Dalric looked past Ryku, at the eight others that stood behind him. While he was now more intimately familiar with six of them, all eight, besides Heitor, had been a part of his unit when they had stormed up the camp. He had a strong suspicion they were not here to train with him.

  He turned back to Ryku, “I do not...”

  His voice softened. He was going to deny the barely subtle request to be trained. Even outside of his desire to not be a mentor, it was against every code ever written to train outsiders in secret techniques. While the vast majority of the individual components of his regimen were neither unique to nor founded by giants, the ways in which they were modified, sequenced, tracked, and progressed all were.

  Obviously, he trained out in the open so any and all could see exactly what he did and replicate it to the best of their abilities. That alone would give them nothing though as they’d have no understanding of the whys and hows. More often than not, those that sought to copy what they’d seen of the regimen ended up injured.

  So his secrets would remain so.

  That said, he thought back to his brief conversation with Adlar. What he’d done in recruiting a large chunk of the camp to facilitate his whim was only paint over a crack. As the days went by, and certainly those days would turn to weeks and then months, that feeling of listlessness they held would only remerge and then grow. Dalric felt partially responsible.

  He wouldn’t say it truly weighed on him, to be listless is better than to be chained, but he had stated he would take greater responsibility so he couldn't simply ignore it. Even if he planned on leaving, there was something he could do. In fact, there was something he could do that would outlast his presence.

  “You do not?”

  “Hm.” He reached his hand out to Ryku and the much smaller man pulled him into his feet with relative ease, “I do not believe that you are the only nine.”

  Ryku’s eyebrows furrowed a little, “We… are not.”

  “Bring the others. All of the others.”

  An air of confusion rose throughout the group. It seemed what he had said fell completely outside of their expectations. Understandably.

  “Also, for you all, make sure you bring the healers.”

  A slight smile slipped onto Dalrics lips as concern quickly replaced the confusion. Only Ryku remained unbothered, just that bit more aware of what they had signed up for. He nodded and headed off. The other eight either calmed at the sight of his reaction or grew even more concerned.

  Dalric had no need for them and their time was better served elsewhere so he sent them off too. The moment that word of his willingness to play the part of ‘trainer’ spread, the odds that Ryku would be overwhelmed by the volume of eager trainees was essentially a guarantee. More importantly, Dalric needed them gone so he could make the alterations he had in mind.

  Currently, the training grounds covered roughly thirty by forty fathoms. The majority of that space was taken up by tracks and other mobility courses. For the most part, they were inessential. Everything that was truly necessary for his regime could fit within roughly ten by ten. He’d have to shift some things around and more than likely still have to extend the space, but the work wasn’t too complicated. The only truly irksome part of the process would be moving the giant walls he constructed around the grounds.

  Although.

  If he was no longer working alone and would instead be in the midst of a crowd, maybe the walls weren't totally necessary. They weren’t particularly protective anyway. He’d made them somewhat thick at around ten feet, but they were less than three fathoms high and still just rock formations. Their true value was simply a physiological deterrent, creatures naturally hesitated when they saw large walls. A large crowd would have a similar effect.

  In that case…

  A number of hours later, after recruiting a few dozen people to help cut down trees and manually move a few things around, Dalric had finished the new, expanded training grounds. Though the ‘training’ part of that statement was a bit debatable now.

  His personal section, which he tucked right against the wooden wall, in the most secure spot he could manage, still had that focus. The space immediately beyond it did as well. He had kept a short three lane track that wrapped around two mobility courses, a large weight lifting area, and a covered dueling ring. Those were in part for his own use, but mainly for others.

  All together, the actual training part of the ‘training ground’ took up less than a third of the space. The rest of it held two new additions that had related, but very difficult focuses.

  The surprisingly larger of the two was a rectangular, debris-littered pit that he made at the behest of a large number of his helpers. They wanted to use it to play some sort of sport he had never heard of. He hadn’t really cared to learn the details of it either, but he fulfilled the request anyway as it was another avenue for people to spend their time productively, or at least less listlessly.

  The main new addition, which while smaller, housed far more people than the pit and its few raised seats, was the two thousand seater amphitheatre. Originally, he had planned on making a simple, flat ring of seats around a raised platform, but due to the simplicity of the task he had made the pit first. In doing so, more specifically in repurposing the thick walls to be the back support for the main set of seats, he realized how wasteful space-wise his original plan had been. In the end, a two-tiered, twenty five fathom wide cavea was enough for fifteen hundred to sit comfortably with room to spare.

  As they did at this very moment.

  “Once you feel as though you have absolutely nothing left to push out, pull.”

  “Yes sir!”

  “What?”

  “Huh?”

  “He just said that’s impossible.”

  “Did he say pull?”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Pull?”

  “I missed it, what did he say?”

  “Huh?”

  “I knew this was a waste of time.”

  Dalric projected his voice through the crowd. Each of the one thousand five hundred and twenty–seven in attendance had a random object of ill-import in their hand, or appendage as it were. They had spent however long it had been necessary for them to empty out their ahjer into said object, doing just that. Now, he told them to pull that expended ahjer back into themselves. An impossible task.

  They reacted as one would expect.

  “I did not say speak, I said pull.”

  Impossible though the instruction was, attempting it was an essential step in the process. The process of developing ranged ahjer sense.

  Subconsciously, everyone had it. One’s soul was always in communication with the world. That communication simply bypassed the body. To consciously develop the ability, they had to first listen in.

  The easiest way to do so was another secret that Dalric would not share blindly, but this method was decent enough and standard procedure practically everywhere that had ahjerists. It primarily operated on the fact that within the soul's maximum radius, one could and would immediately recognize where their own ahjer was. That in and of itself was not ranged ahjer sense, it would be more akin to knowing where one’s fingers were even in a dark room, but in the process of trying to reclaim that ahjer many of the crowd would for the first time in their life feel their soul.

  It would take years. For the less talented, decades. For the talentless, it could take their entire life. In any case, eventually after consistent and diligent effort they would no longer just feel the impossibility of that act, but rather ‘hear’ the resistance. Ahjer could not be absorbed because the soul refused to accept it.

  There were exceptions of course, but by and large they were not true exceptions. Rather, they were almost always augments to the soul that bypasses its rejections. Such augmentations were far and above anything all but a handful of the strongest beings on the planet could attain so Dalric had no qualms teaching it as an absolute.

  “Your soul dislikes it when your body lacks ahjer and as I said, your soul is never silent. Some of you may have noticed this. The object in your hand, how big is it?”

  Large chunks of the crowd were still disgruntled over his instruction, but quickly and loudly surprise supplanted the discontent. Many of them just realized for the first time that the rock or plank or bar or whatever it was that they held seemed to suddenly take up more of their perception.

  In reality, the objects sizes obviously hadn’t changed, but the fact that they held their own ahjer made them something of a beacon to their souls.

  “That is a sign of your soul speaking. You can not yet hear it, but it’s telling your body it wants more ahjer.”

  That detail didn’t truly matter just yet. It would be important in the next phase of the process, when it was time to differentiate between the different ahjer that one sensed, but that was years away and outside the scope of Dalric’s involvement. For now, he just mentioned it to refocus the crowd.

  “Now, as I said, you can not absorb ahjer. That is not the goal. In the same fashion that your soul is telling you it desires ahjer, it is also telling you it refuses to absorb it. Your goal is to hear that. You could, if you so chose, train to hear its call for ahjer instead, but I would advise against it. Between the two, its refusal is loud. With this method, though the majority of you will take several years, the most talented among you may develop the beginnings of ranged ahjer sense within just one. With the other method, a decade could pass and the brightest of you would have nothing to show for it. The choice is yours though.”

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Many hurled questions at him, but he had said at the very beginning that he would not field any and he stuck to that. His personal goal here had been to give them something productive and communal to do with their next few months. All else fell outside his responsibility. If they refused it or found it unworthy of their time then so be it. He would lay the foundations and give them clear instruction, that’s it.

  “Keep pulling until you can no longer feel your ahjer. For those who had more ahjer to push out this will naturally take more time to occur. For those who had less, do not fret. It will also take them more time to replenish themselves. You should only ever restart the process when your body is full once more. I will give this warning once more. Only restart the process when your body has replenished it's ahjer.”

  He gave the warning twice as few seemed to take it seriously the first time. While he did not mind nor take accountably for a fool doing something foolish, as the instructor there was a bit of diligence that was due.

  “You do not restart the process beforehand because repeated, sustained stints of low ahjer can cause a host of different complications. I will not get into what those are as there are too many, just do not do it.”

  With that, he’d covered everything he needed to cover. All that was left were his closing remarks.

  “That is all that I have to say. I know many of you will give up in the next months. This, though not arduous, is a tedious and long process. However, I also know that there are those among you who will find that this is the moment that you began your rise. I wish you the best.”

  Dalric did not know that, but much of motivation was rooted in lies and delusion. He’d been deceptive a number of times throughout his instruction. In truth, he’d already picked out all the people he’d seen with ‘meaningful’ talent. Aside from the more deplorable characters that Ryku had warned him of, the rest were already separated into a second group waiting for him by the ring.

  However, talent may be the most important quality, but it was not everything. Diligence could take one quite far. Maybe one of them would rise.

  In any case, even though more questions were thrown in his direction Dalric kept to his word and left the amphitheatre. As expected, a few hundred left soon after he did. It was a minor shame to immediately throw away such an opportunity, but alas. He reminded himself that there were plenty who could barely manipulate their own ahjer at all. For them, his lecture was many steps past what they were even ready to learn.

  The group of fifty or so that he headed toward now were the exact opposite of that. They were all advanced enough for him to have something concrete to teach and they were very eager to learn. Unfortunately for them, they would not be receiving the kind of training that they likely expected. Dalric still hadn’t changed his mind on truly training others, but he had come up with a solution that would benefit both parties.

  Two razor sharp edges sliced through the air around him. First diagonally across his front, where he used to be standing, and then horizontally through his right, also where he used to be standing. Before they could be repositioned to continue the flurry further, he bludgeoned their wielder’s shoulder with the thick, blunt edge of his stone ‘shield’.

  Her right arm went limp, dropping the blade. It didn’t last more than a second though. The blade didn’t even touch the ground before her arm was operational again.

  ~Reform~

  The bright red scimitar she still held absorbed its near fallen twin and turned into a maroon longsword. She gripped it with both hands and thrusted once more. The extended reach meant he had to make even more distance, but only by a foot. Which didn’t make sense.

  Dalric erred on the side of caution and evaded to the side instead. The choice instantly proved prudent as what he could only assume was some sort of toxic, poisonous black blood spurt out of the sword and splattered across the ring.

  That explains it.

  After a few more slashes, a few more dodges, and a few more bludgeons, he felt comfortable winding down the fight, “Your ability to turn receiving damage into an asset is exceptional.”

  He sidestepped the upward slash and repositioned his ‘shield’ above his head to block the subsequent blood downpour.

  ~Reform~

  Maim morphed what remained of her now crimson longsword into something of a rapier and attempted to lunge for his chest. Just as she extended her arm, he dropped his own and plunged the edge of his ‘shield’ that he had quietly sharpened and reinforced directly through hers. He severed it at the bicep.

  “But. You rely on it to the point of foolishness.”

  She leapt back, confusion in her eyes, but a spell already at her lips.

  ~Bleeding edge~

  Dalric’s stone sword flew for her head just as she finished the incantation. She jerked it out of the way. The blood that fell from her stub gushed for a moment before beginning to pool into what could have been a double sided scythe. Dalric would have to find out next time.

  His ‘shield’ plunged through her waist. Like her arm, he bisected her body. Also like when her arm was split in two, her eyes held both confusion and a fire to keep going. As her torso fell, she swung the barely formed blood scythe. If she managed to get even the slightest incision into his skin, the blood would almost certainly invade his body in some way and potentially allow her regain a footing within the fight.

  He leaned back and watched it swipe past him.

  ~Wreathed in—

  “I believe that’s enough.”

  The sharp edge of his ‘shield’ hung above her heart. The Nightkin could regenerate much, but there were limits. The brain was the obvious one, but the heart was just as important. It was the foundation for all of their strength.

  “Ahhh! How are you so fast!”

  Maim bellowed in frustration. He could tell that the moment he decided to strip to nakedness she thought she’d have a decent chance of at least damaging him. It was the exact reason he did so. He had not anticipated the move proving so effective, but he did expect her to be overly offensive.

  “At no point did I move too quickly for you to evade, you were merely too focused on the sword.”

  He helped her out by placing the bottom half of her body next to the top then quickly stepped away from her. Sexual attraction was not something he had felt as a human yet. More than that, it hadn’t even crossed his mind. Though not physically, he mentally considered himself a eunuch.

  Until the moment he gripped her thigh and felt the thickness of it.

  He immediately understood why humans were rabid. The desire was so sudden and so arresting. The thought of mating pushing back every other thought in his head. It disgusted him a little. A lot actually. His initial attempts at ridding himself of the thoughts and feeling did nothing, but he refused to allow them to hold him so he just sat and continued speaking.

  “As I said, you over rely on your ability to convert damage into strength. You willingly let me strike you anytime I did not aim for the head or chest. You did not study by pace, my rhythm, my timing, my reach, nothing. You did not even notice the moment my shield stopped being a simple shield.”

  The early moments of their bout had been a lot of Dalric cutting her up with his sword and her using the resulting blood in a myriad of spells. Once he had explored every angle of attack she could produce from that exchange, that’s when he switched to using the thick, blunt edge of his shield to bludgeon her instead. He never did enough damage to more than momentarily stun her, but that very fact allowed him to set up this finale.

  “In short, learn to protect yourself. Once you can win difficult battles without taking significant damage, your ability to absorb and redirect it into strength would make you a hundred–fold more difficult to beat.”

  She groaned. He chuckled. There were many things different between the various valinbarns, but certain expressions seemed universal. He could tell that groan was the type that came out when you were told something that you had heard a thousand times before.

  He had a lot more specific instructions he could provide her. Even things uniquely suited to Nightkin that she was not properly making use of, but that was not part of the trade. Like the forty–seven others that preceded her, he provided first hand experience fighting against a powerful opponent and his general impressions of fighting against her. They all provided him an expansive repository of the state of combat and spell casting. They were spar partners.

  Thankfully, the lust had died down so his mind was unencumbered and now that he had fulfilled his end of the bargain he could digest what he learned. Maim was only the third of the forty-eight that had a unique, yet more recognizable style of incantations. Or maybe she was just the third that was willing to reveal that. In either case, it appeared to be exactly as he thought. The form of spellcasting that he was familiar with still existed. It was also much better.

  The standardized incantations supposedly taught to soldiers and in certain academies were exact. They seemed to function well enough at completing whatever spell was defined, but there was absolutely zero deviation. A spell to conjure a sword would conjure the exact same sword every single time, regardless of the caster or conditions.

  Dalric didn’t understand how that was possible. Two people at the exact same strength could say the exact same incantation and give completely different results. At the root of it all, a spell was merely one bidding ahjer to do something for them. Regardless of strength, souls spoke differently, ahjer listened differently. Hells, if he cast the same spell twice both would not be identical.

  It was not a detail that mattered massively to him as far as combat went, if anything it made fights far easier, but it did give him some other concerns. It hinted at some sort of fundamental change regarding either souls or ahjer. He had already theorized that the former had occurred and could potentially be why the Gods lost access to their worshippers. He had not truly delved into the thought though.

  What would it really mean in totality?

  “You truth swear no speak anyone?”

  Dalric refocused on Maim. She stood mostly healed, with her severed arm hung over her shoulder.

  She said… ‘You truly swear not to tell anyone?’

  The other thing he learned was that people on this side of the planet did not know what Nightkin were and thought them no different from humans. That was fairly understandable. Outside of Nightkin being on average a foot taller and universally dark skinned, the two races were indistinguishable visually.

  He waved his hand at her, “Your secret is safe. That arm dangling off of you is more likely to expose you.”

  She looked at it, nodded, then placed her lips on the fingers of it and flicked its wrist, “Next time, I’m cutting you.”

  Dalric wasn’t sure what the gesture meant, but he responded in kind, “You failed the easy round. Next time, I’m wearing armor.”

  “Booo!”

  He chuckled. Of course he wasn’t going to give her another easy opportunity to pierce his skin. That was a one time trick.

  She left after that. In between rounds, he had a five minute break. He used it to walk over to where he placed a few jugs of water and down half of one. With Maim out of the room, he thought back to how arousal had overtaken him. Disgusting as it was to experience in the moment, upon further consideration he was not upset at its existence. Romance, true romance, was definitely impossible in the short to midterm future, but if he sought to rediscover his personhood maybe brief companionship was something to look into.

  Though…

  Deep, dark memories rose. The last woman he laid with ended up far worse than just dead. In fact, her death had not come from his hands at all. It came from her own.

  So much was taken from her… so much…

  A different, even more arrestive feeling took hold of him. It tried to suffocate him. But. He could still breathe. Slow, deep, heavy breaths flowed through him. Each controlled and deliberate. The feeling still clung to him, still weighed on him. It didn’t crush him though. It—

  “What fuck!”

  He hadn’t realized that he closed his eyes and zoned out his ahjer sense. When he opened them, he saw Grey covering his eyes.

  “Why are you naked?!” Then he stopped covering his eyes and turned to the hallway he walked in from, “Wait… were you…?”

  Dalric shook his head. He took his final deep breath as he felt his chest finally open back up. The feeling slowly faded. Whether it passed solely because of his own fortitude or the man's mildly humorous shock played a role, it didn't matter to him. It passed.

  A victory.

  He savored it for the briefest of moments before addressing the assumptions he had fostered, “Do not insult Maim. Time in here is for work, not leisure.”

  Grey had a cynical look on him, “Then why are you naked? It sounded like you were panting.”

  “Hm. Would you like me to reveal to the others, exactly what transpires during our sparring?”

  The look didn’t disappear, but it softened, “No… that’s fair enough I guess.”

  “Good. Now tell me, the summon in stealth behind me, is that your main source of combat strength or a hidden trump card?”

  Now, I say 4k chapters. What I mean is, mostly 4k chapters. For example, there will be a 2k chapter on Wednesday because I like how this one ends and it wouldn't fit in the next 4k chap (which will be out next Sunday). The schedule is OFFICIALLY, 1 4k chap every Sunday and if and where necessary a 2k chap on Wednesdays.

  Thank you for your patience. Next few chaps are already scheduled!

  Thanks for reading and see you in the next chapter!

  Discord