"Two months," Lucien muttered, watching the sun drop toward the horizon with the resigned recognition of someone who had learned to track time by how much everything hurt. "Two months and I have not landed a single clean hit on a retired man who is probably past sixty. Not one." He paused. "He runs my body into the ground every single day and then, only after that, asks me to spar. In that order. Every time."
He already knew what was coming next. He always knew what was coming next. That was perhaps the most exhausting part of it.
The training Cael put him through made his father's notebook regime look like a gentle suggestion. The old man ran it with the particular efficiency of someone who had spent years in the Marines and had retained all of the methodology while discarding any interest in making it comfortable.
The first morning had begun before sunrise, as promised, with the sensation of cold water hitting his face. Lucien, who had always treated sleep as one of the few genuinely worthwhile activities available to him, had lain there for a full second in a state of profound offence, briefly entertaining the idea of whether killing the old man was a reasonable response, before Cael's voice arrived from somewhere above him.
"Up."
That was all. Just the one word. It had been the same word every morning since, and it was the official beginning of what Lucien had come to think of as the daily destruction of his body.
It started with the boulder run. Down the mountain with the rock on his back, around the base of the hill once, then back up. That was one round. Cael required ten rounds, three times a day, using the same route without variation. The boulder itself had changed partway through the first month when Cael had looked at him completing a set and declared, with no particular feeling about it, that they were switching to a heavier one. Lucien had not been consulted on this decision.
After the runs came the strength work, and this was where Cael had made his opinion of Lucien's current hitting power abundantly clear.
"You hit like a little girl," the old man had said on the third day, with the flat certainty of someone delivering a weather report. "We are fixing that."
The rock that had just carried him up and down a hill ten times then became a weight, repositioned and repurposed through a variety of exercises that targeted every muscle group Cael had apparently decided was insufficient, which was most of them. Lucien had written the full list in the notebook on the first day and then stopped referring to it because the list was long enough to be demoralising and he had memorised it within the week anyway.
That brought the first half of the day to a close. Only when the sun was directly overhead would Cael bring him back inside to eat a substantial lunch intended to compensate for the breakfast that did not exist in this household. The portions were enormous. In the first week Lucien had struggled to finish them, and on the days he could not, Cael had resolved the problem by grabbing him by the back of the neck, stretching his mouth open, and depositing the remainder before clamping it shut. Lucien had not left food on his plate since the third occurrence.
After lunch came a short rest. Then the same thing happened twice more, boulder runs and strength work in the same sequence, until the sun began its descent toward the horizon.
Which brought him to now.
"You should not talk badly about old people," came a shout from inside the house, clear and unhurried despite the walls between them. "Now get up."
Lucien stared at the closed door for a moment. This was the other thing about Cael that had been frustrating him since the first week, the thing he still had no rational explanation for. The old man heard and saw everything. Through walls, across distances, apparently without any particular effort. It should not have been possible and yet the evidence was consistent and overwhelming.
He still remembered the afternoon in the third week when he had made what he had considered a very reasonable tactical decision. The boulder run took him down the hill, around the base, and back up. The critical detail was that Cael did not watch him run around the base of the hill which meant that once Lucien reached the base of the hill he was out of the old man's sightline for.
The mathematics had seemed straightforward. He had completed the downward portion at full effort, arrived at the base, found a flat patch of ground behind a cluster of rocks, closed his eyes, and begun what he intended to be a brief and well-deserved rest.
He had managed approximately four seconds of it before he felt himself being lifted off the ground entirely. Cael had come down the hill, in the time it had taken Lucien to close his eyes, crossed the distance without making a sound, and was now holding him by the collar at arm's length with an expression that conveyed nothing in particular. He was thrown a considerable distance. The boulder, which Cael had apparently also carried down the hill for the purpose of making a point, arrived shortly afterward.
Lucien had not stopped running since. At least not until he figured out how the old man did it, which he fully intended to do eventually. He stood up slowly, already knowing what was coming. The sparring session. The part of the day where he got hit repeatedly and told exactly why.
Cael walked out at a leisurely pace and took his position in front of him with the same unhurried ease he brought to everything. Lucien's eyes had none of their usual laziness in them. He opened them wide and kept them there, watching.
Lucien moved first this time, which he had learned was preferable to waiting. Waiting gave Cael nothing to work with and nothing to work with suited Cael perfectly.
He threw two quick jabs, not expecting them to land, just measuring the response. Cael slipped both without stepping back.
Lucien changed levels and drove forward low. Cael sidestepped and let him pass, tapping the back of his head as he went by. Light. Instructional.
"Too straight," Cael said.
Lucien reset and came again, this time cutting the angle before committing. Cael moved off the line but slower than usual, and the follow-up elbow came close enough that the old man actually raised a forearm to deflect rather than simply stepping away.
That was new.
Lucien pressed the advantage immediately. A low kick to disrupt the base, a shoulder feint, then a straight right aimed at the opening. Cael caught the right and redirected it, but the redirection pulled him fractionally off balance, and Lucien had already dropped his weight and pivoted.
The kick came from the left, low and tight, and it landed.
Not cleanly. Not with everything behind it. But the heel connected with Cael's ribs and the old man moved with it rather than absorbing it, which meant it had carried enough to matter.
"You got better."