Joji took a single gulp straight from the pitcher. The water rushed down his throat and settled cold in his gut.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, set the pitcher aside, and reached for another practice sword.
If he wanted to conserve stamina, he would have to slow the pace just enough to endure without making it obvious he was doing it on purpose.
Head Knight Gregorius watched him with cold eyes and motioned the next man forward.
"Gawain of Everhart. No surname," the man said impatiently.
"Sir Joji of..." Joji began.
Gawain did not let Joji finish. He lunged with such speed it seemed he vanished outright.
In the span of a blink, the blunt tip of the training sword was already pressed against Joji's chest.
Joji's breath caught in his throat. His arms were still rising into guard when the strike landed.
His boots left the ground at once. The blow hurled him backward for a dozen meters, and when he hit the earth he rolled another half dozen, shoulder and hip scraping through dirt until the last of his momentum bled away and left him sprawled.
"Missed start," Gregorius said flatly.
Joji dragged in air like a man who had just taken the charge of a rushing bison.
His head still rang, and the knights around him blurred into doubles and triples.
He reached out with a trembling hand, as if testing whether the world would still answer him at all.
{Measure of Completion: 2 of 100}
A sound slipped out of him before he could stop it. A rough snort that nearly turned into laughter.
The knights went rigid, their faces darkening at once.
"Audacious. You dare laugh."
"He spits on our honor."
"End this farce. He makes a spectacle of us."
Gregorius did not move with them. His eyes narrowed as he studied Joji, withholding the easy judgment the others rushed toward.
What sat in Joji's eyes was not mockery. It was triumph.
To the Head Knight, the meaning seemed plain enough.
Joji was not laughing at defeat. He was turning the exchange over in his mind, feeling through the flaw, tracing the shape of the technique that had beaten him.
No sane man moved his hands in the air like that without reason.
To the Head Knight, Joji was searching for the answer even while sprawled in the dirt.
Joji stayed down for a few breaths, then pushed himself upright.
He raised a hand and pointed toward the edge of the platform.
"Yeah, this one's yours, Sir Gawain. Take the win."
Gregorius drew breath to speak, but Joji lifted a hand again and cut him off with startling confidence.
"In a real fight, do you even get time to breathe before someone jumps you and you have to draw steel? Sir Gawain, your feel for it... yeah, that's real. I appreciate you setting me straight."
Joji looked at Gregorius, and something passed in that glance.
Gregorius understood the intention and called the next man at once.
"Next. Alaric. Come forth."
A knight stepped forward and gave his name.
"Alaric of Everhart."
The words struck Joji in the chest. Not where the bruise sat, but somewhere deeper, in a place that did not wholly belong to him.
A buried pain stirred. Fire. Screams. Men and women fleeing through smoke.
And above it all, a father standing tall with a wild grin on his face, defying meteors that rained from the sky.
Joji and the man before him were both children then, both being dragged away as they cried out for him.
"Father. Father! Father..."
Joji blinked, and the yard came back into focus. Dust. Steel. Sunlight. The ring of armor. The taste of blood in his mouth.
"Joji of Sins Crossroads," he said, and this time the name left him with more honor than he had ever given it before.
Alaric's aura rose in a tight green gale, the unmistakable mark of the Everhart Tempest Arts that had made the Everhart knights famous.
Shame twisted sharply through Joji. The old Joji had never despised those Arts.
If anything, he had admired it. Yet seeing his adopted brother, his one true friend, wield the inheritance of another house made something sour turn in his chest.
It felt like failure. A Sins should not have left his own blood and bond to take up a foreign path. It should have been their art to share.
'What is going on with me? Is this the original Joji's regret bleeding into me?'
"Joji. Focus," Alaric snapped.
The sharp call pulled Joji back into himself.
Alaric moved first.
He was slower than Gawain and gentler in intent, but the blow still carried enough force to drive Joji back three full steps.
Their blades met with a clean ring of iron. Aura hissed along the edges.
This time the exchange did not rush toward a finishing strike.
Blow met blow in measured rhythm. It was a fight meant to teach, not to end.
Around them, the other knights began to understand.
Crispin and Gawain stood stiff-faced at the edge, and there was shame in their eyes now.
Not because they had won, but because in winning as they had, they had denied Joji the chance to learn from those first two bouts.
As the sparring grew fiercer, Joji tried to force more power into the aura along his blade, but the control slipped at the worst moment.
The edge trembled. Alaric swept in at once. Joji's practice sword flew from his hand and clanged across the stone.
He barely had time to raise his forearms. Something cracked.
The next instant sent him hurtling into the sword racks. Wood splintered. Practice blades came rattling down around him like rain.
Pain tore through him, and Joji winced, but he did not curse. He pushed himself back to his feet, bowed, and kept his voice steady.
"Thank you for your guidance, Sir Alaric."
Joji knelt and started setting the fallen swords back in place, forcing his aching arms to work as he stacked each weapon neatly.
Once the rack looked proper again, he took up a fresh practice sword and rose to full height.
The bouts did not stop.
By afternoon, he had already faced more than thirty knights, and his body paid for every one of them.
Swelling had begun to rise across his face. His left eye had darkened until it was nearly swollen shut, while his right cheek had turned a deep maroon with the mark of a fist still stamped across it.
His palms were rubbed raw from sweat and strain, and the sword grips had started taking on a rusty smear where his blood mixed with the dust.
Above the yard, Duchess Rosalind Everhart watched from the shade for a long while, her expression unreadable.
Daisy stood beside her with wet eyes, both hands clutched tight around her mother's sleeve like a child hanging from the edge of a cliff.
"Mother," Daisy whispered, "please. Let us end this madness now, before it goes any further."
Duchess Rosalind did not look away from the yard. Not from Joji. Not from the way he kept getting back up.
"Tell me, Daisy," she said softly. "If the thing you wanted most were placed before you, close enough to touch, would you let it slip away?"
Daisy opened her mouth, then shut it again. All she had ever wanted in this life was Joji.
She wanted to run down into the yard and pull him out with her own hands.
She wanted to make it stop. She wanted him spared the sight of suffering, and herself spared the pain of watching it.
She could not. Not with her mother's eyes on her.
Below, on the practice ground, Joji felt as though he might die. For all the stubbornness in him, he was still only human.
Joints ached. Lungs burning. Yet the system kept ticking with cold, inhuman calm, and he did not dare slow down.
Not when he still needed time to recover before facing Daisy, and even that felt like a gamble.
{Measure of Completion: 38 of 100}
{Time's bound: Two sunrises and two sundown}