---part 3 chapter 48.3: No Pain, No Gain—continued...
Hexia started everyone with calisthenics.
This was, from the perspective of anyone who had not been paying close attention to the phrase *Hexia designed this*, a somewhat innocent word for what followed.
"Fifty repetitions," he announced. "Each exercise. Start with push-ups."
There was a communal pause.
"Fifty?" Durgan's voice had reached a register usually associated with small animals observing a predator. His magnificent gear-embedded beard had gone very still — always a bad sign. "Fifty *each?*"
"That's what I said."
"That's your idea of a *light warmup?*" Sirenia asked, with the tone of a woman reviewing a contract she had signed without reading the fine print.
"Yes."
Another pause, briefer this time.
"...Whose idea was it to volunteer for this?" Durgan asked, looking around at nobody in particular.
"Yours," Durin said, without looking at him, already dropping into position.
"I blame Kiara," Durgan decided.
"I accept the blame," Kiara said, with the easy dignity of someone who was already into her fifteenth push-up and finding it more challenging than she had anticipated but would not, under any circumstances, admit this. "It's fine. We're fine. This is fine."
It was not fine.
It was, in fact, fifty push-ups, fifty squats, fifty lunges each leg, fifty dips, and fifty burpees — the last of which caused Durgan to produce a sound of genuine personal offense — and Hexia performed every single repetition alongside them. Not demonstrating. Not monitoring from a distance. *With* them. Leading. And he did not fall behind, did not labor, did not count under his breath. He simply moved through every exercise with that liquid precision that characterized everything he did physically, and the complete absence of strain on his face was somehow more motivating and more demoralizing simultaneously.
"He's not even *breathing hard,*" Rhaine muttered, to her left. She touched the burn scars on her face absently — a habit when she was processing something difficult.
"Don't look at him," Kiara advised through clenched teeth. "Look at the ground. Focus on the ground. The ground is your friend."
"The ground is *not* my friend right now," said Lyssa, whose small arms were shaking through her forty-third push-up.
"Yes it is," Kiara insisted. "It's the ground that's going to catch you when you fall, and you are *not* going to fall."
Lyssa's forty-fourth push-up wobbled considerably.
"You are *absolutely* not going to fall."
Forty-five. Forty-six.
"FORTY-SEVEN! FORTY-EIGHT! FORTY-NINE! *FIFTY!*" Lyssa collapsed flat onto the ground the moment the last one was complete and lay there breathing like a small, determined fish that had briefly considered the possibility of being a bird and had been corrected by gravity.
On the other side of the yard, things were progressing differently among the companions.
Grome Bloodaxe had, by the time the calisthenics were half-complete, entered a state that could best be described as *enthusiastic suffering* — he was not complaining, he was not slowing, but every repetition was accompanied by a grunt of effort that started conversational and had graduated to something that rattled windows.
Hargen Purger, predictably, performed his fifty repetitions with no sound whatsoever. At one point Elaine looked over at him and found him in the middle of burpee number thirty-seven, expression entirely neutral, as though his body's relationship to effort had been renegotiated on terms she was not privy to.
Titania was thriving. Her Titan biology meant that the calisthenics registered as light exertion — but she had come to train, not coast, so she added complexity to each movement that had Solaria watching her with an expression of quiet scientific fascination.
Kragwargen, Magnus, and Sergius performed upper-body calisthenics while Hexia had arranged balance drills for their lower bodies — alternating between leg positions and weight-distribution exercises that had no human equivalent but clearly identified specific control problems that precision combat would require them to address. Both Magnus and Sergius found these unexpectedly challenging. Kragwargen found them *interesting*, which in a warchief of his experience meant they were already useful.
Karlugus performed every repetition and spent them visibly conducting internal arguments about whether calisthenics had tactical value, arriving, by burpee forty-three, at a grudging conclusion that they might.
Aelindra performed them with a ranger's economy — each movement precise, no energy wasted, and when she finished the burpees she stood up and was already thinking about something else entirely.
Elaine, who had spent years as Grand Imperial Magus in one of the great elven academies and who was, therefore, not remotely accustomed to physical training of this variety, nonetheless performed all fifty repetitions of everything with an expression of focused determination that drew a raised eyebrow from Nerissa.
"Are you all right?" Nerissa asked, pulling level with her on the twenty-ninth squat.
"I am making a strategic commitment to physical excellence," Elaine said, very precisely, through a face that was suggesting things about physical excellence that her words were not.
"You're dying." Nerissa teasingly said.
"I'm *adapting*." Elaine rephrasing it.
"Same thing." Nerissa Teasingly replied.
---To be continued in part 4...