The resistance bands hit different when Vale stopped pretending to be nice.
Bronze tier meant the tension scaled to match my stats, which meant my C-rank strength had to fight for every inch of movement while my off hand held a spiral of condensed stamina that wanted to collapse every time my concentration slipped. The first ten reps burned. The second ten made me question my life choices. By rep thirty I had stopped counting and started surviving.
"Spiral dropped," Vale said from his chair. "That one doesn't count."
"It flickered."
"Flickered is dropped. Start over."
I started over. The spiral reformed in my palm, blue-white and unstable, a basketball of compressed energy that cost me stamina just to maintain. Wave Motion was supposed to be my trump card. Vale had turned it into a torture device.
"You're thinking about the pain," he said. "Stop thinking about the pain. Pain is information. Process it and move on."
"Easy for you to say. Nothing touches you."
