“It’s time for you to train me. Train me, Master”

I groaned, half asleep in the morning light. It had been a few days since the fight with the Ilfid. We’d left that particular forest behind and entered grasslands, which permeated the surroundings with a pleasant smell that was very conducive to napping.

“Cut it out with the ‘Master’ nonsense,” I mumbled.

The caravan was stirring, getting ready to start on the road for the day. Drivers harnessed animals, guards took up their stations, and the general organized chaos trended toward moving soon.

“I know what your actual Master, the geezer sitting in his relic of a school, actually sent you to me to learn, and it’s not my tricks. I’m not sure if I want to teach you anything anyway.”

“My Master ordered me to find you and learn what you have to teach. I can’t go back until I’ve learned whatever it is, he never said exactly what I should be learning. In the meantime, you’re stuck with me, as you have been for a while now.”

I sighed and started to reach for the cubby, for the sweet temptation of the flasks within, but stopped myself. I did owe the old man a favor. Favors couldn’t be left unpaid.

“Fine, sure. I can’t teach you the deep ways. That carries a price that you’re not prepared to pay, and it’s something that can’t be taught anyway.”

“I’m willing to pay a high price for knowledge, if it makes me stronger.”

“Let me put it another way then; you’re not capable of paying the price needed, as you are, and seeking to pay the price will have invalidated it, making it worthless and you’ll end up empty handed anyway.”

“Fine. I’m not going to argue with you about it. If you won’t teach me what you call ‘tricks’, then what will you teach me.”

I sighed again. The reason he was sent to me was obvious, from my point of view. Kan’on was caught between two levels of strength. His Master was still far stronger than him, but Kan’on himself made even other powerful swordsman look like silly children playing with sticks in the woods. No, technique wasn’t his problem.

“You lack willpower.”

“Lacking willpower?” Kan’on scoffed. “I’ve endured countless hardships, injuries, and humiliations to get where I am. Nobody with weak willpower can achieve what I have.”

I got up and gathered my gear, packing it away in my bag and throwing it in the wagon bed. Jass was already sitting in his seat, ready and aloof. Climbing into the bed exacerbated the ever-present hangover, so I drew a quick rune and shoved my hand through it. The comfortable power spread through my body, alleviating the aches and pains, as well as finishing up the last touches of healing on my hand.

Kan’on tossed his stuff in and climbed in after. He stared at me, dissatisfaction plain on his face. For a man like him, someone telling him he lacked willpower probably felt like a slap in the face. He was disciplined and almost at the pinnacle of his craft. Almost.

“It’s not as simple as just being able to endure and persevere. It has to do with how your willpower interacts with what you call ‘magic.” To put it simply, the runes are the result of countless generations of people agreeing that the concept the rune represents should do what it does, investing the concept with the willpower of all those generations. It’s convenient, and it’s powerful, but it’s also a crutch. It’s a crutch that you didn’t even know you had, but your Master sees clearly. You rely on the rune to work, without needing to make it work.”

“How are the runes a crutch? You use them all the time. You don’t even complete them when you use them, leaving them sloppy and half finished, which is an impossibility I’ve already pointed out. I can throw a ball of fire that will level a city block with the right rune, but I’ve never seen you do anything of the sort, so how is what you’re doing better than what I do?”

“It’s a crutch because you just expect the rune to work without having to work to make it work. It hasn’t been a problem for you because you haven’t come up against someone or something that would make it a problem.” I paused, considering the differences in how we approached our power. In pure capacity, he was a monster.

“The other thing is a question of pure capacity for power. I’m more like a sprinter, good for quick bursts of short duration. You’re more like a long-distance runner. Your capacity is an order of magnitude greater than mine; I’ll not lie. But that capacity is meaningless if I can unravel it with my willpower.”

The wagon jerked into motion beneath us, and I laid back against the rail, propped up on my pack. It was shaping up to be a pleasant day, too bad that the way things were going it was going to end in a tough lesson.

“Prove it,” Kan’on said.

I raised an eyebrow and said, “Just like that? Ok, I’ll prove it, but we need to make this interesting. Every time you fail to do what I ask of you; you will break one of your own fingers.”

“That’s ridiculous.” He laughed for a second before realizing that I wasn’t laughing with him. “You’re serious. You really expect me to break my own fingers. Expecting that I’ll fail at whatever it is aside, you can’t honestly expect me to injure myself, right?”

“You want me to teach you. This is the way it’s going to happen.”

Kan’on had probably suffered many injuries over the years as a result of combat and probably just training, but I doubted he’d ever purposefully inflicted an injury on himself.

The nobles loved those tragic stories where the hero casually cut their own hands to make blood pacts with fairies, or the hero sacrifices their own bodies to gain powers to defeat the monster. It was all bullshit.

I’d met very few people capable of chopping up their own flesh. You had to be able to overcome your body and mind’s natural response first, and to most that was an impenetrable barrier.

I’m sure that Kan’on was capable of that kind of willpower, if he was pushed to it. He probably thought that it wouldn’t be that big a deal, but making him aware of what it took, then pushing him to realize that he was capable… that was another matter. The whole point was to sharpen willpower, weaponize it. He needed to be able to turn the weapon on himself first.

“Fine. The sooner I can get it done, the sooner I can get back to where I belong, not that I don’t enjoy traipsing around with you.”

I grinned. His confidence in himself was admirable, but I was going to burst his bubble and all it would take is a simple heat cantrip.

“All you have to do is use the heat rune to burn my hand.” I set my hand on the bed of the wagon between us and looked at him expectantly. “But remember, if you fail you will break the finger of your choice. If you don’t, I will not continue teaching you until you do.”

Kan’on hesitated at the last part, but soon drew a familiar rune in the air over my hand. To my eye, it looked technically perfect, not unexpected from someone of his standing. The power he invested into the rune bled out into the Flow, building up as a precursor to the searing heat the rune was known for.

Much like with the Ilfid Brute, I nudged the current connected to the rune, urging it to spill its power out faster, bleeding away its capability to harm me. I sat there, waiting for Kan’on to realize something was off.

It didn’t take long. His brow furrowed, I felt and saw him feed more power into the rune, which swelled the currents, giving me more to work with to bleed the rune faster, which led to him feeding it even more power, until eventually he struggled at max capacity, and then finally slumped back, spent. My hand remained on the bed of the wagon completely unharmed.

“I don’t get it,” Kan’on said weakly. “It should work. There is no reason it shouldn’t have worked.”

“If you were fighting another ‘magic’ user, a ‘magician’, then it would have worked, because you’re fighting each other with your power, not fighting for control of the power. Now go ahead, break a finger.”

Kan’on looked up, shocked, seeming to have forgotten the price of failure.

“Pain isn’t a good teaching tool. I would expect someone like you to know that.”

“It’s not about the pain. Not really. When you’ve done what I’ve asked, I’ll show you what I mean.”

Kan’on hesitantly put the index finger of his off hand in his other hand, gripping it tightly. Seconds passed and hesitant attempts were made. He even went so far as to severely bend the finger over, causing himself much more pain and dread than was strictly necessary. I watched his hands shake as he struggled with himself, working to overcome his own kneejerk response. And failing.

He jumped to his feet and shook out his hand. Giving me an irritated look, he grabbed his sword and jumped out of the wagon. I laughed to myself as I watched him fall behind. He’d get it. He just needed to work himself up a bit.

Was I being too cruel? I wasn’t a kind person by nature, and even though I’d practically been forced to help Kan’on, to accomplish what he asked in the shortest amount of time, a little bit of pain and sacrificed was required. He needed to be sharper, his willpower like the razor point of the cherished sword he carried around. Sharp enough to overcome all the tricks I could pull with the Flow messing with his power.

A self-satisfied smile crept onto my face and I reached through the Flow to my cubby to grab a flask. I let the liquor run down my throat, then sighed. It tasted sweeter than usual.

###

Kan’on hopped back into the wagon sometime later, interrupting my cloud gazing. I sat up and searched his expression for any change.

“Will I be able to do the other thing you do? The thing where you throw a rock or your sword through a rune and it carries the effect with it?” Kan’on asked.

“Nope. But I can guarantee you that when you’re done there won’t be a single person alive who can interrupt your power. Not me, not the Grandmaster of Skyreach Pinnacle… nobody.”

“Just another impossible mystery then, I guess.” He let out a resigned breath and looked at his hands.

Kan’on’s expression hardened. Without hesitation, he grabbed his left index finger and snapped it at the knuckle… decisively. He grimaced and I heard a suppressed growl ripping up his throat.

I related to that, the suppressed pain, on a visceral level. Even if it was just a finger, the small stuff always seemed to hurt more than it had any right to. On the other hand, he had a broken finger.

I drew up a bone setting rune in front of me and looked around the bed of the wagon. I spotted a large hard-shelled nut and plucked it from its place. I lined up the nut with the rune, aimed carefully, then tossed it through. It smacked into the broken finger and, to my delight, a strangled cry escaped Kan’on’s mouth, then his face did something I hadn’t seen before; his expression fell into a deep state of annoyance. Of course I laughed.

“I guess I should thank you, but you’re a vicious bastard, so you can forget about that,” Kan’on said, his finger bending and crunching back into place. After a few seconds the bleed-over healing effect repaired the rest of the damage as well.

“Let’s get started then. We’ll do the same thing again, but don’t go crazy with it. You need to learn how to be aware of your willpower when you’re using the runes. We’ll make another serious attempt another time. For now, just try to sense it.”

We sat in the wagon’s bed, him trying his damned best and failing to sense my willpower fighting his own, failing to figure out where the power he was pumping in disappeared to. I suppressed my own glee at being able to mess with one of the world’s preeminent sword masters.

I didn’t blame him for being frustrated, though, despite my not-so-hidden enjoyment of his predicament. Trying to sense yours and other’s willpower was like trying to taste color with your ears, except it was illogically possible to do it.