Leonidas hit the ground in the arena with a groan of pain, and an angry flash of his lowered health. His eyes, unfocused for a moment from the impact, sought out the source of his suffering where she stood not three feet distant—watching him with an imperious expression.

  It was the first morning of their training, and she was thrashing him out the gate.

  Ceruviel’s eyes were merciless when she regarded him.

  “{You fight like a conqueror, Achilles,}” she told him while he caught his breath, her voice calm yet piercing as she watched him. “{Overwhelming, relentless, but ultimately wasteful. An Archon does not swing to destroy like some overwrought primate when instead a single, precise cut will suffice. Power without purpose is nothing but noise.}”

  Leonidas picked himself up with another hiss of discomfort, while grimacing in reflection at the power behind her hits. Even holding back, Ceruviel struck like a battering ram—and cared little for the immensity nor intensity of the pain that followed.

  “{Agony is an anvil, Achilles.}” she had said ruthlessly after their first few clashes that morning, when he’d laid heaving on the ground after she had punched him—with mitigated force no less—in the stomach. “{Either you will be molded by it as is needed, or you will shatter and show the truth of your brittle material.}”

  “{I thought you wanted me to be a Conqueror.}” he said hoarsely while pushing his hands against the arena floor to force himself upright. “{Dawnhaven does not need a peaceful monarch. Those were your words, Ceruviel.}”

  “{They were, and I do.}” she affirmed while eyeing him still and regarding him with her cold, calculating lavender eyes. “{But there is a difference between conquest and brute force. Conquest is an act of intellect, utilizing force but harnessing strategy. You lacked the latter.}”

  “{Not using force against you is asking to lose.}” he argued with a wheeze. “{If I hold back, I—}”

  “{You will lose regardless.}” she cut in ruthlessly. “{Victory is not what this lesson is about.}”

  “{Then what is the goal?}” he asked in frustration.

  “{You have fought from a position of power your entire time in Elatra. Even when you were training, it was with the subconscious awareness of your own might. That has imbued a mentality of invincibility in you that—even ignoring your normal fatalism—will result in your death. I am teaching you to break that mentality, and to learn to fight from disadvantage.}” Ceruviel explained with brutal honesty.

  The days had continued like that for most of the week.

  Leonidas had known suffering before. Suffering and pain were old friends, earned on the battlefields of Elatra and at the cost of several lives he had learned to cherish.

  Suffering did not break him.

  He fought until his muscles trembled and failed, until exhaustion clawed at his very bones, and until all he could see was Ceruviel before him and the world faded to a single point: her, her sword, and his next movement.

  He had bled and been battered until his vision blurred into a crimson haze, and the Duchess came at him like a ghost of wrath; overwhelming him like a force of nature—like the living embodiment of the cataclysm raging in his body.

  Ceruviel’s training did not simply push him to the limits of his System-wrought body; it ripped him apart, piece by agonizing piece, weakness by exposed weakness, tearing down every flawed foundation he had built over years of combat in Elatra—and reshaping him into something new.

  Her methods were not designed to make him stronger in the way Miranda’s had been—Miranda, with her steady hand and unyielding resolve, had forged him into a warrior, a weapon honed for the chaos of battle, a blade tempered for war.

  But Ceruviel? She was crafting something beyond that, something far more refined. Something precise. Something indomitable. Something that she not only wanted, but that Dawnhaven and the world at large needed.

  An Archon.

  A King.

  The lessons in combat and warfare continued without break or abatement throughout the time she had allotted for them, and from six until the midday bell every morning Ceruviel put him through a crucible of pain. She never allowed him a reprieve, not when he felt bones crack or limbs dislocate, and not when he was dry-heaving from an exhaustion that pushed even his System-enhanced body to its limit.

  It was not that the conditioning did not pay dividends, though.

  Quite the opposite.

  While it was true he accrued no experience fighting Ceruviel, his physical exertions earned him considerable progress. Strength, Dexterity, Agility, Vitality, and Endurance all improved notably. The latter two had grown the most, with Endurance outstripping every other attribute for its massive rate of increase.

  He had pointed this fact out to Ceruviel with considerable surprise during one of his first sessions with her, and the Dusk-Lord had looked at him like he was an idiot.

  “{That is the point, Achilles. We cannot give you levels, but we can certainly make your foundation peerless. Is that not what I promised you?}”

  From there the training had continued relentlessly, and Leonidas had thrown himself into it with single-minded gusto. Being beaten black and blue and having his bones broken by his mentor was nothing new, thanks to Miranda—but the concept of quantifiable growth through the System left him breathlessly giddy. It was as addictive as any VR game he’d played prior to his pseudo-transmigration.

  The physical part of his training, however, was not the most difficult.

  At midday, after a stabilizing lunch and only enough medical attention to ensure he wasn’t crippled—Ceruviel said natural healing would improve his Vitality faster—had been applied, Leonidas was subjected to the conditioning of his mental attributes: Intelligence, Willpower, and Charisma. While the latter was technically more of a spiritual power, to hear Ceruviel explain it, she no less included it in her lessons.

  And so, after hours of grueling combat, when most warriors would be granted respite or a chance to collapse and recover, his training shifted to another battlefield.

  Ceruviel attacked his mind with the same calculated ruthlessness she brought to physical combat, and assailed him like he had kicked her dog.

  Psionic conditioning became a daily torment, and represented a relentless and single-minded siege on his already tenuous mental stability.

  First, it was mental endurance—forcing him to withstand overwhelming waves of mental pressure and illusions designed to break his spirit: fabricated nightmares so vivid, and so immersive that they unraveled his sense of reality; pulling him into depths of bleakness and drowning him beneath fears he still barely managed to keep at bay.

  She barely gave him time to recover between each onslaught, even after he was a shivering mess of sweat, tears, and—in some cases—animal panic.

  “{The world will not be kind to your traumas.}” she had said to him after a session that left him struggling to breathe from sheer panic and fear. He had focused on her, despite being the cause of his suffering, like a lighthouse in the darkness.

  “{I am sorry you carry the burdens you do, Achilles, but I cannot let them be the weakness that breaks you. If we had time, we could do this more gently—but our enemies will not be so kind as to wait, and so I must be even more cruel than they.}” she reached for him then, and braced his cheeks with her hands encouragingly. “{Weather this. You have the strength. It will make you stronger.}”

  After the mental assaults had concluded, the lessons shifted to complex tactical exercises: illusory battlefields conjured within his mind, where he commanded phantom forces in engagements that tested his ability to predict, manipulate, and master the flow of combat.

  He had to win, not with brute force as he once might have, but with strategy, foresight, and adaptation; outthinking enemies that shifted and evolved with every move he made.

  Some days, he found himself trapped within illusions that blurred the line between memory and fabrication—forced to fight old battles with different and twisted outcomes, or forced to relive choices he had made years ago and see their consequences shift and twist before his eyes.

  “{You rely too much on instinct,}” Ceruviel observed after a particularly harrowing session, where he had barely clawed his way back to lucidity, and sat heaving in air while his mind and body had trembled in unison from the strain. “{Instinct is useful, a tool for survival. But without the ability to truly see the battlefield, to think beyond the present moment, you are nothing more than a beast reacting to its environment. You must learn to be the hunter, not the prey—to shape the fight, not merely endure it.}”

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  The worst and best elements of his lessons were when she simply crushed him under pure Psionic force, hammering his mind with relentless waves of external willpower that bore down on him like a collapsing sky. It played to his strengths in a way nothing else did, and there was a kind of sanguine calm in simply relying on pure force of will to endure.

  Ceruviel forced him to stand while the pressure of her presence threatened to suffocate him, smother him, shatter him, and grind his resolve into dust.

  The first time, he had barely lasted two minutes before his knees buckled and hit the ground, all while his chest heaved and he gasped for breath with sweat dripping into his eyes. The second time, he endured for five with a clenched jaw and a determination to never surrender; his legs shaking but holding.

  By the end of the third day, he could stand against her for nearly an hour before exhaustion finally claimed him, and his body and mind were pushed to their breaking point. He hated that he could not last longer, but Ceruviel had remarked on how stellar his growth was, despite his feelings to the contrary.

  And when, on the fourth day, he pushed back for the first time—when he summoned his own will and forced his mind outward, cracking her illusion like glass—she had only smirked in approval, while a faint glint of pride shone in her otherwise impassive and ancient violet gaze.

  “{Good.}” she had said with no small amount of tacit approval. “{It seems this exercise truly is the easiest for you. The illusions attack a weakness, but this attacks a strength. Your Willpower has always been your most precious asset.}” she commended while he remained on his hands and knees, watching her but gasping for air.

  “{You are right to harness your emotions as you do, and convert them to power. You are a natural at this part, at least. Few Squires show so much raw Willpower, especially while Untempered. Well done.}”

  But even after all of that—after the physical torment, the mental onslaught—his day was not over. There was no reprieve, no moment to simply breathe.

  Training for his Core and his Affinity followed closely on the heels of his psionic and mental conditioning, and in many ways it was both the easiest and most frustrating part of his lessons.

  His [Cataclysm Core] refused to heed him at the best of times, and when Ceruviel taught him ways to more efficiently cycle his mana, while applauding his ingenuity around using Psi as a buffer—he often found himself falling backward in exhaustion, or writhing against internal agony from the searing pressure of his own power.

  The Duchess braced him against his frustrations with assurances he was progressing and always, always seemed to know exactly when to flip from Core work to Affinity progression. Learning to harness Psi in a way that was more natural and less linear was a great boon to Leonidas, and it was these lessons that he found the easiest throughout the week.

  Psi was a living thing, as strange and lively as his own psyche, and it seemed to want to respond to his Willpower when enough certainty was present in his mind. Ceruviel taught him to wield it like a second limb: to shape it, layer it, twist it, and manipulate it freely.

  While nothing he did was strong enough to actually impact the world around them, she taught him the principles behind several new skills, and how to use those foundations in combat to attain them officially through the System.

  “{Psi has always been the weapon of an Archon, and we learned well its myriad mysteries and applications.}” she had explained while manipulating the energy before him as easily as breathing. “{There is no limit to what one can do with its power, and when combined with your unique abilities, I believe this is more true than ever. You will be an Archon that shakes your world, Achilles. My duty is to ensure you develop in such a way as to benefit it, instead of become its bane.}”

  When the sun dipped low and his body ached with the day’s exertions, Ceruviel departed for her duties—but not before thrusting him into yet another theatre, one which he had dreaded more than any other: the shadowy world of politics and diplomacy.

  The halls of her luxurious estate became a new battlefield, filled not with Blues seeking his head nor Hive Tyrants wanting to make him their meal; but with powerful merchants draped in silks and jewelry, nobles adorned in regal attire and ancestral items of inheritance, and military officers of all ranks with stern gazes: each one skilled in their own subtle and insidious kind of warfare.

  These were battles he had never truly trained for, and in fact had actively avoided during his time in Elatra. They took place in a realm where his skill with a blade was as meaningless as paper before a tidal wave, and words were the deadliest of weapons.

  “{A King is more, much more, than just a Knight, Achilles,}” she told him one evening, while leading him through the arcane-lit corridors toward yet another meeting with some tutor or another. “{A King must wield words as deftly and as lethally as he wields a blade. He must shape perception, command respect, and understand the theatre of politics just as he does the theatre of war. Strength alone, no matter its potency, will not suffice here.}”

  “{But does strength not dominate all, in the end?}” he had asked while remembering her tales of the tiers within the System.

  “{Were you a seventh tier elite, perhaps.}” Ceruviel conceded, with something between amusement and exasperation. “{But you are not even Tempered yet. Dispel those thoughts from your mind. If you seek brute force as a safety net, you will only doom yourself before you begin. Learn, Achilles. Learn, so others may not destroy you without ever drawing a blade.}”

  And so, he learned—slowly, painfully, but he learned.

  He learned to read people as easily as he read an opponent’s footwork in combat. He learned to decipher the subtle shifts in posture, the flickers of expression, the fidget of hands, and the nervous or unconscious tics of facial muscles and anatomy that betrayed intent.

  He learned to recognize the weight behind casual words, spoken with a seeming lack of care, and to hear the intentions left unsaid beneath polished smiles. He learned to navigate conversations where every phrase, every instruction, every question was a test—a maneuver or hidden trap waiting to ensnare the unwary.

  Some nights she threw him into discussions without warning before departing, and forced him to convince a shrewd merchant to negotiate better trade terms while struggling to think of leverage he didn’t know he had—or to resolve a heated contention between nobles who had no interest in compromise, all while they leered at him with thinly veiled contempt, and pride as unyielding as stone.

  Other nights she took him with her to the Moonstone Fortress, and made him stand silently at her side in order to absorb the flow of conversation. She bade him to be patient, all while watching how she bent wills with a single well-placed word, expression, or calculating smile.

  At first he had struggled, stymied and crippled by his own impatience and bluntness. Leonidas had been a warrior, a soldier, a Hero forged in blood and fire—one that rejected niceties in favor of overwhelming violence. Ceruviel’s demonstrated world of velvet and venom was not his, and he struggled greatly.

  His first attempts were clumsy: his words too direct and his frustration palpable.

  But he learned. He grew. He committed to his improvement.

  He adapted. He always adapted.

  Just as he had with the sword, just as he had on the battlefield against demons and men alike, he bent himself to the task and he overcame. By the end of the week, he could command a room without raising his voice, and his presence alone was enough to draw eyes and silence tongues. He knew he owed some of that, at least, to his status as Ceruviel’s Squire—but his own Ambition, Charisma, and sheer Willpower played the greatest part; and he took pride in knowing how far he had come.

  The fights with the Duskguard in the evening were their own challenge.

  Each of his foes seemed determined to prove themselves, both to Ceruviel and to him, despite the Dusk-Lord’s notable absence. They tested him without mercy, without holding back. He was their Lady’s Squire, and he was not Haelfenn. He was an enigma, a mystery—and in some views, he was a usurper and a mistake.

  They did not hide their discontent.

  Ceruviel had chosen the youngest and most promising of her soldiers for him to spar with, and there was nothing held back in those matches. Leonidas fought them like his life depended on it, utilizing every lesson he had learned in Elatra, and every insight Ceruviel had given him. He fought them with gusto and with pride, wielding Psi with an ease and confidence he never would have felt without his mentor.

  Power and lethality flowed within him, and each night he sparred, each night he fought, he found himself growing more and more comfortable with his new abilities.

  More than that, he found the Duskguard growing more and more comfortable with him.

  By the last night of his training with Ceruviel, Leonidas sat in the arena laughing with several of the final evening’s sparring partners; Haelfenn that had come repeatedly to fight him, and while eking out some victories—they were hardly pushovers, after all—they had failed to overcome him the majority of times.

  Yet, there was no resentment.

  Instead, he had proven himself.

  And in the act, vindicated Ceruviel’s choice.

  “{Tomorrow you face the arena, Achilles.}” said Vasryn, a bold-looking Haelfar with stark white hair. “{Are you sure you are ready?}”

  A laugh echoed from their left, and another Haelfar—a blonde female named Cerys—shook her head. “{The better question is whether the arena is ready for him, Vasryn.}” she declared with amusement. “{He just fought two of us to a standstill and managed to take you down. If not for already being exhausted from Her Grace’s training during the day, we may have been flattened by him.}”

  Vasryn glanced at Cerys, and then another voice cut in from opposite the blonde female.

  “{Cerys is right, but don’t let that go to your head, Achilles.}” rumbled Garion, a massive Haelfar that looked like the elven equivalent of Dwayne Johnson. “{The arena will not be merciful. You survived the Hive Tyrant, but those were the pregames. The title matches will be far more harrowing, and you may not just be fighting beasts.}”

  “{What do you mean?}” Leonidas had asked with mild trepidation.

  “{The arena is how they execute capital offenders, Leonidas.}” Vasryn said in a more solemn tone. “{That means Terrans, too. Your own people.}”

  “{It is never easy to kill kin.}” Cerys added quietly while looking between them all. “{And if the Prince and the Blues catch wind of who you are and what Ceruviel intends, it is likely they will do everything in their power to diminish you in front of the city—and especially the other Terrans.}”

  Leonidas frowned at her words, but the nods of affirmation from Vasryn and Garion gave him reason to take them seriously. Cerys was always a bit of a storyteller, but if she was being serious, then he had much to consider. He would not take the warning, given by people that had been among a dozen or more that had disapproved of him even two days earlier, as anything less than what it was: a gesture of sincerity.

  By time the night wound to a close and the three remaining Duskguard—six had come that evening—departed, Leonidas had retired to his meditation with a quiet resolve.

  By time Dawn had come and Ceruviel returned, his mind had been settled.

  He would go to the Arena as Ceruviel bade, and he would prove his mettle.

  And when he was done, all of Dawnhaven would know the name Achilles.

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