Shyam had assumed, in the vague, untested way people assume things about themselves before reality intervenes, that awakening as a Water Monster-footed Awakener would come with some baseline competence attached. A little instinct, maybe. Some sense of how his own body worked now.
Birju disabused him of that notion within the first four minutes of training.
"Again," Birju said, entirely unmoved by the fact that Shyam was currently lying flat on his back in the dirt for the third time, water pooling uselessly around his own wrists instead of doing anything remotely useful. "You keep summoning it too close to your own body. It's not armor unless you actually shape it before the hit lands."
"I'm trying."
"Try faster. The ground doesn't care how tired you are."
Beside him, Nasreen fared marginally better, though marginally was doing a great deal of work in that sentence — she'd at least managed to keep her feet under her, curse-marks flickering faintly along one forearm as she tried, and failed, to land a technique on the padded dummy Meher had set up at the yard's edge.
"This is humiliating," Nasreen muttered, shaking out her hand after the third miss.
"Welcome to the club," Shyam said, still lying in the dirt. "I have a founding membership."
That got a real laugh out of her, sharp and surprised, the first one Shyam had heard from her since she'd arrived at the compound three days earlier, quiet and careful and clearly bracing for a welcome that hadn't fully materialized yet.
The rest of Team 7 watched the training sessions with the specific, half-amused interest of people observing something new happen to their routine, and their reception of Nasreen, Shyam noticed, was cautious but not unkind — nobody warm exactly, but nobody cold either, everyone waiting to see what she did with the chance rather than judging her for needing one.
Everyone except Birju, who ran her drills with a rigor that bordered on personal.
"You fought two of my teammates in that alley three weeks ago," he said flatly, after Nasreen missed a block badly enough to end up on the ground herself. "I'm not going to pretend that didn't happen because your cousin vouches for you. Get up."
"That's fair," Nasreen said, getting up, jaw tight but voice level. "I'd want the same, if it were reversed."
Something in Birju's expression shifted, fractionally, at that — not warmth exactly, but the beginning of something adjacent to respect. "Again," he said, and this time there was slightly less edge in it.
Farah watched all of this from the yard's shaded edge, arms crossed, saying nothing, though Shyam caught her exhale slowly each time Nasreen took a hit and got back up anyway, the particular relief of someone watching a fragile thing prove sturdier than expected.
By the second week, Shyam had learned exactly three things with any real confidence: that summoning water close to his skin without shaping it first was, as Birju had promised, useless; that his new abilities responded better to calm than to panic, which was inconvenient given how little of his life so far had involved calm; and that Nasreen, for all her family's old-world combat pedigree, was just as capable of tripping over her own curse-marked hand as he was of drowning himself in his own defensive water.
"You'd think," Nasreen said, flat on her back beside him after a particularly ignominious joint failure during a paired drill, "that between the two of us, one person would be good at this by now."
"Give it time. We've only been humiliating ourselves for two weeks."
"Is that supposed to be comforting?"
"Not remotely."
She laughed again, easier this time, less surprised by her own capacity for it, and stared up at the sky for a moment before speaking again, quieter. "Thank you. For not treating me like I'm still the person who nearly killed her own cousin in a chamber full of blood."
Shyam considered the sentence honestly before answering. "You're not that person today. That's usually enough for me."
"Farah doesn't think that's enough. Not yet."
"Farah watched you get up every time Birju knocked you down for two weeks straight," Shyam said. "I think she thinks it's enough. I think she's just as bad as the rest of us at saying so out loud."
Nasreen didn't answer that, but something in her expression eased slightly, and they lay in the dirt together a while longer, two people who'd each survived something enormous through means neither of them had planned for, slowly, clumsily, learning how to survive the much smaller, much stranger business of an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.
The breakthrough, when it finally came, came for both of them within the same afternoon, three weeks in, and neither of them saw it coming.
Shyam had been trying, for the better part of an hour, to shape water into something that held together for longer than a second before collapsing back into a useless puddle at his feet. Ishita watched from the sidelines with her arms crossed, offering the occasional correction, until something in Shyam's concentration finally clicked — not effort exactly, but release, the same instinctive surrender that had first summoned water in that transaction chamber weeks ago.
The water didn't just hold this time. It curved, gathered, took shape, and a moment later a dolphin built entirely of moving water arced up out of the basin at the yard's edge, circled once through the air with a grace Shyam certainly hadn't consciously commanded, and slammed into the padded dummy hard enough to knock it clean off its stand.
The yard went silent for a beat before Ishita actually laughed, delighted, clapping him on the shoulder. "Now that's Water Monster-footed. Welcome to the class properly, Raj."
Ramesh let out a low whistle. Even Birju, watching from across the yard, gave a single, approving nod that felt, from him, like a standing ovation.
Nasreen's moment came less than ten minutes later, when a curse she'd been fumbling for three weeks finally landed clean — the dummy's padded arm swinging wide and missing its mark entirely, exactly the debuff she'd been chasing, precise and unmistakable.
Farah crossed the yard without a word and studied the result with real professional attention, the first time she'd offered anything beyond careful distance since training began.
"That's a proper curse," Farah said. "Not luck. Technique." She looked at Nasreen for a long moment, something shifting behind her eyes. "You inherited more of the family's actual skill than I gave you credit for."
"Is that a compliment?"
"It's an observation. I don't hand out compliments before people've earned them." But something in Farah's face, just briefly, softened past the careful distance she'd been keeping all month, and Nasreen, watching it happen, looked for a moment like she might actually cry from the sheer relief of being seen properly by her cousin for the first time since the coup.
Rathore found Shyam alone afterward, toweling dirt out of his hair, and studied him with the particular assessing look she reserved for progress reports she hadn't yet decided how to deliver.
"You're still terrible," she said.
"I'm aware, Captain."
"You're terrible in slightly more interesting ways than you were two weeks ago, though." Something almost warm crossed her face before she caught it and reined it back into professional neutrality. "Keep at it. Nasreen too. I want you both combat-viable within the month. Not because either of you will ever out-fight Birju — because I never want to stand in a room again watching someone under my command eat meat out of desperation with no instructor, no supervision, and no plan for what happens if it goes wrong."
"Understood."
"Good." She turned to go, then paused, glancing back at him with something unreadable. "For what it's worth — most Awakeners who come up through proper channels spend months in preparation before they ever eat their first piece of meat. Medical checkups, supervised consumption, an instructor standing over them in case something goes wrong. IARF built that process for a reason. You skipped all of it and survived anyway, on nothing but instinct and bad odds. There's something to be built on that, if you're patient enough to build it properly instead of rushing."
She left him with that, and Shyam stood alone in the yard for a long moment afterward, turning the water in his palm over slowly, thinking about patience, and about a voice with no visible source that had promised to be patient too.