In the world of magic, there were those who possessed what was called a body constitution.
A body constitution was essentially a specific physical condition a person was born with that set them apart from everyone else in a particular way. Some people were born with bodies simply stronger than average for no explainable reason. Others had the yin and yang constitution, where their body would never burn in fire nor freeze in cold no matter the temperature. There were many others that history had recorded and even more that had not been seen in generations, but the common thread was always the same.
You were born with it. It was not something you could be given, trained into, or developed after the fact.
Which was what made Lucas's case unusual.
Arthur had been watching the boy's physical progression with growing attention over the past two days. The rate of change was not natural by any standard he had seen in his long years of teaching and fighting. And after running through every other explanation he could think of, the only one left standing was this.
Lucas had a constitution that allowed his body to adapt. To absorb stress, pressure and physical demand at an accelerated rate and come back from it changed, not just recovered. A constitution built for growth itself.
If that was true, and Arthur was fairly certain it was, then the boy standing in front of him was not just talented. He was the kind of person that appeared once in several generations, if that, and whose existence tended to upset the balance of things considerably.
A smile settled onto Arthur's face without him meaning it to.
He is going to shake the world. He crossed his arms as he thought. And I hope to be there when he does.
What Arthur did not know, and would not have believed if someone told him, was that he was wrong. Not about the conclusion necessarily, but about the reason. The growth he was attributing to a rare inborn constitution was actually the product of a month spent inside a dimensional space where time ran at a completely different rate from the outside world.
A significant misunderstanding. But an understandable one.
Arthur looked up. The sky had shifted while they were at it, the first pale light of the sun beginning to show at the horizon.
He looked back at Lucas.
"I had been planning to push your body further before teaching you the technique, to make sure you could handle the physical strain of the movement itself. But looking at where you are now, I think you are close enough." He paused. "So I will teach you."
Lucas's face broke into a wide smile and he nodded.
"Before that, however, I will be adding another fifteen kilograms to the cuffs."
Lucas opened his mouth.
Before a single word came out the cuffs shifted and the weight hit him all at once.
His knees dropped to the ground. Both hands came down onto the stone to catch himself.
"F-fuck." He breathed out quietly.
Arthur clapped his hands once. "Morning exercise first. Then the technique. Off you go."
Lucas clicked his tongue, pushed himself back upright and started running. He was struggling, each step a little more deliberate than it should have been, but he was moving and he did not stop.
Arthur conjured a small golden platform beneath his feet, let it lift him up and carry him along at a comfortable height above the running Lucas, and picked up a wooden stick.
Motivation worked best when it was immediate.
Two hours later I finally finished the morning exercise.
The extra weight had been brutal at first, the kind of brutal where your legs are doing the mechanical work and your whole body is screaming at you to stop. But I had managed. Partly because I genuinely did not want to get hit by that stick, and partly because I was starting to understand that discomfort and impossible were two very different things.
My body ached all over and I was covered in sweat.
I used the cleaning spell I had practiced the night before and everything cleared off in an instant, leaving me feeling like I had just stepped out of a proper wash.
That spell alone was worth every hour it took to learn. I was never going back to doing things the slow way.
I looked around properly for the first time since we had come inside. We were in a large training room. The walls and floor were grey marble, smooth and solid, with high ceilings fitted with chandeliers powered by mana stones that threw clean even light across the whole space. The room was wide enough that a hundred people could train in it without crowding each other.
Training dummies of every kind were spread across the floor and along the walls. Tall ones, short ones, some built from wood and some from metal, varying weights and sizes clearly meant for different purposes. Weapon racks lined the walls with blades, blunt weapons and pole arms arranged neatly across them.
To the left the room opened into a more specialized area. A large pool sat against the far wall, clearly built for endurance work, its surface still and dark. Beside it, target ranges of different distances were marked across the floor for long range practice.
The whole room was worth an obscene amount of money. It was the kind of place that quietly reminded you how much wealth the royal family actually had.
But the most important thing was not what I could see. It was what I could feel.
The mana concentration in here was different from anywhere else in the palace. Purer and noticeably denser. Just standing in it felt like the air had a little more weight to it. If I trained in this room every single day I had a feeling the path to the second rank would be a lot shorter than I had expected.
"Now listen up." Arthur's voice pulled me out of my thoughts.
"The first move is about speed and movement. It is designed to take down not one opponent but many at the same time." He raised a hand and seven metallic dummies activated and spread out across the room, positioning themselves at different angles and distances from each other.
"If you watched carefully earlier, you will have noticed that the movement is not a straight line. It is a zigzag. And before you think that is just for show, it is not. The purpose is to keep your enemy from being able to fix your position. The moment they think they know where you are, you have already moved somewhere else."
That was exactly why I had not been able to track him earlier. My eyes had kept trying to lock onto his figure but every time they got close he had already shifted direction and I was chasing the afterimage.
It was a simple idea when you broke it down. Brutally effective.
Arthur stepped forward and drew his rapier.
"You do not zigzag randomly either. You calculate it. Every movement has a purpose and a target. Wasted motion costs you time and energy, and if you take too long your opponent will read the pattern and counter before you finish. It has to be instant from start to finish."
He took his stance and moved.
A golden blur shot forward, cutting across the room in a tight zigzag at a speed that was easier to follow than before but still seriously fast. Each pass through the pattern brought his blade across a different dummy and then he was already moving to the next one before the cut had fully landed.
He appeared behind the last dummy.
A beat of silence.
Then all seven heads hit the floor at exactly the same moment, rolling in different directions.
"That is how you clear multiple enemies at once. Slash as fast as you can and do not hesitate between targets. No delay, no second guessing. Move fast, strike fast. That is all there is to it." He turned to face me. "Questions?"
I had been listening to every word and turning it over as he spoke. The technique itself was straightforward when he laid it out like that, which somehow made it more unsettling. The simplest things were usually the ones that were hardest to actually do.
"How much mana does it consume? At that speed it must be significant."
Arthur shook his head. "Less than you would think. That is actually one of the strengths of this move. You do not need to push your body with heavy mana enhancement to execute it. As long as your raw physical speed is where it needs to be, the movement does the work. What I showed you earlier was mostly my base speed with the lightning affinity layered on top, nothing more. And lightning already gives a natural boost to speed, especially for our affinity which runs a little differently from standard lightning."
"I see."
So the real foundation was physical speed. The mana enhancement was secondary. Which meant that if my base speed was already at a high enough level I could use this move repeatedly without burning through my reserves, the same way a fighter with naturally fast hands does not tire themselves out throwing punches.
I nodded to myself, grabbed my sword and stepped forward.
The dummies had already reset. Apparently they were infused with runes that kept restoring them to their original condition after damage, unless you completely destroyed or melted them beyond what the runes could work with. Useful things.
"Start by working on your base speed first." Arthur tapped the ground once with his foot and the floor around me and the dummies shifted, the marble giving way to a wide stretch of sand that settled with a soft sound beneath my feet.
I felt the soles of my shoes sink slightly into it.
"Once you can move properly on sand you will move significantly faster on solid ground. The resistance builds everything." Arthur stepped back out of the area and folded his arms.
I nodded, settled into my stance and pushed forward.
My body immediately felt wrong.
The moment my feet hit the sand the ground refused to cooperate. Every step that should have been clean and quick became sluggish and uneven, the sand absorbing the force I was putting into it and sending it sideways instead of forward. I felt myself fighting my own momentum with every stride.
I had barely covered half the distance to the first dummy before my foot slipped out from under me and I went down face first into the sand.
"Fkwoskk." I tried to curse but my mouth was full of sand before the word finished.
I pushed myself up, spat out what I could and wiped my face.
"Kgh."
A sound came from behind me causing me to I looked back.
Arthur was standing with his arms crossed and a completely expressionless face.
I stared at him for a moment, then turned back to the dummies and tried again.
And fell again.
"Kuk."
I tried a different approach. Fell again.
"Pff."
Every time I hit the sand I heard that same muffled sound from behind me and every time I looked back , Arthur was standing there with the same poker face, shoulders perfectly still, expression totally neutral.
It was on the fourth or fifth fall that I actually looked closely.
His shoulders were trembling.
Oh.
Oh, this absolute bastard.
"You are laughing at me, aren't you." I said, squinting at him.
"No, I am not—" He coughed. His eyes went somewhere else. "Not at all."
"Sure."
I stood back up, made a show of taking a very serious stance, and then deliberately slipped and dropped flat on my back.
The dam broke.
"Pfft, ahahahaha!" Arthur bent forward and grabbed his stomach, laughing properly and without any remaining attempt to hide it.
I knew it. I thought, clicking my tongue. And Virgil is probably watching and laughing at this too, from wherever he is.
"This is going to be a long day." I muttered, stood back up and got moving again.
And a long day it was.
Slowly, though, things started to shift. The falls came less often. I started reading the sand beneath my feet better, adjusting my weight distribution without having to think about it, finding where to push and where to let the ground take the load instead of fighting it.
Arthur, noticing I was no longer wiping sand off my face every thirty seconds, complained that it was less entertaining now.
Yeah. He could live with the disappointment.
I was still not moving at the speed I wanted. The dummies were getting cut but the effort behind each slash was more than it should have been and I could feel the gap between where I was and where the technique actually lived. But that was fine. It was a gap I could close.
After a few hours I took a thirty minute break, ate some potatoes which improved my mood considerably, and went back in.
The afternoon sessions went better. My adaptation to the sand kept building and my speed built with it. Every time I pushed off the ground the sand would kick up behind my heels in a small spray, which I decided to take as a sign that I was finally moving the way the surface wanted me to.
As Arthur watched, the same thought kept circling in his head. The adaptation constitution. It had to be. He had expected this particular adjustment to take a day or two at minimum. It had taken a few hours. That was not effort. That was something in the body itself.
By the time I noticed what the light outside the high windows looked like, it was already four in the afternoon.
"Our session is done for today, my prince." Arthur said, the faint trace of a disappointed look on his face. "I wished we had more time but unfortunately the day does not wait."
He just wanted more material to laugh at. I was not fooled.
"Your first mage instructor will arrive in about thirty minutes. Rest until then."
"Understood." I nodded.
"Until tomorrow then." He gave a short nod before giving me a smile and disappeared in a quiet flash of golden sparks, leaving nothing behind.
I stepped out of the sand, rolled my neck until it cracked properly, and shook my head to get the remaining grains out of my hair. Most of it came loose. The rest I cleared with the cleaning spell.