I was completely exhausted by the end of the day. It was far later than I would normally be back.

  If my master had not been the one telling me to keep going, I would have tried to drag myself to a guild hall. Instead, he simply picked me up and let me rest across his broad shoulders.

  “You did really good today, Azolo,” he said casually, as if he had not spent the entire day throwing me at things that wanted me dead. “You know what? We’re not going to wait. You’re getting your core tonight, when we get back, you’re getting your upgrade.”

  I blinked, too tired to even argue.

  “I don’t see the point in wasting time when your foundation is clearly strong enough,” he continued. “If you sit on it, you’re just delaying progress. We need to get you ready for the tournaments. You’re going to need to win a lot of them.”

  He glanced down at me. “You’re what, four? Five?”

  “Four,” I said.

  “Good. That means you’ve got eight years before you have to hit iron or wash out.” He hummed thoughtfully. “That’s a lot of time for someone so young. Not much in the grand scheme of things, but we’ll make every moment count. You’ll squeeze every reward you can out of it.”

  He adjusted his grip like he was carrying a sack of grain instead of a battered child. “And when you graduate, we are going to the Voidlands.”

  I lifted my head weakly. “We are going where?”

  “The Voidlands,” he said. “You know. The place with all the squiggly, mind-boring, what’s-the-word… eldritch horrors.” He chuckled to himself. “They’re good training. Creatures that don’t conform to normal body plans force you to fight in ways you’ve never fought before. Great for sharpening instincts.”

  That made my stomach turn.

  The Voidlands were where abominations lived, creatures of nightmare given physical form. The void plane itself was the aperture they seeped from, a place where dreams and horrors existed without shape or rules, but the Voidlands were where that corruption bled into the world and took shape.

  In my old life, the rift had been contained, and it was not something you visited lightly. Even in my prime, I had only gone near it to bombard whatever massive horror was trying to crawl out.

  Master Fatty Chunk made it sound like we would be training inside the Voidlands.

  That seemed like a spectacularly terrible idea.

  I did not argue, mostly because I did not have the energy to argue. It had been an exhausting day. Rewarding, in a sense, but his training philosophy could be summed up as one simple rule: Try to not die.

  He threw me at monsters two ranks above me and expected me not just to survive, but to win under increasingly worse conditions.

  The first fight after the nest had been a fully healthy one of those things. I never learned the proper name. In my head, I called them tentasnakes. I hated them with the fire of a thousand suns.

  The first tentasnake was fast. When I say fast, I mean it bit me the first time we engaged, and its fangs went clean through the bone in my arm and locked me in place.

  I only managed to kill it, and not die or lose my arm, because that bite pinned me. Being trapped gave me just enough leverage to jam my other arm into its eye socket. Once I was in that deep, it could not really do anything to stop me.

  Master Fatty Chunk hauled me off it the moment it went still and dumped another healing potion straight onto the wound. I screamed as the bone knit itself back together.

  “Good,” he said. “We’ll do it again with the next one.”

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  I was ashamed of how I fought. I was not ashamed that I survived.

  The next fights got worse.

  Instead of one creature, he sent me one and a half. A crippled one and a fully healthy one together. They did not coordinate. They did not hesitate. They attacked as if the other did not exist.

  So I used that fact.

  I slammed the crippled one into the healthy one, used the moment their bodies tangled to force openings, and shoved my fist into whatever orifice was large enough to fit. Then I tore.

  It was not clean. It might not have been honorable, but by all the gods was it effective.

  It also taught me something important. You did not always want a fair fight. Sometimes fighting multiple enemies at once was better, because they created weaknesses in each other.

  The pattern repeated all day.

  Master Fatty Chunk collected the cores once they started dropping. He told me he would keep them safe for me. Every day we trained, he would gather everything.

  I was not allowed to take the iron cores.

  He was very clear about that.

  “You do not touch iron until your last day,” he said. “You will always be fighting up two tiers. That’s how you learn to survive monsters you have no business surviving.”

  He said that was how you eventually fought platinum-rank monsters. Because the curve there was brutal. And a mithril-rank boss was something else entirely.

  He told me a story about helping break a gold-ranked dungeon that escalated into platinum, and how he had been forced to solo the boss when everyone else failed. He said he was not unique, but he was rare enough that there were only a handful of people like him.

  Mithril-ranked fighters almost never gathered. Usually there was one, sometimes two, tied quietly to a major dungeon. People passed through those places without ever realizing someone like him was there at all. They were not champions or public figures.

  They were background guardians. The kind of presence that only revealed itself when everything else had already gone wrong.

  His involvement with the Sea of Trees was deeper than anyone realized. He was not the warden.

  He was what got sent in after the warden failed.

  He was the last line, the one that only moved when every other defense had already failed.

  He told me it was a secret.

  I asked him why he was telling me any of this.

  He snorted softly. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. If you tell anybody, I’ll kill you.” He shrugged, like he was commenting on the weather. “Then I’ll kill them too. It won’t cost me anything. Only you.”

  I believed him.

  Especially after we finished for the day and I watched him flick a single stone through the nest we had cleared earlier. The rock punched through the entire cavern, killing every remaining tentasnake inside.

  There were hundreds of them.

  There was never any doubt that he could kill me instantly.

  He did not take us back to the guild hall the way he had brought us out. Instead of the sudden displacement, he ran, carrying me the entire way.

  It was a long distance, but he moved like a fat blur, the world streaking past us. I did not feel the ground or the wind. He did not even look like he was running hard. It was almost a light jog.

  I asked how he was doing it.

  “My aura,” he said easily. “The world usually does what I tell it to. Not like magic. More like I’m more real than the things around me.” He chuckled. “You’ll get it one day. Maybe you’ll show me yours when you reach that point. It’ll be a while.”

  As the guild hall came into view, he slowed. “All right,” he said. “I’m about to get into an argument with your instructor. She’s going to be furious we’re late, and she’s never liked me anyway.” He laughed. “Good instincts. She’s a great judge of character.”

  I heard Greta before I saw her.

  “You,” she bellowed. “How dare you. What were you thinking? He’s four years old. Do you know how late it is? Do you know how long we’ve been looking for him?”

  She stormed toward us, tusks bared. “He was nowhere to be found. The only explanation was that you took him. Where did you go?”

  Master Fatty Chunk did not acknowledge most of it. “He’s going to upgrade his core tonight,” he said. “Then I’m taking him with me. A few months. Maybe a year. We’ll see. He’ll be back before the tournament season next year for sure.”

  Greta froze. Her eyes dropped to me, still draped over his back.

  “I chose him,” Master Fatty Chunk said. “He’s mine.”

  “What right do you think you have to do so?” she demanded.

  “The right of might,” he replied calmly. “If you think you can stop me, then do something about it. I won’t strike you. But if you strike me, you will not enjoy the result.”

  She hissed, steam rolling off her as her temper spiked. I knew she did not fully believe he was as strong as he claimed. I also knew she believed he was strong enough to make that threat without bluffing.

  “If you harm him...” she said tightly,

  “I will harm him in many, many ways.” He cut in.

  “That’s just the nature of training,” he continued. “But that does not mean harm does not come with care. I won’t let him die or stay dismembered.”

  He considered it for a moment. “He might lose a few parts here and there, but I’ll put him back together. I have enough elixirs, potions, medicines, and concoctions of many sorts to make sure of that. He’ll come back mostly the same, in mostly the same shape. Most likely, he’ll come back far far better.”

  Her tusk ground against her teeth. “This isn’t over.”

  “No,” he agreed. "It isn’t. But it is over for now. When we are back, you may strike me once for every month he is gone. I will not retaliate."