Sunset bled into dusk, and dusk slipped past midnight, yet the clang of steel still rang through the Everhart Training Arena.
More people began to gather and watch as Joji sparred without end.
The gardener stood with a trowel in hand. Maids came with flour still dusting their aprons.
Whenever she could, Daisy hurried in to refill his pitcher, her lips pressed tight with worry.
She watched every exchange, every brutal meeting of steel on steel, and each blow seemed to land in her own chest, as though the knights were hammering her heart flat.
None of the knights held back. Mercy was not what they had come here to practice.
To soften now would not only stain their names, it would also betray the very iron resolve Joji was trying to prove he possessed.
Aurelio, the knight facing Joji, caught a small opening.
He showed a false lunge, then drove a kick into Joji's side.
Joji tumbled across the stone arena, his body flung like a discarded rag.
Head Knight Gregorius watched with the same stern expression. Then his hands rose with practiced precision as he gave the next announcement.
"Victory to Knight Aurelio. Next."
Joji barely heard it through the haze of exhaustion.
His eyes wanted to close and never open again, but he forced them wide enough to peer at the Sir Engine panel through lashes that kept sagging shut.
{Measure of Completion: 81 of 100}
Joji forced himself upright. His hands trembled, but he clenched his left one into a fist to hide it.
He could no longer feel his arms or his legs, or much of anything at all beyond a strange dead numbness that had settled over his body.
Eighty one. That number should have carried weight.
Instead, it only showed him how much farther he still had to go.
He was past spent. No amount of water could refill a body that had already burned through the last of its strength.
"Anselm of Everhart. No surname," the knight said.
Across from him, Anselm did not move to attack. He had seen enough to know Joji had been standing on will alone since the seventieth bout.
"Are you still fit to fight?" Anselm asked, concern showing beneath his discipline. "Can you still hold your ground?"
"I'm alright," Joji replied, sparing even his words as he forced them out.
Head Knight Gregorius took a step toward them, the count of bouts already turning in his mind. He allowed Joji a brief mercy, a short silence in which no one moved.
After a dozen breaths, Joji raised his stance and gave his name.
"Joji of Sins Crossroads."
As the Head Knight's hand dropped, Joji moved first.
He lunged in. Anselm tried to pivot away, but Joji leaped and brought his sword down in a hard overhead slash.
The strike landed heavy, yet Anselm did not buckle.
He let the force drive him low, then power flooded his legs through the Everhart Tempest Arts, the first movement called Lightness of the Wind.
Green aura burst around Anselm, drawing his body tight like a coiled spring.
In the next instant, Joji's stalled weight above Anselm was flung aside with ease as Anselm's lower body snapped upward in an explosive surge.
Joji was hurled half a dozen meters into the air, but he adjusted fast.
He twisted his body, turned through a clean somersault, and let gravity drive his blade down with greater force.
Gold and green aura collided. Steel chipped. Steel cracked.
Joji turned just enough for his pauldron to catch Anselm's blade even as his own sword split in two.
His free left hand snatched the other flying fragment from the air, and with a broken blade in each hand, he drove at Anselm with both points aimed for the neck.
Before either strike could turn lethal, the Head Knight raised a hand.
"Halt. Draw."
{Measure of Completion: 82 of 100}
Anselm was not a prideful man. At first, he thought the win was his. Then he understood the truth.
He had not hungered for the win the way Joji had. Realizing that, Anselm gave him a silent word of thanks for the lesson and stepped aside.
Joji bent and gathered the broken sword along with its scattered shards.
It was a small act, but not a meaningless one.
Knights held their blades in reverence, and by stooping to collect the pieces himself, he showed a sincerity that even steel could recognize.
But Joji used the pause to steal a little rest.
After carefully setting the broken pieces in a quiet corner, he forced his battered body back toward the center of the training arena.
Another knight stepped forward before the last ring of steel had fully faded.
"Theobald of Everhart," the man announced. Theobald did not raise his blade right away.
He simply stood and waited, giving Joji a brief moment to catch his breath.
At the edge of the stone arena, Daisy clutched the hem of her dress until her knuckles turned white. She bit her lip hard enough to taste iron.
She knew Joji's stubbornness. She knew that if she told him to stop, he might obey, and then hate her for it after, hate her for taking away the last thing he could still claim as his own.
"Joji, please, be alright," she breathed, so low the words barely left her.
Joji had been an old man before all this, and that made Daisy's eyes impossible to miss.
The feeling in them drew a quiet chuckle from him. It was sincere, pure, and warm in a way that reached somewhere deep inside him.
And she was beautiful too. Hazel eyes. Curly golden-brown hair. A young figure blessed in all the right places.
What struck him most was that the original Joji had never even kissed her, not once, nor so much as held her hand.
'Does Daisy always be looking like a snack? Damn, officer knight, get me outta here,' Joji muttered with a faint grin, already picturing the sweet young woman in his arms.
It was cheap fuel, but he used it anyway, trying to stir life from whatever scraps of strength still clung to him.
He drew a deep breath and looked at Theobald.
"Joji of Si..."
The words died in his throat.
The back of his head suddenly felt too light, as if something vital had come loose inside him.
The training sword that should have been manageable now weighed like a pillar in his hands.
Darkness crept along the edges of his vision. His knees forgot their duty.
His body began to fold beneath him.
'Please... I'm already... so close,' he thought, though even that inner voice sounded thin and far away.
He started to tip forward.
The knights saw it at once. That loose, empty sag of a man on the edge of collapse from pure exhaustion.
And yet his jaw was still clenched. His spirit had not yielded, only the flesh around it.
Then Joji suddenly straightened. He rose again as if some unseen string had jerked him upright.
His eyes opened wide. Alert, but wrong. Hollow. Vacant.
Inside his skull, Sir Engine chimed.
{Summoning Sir Engine's emergency reserves...}
{I shall take the helm of this weary body and see this mission done.}
A notification appeared, marked by three grim reapers. It carried a quiet, ominous air.
Then the one on the left suddenly flared to life, its eyes burning with a ghostly green flame.
{The chances of snatching life from death grow thin.}
{Three were set. One is spent, two still remain.}
As Sir Engine took over, Joji found himself trapped inside his own body.
There was no pain. No breath. No weight. He drifted in a darkness that felt like the inside of a closed eye.
Ahead of him hung a single screen, showing him only what it wished him to see.
Even so, his gaze kept sliding past it, drawn instead to the words burning across his retina.
'Spare lives? So I really died?'
One question crashed into the next until he finally forced one of them out.
"Sir Engine, just to confirm, I literally died from exhaustion. Just like that?"
{You are not dead, yet I have assumed command of my own accord. The reason is simple.}
{Rather than sparring across three successive days, you chose to see it finished in a single sitting.}
{Bear this in mind. This shall happen once. We are not here to nurse your character like an infant.}
Relief washed over Joji, but it brought more questions with it.
If he spent the two chances he had left, then what came after?
Would he return to Earth?
Would he wake again in his old body?
The petrol truck came back to him in a hot, jagged flash.
In that final instant, he remembered his skin beginning to sizzle as the explosion roared and turned the world white, then black.
He was certain that if the blast had not reduced him to ash, it had at least left nothing but charred bones behind.
'What am I even going back to?' he thought.
He did not voice any of it. Joji had no idea whether Sir Engine had limits, and this was not the moment to test them.
Not because he was afraid, but because he had no wish to gamble on a maybe.
Outside, the knights noticed the change. Something in the air around Joji turned oppressive, as if he were only a faint ember concealing a furnace buried deep below the earth.
"I have been lacking in courtesy," he said to the crowd, his vowels polished and strangely old in the mouth.
He bowed again, deeper this time, to the man before him.
"Sir Theobald, pray forgive me. I have kept you waiting."
Theobald blinked at the voice. So did everyone else. It came from Joji's mouth, but it carried a different weight, older and steadier, like something that had worn many lives before this one.
Even so, Theobald mastered himself and gave a stiff wave.
"This knight bears no pettiness in his heart toward you. Think no more on it."
Both men turned their gaze toward Head Knight Gregorius.
"Start," Gregorius said.
Theobald moved at once. He had no intention of falling into Joji's earlier rhythm.
Aura surged into his legs as he slipped back to make room.
Once he had the distance, he raised Lightness of the Wind and layered it over Emerald Blade Wind, the second Art.
That technique did more than cast projectiles. It condensed aura into a cutting force sharp enough to pierce steel.
Used together, the two Arts sent the wielder's speed soaring at the cost of burning through aura at a vicious rate.
Then Theobald lunged. A streak of green light was all he left in his wake.
Sir Engine, now moving through Joji's body, merely smiled.
He had used no Art at all, yet he vanished from his place just the same.
He met Theobald's charge head on, raised his blade high, and with a sharp slap knocked aside the straight thrust Theobald had driven forward.
Theobald was no child and reacted at once.
He turned hard on his heel and drove his blade into the arena floor, using the downward force to wrench his body into a new line of movement.
For the briefest instant, his eyes dipped to his footing and the angle of his sword.
When he looked up again, his pupils shrank.
Five Jojis stood before him.
He thought his sight had betrayed him and shook his head once, but that heartbeat was enough.
A cold edge kissed the line of his right jaw and neck.
"A splendid match, Sir Theobald."