The advanced training hall was empty at five in the morning, which was exactly why William used it.
Most students slept until seven on Mondays.
The few who trained before breakfast preferred the smaller auxiliary halls closer to the dormitories.
This hall, the large one, the one with ceiling high enough to practice aerial essence techniques, sat unused in the early hours, and William had stopped thinking of that as coincidence and started thinking of it as resource.
He ran forms until six. Not the academy standard sequences, which he had memorized months ago and which no longer challenged him in the ways that mattered, but the techniques from his mother's journal.
The ones designed for killing. He worked them slowly first, feeling where each motion connected to the next, finding the economy of it. His mother's style was efficient in the way that old things were efficient—no elegance wasted on display, everything pointed at outcome.
