A Month blurred into a punishing, near-daily rotation of drills. Elias, closing in on seven, moved with a new coordination that made the stumbling toddler he'd been feel like an entirely different, more embarrassing person. He'd learned, through relentless trial and a truly staggering number of bruises, to channel Flow into a temporary shield across skin and bone — enough to dull the sting of Aina's corrective smacks when his form slipped, enough to shrug off the shock of her metal-dust training rounds, charged just enough to hurt without doing any lasting damage.
"Focus, Elias! Properly!" she'd snap, whenever the reinforcement failed him, and the resulting sting was, annoyingly, an excellent and consistent teacher.
He tested his own limits once, quietly, alone — an "accidental" tumble off a low balcony into a rose bush below, thorns and all, that turned out, he discovered much later, to have snapped his neck outright. He hadn't even noticed at the time; his body had simply healed itself before he'd regained full consciousness, leaving only a lingering stiffness and Miss Gable's frantic, guilty apologies for a fall that had nothing to do with her at all.
Isn't that supposed to hurt more, he'd thought afterward, deeply, almost personally unsatisfied by his own body's efficiency.
Later, Aina taught him to trigger the process deliberately — Accelerate Heal, channeling Flow straight to torn tissue on command. He tested it obsessively, alone, with a smuggled kitchen knife and a shallow cut to the wrist that closed itself before he'd even finished consciously applying the technique, the wound sealing over almost the instant the blade left his skin. He tried again. And again. Each time, only a fading, residual sting remained, gone within seconds.
Every experiment confirmed the same infuriating conclusion, over and over: his body simply would not let him die, quietly or otherwise, and the sheer relentless efficiency of it felt less like a gift and more like a very well-funded, extremely thorough prison with excellent staff.
Damn you, Deus, he wrote that night, cramped handwriting filling another page of encrypted English. Immortal, but I still feel every single hit. What kind of curse comes with a copay attached?
Aina noted his healing speed with mild, professional approval and his continued "clumsiness" with visible, ongoing disappointment, entirely unaware of exactly how much of both was deliberate, controlled experimentation on his part.