The System Chose the Weakest Man

Chapter 029: Rhea's Lessons

"Again," Rhea said.

Ethan got up off the ground.

It was past midnight, and the farrier's yard behind the east stable smelled of coal smoke, horse sweat, and cold iron. A single lantern hung from a post. The ground was packed dirt scattered with straw and nails. In the middle of it, Rhea stood with a hickory staff held loose in both hands and her short hair sticking up in the wind. She did not look tired. She had worked ten hours that day mending harness for a stablemaster who talked about his knees.

Ethan's ribs hurt. So did his wrist, and his right knee, and a spot behind his left ear where she'd tapped him with the staff to make a point. He lifted the ash practice sword she'd carved for him and stepped back into the line.

"Don't look at the blade."

"I wasn't."

"You were. Your eyes dropped to it, just for a heartbeat, right before I came in. That's why you're on the ground." She tilted her head. "Where should you look?"

"At you."

"Where on me?"

"The shoulder?"

"The hip." She rapped it with her staff. "The hip tells you where a person is going. The blade tells you where they've already been. A good fighter's blade lies. Her hips can't."

She moved.

It wasn't fast. It never was, at first. She stepped in with a half-pace, and Ethan saw her hip turn, a small quiet pivot, and thought left. He slid right. The staff cut the air where his head had been, and the wind of it ruffled his hair. Her second strike came low. He hopped it. Her third, from above, he caught on the flat of the sword, and the shock rang up both arms like a bell.

He kept his feet. He drove forward. She stepped aside, tapped his wrist with the end of the staff, and the practice sword dropped.

"Dead," she said. "But better."

"That's what you said the last four times."

"And I meant it every time. Pick it up."

The days had a rhythm now.

At dawn Ethan went to the Yard and carried whatever anyone would pay him to carry. At dusk he went to the stable, ate whatever Rhea set in front of him, and then they walked out into the dark and she hit him with a stick. In between, there was Tomas's stall at the west market, a three-sided wooden box with a canvas roof, where the old man sold maps and torn almanacs to hunters too nervous to ask the Guild for directions. Mira came by most afternoons to eat the bread he brought and tell him about her day, which was mostly about how little she'd found.

On the fourth night, Rhea sat him down on an upturned barrel and put a mug of water in his hands.

"Your stats," she said.

"What about them?"

"Tell me how you spend them."

He thought about it. "Whatever's closest. Strength when something's heavy. Endurance when I'm tired." He shrugged. "I try to cover what I need."

"That's the problem." She said it without heat. "You're spending your points like a man scattering coins. You're getting a little of everything and a lot of nothing." She tapped the barrel. "What do you want to be?"

He stared at her.

"Not what do you want. What do you want to be. A man who takes a hit and keeps standing? Or a man who isn't there when the blow lands?" She leaned forward. "You can't be both. Not yet. You haven't got the points."

Ethan looked down at the water. The window hovered at the edge of his sight, quietly waiting.

Level 9. Strength 11. Agility 11. Perception 12. Endurance 14. And a tidy stack of three unspent points, from the Ember Hound.

A man who isn't there.

He thought about the Stalkers in the sluice. The Slug with its blind mouth. Voss's slow blade. Every time, in every fight, the thing that saved him had been seeing first and moving second.

"Fast," he said. "Fast, and watching."

"Good." Rhea nodded once. "Then put them where they'll count."

He put the three points in slowly, one at a time. Agility, two. Perception, one. The numbers shifted.

[AGILITY 13. PERCEPTION 13.]

He felt it at once. Not a surge. More like a room whose curtains had been pulled back by a hand. His eyes caught details they'd missed, dust on the lantern, a nail head in the straw. His feet felt lighter on the packed dirt.

"Now we find out," Rhea said, rising.

On the sixth night she tried the thing he'd dreaded. In the middle of a bout, with no warning at all, she brought her palms together in a single flat clap.

Ethan froze.

One second, rigid as a post. The staff came down across his thigh and he went over like a cut tree.

"There," Rhea said, standing over him, not unkind. "You can't stop the Flinch. Fine. But the clap doesn't come from nowhere. A person has to breathe in before they do it. Your ears are better than anyone's in this town. So listen for the breath, and be somewhere else when it lands."

They spent the rest of that night on it. A clap, a freeze, a bruise. By the end, he'd caught her breath twice before her hands met, and once he'd ducked clean out of the frozen second. It wasn't a cure. It was a habit, the beginning of one, and it was more than he'd had.

On the ninth night he hit her.

It wasn't planned. He'd spent two hours getting tapped, whacked, and knocked flat. Rhea had added a new rule. No Appraise, not for a single bout. "It makes you late," she said. "You read the text, then you read me. You need to read me." So he had put the window away, behind a shut door in his head, and fought with nothing but his eyes.

She came in high and fast. He saw her hip turn. He saw the shoulder follow. For one tiny, clear moment he knew where the staff would be, and instead of blocking, he did something stupid. He dropped his sword.

Rhea blinked.

It was only half a blink. But it was enough. He stepped inside her reach, snatched the staff in both hands, and used his weight to drag it out of line. She stumbled. He came around her hip, scooped the practice sword off the ground with his foot, flicked it into his palm, and tapped her gently on the back of her knee.

They both stood there, breathing hard.

"That," Rhea said slowly, "was the first time tonight you didn't think."

"I thought a little."

"You thought less." She pushed her hair off her face. Her mouth had started to turn up at one corner, the way it did when she was trying not to be proud. "Tobin could never do that. He'd freeze. He used to fall asleep with the practice sword across his knees, and I'd have to carry him up to bed."

Ethan didn't say anything.

"He was bad at it," she said. "He was so bad. He didn't mind. He used to say a null who could fight would be an insult to the natural order." She laughed, one short breath. "Gods, he was funny."

The lantern flickered between them.

"I'm sorry," Ethan said.

"Don't be. It's nice, sometimes, to say it out loud." She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, not hiding it, and picked up the staff. "Again."

"Rhea."

"What?"

He nodded past her. At the gate of the yard, a thin silhouette had appeared in the dark, slight, hooded, bouncing from foot to foot. Ethan had heard her breath for the last full minute. Quick. Shallow. Very excited.

"Is it safe?" Mira whispered.

"It's safe," Rhea said. "What is it?"

Mira stepped through the gate. She carried a bundle of crumpled papers, tied with string, held to her chest like a child. Her eyes were wide and shining.

"I got into the Warden office," she said. "I got the books."