“I’ve decided that I’m actually going to train you,” he said. “Be grateful. You’re at least worthy of the day. We’ll see if you’re worthy of my time.”

  I crossed my arms. “Look, I don’t want to deal with you, and you don’t want to deal with me. We both know you’re just here to get paid.”

  He laughed, deep and rolling. “Is that what they told you?” He leaned closer, looming. “Child, I’m here for one thing and one thing only. I’m not here to train a bunch of brats. I’m here to train one brat. Maybe that brat will be you.”

  He turned and started walking. “I’m here as a favor to a friend. He doesn’t want to see my style die with me when I inevitably leave this place. So, I come here year after year, expecting nothing.” He glanced back over his shoulder. “And then you surprise me. Come.”

  The next thing I knew, I was in the air.

  I landed across his shoulder, my stomach pressed into solid mass, and I hadn’t seen him move. There was no warning. No wind?up. One moment I was standing, and the next the world lurched sideways.

  When he set me down, the courtyard was gone.

  We stood in a forest clearing I didn’t recognize.

  “Where are we?” I asked, my words tumbling out as I tried to make sense of what had just happened.

  He looked down at me. “Where I want to start your training.”

  I turned slowly, taking in the trees. Red oaks.

  I’d seen current maps of the Sea of Trees before, at least the parts anyone had bothered to chart. Red oaks were marked there as part of the iron zone along the southern edge. We’d been staying on the western side.

  This wasn’t just far. This was wrong.

  It felt like teleportation. Base?level teleportation wasn’t instant, and what he’d done was faster. Much faster, close enough to ninth, maybe even tenth circle that the distinction barely mattered.

  I switched through my visions and brought up mage sight.

  There were no magical circuits. Nothing that could reasonably be called a structure.

  “How’d you do that?” I asked.

  He smiled. “You’ll learn, if you’re good enough. If not, then it was never for you.” His voice hardened. “I won’t waste my time on someone who asks foolish questions. I only teach what can be taught.”

  He studied me for a moment. “Are you one of them?”

  “One of who?” I asked.

  “The reborn,” he said. “Reincarnators.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He nodded slowly. “That explains the precision. Too bad.” He turned away. “You’re not new. I should take you back.”

  “Wait,” I said quickly.

  I didn’t know what came over me in that moment, but something in me refused to let this end with him simply taking me back.

  “I was a wizard in my past life,” I said. “I had no martial training whatsoever before this.”

  He stopped and looked down at me. His gaze lingered, then shifted to my eyes.

  “A wizard,” he said slowly. “Not a criminal wizard?” He tilted his head. “It doesn’t matter if you were, but those markings in your eyes aren’t typical for someone on the martial path who wasn’t a criminal, and most wizards wouldn’t take those upon themselves.” He paused. “Are you sure?”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  I nodded.

  “Interesting,” he said. “If martial training really is new to you, and you’re already this precise, this might still work.”

  He stepped closer and pointed at me. “I need someone uncorrupted by what they believe is possible, or even right. Someone who hasn’t already decided what a body can and can’t do.”

  He lowered his hand. “What do you know of the body?”

  I answered at length. Biology. Anatomy. Physiology. Everything I’d learned from texts and half?remembered medical theory. I talked about magical circuits, about how wizardry branded the body over time.

  He listened without interrupting. Then he stroked his beard.

  “So,” he said, “you know what books have told you about bodies, and what wizardry has done to yours. That’s not the same thing as knowing how a body actually works.”

  “I understand how a body works,” I said. “I had one for nearly five hundred years. A little more, now.”

  “So no,” he replied calmly.

  We went back and forth like that for several minutes. I argued that I understood. He stated, just as calmly, that I didn’t. That I knew what I thought a body was, not what it actually was or how it worked.

  Eventually, I stopped fighting it.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t actually understand how a body works.”

  He smiled. “Good. That’s the first truth I needed you to say before we could continue.”

  Everything about him was wrong.

  He looked like a fat man, almost a joke at first glance, and yet what he’d done without effort told me I should’ve been terrified of him. He could’ve killed me without trying. He could’ve erased me without blinking.

  He noticed me staring and chuckled. “My name’s Master Fatty Chunk for a reason,” he said. “Not because of my girth.”

  He tapped his chest with two thick fingers. “This is the body I was given. So, it’s the name I chose, one that makes sure people never forget who and what I am.”

  He smiled, humorless. “People think it’s funny. They laugh. They make their little assumptions.”

  His eyes hardened. “They usually stop laughing when Fatty Chunk chokes them to death.”

  He pointed at my body. “Not everyone needs to look like they were sculpted from marble. There’s nothing wrong with your body. What’s wrong is your understanding of what a body should be.” He tapped his own chest. “This is the right body for me. Yours is the right body for you.”

  “My training won’t teach you how to fight like me,” he said. “If it works, it’ll teach you how to fight like you.”

  He met my eyes. “Do you understand what I’m telling you, child?”

  I nodded. I still didn’t understand what was happening, but I understood what he was saying.

  “You don’t shame me for my body,” he continued, “and I won’t shame you for yours. Mine is the weapon I was given, and the weapon I honed.” He paused. “I’ll teach you to learn the weapon you are, not the weapon you think you are.”

  He watched me for a moment. “I can already see you’re trying. The way you train tells me you’re listening, even if you don’t understand what you’re hearing yet.”

  His smile was slow and unsettling.

  “I can see that you are listening to your body, even if you do not understand what you are hearing yet. You will one day understand the sound of every bone, every muscle, every bit of sinew and tendon in your body will speak to you in song and you will be able to sing back to it.”

  Those words resonated with me in a way I hadn’t expected. I knew better than to judge a book by its cover, because I was the perfect example of that. I was an ancient mind trapped inside a child’s body. My body was part of who I was, but it was not all of me.

  This man was the same, or at least I thought he might be. I’d seen him move me here, but that alone didn’t prove anything. For all I knew, it could’ve been an enchantment, a one?time scroll burned just to drag me into the forest. The explanation didn’t sit right. It didn’t feel like that was what he’d done.

  “How many others have you tried to train like this?” I asked. “In your path, or whatever you want to call it.”

  “You’d be the fourth,” he said. “Most don’t last the first test. I think you’re the first to actually pass it.”

  “Pass what?” I asked.

  “Fear,” he said. “The others panicked when they realized how far we were from safety. They cried. They begged. Some froze.” He studied my face. “Unless you don’t know where we are. In that case, I’ll take you back, because that’d mean you’re too stupid to understand the danger you’re in.”

  I looked around again, then back at him. “Why are we in the Redwoods?”

  That was the name given to the red oak iron zone. Everyone knew it. For obvious reasons.

  “Because you’re going to fight monsters here,” he said. “Clearly.”

  I grimaced. “I’m a tin core. I can barely fight copper.”

  “You can barely fight copper now,” he corrected. “When we’re done today, copper’ll be a joke.”

  I felt a flare of excitement, immediately followed by dread.

  “And once you’re copper,” he continued, “which you will be if you do well today, I’ll make sure you reach it by the end of the week.”

  That should’ve thrilled me. Instead, the implication settled in.

  Iron?rank monsters.

  I turned, suddenly aware of something missing. My staff wasn’t with me.

  “Do you mind if we go back?” I asked. “I need my weapon.”

  He stared at me. “Child, what class do you think this is?”

  My stomach sank. “Right.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You figured it out.”

  He stepped closer. “You’ll be beating things to death.”

  He tapped my chest once, hard enough to make the point. “Your body is your weapon. That’s all you get.”

  He smiled faintly. “Just like the gods intended.”