Chapter 124: The Opening He Couldn’t Reach
The updated bracket board near the arena exit had delivered one piece of good news before they left: Arthur’s second-round match was not scheduled for another three days.
Three days should have felt generous. By dinner, Arthur was already thinking about how much of that time he could spend in the dojo.
The rest of the table was in a much better mood. Kael had been retelling his two-minute victory to Seraphina as though it had required several layers of strategy, while Adrian occasionally corrected the more ambitious parts of the story. Seraphina had spent most of the afternoon dealing with the compound and had missed both matches, so for once she let Kael talk.
Arthur answered when Seraphina asked about his match, but otherwise let Kael carry most of the conversation. His shoulder still throbbed whenever he moved it too quickly, an irritating reminder of the price he’d paid to get inside Rian’s spear.
Emily noticed his unusual quietness but left him alone, and Gareth seemed equally content to let the subject rest. By the time dinner ended, Arthur had already made up his mind about what he was doing next.
Dinner broke up soon after. Arthur went upstairs, but only long enough to change into a loose training tunic and collect the competition dagger before heading back toward the main dojo.
By the time Arthur reached the sprawling training hall, most of the younger dojo students had already gone home for the night. A few senior students lingered near the edges of the mats, quietly cleaning equipment or finishing their final conditioning drills. Gareth was still there, speaking in low tones with one of the instructors near the weapon racks.
Arthur didn’t walk straight into the middle of their conversation. He waited near the edge of the mat, his injured shoulder resting lightly against the wooden support pillar.
Gareth eventually turned, his eyes dropping immediately to the competition dagger in Arthur’s hand. He didn’t ask why Arthur had come.
"During the match, I kept seeing places I should have been able to attack," Arthur told him simply. "But every time I tried to reach them properly, my feet were wrong, or Rian had already recovered."
Gareth considered him for a moment, then glanced toward one of the senior students who was packing away a wooden training weapon.
"Stay a little longer."
Arthur expected a fighting lesson, perhaps a breakdown of spear counters. Instead, Gareth used a piece of chalk to mark two small positions on the wooden training floor.
The exercise he laid out was almost embarrassingly simple: start just outside the opponent’s reach, get inside, touch the marked spot on the senior student’s chest with the blunted dagger, and finish without stumbling out of position.
He got the touch easily enough, but his front foot landed too far forward, dragging the rest of his weight over his leading leg.
"Reset," Gareth ordered.
Arthur backed up and tried again. This time, he reached the student’s weapon arm cleanly, but he twisted his torso too far, leaving his own shoulder completely exposed to a counterstrike.
"Reset."
Arthur set his jaw, stepped in, touched the target perfectly, and then automatically retreated three quick steps backward to clear the danger zone.
The retreat came automatically. Morwenna had spent weeks drilling that response into him—break the pressure, make space, get back to a distance where he could use the bow.
Gareth raised a hand before Arthur could reset. "Stay."
"Finish somewhere you can keep fighting," Gareth said, pointing to where Arthur had abandoned the exchange.
Arthur frowned and returned to the starting mark. Morwenna had trained that retreat into him for a reason. With Whisperwind waiting at range, leaving was usually the correct answer.
Here, leaving meant giving up the position he’d just fought to reach.
Adrian arrived during the session, stepping onto the mats in his own training clothes for evening practice. He watched Arthur fail the exact same entry movement three more times.
Gareth motioned Adrian onto the mat. "Show him."
Arthur watched closely. The senior student thrust a wooden training weapon toward Adrian’s chest. Adrian shifted effortlessly aside, but the dodge was barely separate from the attack that followed. His leading foot landed exactly where it needed to, leaving him balanced as he moved forward. His left hand redirected the weapon while the rest of his body was already moving in. He touched the target on the student’s chest and finished completely ready to strike again or pivot away.
The entire exchange took perhaps two seconds. Nothing spectacular happened, which was exactly why Arthur found it so irritating.
Arthur was faster, yet Adrian never had to stop and fix his footing after one movement before starting the next. One simply carried into the other.
Arthur tightened his grip on the dagger, stepped back to the starting mark, and tried again.
It was slightly better. Not good. But better.
Kael wandered into the dojo about half an hour later, towel slung over one shoulder.
"Decided winning wasn’t painful enough for one day?" Kael asked, tossing the towel onto a nearby bench.
Arthur ignored the bait and asked Kael to stand in as his partner for a few rounds.
Kael stepped onto the opposite mark, and Arthur immediately discovered how much easier the senior student had been making things for him.
Kael kept shifting at the last moment, showing Arthur an opening and taking it away again, sometimes stepping forward just as Arthur thought he had finally found a clean way inside.
He saw Kael’s adjustments almost as soon as they happened, but seeing them and getting his feet into position were still two different problems.
At one point, Arthur managed to slip inside successfully. He brought the dagger guard down hard against Kael’s wrist, and then his academy instincts took over—he automatically pushed off his back foot to disengage and retreat.
"Stop," Gareth called out. "Stay."
Arthur cursed under his breath, reset his position, and tried it differently. This time, after touching Kael’s wrist, he forced himself to circle to Kael’s outside, attempting to keep himself in a useful, threatening position.
Kael caught the hesitation immediately. He knocked Arthur’s dagger arm aside, stepped across his path, and turned him off balance before Arthur could recover his footing.
Arthur caught himself, glanced once at the spot where Kael had turned him, and walked straight back to the starting mark.
Emily walked into the dojo much later. She found Arthur already sweating completely through his tunic, his breathing heavy as he reset his stance for the fiftieth time.
Emily stopped near the edge of the mat and watched quietly. It didn’t take long for her to understand what her father was making Arthur practice.
When Gareth eventually brought her onto the mat for a short exchange, he didn’t test Arthur’s ability to simply dodge her. Gareth drew another chalk line behind Arthur. This time, stepping beyond it counted as failure.
Arthur glanced at the line, then at Emily. He had spent enough time training against her to know how to get away from her pressure. Now he had nowhere to go.
When the exchange started, Emily stepped in fast and crowded his injured side before Arthur could settle. He slipped the first shoulder check, but she caught his dagger wrist as he tried to turn past her.
That was familiar territory. Arthur rotated with the grip instead of fighting her strength directly, peeled his wrist free with the ugly little twist Morwenna had drilled into him, and opened the space he normally would have used to retreat.
This time, he forced his feet to stay planted. He attempted to turn the violent escape directly into a counter-position, driving the dagger toward Emily’s ribs.
He was a fraction of a second too slow.
Emily recovered immediately, knocked his dagger arm off line, and stepped across his stance before he could settle. Arthur was forced sideways over the chalk line before he could stop himself.
He looked down at the line and clicked his tongue.
Gareth gave a small nod toward the starting mark. "Again."
Arthur looked once at the chalk line, then returned to the starting position without complaint.
As the night wore on, the quiet conversations around the edges of the hall naturally died away. The dojo slowly emptied until only the Thorne family remained, and eventually, even Adrian and Kael headed back to the main house.
Arthur kept repeating the exact same, miserable few movements.
Entry. Touch. Stay balanced. Reset. Again.
There was nothing impressive about it. No dramatic technique, no burst of mana—just the same few steps repeated until Arthur’s legs burned and sweat ran down his back. And Arthur had probably never hated a simple two-step movement more in his entire life.
Eventually, Gareth stepped onto the mat and told him to stop.
Arthur gritted his teeth, adjusted his grip on the slick handle of the dagger, and forced his burning legs through one more repetition anyway.
When Arthur finally returned to the quiet corridors of the guest wing, it was late.
Nessa paused when she saw him. Her eyes moved from his sweat-soaked tunic to the late hour before returning to his face.
"I technically rested during dinner," Arthur offered, leaning against the wall near his door.
Nessa didn’t dignify the excuse with much of a response. "I’ll have fresh water brought up. The kitchen is still open, so I’ll send something hot as well."
Arthur looked at her more closely. She was still dressed as neatly as she had been that morning, but there was a faint tiredness around her eyes that hadn’t been there when she’d handed him his jacket before breakfast.
"Have you eaten?" Arthur asked.
Nessa paused. It was the first time all evening that Arthur had managed to catch her without an immediate answer.
"I have," she said after a moment.
Arthur wasn’t entirely convinced, but he didn’t press the issue. He simply thanked her and stepped into his room.
Once he was alone, Arthur stripped off his sweat-soaked tunic and lay back on the bed for a long time, staring up at the ceiling before finally opening his system interface.
Strength: 44
Stamina: 40
His Dexterity and Perception sat far above both numbers. That imbalance had never bothered Arthur much before. As long as he could control the distance, Strength was someone else’s problem.
Today had made that excuse considerably harder to defend.
More Strength would have helped when Rian’s spear struck him. More Stamina would have made the hours in Gareth’s training hall less miserable. Neither would have fixed the step Arthur kept getting wrong.
Arthur stared at the numbers for another moment before closing the interface. Levels could improve his body, and the Ironblood Refinement Elixir might eventually do even more, but neither was going to teach him where to put his feet.
Whisperwind rested in its usual corner while the competition dagger lay on the small table beside the bed. Arthur looked between them before pushing himself back to his feet. His ribs immediately complained, but he ignored them, picked up the dagger, and found what little space the room offered.
He repeated the entry Gareth had forced him through all evening. His first step carried his weight too far forward again.
Arthur reset his feet and tried once more.
Better.