Another two years had passed since my reincarnation into this world, putting me at five years old.
Today was our fifth birthday, so for the first time ever, I bolted down the stairs as fast as my legs could carry me. It turned out to be a bit too fast. I tripped and slammed into the wooden floor hard enough to make the whole room echo.
"Dai, sweetie... be more careful."
Zenith looked worried, but in reality, I was totally fine. Not because I was tough, though I kind of was, but because right then, nothing mattered to me more than this party. The worst part was, I didn't even understand why.
Over the past two years, I'd drilled the sword basics, put myself through physical conditioning and mental prep, practiced magic with Roxy, and managed to get a decent grip on a hilt with my tiny hands, even if they still slipped now and then.
I picked myself up off the floor and headed into the dining room.
The first thing that hit me was the smell of freshly baked bread, seasoned meat, golden rolls, fruit, piled cheeses, and... well, you get the picture.
To nobles, this would be nothing special, but for us it was different.
My mom had gotten up before dawn to get everything ready. My dad, Paul Greyrat, probably got up early too, but only to sneak bites of food while Zenith shooed him out of the kitchen.
"Mom... thanks," I said, pulling out a chair and digging right in.
Beside me, Rudeus was attacking his food with even more enthusiasm.
"This is so good, Mom..." Rudeus had his mouth full, but he didn't care.
"I'm glad, Rudy... but don't talk with your mouth full, okay?"
"Got it, Mom."
While we ate, I thought about everything I'd accomplished so far. Voiceless magic, both offensive and healing. The basics of swordsmanship in a five-year-old body. Making it to five years old without once wishing I was dead.
All things considered, not half bad.
---
Once the meal was over, and after we'd savored every bite, laughed at Paul's jokes, and watched him do a quick sword trick, my dad finally spoke up.
"Alright..." He cleared his throat. "When a kid turns five, they get something special from their family... it's a tradition that marks the transition from early childhood... to, well, slightly less early childhood. There's not much else to say. If you want to call yourselves adults, make it to twelve first, and then fifteen, assuming your mother actually lets you go by then."
Paul handed me two swords. One was a real, live blade. It was long and heavy, with silver trim, a white stripe down the center, and a diamond motif stamped into the middle. The other was a shorter wooden practice sword, scaled down to fit my current strength.
"Dai, as the firstborn, you get yours first. I know it was only by a few minutes, but rules are rules... well, okay, there aren't actually any rules for presents, but I want this to be a moment between a father and his swordsman son. I'm proud of you, kid."
I grabbed the metal sword and lifted it over my head. It felt perfect. A high-quality leather grip hugged my palm without chafing.
"Father, this is too much."
"Come on, Dai. It's a real sword, the kind that cuts, not a toy, and..."
"I know, don't worry," I said, cutting him off. "A sword isn't a toy. It's a tool, and like any tool, it demands respect and a purpose."
"That's... where did you get that from, Dai?"
"From books, Father."
Paul scratched the back of his neck and decided not to push it.
"Son, a man should always carry a sword in his heart. Don't go thinking that holding a metal blade means you've suddenly gotten stronger. To protect what matters to you, you…"
"…have to carry that conviction inside you. Not to attack, but to protect. Don't think you're going to become invincible overnight. One day, people are going to rely on you, and your duty will be..."
He was cut short by Zenith, who lightly smacked the back of his head with an open palm.
"That's enough," Zenith said.
Paul hung his head.
"Fine. Just remember to put it away when you're not using it."
"I will, Father."
Now it was Rudeus's turn.
I watched Paul unwrap another sword. It was similar to mine in design, though slightly smaller and with different detailing. He handed it to my brother with a solemn gesture that bordered on total disinterest. To be fair, that feeling was entirely mutual.
"Son, I know you don't like swords and prefer magic. I don't expect you to follow the same path as your brother, but every man should at least know how to defend himself in hand-to-hand combat. Magic won't always save you."
Rudeus took the sword and looked it over. He mentioned it was heavier than he expected and gave Paul a polite thank-you, though he clearly wasn't thrilled. He leaned way more toward magic, which was fine by me. The sword was my true calling anyway.
I never quite understood the sharp divide between us. We were supposed to be twins, but we couldn't be more different.
My thoughts were cut short when Zenith stepped forward holding two books. They looked thick, though one was slightly slimmer than the other.
"My sweet little Dai. You have no idea how proud you make me." She gently stroked my cheek. "I love that you decided to follow your mother's path and take it even further. I know you only took an interest in it a couple of years ago, but... well, never mind that. This is a compendium on advanced healing magic. It's a little incomplete, but..."
"This..." I took the book. "This must have cost a fortune."
"Well, yes," she said, placing a hand on her cheek, "but when it comes to my children's future, I don't care what things cost. Besides, with your talent, it's worth every penny."
"It's... it's perfect! I mean... thanks, Mom," I blurted out, before quickly catching myself.
Where did that come from? I didn't know why I'd reacted like that, but it didn't feel as strange as I thought it would. It felt natural. Like a piece of me that had been sitting there the whole time, waiting to be noticed.
I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around her. A real, tight hug. It surprised even me, but I held on as hard as I could. It was just like I'd promised the sky.
I heard Paul let out a dramatic, fake scoff behind me.
"Look at this little rascal. Getting all sentimental with his mother. You little scamp!"
Zenith turned to glare at him, refusing to loosen her grip on me.
"He's my baby, leave him be." She hugged me tighter. "He can stay with his mother for as long as he wants."
"Alright, alright... but tonight..."
"Paul!"
"Hehehe."
"Just you wait until tonight."
Paul took a swig from his tankard and balanced the blade of a sword against his lips.
"Honey, you do that every time. Don't you have any other tricks?"
Paul took the sword away, set it on the floor, and sank back into his chair to keep drinking, completely defeated by a single sentence from his wife.
Satisfied with her victory, Zenith let go of me and walked over to Rudeus.
"And for you, Rudy... a botanical encyclopedia. I know how much you love studying the world. It's packed with illustrations and notes on flora from across the entire continent."
"Whoa! Mom, this is..." Rudeus flipped eagerly from page to page. "Look at these illustrations. They're so detailed. And the notes on their magical properties..."
He got completely lost in the pages before remembering where he was and snapping the cover shut.
"Thank you so much, Mom. It's exactly what I wanted."
"I'm glad, sweetie." Zenith hugged him, shedding a few quiet tears into his hair.
Finally, it was Roxy's turn.
She stepped forward holding two wooden wands. They were simple, roughly a foot long, but clearly crafted with care. Rudeus's had a blue stone embedded in the tip; mine held a deep red one.
"I made them yesterday... I completely forgot, what with you two casting magic bare-handed this whole time. A master is supposed to craft a wand for a disciple the moment they master elementary magic. I apologize for the oversight."
"Thanks, Sensei," I said. "I'll take good care of it."
"Same here, Sensei," Rudeus said.
At first, Roxy had been reluctant to accept the title of master. However, she'd taken a liking to a word I'd introduced from Japanese. She loved being called "sensei," and I'd even ended up teaching her how to write it.
---
The next day, my real swordsmanship training began. The goal was to practice basic swings and stances using a five-year-old body that had already spent two years doing just that, but since Paul declared it "necessary," I didn't argue.
I worked on my footwork and weight shifting through sparring matches with him, sharpening my reflexes and keeping a cool head while my dad swung live steel inches from my face.
On top of that, Paul sat me down to explain the three major sword styles.
"The first is the Sword God Style."
It was a school that prioritized sheer speed and aggression, designed to finish an opponent in a single, lightning-fast strike. If that failed, the philosophy was simple: keep attacking and pressing forward until the enemy stopped moving.
"The second is the Water God Style."
This style focused entirely on defense, parrying incoming strikes to create an opening for a counter. Because it was purely reactive, offensive techniques were rare. The focus sat entirely on deflecting attacks, spells and projectiles included. It was the preferred style of noblemen and court knights.
"The third is the North God Style."
It lacked signature forms, emphasizing situational adaptability instead. According to Paul, "adaptability" was usually just a polite word for trickery, feints, and fighting dirty. Mastered, it made a swordsman completely unpredictable.
"Supposedly, it works great for picking up girls at taverns, too..." He trailed off, noticing my mom glaring at him from the kitchen doorway. "Anyway! You're going to learn Sword God and Water God. Offense and defense. If you ever want to pick up North God later on, I can teach you that too, alright?"
Historically, the North God style tended to be looked down on. I didn't agree with that assessment. It was far too practical to be useless. More likely, Paul just personally disliked it, even if he held an advanced rank in all three.
"Understood, Father."
Paul nodded, satisfied, and pulled me out of my thoughts by playfully ruffling my hair.
"Good. Now, show me your basic stance. Run through everything you know. Take your time."
Ten minutes into my demonstration, Paul had gone completely silent. He just stood there, frozen, looking like he couldn't believe a five-year-old was holding forms that cleanly. What he didn't know was that I'd practiced kendo in my previous life. The geometry wasn't all that different, even if the center of gravity in this tiny body felt strange.
"Son... have you been practicing these on your own?"
"Just at night. Whenever I couldn't sleep."
"You obsessed little freak..." Paul burst out laughing, his chest swelling with pride. "Alright then. Time to teach you what actually matters. The one thing that separates a guy holding a sword from a true swordsman."
He walked over to the corner of the yard where we kept the wooden training dummies.
"Swordsmanship in this world isn't just hitting things with a heavy stick. Watch."
Paul casually stepped up to a dummy. With one lazy flick of his wooden practice sword, the thick log sheared cleanly in half.
Wait. That shouldn't be physically possible.
"You used magic just now."
"What? No."
"Then how did you do that?"
"This?" He pointed at the severed wood. "Oh, you just plant your foot with a *whoosh*... and then *shwip*! That's all there is to it."
"Father, you just bisected a solid log with a blunt piece of oak, and the wood didn't even splinter. There is a lot more happening there than *'whoosh-shwip'*."
If there was an actual science to this, and if I could consciously capture whatever reinforcement he was doing instinctively, the ceiling on my training was going to skyrocket.
I took a breath and stepped up to the second dummy.
"Let me try."
"Trying is free, kiddo, but don't get discouraged. It usually takes trainees a few years to land their first..."
I closed my eyes, shutting his voice out. I dropped my awareness out of the courtyard, out of the afternoon heat, narrowing my entire world down to two things: the vessel of my body, and the wooden grip in my right hand.
In my mind's eye, I called up the familiar, warm current of mana I used to form spells. But instead of letting it reach my palm and leap outward into the air, I capped the exit. I forced the current to turn around and cycle back through my own anatomy.
*Can I thread this?*
*Don't push it out. Pack it into the muscle. Weave it into the tendons. Calcify the bone. Let it rush down the shoulder, through the forearm, into the wood.*
I opened my eyes. The courtyard was gone; there was only the target log. I brought the sword up, drew on every single fiber of my five-year-old frame, and drove the blade down, snapping my eyes shut a millisecond before the wood hit wood.
When I opened them, the dummy was still standing in one piece. I hadn't expected to cleave it on attempt one. But sitting right across the center of the trunk was a clean, half-inch-deep fracture.
"What... what in God's name did you just do?" Paul dropped his practice sword, staring at the log like it had grown a second head.
"I call it reinforcement. I took the standard spell-casting flow, but kept it trapped inside my skin."
"Are you serious? You did that consciously?"
"Yes. The distribution was sloppy, but it was an intentional routine. Not a fluke."
Paul dropped to one knee, grabbing both of my shoulders to look me dead in the eye.
"Listen to me. We are not letting you hit a wall with this. We are riding this momentum right now. But before we take another step... do you actually want this, Dai? The way of the sword is..."
"I want to learn the sword, Father."
Paul's face flushed bright red.
"Then let's get to work. Guard up!"
***
Over the next fortnight, the training became brutal.
Paul rewrote my regimen from the ground up, forcing me to execute high-speed forms while actively holding a mana-loop inside my muscles. Dividing my brain between high-precision gymnastics and internal spell-weaving was exhausting, but slowly, the reinforcement started to happen automatically.
My dad kept hammering the same concept into my head: *the mana and the strike cannot be two thoughts. They have to be one verb.*
During a quiet afternoon inside, Roxy looked at me over her book.
"Daiki, I need to ask you a serious question. Do you genuinely love the sword as much as magic? Or are you forcing yourself down this dual track because you feel obligated to? Because the road you are trying to walk is exponentially more punishing than picking a lane."
"Magic still feels... external to me," I admitted. "I can generate the formulas easily enough, but the sword feels like an extension of my arm. That said, I don't think they're mutually exclusive. Especially when it comes to chantless healing."
Satisfied with the answer, Roxy pivoted her curriculum. She began teaching me "hot-cast" combat spells. These were quick, low-tier spells designed to be fired from a free left hand while the right hand remained occupied with a hilt. A true spell-fencer, she explained, doesn't put the sword away to cast. They use the flash of the spell to hide the angle of the blade.
---
As my physical sessions with Paul intensified, Roxy's theory lessons scaled up to match.
We moved into compound magic: generating micro-weather systems by stacking thermal and moisture spells in rapid succession, creating dense fog banks and instantly snapping them out of existence.
When I asked if a high-tier mage could essentially play God with local physics, Roxy gently brought me back to earth, warning me never to fall in love with my own mana pool.
She sat me down to explain the sheer demographic reality of the world: genuine, battle-competent mages were a statistical anomaly. Out of ten thousand people, only a tiny fraction ever achieved the *Advanced* rank.
She told me stories about the Ranoa Magic Academy, her alma mater. She described it as a strange, sprawling sanctuary up north that cared infinitely more about a person's research than the shape of their ears.
"Isn't it a bit early to be pitching universities to him, Roxy?"
"For normal five-year-olds, yes," Roxy said placidly. "For Rudy, no. I am running out of things to teach him. With his graduation coming up, it felt like the appropriate time to bring it up."
"Graduation...?" Rudeus blinked.
"The practical exam. We'll be taking a horse out beyond the village borders."
I saw Rudeus's spine lock up instantly. I recognized that specific posture. I knew exactly why the concept of leaving the yard made his blood run cold.
"Beyond the... village?"
"Yes. Is that an issue?"
"Couldn't we just... do a written test in the parlor?"
"No."
"No..."
Roxy entirely missed the existential terror behind his voice.
"Are you feeling unwell?" she asked, peering at him.
"Ah... well...the local fauna! The woods are likely crawling with beasts..."
"As long as we keep to the main road, monster sightings are negligible. Even if we encounter a stray, they are low-tier. I can dispose of them. Frankly, Rudy, *you* could likely dispose of them."
Rudeus went dead silent, his eyes glazing over as he stared at a blank patch of wall.
"Wait," Roxy said, a strange look crossing her face. "Rudy... have you actually never stepped outside the front gate?"
"...No," Rudeus squeaked.
"Ah. Are you frightened of the horse?"
"I am completely indifferent to horses!"
"Fufu. Well, thank goodness. For a moment I was worried you didn't know how to be a child."
Before Rudeus could formulate a counter-argument, Roxy stepped forward, hooked her arms around his waist, and hoisted him over her shoulder like a sack of barley.
"*HWah?!*"
"The view from the saddle fixes the vertigo rather quickly. Come along."
Ignoring his muffled protests, she carried him out the front door.
---
I wandered back into the kitchen.
"You didn't go with them?" Zenith asked, kneading dough.
I hopped onto a stool.
"Not my test. Paul has me doing footwork drills in twenty minutes, so I can't be stiff for it." I tore a corner off a loaf of bread and popped it into my mouth.
"Oh, Dai, it's one afternoon. Your father wouldn't have minded. Muscles need a day to breathe, you know."
"I know. Speaking of which, where is the tyrant?"
Zenith giggled.
"Passed out upstairs. He claimed he needed to 'store his *ki*' for your afternoon sparring."
"He didn't actually give you a lesson plan, did he?"
"Not a syllable. Just dead-man snoring."
"And he fell asleep on top of the quilt with his boots and belt on."
"Got it in one," Zenith beamed.
---
I spent the next three hours running solo kata in the dirt, forcing my nervous system to hold the internal mana-loop through forty consecutive repetitions. Just as I raised the wooden blade to initiate the final strike, the rhythmic *clop-clop* of hooves echoed down the lane.
I dropped my stance and walked to the gate.
"What... happened to the two of you?"
They looked like they'd been dragged behind a river barge. Roxy slid down from the saddle, looking utterly exhausted but radiating a quiet, fierce pride.
"Exam passed. Your brother is officially a Saint-ranked Water Mage."
"Really?"
Rudeus practically peeled himself off the horse's flank.
"It was... an eventful ride," Rudy said, water dripping steadily from his bangs.
"Looks like it."
"You missed out, brother."
"I'm okay with my choices."
"We got caught in a flash deluge."
"Sounds magical."
"It really wasn't," Rudy laughed weakly.
The front door flew open, Zenith appearing on the porch like an avenging angel.
"*By the Goddess!* Look at the two of you! You'll catch pneumonia standing in the breeze like that. Inside! Both of you, march! Towels and dry wool, right this second!"
"Yes, ma'am," Rudy sighed.
As my mother herded the newly minted Saint inside, the side door of the house creaked open. Paul stepped out onto the porch, stretching his arms over his head and letting out a jaw-cracking yawn.
"What'd I miss?" he blinked sleepily.
"Rudy passed his exam. He's a Saint now."
Paul stopped mid-stretch. He let out a long, low whistle, shaking his head.
"That smug little monster... damn it, now I actually have to try hard so my own kids don't start treating me like a mascot."
"It's a real risk."
Paul grinned, dropping his hand to the hilt of his training sword.
"You warm yet?"
"Born warm."