arm means nothing if the earth beneath your feet doesn't support the blow. Spread your legs. Shoulder-width."
Maya clumsily shuffled her feet apart.
"Wider," Percy commanded, stepping forward and using the toe of his heavy leather boot to kick her right ankle further out. Maya stumbled, barely keeping her balance. "Bend your knees. You're locking your joints. A locked joint is a broken bone when a heavier opponent strikes you."
She bent her knees, feeling an immediate, trembling burn in her thighs. She wasn't used to holding this kind of tension.
"Now, raise the blade. Both hands on the hilt. Tip pointing at my throat."
Maya lifted the wooden sword. Her blistered palms screamed in protest as they ground against the coarse grip. She leveled the tip at him, her arms already shaking under the weight.
Percy walked around her in a slow, critical circle. He tapped her elbows with the back of his hand, forcing them closer to her ribs. He adjusted the angle of her wrists. Every correction was precise, rough, and entirely lacking in bedside manner.
"Hold it there," he said, finally stepping back.
"For how long?" Maya asked, her breath already coming shorter.
"Until I tell you to swing."
Silence settled over the courtyard, broken only by the distant, whistling wind blowing over the high stone walls. One minute passed. Then two.
The burn in Maya's thighs evolved into a violent tremor. Her shoulders felt like they were being pierced by hot needles. She bit her lower lip, tasting copper as she tried to distract herself from the agony of simply standing still. She was essentially doing a weighted squat while holding a heavy lever extended in front of her.
"I can't..." she gasped, the tip of the wooden sword dipping toward the cobblestones.
"You can," Percy countered, his voice steady. "Your mind is accustomed to comfort. It is telling you to drop the weapon because it does not want to endure the discomfort. Ignore it. You command the flesh, not the other way around."
"I'm going to drop it," she ground out, sweat stinging her eyes.
"If you drop it, the two hours reset," Percy lied—or perhaps he wasn't lying. Maya had no way of knowing how the System actually timed the tasks, and she wasn't willing to risk it.
She forced the blade back up. She squeezed her eyes shut, imagining the rhythmic, desperate beeping of the hospital monitor. She pictured the dark circles under her mother's eyes. I am surviving, she told herself. I am surviving for her. I am surviving so I don't have to die twice.
"Good," Percy said softly, noting the subtle shift in her posture, the sudden rigid determination that locked her shaking muscles into place. "You have found your anchor. A knight without an anchor is just a mercenary. Remember why you hold the blade, Maya. It is the only thing that will keep your arms raised when the sky is falling."
He took a step back, drawing his own massive broadsword from the dirt with a single, fluid motion. The steel hissed in the twilight air.
"Now," Percy commanded, his eyes flashing with the thrill of the incoming violence. "Strike me."
The command hung in the damp, heavy air, echoing off the high stone walls of the courtyard.
Maya stared at the towering knight. Her rational mind, the part of her that used to analyze quarterly spreadsheets and assess risk, screamed that this was a terrible idea. She was holding a block of wood. Sir Percy was encased in blackened chainmail, holding a blade of pure steel that looked sharp enough to split a hair.
But hesitation was a luxury she couldn't afford.
With a ragged, desperate yell that tore at her dry throat, Maya lunged. She threw all her meager, trembling weight behind the wooden waster, aiming a sweeping, chaotic arc right at his heavily armored shoulder. It wasn't a technique. It was pure, unadulterated survival instinct wrapped in frustration.
Percy didn't even step back. He didn't flinch.
He simply raised his broadsword a fraction of an inch, catching the wooden blade on the flat of his steel.
CRACK.
The sound was deafening, like a tree branch snapping in a quiet forest. But worse than the sound was the kinetic shockwave. The vibration shot down the heavy wood, violently jolting Maya's blistered palms, traveling up her forearms, and rattling her collarbones. The impact tore the waster from her grip entirely. It clattered uselessly against the cobblestones ten feet away.
Maya stumbled backward, clutching her hands to her chest. The blisters on her palms had popped, leaving raw, stinging flesh exposed to the cold air.
"You swing like a tavern drunk," Percy observed, his tone maddeningly level. He lowered his sword, resting the tip back in the dirt. "You telegraphed the strike with your eyes. You shifted your weight to your front foot before your arms even moved. If I had turned my blade, your weapon would be in splinters, and my counter-strike would have severed your neck."
"I... I'm not a soldier," Maya gasped, bending over and resting her hands on her knees, trying to breathe through the stinging pain in her palms. "I was an office worker. I typed for a living. Yesterday, my biggest physical challenge was a broken elevator."
"Yesterday is dead," Percy replied coldly. "You are in Avalon now. The creatures that will come for your city will not care about your elevator. They will not wait for you to learn. Pick up the sword."
Maya squeezed her eyes shut. She wanted to quit. She wanted to wake up in the sterile hospital bed, hit the call button, and let the morphine carry her away from this medieval nightmare. But the image of her new mother's tear-streaked face flashed behind her eyelids. The rhythmic, failing beep of her own heart monitor echoed in her memory.
If she quit here, she died there.
Swallowing a curse, she turned, walked over to the dropped waster, and picked it up. Her raw skin screamed against the coarse wood grain, but she squeezed her fingers tight, forcing her jaw shut so hard her teeth ground together. She walked back to her starting position, forcing her feet shoulder-width apart, bending her knees, and raising the blade.
"Again," Percy commanded.
She swung.
He parried, barely moving his wrist, and hooked the flat of his blade behind her ankle, sweeping her leg out from under her. Maya hit the damp cobblestones hard, the breath leaving her lungs in a sharp whoosh.
"Your base was entirely on your heels," Percy said, looking down at her. "Get up."
She dragged herself to her feet. She swung again, trying to aim lower this time, hoping to catch him off guard. He stepped inside her guard, bringing the heavy steel pommel of his sword to a dead stop an inch from her nose. The displaced air brushed her eyelashes.
"You overextended. Your ribs were completely exposed. A goblin with a rusty spoon could have gutted you. Get back in stance."
And so the nightmare began.
Time in the Mindscape Pavilion didn't flow; it ground forward like a rusted iron wheel. There was no sun to track the hours, only the perpetual, bruised-plum twilight and the relentless, grueling repetition of failure. Maya attacked. Percy effortlessly deflected, countered, and knocked her to the dirt. Every single time she hit the stones, her mind registered the jarring pain, the bruising impact on her hips and shoulders, the burning in her lungs.
She lost count of how many times she fell. Twenty? Fifty? A hundred?
Her tunic was soaked in sweat and plastered to her skin, stained with the grime of the courtyard. Her hair clung to her face in damp, matted strands. Her arms felt like they were filled with wet sand, so heavy she had to use her entire upper body just to lift the wooden sword above her waist.
Rationalize it, she told herself as she lay on her back, staring up at the empty sky after another brutal sweep of her legs. This is data collection. He is showing you the physical mechanics of momentum. It's just physics. Force equals mass times acceleration. You have no mass. You have no acceleration. You need leverage.
"Are you taking a nap, girl?" Percy's voice floated down to her.
"I'm calculating," she spat back, rolling onto her side and using the wooden sword as a crutch to force herself upright. Her legs were trembling so violently she wasn't sure they would hold her.
"Calculation belongs to scholars," Percy said, pacing a slow circle around her. "Combat is rhythm. It is breathing. It is knowing the exact moment your opponent commits their weight and punishing them for it. You are thinking too much about your hands and not enough about your center."
"It's hard not to think about my hands when they're bleeding," she muttered, wiping sweat from her eyes with a bruised forearm.
"Then don't strike," Percy said softly, stopping directly in front of her. "Defend."
Without warning, the Black Knight swung.
It wasn't a full-force blow—if it had been, the wind pressure alone might have knocked her over—but it was fast. A heavy, overhead chop aimed directly at her collarbone.
Maya's eyes went wide. She didn't think; she reacted. She threw the wooden waster up horizontally, catching the steel blade on the thickest part of the wood. The impact forced her to her knees, her bones rattling under the immense pressure, but the wood held. She hadn't dropped it.
"Better," Percy grunted, pressing down slightly, forcing her to strain every muscle in her core just to keep the steel from crushing her shoulder. "You stopped thinking. You just survived. Do it again."
He pulled his sword back and swung horizontally.
Maya ducked, the heavy steel whistling over her head, slicing through the air with a terrifying hiss. She awkwardly thrust her wooden sword upward, catching Percy in the heavy leather of his belt. It didn't even make him blink, but it was the first time she had successfully landed a touch.
"Sloppy," he remarked, but there was the faintest hint of approval in his rough voice. "But you kept your eyes open. That is a start."
For what felt like another eternity, the drill changed. Percy attacked, and Maya desperately scrambled to survive. She parried, she dodged, she absorbed glancing blows that left her arms numb and her ribs aching. She learned to read the subtle shifts in his massive shoulders, the slight turning of his boot right before he launched a strike. She was an amateur playing against a grandmaster, but Arthur's analytical mind slowly began to parse the violent data, translating Percy's movements into a brutal, terrifying language.
Just as her vision started to blur at the edges, her lungs burning as if she were inhaling ground glass, a golden light flared brilliantly in the center of her field of view. The sharp, metallic chime of the System cut through the heavy silence of the courtyard.
[Task 1 Complete: Physical Conditioning (2 Hours)]
[Conditioning logged. Analyzing host effort...]
[Effort Assessed: Maximum. Pushing beyond baseline limits detected.]
[Reward Granted: +10 Vigor EXP] [Milestone Reached: Vigor Level Up!] [Vigor: 3 -> 4]
Maya dropped the wooden sword. It hit the cobblestones with a dull thud. Her knees buckled immediately, and she collapsed forward, catching herself on her bleeding, raw hands. She didn't care about the dirt. She didn't care about the pain. She stared at the golden number hovering in the air.
Four.
It was still pathetically low. It was still miles away from the '10' of an average human. But it wasn't a three anymore. She had moved the needle.
A sudden, strange sensation washed over her. It wasn't the magical glow of a video game healing potion. It was subtle. The tightness in her chest—the phantom memory of her failing heart that had followed her even into the mindscape—eased just a fraction. Her breathing, while still ragged from the exhaustion, felt slightly deeper. The air reached the bottom of her lungs without that terrifying, rattling catch.
Sir Percy walked over, his heavy boots crunching on the stones. He looked down at her shivering, sweat-drenched form. He didn't offer a hand to help her up.
"You survived the first day, Maya," he said, his voice quiet, lacking the drill-master bark from before. "But tomorrow, the sword will be heavier. And the day after that, I will not pull my strikes."
Maya looked up at him, her chest heaving. She felt like she had been run over by a truck, but behind the exhaustion, a tiny, stubborn ember of defiance had been stoked.
"I'll be here," she rasped.
Percy offered a slow, grim nod. "See that you are. Because your time is up. Return to your fragile shell. You have a knight's errant to perform before the sun sets in the waking world."
Before Maya could ask what he meant, the bruised-plum sky above the courtyard violently fractured. The damp cold of Avalon vanished, replaced instantly by the suffocating scent of bleach and industrial lavender. The heavy stones beneath her hands dissolved into the starched, irritating friction of hospital bedsheets.
The transition was instantaneous. Maya gasped, her eyes flying open.
The dim, purple glow of the city lights still filtered through the blinds. The digital clock on the wall read 8:03 AM.
She was back in New York. The Mindscape Pavilion had faded, but the exhaustion had not. Her physical muscles hadn't moved, but her nervous system remembered every agonizing parry, every fall, every blistering second of gripping that wooden sword. She felt like she had just run a marathon while being beaten with a sack of doorknobs.
But as she lay there, waiting for the inevitable spike of pain from her failing heart, she noticed something.
The heart monitor beside her bed was still beeping. But the rhythm had changed. It was no longer the frantic, uneven stutter of a dying bird. It was slightly slower. Slightly stronger.
She slowly raised her hands. The deep, raw blisters from the mindscape weren't there—her palms were still pale and translucent—but her joints ached with a deep, phantom soreness. She closed her hand into a fist. It felt incredibly weak, but the terrifying fragility, the sensation that her fingers might snap under their own tension, was marginally less pronounced.
The System hadn't lied. The Vigor increase was real. The magical reinforcement had translated to her physical vessel. It was buying her time, a few miserable, agonizing hours at a time.
The heavy, wooden door to her hospital room clicked open.
Maya turned her head on the pillow. A nurse stepped in, carrying a plastic tray with a small paper cup of pills and a blood pressure cuff. She was humming softly to herself, but stopped short when she looked at the bed.
"Oh, sweetheart, you're awake," the nurse said, her voice dropping into a professional, soothing register. She set the tray down on the rolling table and approached the bed, her eyes darting to the monitors. She paused, her brow furrowing slightly as she read the digital readout. "Well, look at that. Your O2 saturation is up a point. And your resting rate is... stabilizing."
Maya didn't say anything. She just stared at the ceiling, feeling the phantom weight of a wooden sword in her hands.
She had survived the night. She had leveled up.
Now, stuck in a cardiac ward, unable to walk to the bathroom unassisted, she had to figure out how to perform an act of common chivalry before the day was out, or risk losing the very life she had just fought so brutally to extend.