He woke up on the training ground floor.

Not in a dramatic collapsed-hero kind of way. More like he’d sat down to catch his breath at some point during the previous night and his body had made an executive decision without consulting him. His cheek was pressed against the cold stone. His wooden sword was still in his hand. There was a training dummy ten feet away with a cracked torso that absolutely had not been cracked when the day started.

Orion blinked at the ceiling. Or the sky, rather. Still dark. Twin moons both hanging low and lazy, the kind of hour that had no business being anyone’s morning.

Everything hurt.

Not in a dramatic way either. Just the specific comprehensive ache of a body that had been pushed past what it knew how to handle and was now sending detailed invoices for every single decision he’d made in the last twelve hours. His sword arm. Both legs. His lower back in a way that felt almost personal. The bruise on his wrist from yesterday’s spar with Astra had progressed to a deep ugly purple that he discovered by pressing on it like an idiot.

"You’re awake."

He turned his head. Luna was sitting cross-legged two feet away, watching him with those silver eyes that caught moonlight in a way that was slightly unsettling at this hour. She was in her human form. She had not slept. He wasn’t entirely sure she needed to.

"How long was I out," he said.

"About two hours."

He did the math. That meant he’d trained for roughly nine hours with one short break and a brief argument with himself about whether Shadow Step was a momentum skill or a displacement skill. The answer was both and neither and it had taken him until hour seven to understand why.

"You should’ve woken me up," he said.

"You looked peaceful."

"I was on a stone floor."

"You looked peaceful on a stone floor," Luna amended, completely unbothered.

Orion sat up. His spine made a noise he chose not to think about. He stayed there for a moment, elbows on his knees, looking at the cracked training dummy in the dark. It was one of six. Three others had varying degrees of structural damage. The last two were completely fine because by the time he’d gotten to them his form had deteriorated enough that he’d switched to footwork drills instead.

The system screen materialized in his vision, quiet and gold, like it had been waiting.

◈ OVERNIGHT PROGRESS REPORT ◈

Training Session Duration: 9h 14m

Shadow Step Compatibility: 70% >> 79%

Body Conditioning Progress: +11%

Sword Fundamentals: Beginner >> Beginner [Advanced]

Mana Circulation: Irregular >> Semi-Stable

New Data Registered:

[Footwork Pattern A] [Upper Body Rotation] [Weight Transfer Basics]

Mythic Energy Generated: +8

[Source: Training Milestone Bonus]

◈ HOST NOTE ◈

You literally slept on a rock.

Get a mat.

◈ ◈ ◈

Orion stared at the last line for a solid three seconds.

"Did you just," he started.

The screen disappeared.

"...Did this system just roast me."

Luna tilted her head. "Master?"

"Nothing." He stood up, joints protesting the entire way. "Let’s go inside."

She immediately attached herself to his arm. Her warmth was actually welcome at this temperature and he was choosing not to examine that too closely.

The walk back was quiet. The estate was genuinely peaceful at this hour, no servants moving yet, no guards doing their performative standing-at-attention thing. Just stone paths and tall trees and the distant sound of something moving in the hedges that was probably an animal and not an assassin. Probably.

Orion filed the thought away without anxiety. If someone wanted him dead at four in the morning there wasn’t much he could do about it tonight. Tomorrow he’d worry about tomorrow.

Aria, his maid, was somehow already awake when he pushed open the manor door. She stood in the hallway holding a candle and looking at him with an expression that mixed relief, exasperation, and deeply tired resignation in roughly equal parts.

"Young master," she said carefully.

"I know," he said.

"You were outside all night."

"I know."

"In the training ground."

"Yes."

She looked at the wooden sword still in his hand. The state of his clothes. The purple bruise on his wrist. The general presentation of someone who had been doing something violent for most of the night.

"...I’ll prepare a bath," she said.

"Appreciated."

She turned and walked away with the candle, and Orion caught the very tail end of something muttered under her breath. Something that sounded distinctly like what has gotten into him but he couldn’t be certain.

Luna watched her go. "She’s scared of you."

"She’s scared of being hit," Orion corrected. "Different thing. The previous owner of this body had some habits."

"Habits you don’t have."

"Correct."

Luna seemed to process that. Her tail swayed once, thoughtfully. "Master is a better person than the previous one."

Orion didn’t answer that. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was yet. He just knew what he wasn’t.

He took the bath. Ate the breakfast Aria prepared without being asked, plain bread and something hot that counted as soup only because it was liquid and warm. Changed. Sat at the small desk in his room and spent twenty minutes going through what he’d actually learned overnight versus what he thought he’d learned, which were meaningfully different lists.

Then he pulled up the system properly.

◈ MYTHIC SUMMONING SYSTEM ◈

Host: Orion Ashbourne

Age: 15

Rank: Elite

Mythic Energy: 139 / 100

Contracts: 1

[LUNA :: Mythic Feline :: Elite]

Skills:

[Beast Storage] [Contract Mastery]

Sub-Skill: [Copy :: Cooldown 14h 32m]

Active Copied Skill: NONE

Shadow Step Compatibility: 79%

◈ AVAILABLE MISSIONS ◈

[MAIN] Survive the Academy Selection Trial

Reward: Locked

[SIDE] Land 5 consecutive clean hits on a moving target

Reward: Mythic Energy x15 / Combat Instinct Passive (Basic)

[SIDE] Increase Shadow Step compatibility to 90%

Reward: Mythic Energy x20 / Shadow Step Upgrade Unlocked

[HIDDEN] ???

[Condition Unknown] 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

◈ ◈ ◈

He looked at the hidden mission for a long time.

The system had done this before. Hidden conditions that revealed themselves when he stumbled into them. The first one had been the library mission. The reward had been Copy, which had turned out to be more valuable than anything else he’d received so far.

Whatever the hidden mission was, it would either find him or it wouldn’t.

He moved on.