"Nice," Kael muttered as he approached the boar, tied both its hind legs together, and hurled it behind his back.

The corpse swung up like it weighed nothing, yet it wasn’t weightlessness; it was control. The rope bit into the boar’s legs, then settled across Kael’s shoulder. The smell hit him immediately: warm meat, wet earth, and that faint animal musk that clung to everything it had ever touched.

He looked down the path where the boar was headed. The river was there, but the boar might get stolen if he started his routine.

The mountain wasn’t empty. It only pretended to be. If there were tracks, there were other mouths. And Kael didn’t feel like donating tonight’s dinner to some unseen scavenger because he got distracted training underwater like an idiot.

He looked up the cliff where he came from and sighed, "Gotta put this back up, but if he thinks that I’m too efficient, the half an hour climb down and up will become even less. Nah, screw it," he turned and headed to the stream.

The decision tasted like rebellion. Small, petty rebellion. The best kind.

He found the stream quickly, a ribbon of cold water cutting through stone, clear enough to see the rounded pebbles at the bottom and dark enough to hide depth in its center. He hung the boar corpse and jumped into the water with the backpack and all.

Long gone were the days he panicked and suffocated underwater, or the days he got kicked in. Now he did it himself.

The water swallowed him whole. The cold punched through skin and muscle in a single brutal wave, trying to steal breath, trying to trigger old fear. The backpack dragged him down, heavy and insisting, and for a moment the current shoved him sideways like it wanted to slam him into rocks and laugh.

Kael let it.

He sank with control, letting the weight do its job, letting his body slip under the current instead of fighting it. His ears filled with muffled roaring. His hair floated around his face like weed. The iron rings felt even heavier underwater, and the pressure pressed against his chest like a hand.

He got all the way to the bottom and sat in a lotus position, feeling the river for a bit.

The stone was slick beneath him. The world above became distant, light wavering, surface rippling, everything distorted into a soft, moving ceiling.

He didn’t close his eyes right away. He watched the way the water moved around his knees, the way silt lifted then settled when he stopped shifting. He listened to his own heartbeat, slower than it used to be, steadier. He let the cold bite until it stopped feeling like an enemy and started feeling like information.

After several minutes, he opened his eyes, but never got out of the water. Instead, he stood up, opened his backpack, and held one of the rocks with one hand. He pushed it up; the water resistance made it go up slowly, but come down fast.

The rock rose like a reluctant thought, dragged upward through thick water, then gravity grabbed it again and made it honest. It dropped harder than it should’ve, turning the water around it into a rippling pressure wave.

Still, he stomped his left foot down and struck with his other hand at the incoming rock.

His foot pinned him. His fist moved.

Underwater, everything was slower, except impact. Impact didn’t care about water. It cared about intention.

The impact was enough to rattle the lake’s surface and explode.

A violent bloom of bubbles punched upward. The surface above bucked like something had struck it from beneath. The shock carried through his arm, into his shoulder, into his ribs, the kind of feedback that used to shake him. Now it only made him adjust his wrist a fraction, tightening the line of his knuckles.

’Tsk, didn’t break this time,’ Kael thought as the rock was flung through the lake, but didn’t shatter.

It sailed away, tumbling lazily in the current like it was mocking him.

This was his task for the past couple of weeks. To bring head-sized rocks and crush them with his fist. The goal was to compress the impact and make it concussive instead of explosive. So that whatever takes in Kael’s punch won’t have the majority of its power spread outward, instead, it needed to rattle them inside out. Then burst.

Kael didn’t fully understand why, since both punches would still kill anyone, but he didn’t argue.

Arguing meant sparring, and for some reason, sparing with the Fist King only kept getting more painful and more difficult.

The old man didn’t spar to teach. He sparred to prove a point, usually that Kael still had bones.

’Again,’ He muttered and hurled another rock, then punched.

This time, he angled his fist differently, trying to trap force instead of letting it spill. The rock jolted, skipped away again, stubborn as ever. The water shook. His fingers tingled. He felt that familiar borderline irritation rise.

Not anger.

Focus.

Time went by as Kael finally propped his head out of the water, taking deep breaths. He sighed, "Only three rocks...out of twenty. Damn long way to go," he sighed.

He surfaced like a creature returning from a different world, lungs burning from held breath, water streaming off his hair and shoulders. The cold clung to him, but it wasn’t the cold that bothered him; it was the count.

Three.

Out of twenty.

His master would laugh until his ribs hurt.

He turned toward the bank where he’d left the boar hanging and froze mid-step.

A person was there, cutting themselves a huge chunk of the boar’s thigh.

Not carefully, either. Not like someone preparing food with respect. More like someone who had decided hunger outranked manners, and if anyone had a problem with that, they could try and stop them.

Kael rose up from the water and walked toward them. It was a woman who looked like she had seen far better days, mud-covered. Bloodied and injured all over. But hungry as it can get. Hungry enough to steal from his master’s food.