I had nothing to do, so I read a history book cover to cover.

Lina slept through all of it.

When she was still asleep by midmorning I left her and headed for my regular training.

The training room stopped me at the door.

It was packed. Knights everywhere dueling, drilling, moving between stations. Not a single quiet corner anywhere. The noise alone was enough to make me want to turn around.

I trained in silence. Always had. Crowds made the focus wrong.

I was already heading back out when someone stepped into my path.

A young knight. Maybe my age, maybe a little older. He looked up at me with the particular expression of someone who had already made a decision and was only now informing the other party.

"Can we duel?"

What is he thinking?

His face showed no nerves at all. None.

Around us, a few heads turned.

I looked at him for a moment.

"Sure."

We waited for a free stage. One of the pairs ahead of us was still going, so we stood at the side and watched. Then another pair started. Then another.

An hour passed.

A vein had appeared on my temple. Not because of the waiting, I had patience for waiting. It was the knight standing beside me who was the problem.

He had not stopped talking since we left the door.

"Do you have a particular technique? I have been working on one myself actually. I created it from scratch, took me about three months, I think it was worth it though do you train with a sword regularly? Who taught you? I was trained by the senior knights here, all of them actually, well most of them, there was one who retired before I could finish the full curriculum but I think I covered the important parts..."

He answered his own questions before I could open my mouth.

Every single one.

Why do I always end up next to the strange ones?

Though I’ll admit that wasn’t the only reason I stayed.

The knight who had stopped me at the door and hadn’t stopped talking since.

I recognized him the moment he stepped into my path. I used the system by the way.

Reinhardt.

Future title: The Berserker.

In the novel he was one of those characters who existed at a different scale from everyone around him. Blessed by nature itself, multiple gifts stacked on top of each other, the kind of power that looked like a mistake until you understood what was underneath it.

The hero tamed him eventually. Took three full arcs.

His backstory was the kind of thing you remembered after you finished reading.

He had loved someone. Completely, without reservation, the way certain people loved before the world taught them not to.

She had been with someone else behind his back for over a year.

When he found out he didn’t fall apart.

He went very, very still.

He kept her alive. The other man was less fortunate. Nails first. Then the bones, one by one, methodically, while she watched. Then he cut the body in two and left both halves where she could see them clearly.

Then he walked into the mountains and didn’t come back for years.

It was one of the most unsettling things the novel had described without flinching.

The person currently beside me telling me about his preferred grip stance in elaborate detail was that same man.

Is he gay though! The thought arrived without warning. Actually I think he might be.

"and that’s why I prefer the overhead grip in wider stances, do you have a preference?"

Our turn finally came.

We stepped onto the stage.

The room had thinned out by then, still watched, but not packed. Enough eyes to matter without making it a spectacle.

We bowed. Drew our weapons.

The rules were simple. Fight until one side asked to stop.

He came in fast.

Much faster than someone who had spent the last hour narrating his own life story had any right to be. The talking stopped the moment his feet hit the stage.

He became a different person.

His footwork was immaculate. Weight low, transitions smooth, even though I don’t know much. Nature’s blessing, I remembered. His body moved like it understood the ground under it.

In the first exchange we tested the range. Neither of us committed.

He feinted left, cut right. I stepped back and let it miss by a margin I chose rather than scrambled for.

He noticed. Adjusted immediately.

Smarter than the talking suggested.

The second exchange is harder. He pressed forward in combinations high, low, high, precise and relentless. I matched them without reaching for anything extra. Sword only. No mana.

He caught me with a half-step I hadn’t tracked and the flat of his blade connected with my forearm solid, clean contact.

I gave him a nod.

He grinned.

The first real expression I’d seen from him wasn’t words.

So there’s a person under all that talking.

I pushed the pace not with speed but with pressure. Closing distance before he expected it, forcing his guard up, then not being where his counter aimed. He adapted fast.

Came back with a low sweep I cleared by a margin I wasn’t entirely comfortable with.

Back to neutral.

Both of us breathing harder than before.

He looked at me differently now. Not with the easy openness of someone chatting up a stranger.

That stillness I recognized from the novel.

That was the real Reinhardt.

Not the one that talked. The one underneath.

We went again. And again. His technique was refined and relentless, my body moving in ways that didn’t match any style he had trained against. Neither of us found the clean opening that would have ended it.

By the time we stepped back the crowd had quietly doubled.

Neither of us had noticed when that happened.

He was breathing hard. So was I.

We looked at each other.

Then we both sheathed at the same time.

He put his hand out.

I shook it.

"You’re strange," he said.

"You talk too much,"

He laughed. Loud and completely unbothered, the way someone laughed when they genuinely didn’t care what anyone thought of them.

The future Berserker.

Right now he just looks like someone who had a good fight.