The rest of the week passed in a rhythm of dust, sweat, and grudging progress. The tension from Kaelen's runaway attempt and his mother's tearful fear had not vanished, but it had been transmuted into something quieter and more purposeful. An unspoken agreement settled between the boy and the spear: the training would continue, but the methods would change. They met each morning in the "bad land," the southern field now a familiar, if unforgiving, classroom under the vast sky.
Elara's watchfulness had become a subtle, pervasive force in the household. Her fear had sharpened into a quiet, observant anxiety. She no longer simply accepted his claims of going to the mill. She would ask for specifics—"What will you and Jax be doing by the mill today?"—her eyes searching his face for the faintest flicker of a lie. She'd find reasons to walk to the southern edge of the village on errands, her gaze scanning the rocky scrubland. Kaelen's previously simple deceptions now required layers. He had to manufacture alibis with Jax, whose loyalty was bought with the thrilling secret of a "special project." He had to time his departures to the minute, waiting for the moment his mother was engrossed in washing or weaving, her back turned for just long enough. He became a student of domestic patterns, learning that the creak of the loom's pedal was a sound that would cover the soft click of their door latch. The effort of merely getting to the training ground became its own exhausting exercise in evasion, a constant, low-grade tension that made the physical strain of training almost a relief.
Phenex observed this new layer of Kaelen's education with clinical interest. It noted the boy's increased heart rate not from exertion, but from the nervous adrenaline of a near-miss as he ducked behind a storehouse, hearing his mother call his name from just yards away. The spear understood this, too, was a form of survival training, albeit of a deeply personal kind.
Once they reached the barren safety of the field, Phenex remained an exacting instructor, its expectations undiminished. However, the harsh, psychological barbs—the threats of crippledom and maternal grief—were absent. In their place was a firm, relentless focus on correction. Its voice in Kaelen's mind was that of a dispassionate engineer assessing a mechanism.
For his part, Kaelen's rebellious anger had cooled into a simmering, stubborn resolve. He still got frustrated. When a footwork sequence evaded him for the dozenth time, he would kick at the shale in a brief, wordless burst of fury, his face flushed. But he no longer shouted, "I'm out!" He simply stood there, breathing hard, his single fist clenched, before resetting his stance with a grimace. He worked in concentrated silence, absorbing each critique. He was doing it for the boar. Every ache, every stumble, every moment of fear when dodging his mother's gaze was fuel for that single, fixed goal.
Phenex observed the tangible growth. The boy's stamina increased; the stances he could hold for only minutes on Monday, he maintained for half an hour by Thursday. His footwork became less chaotic, his movements gaining a fledgling economy. But more fascinating to the spear was the raw determination, a focused fire that burned away doubt.
Beyond foundational stances and evasion, the training took its most significant turn when Phenex introduced spear technique. This was not the generic martial knowledge of a hundred soldiers; this was a specialized, poignant archive. Within its soul, Phenex located the faint, stubborn echoes of warriors who had fought on despite grievous injury—soldiers who had lost an arm to a sword stroke, an arrow, or crushing force, but who had adapted. From these echoes, it synthesized a fighting style for a one-armed spearman.
The first lesson was not about attack, but about synergy. Phenex explained, its shaft resting in Kaelen's grip.
The techniques were built on core principles of leverage and momentum. A classic two-handed thrust was impossible. Instead, Phenex taught him the "Body Spear." Kaelen learned to plant his feet, brace his core, and let the forward lunge of his entire body propel the spear point, his one arm acting as the guiding channel, not the sole source of power.
Since he could not switch hands, Phenex drilled him in the "Rooted Guard." This was not about changing sides, but about mastering a single, supremely stable defensive position from his right side. He learned to angle his body, to present the smallest target, with the spear shaft held diagonally across his torso, its butt braced against his hip or the ground to absorb impact that his lone arm could not. It was a static, strong position, but one that sacrificed the fluidity of a two-handed fighter.
The most difficult was the "Retrieving Arc," a whip-fast, circular motion to recover the spear after a missed thrust without the stabilizing second hand, using centrifugal force to bring the weapon back to a ready position. Kaelen's progress was uneven. The Body Spear came naturally, tapping into his raw determination. The Rooted Guard felt awkward and limiting, a constant reminder of what he'd lost. The Retrieving Arc was a disaster at first, the spear repeatedly smacking into his legs or flying from his sweat-slick grip to land point-first in the dirt ten feet away. But he kept at it. Phenex would demonstrate the perfect, smooth motion in the air, and Kaelen would mimic it again and again, his jaw set, until his muscles quivered with fatigue.
Kaelen nodded, wiping his brow with his forearm. He knew it was true. The moves were there in his head, but they felt separate, like individual tools in a box he hadn't learned to combine.
Later, as they sat in the lee of the hawthorn tree during a water break, Phenex broached the next step.
Kaelen took a long swig from his waterskin, his expression turning gloomy. "I know," he muttered, not meeting the spear's presence. "Seeking acknowledgment from the adults. Getting permission."
"That's... that's what makes me sad, actually," Kaelen confessed, drawing circles in the dust with a stick. "The more I learn, the more I realize you were right before. Not about the... the mean stuff. But about how much I didn't know. I thought a week of training would make me a warrior. Now I see it just showed me how deep the well is. I thought I could just learn some tricks and be done with it. Now I see the tricks are just the beginning." He looked up, his young face serious. "It makes me wonder if I'm really ready at all. But I have to be. For the boar."
Phenex was silent for a long moment, the hum of its presence thoughtful.
Kaelen's head snapped up. The doubt in his eyes was instantly vaporized by a rekindled fire. "Cancel? No way! I just... I feel the weight of it, is all. But my heart's settled. It's me or that beast, okay? I'm doing this." The confession of his own daunting ignorance had somehow solidified, rather than weakened, his resolve for the single task ahead.
- - Torvin's Homestead - -
The next morning, under a sky streaked with high, grey clouds, Kaelen set his plan in motion. He was one of the most active children in the nameless village, and he knew where to find the only man who lived by the old ways of combat: Old Man Torvin. Torvin was a relic, a former man-at-arms who had survived the northern wars and retired not to farm, but to hunt. His son had chosen the plow over the spear, a quiet disappointment Torvin bore with gruff acceptance. His legacy now rested on his granddaughter, Lyna, a fierce girl of twelve who had taken to his lessons with a natural ferocity that made the old man's eyes gleam.
Kaelen found them at Torvin's homestead on the village's northern edge, a plot better kept for a warrior's needs—a clear yard of hard-packed earth for sparring, a well-maintained woodpile, a straw-stuffed dummy lashed to a post, its burlap face slashed and resewn many times. The house itself was stout timber and daub, smaller than most but radiating a sense of defensive readiness.
In the yard, Torvin was overseeing Lyna's footwork. He was a gnarled tree of a man, his back straight despite his years, his arms ropy with muscle and scars. His hair was a steel-grey bristle, and his eyes were the color of flint. Lyna, all sharp elbows and focused intensity, moved between a series of stones with a fluid grace Kaelen could only envy. Her movements were clean, efficient, and spoke of hundreds of hours of repetition.
Kaelen approached the low fence, his heart thudding against his ribs. Phenex was a comforting, silent weight in his hand, its presence muted but attentively observing through his senses.
"Hello, sir?" Kaelen called out, his voice smaller than he intended. "Can I have a little of your time?"
Torvin turned, his gaze sweeping over Kaelen with the swift, assessing look of a man used to judging threats and weaknesses. His eyes lingered on the empty sleeve pinned to Kaelen's shoulder, then on the simple, worn spear in his hand—a spear Torvin might have dismissed as a child's toy were it not for the way the boy held it, with a familiarity that wasn't casual. "The boy," he grunted, his voice like stones grinding together. "The one-armed lad who survived the trench beast's attention. Heard you were laid up for a week."
"Yes, sir. That was me."
"What do you want, boy?" Torvin said, not unkindly, but with blunt impatience. He gestured with a calloused thumb toward Lyna, who had stopped to watch, her expression one of open curiosity. "Can't you see I'm busy?"
Kaelen took a deep breath, summoning the courage. "Sorry, sir. But I need your help. I need you to... to see my skill. To tell me if I'm ready. I aim to go back out. To hunt the boar that took my arm."
Torvin's flinty eyes narrowed. He leaned on the fence post, the wood creaking. "And why," he asked, the words slow and deliberate, "would I do that? Huh? What's it to me if a one-armed boy gets himself killed trying to play hero? You think I want your mother's wails on my conscience?"
The question, so practical and brutally dismissive, hit Kaelen like a physical blow. His rehearsed pleas evaporated. The old man was right. What was it to him? Kaelen had no coin, no service to offer, no familial tie. He was just a wounded kid with a death wish, interrupting a real warrior's training. His shoulders slumped, the fiery resolve in his gut sputtering into cold ash. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He was on the verge of mumbling an apology and turning away, the journey ending not in battle, but in this quiet yard under a dismissive, logical gaze.
Just as he took a half-step back, a clear, confident voice cut through the heavy silence.
"Grandfather."
Both Kaelen and Torvin looked at Lyna. She had walked over, not with a child's shyness, but with a purposeful stride. She wiped sweat from her forehead with her sleeve, her bright blue eyes fixed intently on Kaelen. She looked from his determined, ashamed face to the spear in his hand, then back to her grandfather.
"How about you let me test his skill?" she said, not as a plea, but as a proposition.
Torvin's bushy eyebrows rose. "You, girl? Why?"
Lyna shrugged one shoulder, a surprisingly mature gesture. "I'm curious. Everyone talks about the boy who lived. They say he just got lucky, that the beast was blind or sick. But he's standing here asking for a judgement on his skill. Not for help, not for pity. To be tested." Her eyes swept over Kaelen again, analytical and sharp. "And he's been training. I can see it in the way he stands, even now. He's been practicing without a proper teacher. I want to see what a one-armed boy who trains himself can really do."
Her words hung in the air, reframing the entire encounter. She wasn't offering pity or intervention out of kindness. She was offering a duelist's curiosity. To her, Kaelen wasn't just a tragic figure; he was an intriguing anomaly, a puzzle to be solved with a sparring match. It was the first time anyone had looked at him not as a victim or a fool, but as a practitioner of something, however unformed. A spark, faint but undeniable, reignited in Kaelen's chest.