Three knocks on the door: Two, then a short pause, and the third. The code for an injury that needed treatment, but wasn’t an emergency.

A deceptively clear voice rang out from behind the door: “Come in, come in!”

Inside, there was a room with two sections split off by partitions, and another, much bulkier door across from the entryway. Resved’s wrinkled hand stuck out from behind the left-hand partition, waving Victor over.

“Come, come,” came Resved’s voice again, the sound of pouring and stirring accompanying it. The old man glanced at Victor, did a double-take, and stared him down for a moment, seemingly looking through his chest at the exact height of the gash. He let out a sigh, turned around, and picked up a gourd covered in seals written in green ink, pouring something aggressively herbal-smelling and briefly mixing it before he turned back around, in his hands a wooden bowl filled with a familiar greenish goop. Healing Poultice, clearly based on the green-coloured essentia of greenery and natural vitality, Viriditas, though Victor couldn’t hazard a guess as to the other ingredients.

“Shirt off, turn around, sit down. And next time don’t downplay an injury of this sort, even if you think you can distance yourself from the pain,” the old master commanded, and Victor obeyed.

“Hrrm… Distancing oneself from physical reality in order to ignore pain is not necessarily a desirable skill. You’ve merely submitted yourself fully to the Lunar Principle, thinking detachment to be freedom from the pains of your reality,” grumbled the Old Man, spreading that mint-smelling goop on Khestun’s wound with a long stick.

Victor sighed, despite the pain it caused him, snapping back:“Can you say that without the mystical bullshit?”

Duma stopped, putting the stick down for a moment. The noise that came out of him sounded, at first, to be grumbling, but it soon became a quiet, measured chuckle.

“Very well,” he said, tapping Khestun’s shoulder. “Look at me.”

The young man did, and with a smug aura about him, Resved Duma looked him in the eyes.

“You’re a sheltered child of bourgeoisie, struggling to cope with the fact you’ve been separated from your home, family, and lifestyle, possibly permanently. You don’t have the guts to actually act out your nationalistic fantasies, your thoughts of “If this happened to me I would do X”, so you engross yourself in fiction about people who do have that wherewithal, and you’re far from alone - were you an exception, you wouldn’t be able to buy those stories so cheaply and so easily.”

Victor stared into Duma’s old eyes, feeling a dull pressure rise in his chest as the old man’s words flowed into his ears. Another lecture trying to psychoanalyze him - he’d been through such lectures a thousand times at home, and he always found himself dislocating from the present moment without any conscious effort towards that goal, the words flowing through him and being compartmentalized as a flat, emotionless memory to be disregarded.

But… It wasn’t happening. ome otherworldly light in the old master’s eyes kept him anchored, his voice reverberated through Victor’s skull and made him fully acknowledge everything that was being said. What Victor didn’t notice - what he couldn’t notice - was the fact that Resved was actually using a powerful talisman wrought from the brainstem of a Skullmonger to amplify his already considerable mental abilities. This, in concert with the old man’s mastery of Evil Eye Hypnosis and the Great Master’s Word techniques, had allowed him to be such an effective teacher of martial arts even if he himself had been a mediocre martial artist even in his prime; using his skills to help students find their way through spiritual troubles, even if they didn’t want to, was among what he considered to be his duties.

“Instead of escaping from reality, you must confront it without allowing your dire situation to consume you - by finding balance between the Lunar and Solar, between Calm and Rage, Form and Drive, you may become a “Man of Action”, as your pulps so often describe their characters.”

“To say it in mundane terms: Stop wallowing in the schizoid depression you’ve developed as a coping mechanism and face reality - take that numb detachment and make of it something useful, turn it into sheer primal rage if you must! Anything - ANYTHING - is better than total indifference.”

Resved blinked, letting out a shallow breath, and the undefinable shine vanished from his gaze. He locked eyes with Victor once again, this time putting on a slight smile, exaggerated by the canyons old age had carved into his face.

“I heard of what you did yesterday - keep going like that and you’ll get somewhere. I don’t know what there is, only you can figure that out - but it’d certainly fit you more than…”

Duma looked Victor up and down, with his meticulously-kept haircut, perfectly hairless face and body, and clothes that he had gotten tailored to him because the “Men’s” selections didn’t fit him.

“...Well, a lopsided, walking self-contradiction. You’re practically dripping with insecurity. Now turn back around, I need to finish sealing the wound before you bloody up my bamboo mat.”

A short while more passed, with Duma instructing Victor to put his shirt back on once his wound was sealed. As the young man dressed himself and began to walk outside, the old man added: “Do not think to toss aside who you are for a mask… But wearing one to help you keep to the path towards who you wish to be may not be a bad idea.”

Victor knew to leave quickly at this point, his mind already dwelling on what the old man had said to him regardless of how hard the young man tried to purge his thoughts of it. He rejoined the class and waited out the rest of the day quietly, doing his exercises with caution so as to not reopen his wound again, and then burying his nose in his pulp the moment the instructor dismissed the class. His classmates passed by with offhand goodbyes, but otherwise just went on their way, passing Victor by as he walked leisurely down the street, reading.

A brief, but bright thought went through his mind: “For all the time I spend with them, I don’t even know half their names.”

Though he dispelled it as quickly as it reared its ugly head, he couldn’t do anything but acknowledge it as true; Victor had, albeit unconsciously, remained an insular artifact of the city, failing to really integrate into his new community in any meaningful way. Yet again, he chose to smother such thoughts in fiction, but…

…Even engrossing himself in the fictitious heroes’ descent into a dungeon’s eerie depths, where reality and the Sea of Fog were separated by a hair-thin sheet, was no longer enough to let him detach himself.

On his way home, Victor found himself coming across a towering, plate-armoured man accosting a group of workers, a red-scaled, similarly armored tail swishing about behind him. He instinctively hid his book before he passed, keeping his head down, but unable to do anything besides listening in. Between the guttural growl of the Dragon Knight’s voice, the echo of his helmet, and the worried platitudes of the workers, he only managed to catch some thinly-veiled threats, while the workers insisted that something one of them said had only been a joke. Just before he got out of earshot, though, he heard the knight open his visor, and with its opening, what he said next couldn’t have been clearer:

“Very well, I will let you off this time… But if you hear any more untoward rumors about Lord Hoedorff or the good Lady Karmesin, you bring it to me instead of spreading them, understand?”

The Dragon Knights had been trying to get people to sell out dissidents for months now, and the more time went on, the more willing to depart from their chivalrous image they became. Of course, such departures didn’t truly hurt the knights’ public image, in no small part because they put nearly as much work into making themselves look good as they did into all their other duties combined. Victor himself only really took note because he couldn’t help noticing it, having been made to participate in ridiculous events for the sake of face many times. He just made himself look small and continued reading once he was sure he was out of eyeshot.

Victor’s enjoyment of the book gradually decreased as he neared his temporary home, until by the time he actually finished the pulp late into the evening, he had skimmed through a good portion of its last third, only reading the major battles. Consumed by frustration, Victor slammed the book face-down on his table, its spine splitting down the middle like a rotted tree struck by lightning.

“What did that old bastard do?!” he questioned in his mind, but no answer came. Only more wrenching, nagging feelings of insecurity and inadequacy, a deeply-rooted desire to change and grow struggling to break through the conceit and schizoid depression of a barely-noble family’s heir, things his ancestors had suffered with just as he was, but things that they had coped with through far more alchemical means; means which he would’ve likely used as well, had his family been in any position to obtain them during his lifetime.

Of course, Duma had done nothing. While he had used magic to make Victor actually think on what was said to him, Duma had no control over how the young man processed it or what conclusions he arrived at.

Ignoring the growing hunger pain in his gut, Victor picked up the second book, its thickness somewhat contradicting the fact it was a pulp. They were usually two-hundred pages at most, this thing neared six-hundred.

“All the more for me,” he thought as he dove into the book, finally managing to engross himself in it deeply enough to forget the world, even if only for a few hours. He woke up with a stiff neck, having fallen asleep at his kitchen table.

Another day: Training from nine in the morning to one in the afternoon, then an hour’s rest, and then guard duty to pay the bills. It all went quite well, but Victor’s mental state continued to degrade as the thoughts that Duma’s words had sparked in him gnawed away at foundations of the mental spire at whose top he isolated himself. Even his otherwise good technique had been disturbed, forcing him to marshal conscious focus just to land kicks and punches properly - and that was just on a stationary dummy! Frazzled as he was, Victor wasn’t about to try worming his way out of sparring because of what he considered - what he HOPED to be - just a temporary mental disturbance. He got put up against the closest thing to a kindred spirit he had in his class, a phlegmatic, yet conspicuously muscular blonde whose aura of calm apathy was only matched by his entirely age-inappropriate muscularity. His brick-like forehead and jawline, alongside his literally snow-coloured skin, betrayed where his propensity for the physical likely came from. Reiner had to be one of Hallgrim’s Sons, a bonafide Borean Descendant if he’d ever seen one.

Victor had fought him quite a few times and had come to consider the matchup to be effectively a coin toss between his own skill, toughness, and magic versus Reiner’s raw, yet refined physicality, but… He didn’t quite feel like that, now. Reiner’s calm apathy now felt like an oppressive aura of confidence, undermining Victor’s own self-assurance such that he overanalyzed Reiner’s straightforward fighting style, misreading straightforward strikes as playful feints or fakeouts. He struggled to the full extent of his ability, using earth magic to trip Reiner by burning a bit of Terra he’d drawn up during the pre-match countdown, and even drawing in some Aer through a breathing technique, intending to use said Aer to lend propulsive force to his next strike and knock Reiner off-balance. In that same breath he had also drawn in a relatively small amount of Pneuma, his body automatically metabolizing this universal arcane essence, briefly boosting Victor’s overall physical attributes enough to let him duck a right hook with a wide-enough window left over for a solid liver punch, but…

He saw Reiner’s body shifting, seeing the larger boy’s core tightening up as he braced for the strike which Reiner thought to be imminent and knew to be beyond his ability to dodge, but… He mistook it as Reiner readying to counterattack, despite the fact Reiner was physically too large to actually deliver such a strike at this angle, causing Victor to panic, jumping out of the way and right out of the sparring circle, automatically awarding the win to Reiner. The young man sat there, hyperventilating as he stared wide-eyed up at Reiner’s pallid-white hand, held out in an offer of aid.

“You alright? You don’t look alright,” said the apathetic musclehead with an uncharacteristic tinge of concern.