My home wasn’t as damaged as I expected.

The Baron hadn’t been joking that a carpenter would be needed. The front door had been kicked in, and it was likely only the guard standing at the entrance kept the gangs from stripping the place bare. Interestingly, the attic, my room, was in good condition. It looked like someone opened the door, checked if anyone was in the cramped room, and left when they didn’t find anyone.

Beyond the broken door, only a single chair was broken downstairs. All of the furniture had been overturned, and the house had generally been tossed, but I was guessing that was the local gangs checking to see if they could find any coins. The broken chair in the center of the room made it clear what happened. Drops of blood and splatters surrounded it, and the rug was severely stained. This was likely where they interrogated Carten.

Running my hands through my hair, I grabbed the chair and rug and turned to haul them outside and into the alley, but I dropped them in surprise when I found Grandmaster Mason standing behind me.

I managed to avoid shouting in surprise, but only barely.

“You should get [Detect Presence]. Pretty useful,” he said, though he wagged his grey-haired head side to side for a second before he continued, “well, usually anyway.”

While Mason looked around my home, I tried to return my heart rate to a reasonable pace.

“Grandmaster Mason,” I began before he shot me a look and then looked to the wall that hid the guard outside.

Lowering my voice slightly, I continued, “Mason, how can I help you?”

Mason walked past me, hopped and spun lightly in mid-air, then landed seated on the table so that he was facing me.

“We might be able to help each other,” he said.

I almost sat in the broken chair, bloody rug and drops and all, but at the last second, I pushed it away and leaned against the wall instead.

“Interesting. How?”

Before I could blink, Mason threw four daggers, one to each side of me, one above my head, and another between my legs, the blades digging into the wall outlining me. He wasn’t so fast that he could throw four daggers, one after the other before I could react. Instead, he used his Skills to throw four blades in one motion.

I was frozen, the impacts of blades on wood fading away, but my heart was now louder than the impacts.

“Not much for real combat are yah?” he said with a white-toothed smile.

Before I could explode in anger, he waved at me, the sudden motion making me flinch.

“Relax, I was just proving my point. You’ve got some kind of Skill that you can use in combat, but you ain’t a combatant. That’s clear. I’ll help you become one, and in exchange, you act as a contact for me with the Trainers. I’m looking for a protege to pass my skills onto, and I don’t want to have to deal with sorting through shit throwers before I find um.”

Then he pinned me with a stare, “You take time to activate your skill. I can help you learn to do it quick-like. I ain’t got a training skill, but I can throw things at you accurately. Dangerous things. My old Captain always said that it was nothing like danger to focus the mind on a skill, and he was right ‘nough about that.”

Stepping away from the wall, I bit my lip as I considered Mason’s offer. A simple letter sent through a few exchanges, and I could have the Guild sorting through statuses and logbooks. Someone has to have recorded a log of a person with some kind of high level or tiered [Throwing] skill. It wasn’t a common skill, but it also wasn’t rare either.

“Deal. I’ll meet you at my shop tomorrow afternoon, we can train after I work on a few of the Baron’s soldiers,” I said.

Nodding, Mason rose, pulled his knives from the wall in a smooth motion as he passed me and left. The eerie silence of his passage creepy when I could see him move. He was a light and agile man, but still, no one should be able to move like a silent shadow.

It took me an hour of effort to throw out the bloody furniture and return the rest to a presentable state. The most annoying was Carten’s bedroom, where someone had sliced open and thrown around the remains of his goosedown mattress. I hadn’t even known the old man had owned something so extravagant; it must have cost him a fortune. Now that fortune was a disheveled bag of feathers rotting in the alley. Someone would snag even that waste and use it for something. If not, I would pay a waste collector to come and haul it off in a week or two.

Cleaning my bedroom upstairs was relatively simple in comparison. Things were thrown around, but I didn’t own a goosedown mattress. Even my coin stash was still there. While finishing up, the sound of hammering emanated from below. Sure enough, Elijah from down the street was putting in a door. From the multiple looks cast around the now fixed up room, he was also trying to find his next bit of gossip. Not much I could do about it, but I was not happy about it either.

Once the house was locked up again, I grabbed a chair and passed it to the guard standing next to my stoop. Eventually, I will have to talk to the sergeant about stationing my guard detail inside to reduce its obviousness. For now, like many of the other frustrations about this situation, I would just have to live with it.

Returning upstairs, I triggered my passageway and climbed down into the basement. Even though I was the only one in the house, I maintained my usual silence. It was a part of my routine, and it was nice to keep something from being disrupted.

In the basement, everything was as I left it, which caused me a pathetic bit of happiness. Sadly, I still had things I wanted to do tonight, and I would need space to do it. Pushing the central table into a corner, I carefully lifted the light but awkward shaving horse onto the table. The rearrangement left me with an open floor space of around fifteen feet by fifteen feet. Still a bit cramped for tumbling or many other physical pursuits, but for my plan, it should be fine.

I pulled off my shirt and placed it on my desk. Practicing with encumbered clothing as well as naked would be part of my routine. Still, for now, I was expecting to work up a sweat.

Grabbing one of my shaved and polished branches, the straight wood a substitute for a practice sword, I planted myself in the middle of my new practice area. Checking my breathing, I tried to focus and recreate the sensation of my body and mind switching into [Meditation]. It was difficult, to say the least, to find the rhythm of [Meditation]. Relaxed and calm, while also being prepared for physical action, a smooth flow of thoughts but also focused on the exact sensation occurring at any moment. For long minutes I stood, breathing with my eyes closed. I knew that shifting into [Meditation] was taking a long time, but also that there was no other way for me to reach the mental state than to wait and reach for it.

The final key was a stray thought of the monster in the forest that I hadn’t really seen. The whiff of dread strummed through my mind at the remembered terror unseen but heard clicked my mind over the cliff and into [Meditation]. I held my new mental state within a loose grip in the odd drifting yet focused way. I spent what felt like a proverbial hour in my accelerated state standing and breathing. Trying to tighten my mind’s focus onto the sensation of [Meditation] would disrupt the effect. While ignoring the flow of thoughts in my mind would have them slowly shift into disorder and without focus.

[Meditation] was a balancing act, where I was both the acrobat and the platform being balanced.

Once my mind had reached a balanced state, I carefully brought my practice sword up into a ready stance. I was pretending this weapon was a shortsword, so I precisely flowed into the movements of Ferdinand’s First Steps. The childishly named set of actions were designed to keep a swordsman who worked alone, limber and ready to dodge, strike, block, parry, riposte, and lunge against multiple opponents. This was both the simplest and also most often performed routine that I used to stay in practice. I had little use for the later routines, which were more commonly used. I was unlikely to work in a team or on a shield line. My blade work would likely be done in back alleys and against assassin teams once my guard’s throats were slit.

My body flowed around the movements, the practice weaving a small number of attacks into a large number of imaginary blocks and ripostes. Unlike most such routines, it focused more on the defensive side of swordsmanship rather than the aggressive movements. To truly practice Ferdinand’s First Steps, I would need other practice areas. The routine was useful on flat ground, but it shined in training on sloped terrain and in areas with obstruction. The point of the practice was to prepare yourself for unexpected attackers and less advantageous ground, something I had a keen interest in suddenly.

It was hard to tell how long I practiced in the timeless feeling of [Meditation]. I kept a keen eye out for the speed of my movements, working to make them smooth and aligned. I focused my efforts on the exact military perfect expression of body movement instead of my previous attempts to just ingraining the movements. With my drifting accelerated thought, I had all the time in the world for each step, each lunge, each strike or block, to fit into perfect alignment.

When my body dripped with sweat, I brought myself out of the last movement and drew my blade up before my eyes. The sword salute being a mental trigger to pull my mind and body out of my practice, and interestingly I found myself drifting out of Meditation as well. Saluting with the sword had once felt mocking or superfluous, but I now thought of it as a key to my mind, convincing it that practice and the threats were over and unlocking my usually easily distracted thoughts.

Wiping my hand over my forehead as the sweat dripped from my body, I noticed that my breathing was strangely unlabored. I turned to the skill messages that I had ignored during my practice. Mid-motion, I froze in shock, not just because of the number of increases, something wildly beyond my expectations but not unheard of when I was close to improving. Instead, I was in shock because of the last skill increase, which made little sense.

Meditation has increased to 7.

Swordsmanship has increased to 15.

Teacher of Skills has increased to 19.

My sweat ran into my open mouth, and I snapped it closed on the salty taste. I thought I knew everything there was to know about [Teacher of Skills]. It worked on multiple people, but it worked best if I could focus on a single student. It had never increased while I was personally practicing. As far as I was aware, it only worked when I trained someone else. Reinforcing that idea was that I would only increase my skill when teaching students. In fact, the tier two increase itself came after a particularly insightful instruction to a customer. If it were possible to improve during personal training, it would have before this.

But it just did.

My stomach’s grumble, demanding food in payment for my strenuous exercise, brought me out of my thoughts. I cleaned up as best I could, opening hidden air vents to clear out the sweaty workroom, then climbed my ladder to return to the rest of the house. I would cook myself something to eat, then think long and hard about what this skill up meant. If I could indeed improve my [Teacher of Skills] skill while in [Meditation], the odd combination of skills allowing me to focus on my actions as both teacher and student…well, the possibilities were staggering.

I loved to help others gain skills. It was likely why I had developed [Teacher of Skills] in the first place. But there was one thing I enjoyed almost as much; gaining and improving my Skills.