Divine System: Land of the Abominations-Chapter 314: The Burdens of Hand and Crown (4).

He was faster than his frame suggested, and the sword came in at a diagonal angle that was not unintelligent — aimed for the shoulder rather than the center, harder to track, designed to collapse Nero’s guard rather than punch through it. Nero stepped back and to the right, let the blade pass wide, and did not counterattack. He wanted to see the boy recover his footing first, see how long it took, see where the balance went after an extension.

It took three steps. The front foot problem compounded itself mid-lunge and the recovery required a brief stagger, two counts of adjustment before the stance was viable again.

Nero noted it and kept his spear back.

"Don’t wait for him to reset," Vane said, somewhere behind him, and it was not clear if the comment was directed at Nero or the general yard. "Anyone watching in a real engagement will use that." 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

The red-haired boy came again. This time Nero moved forward instead of back, stepping inside the arc of the sword before it completed its angle, and pressed the blunted spear tip lightly against the boy’s ribs before either of them had fully processed the exchange. He held it there for half a second, then stepped back.

The boy’s face went through a small, rapid adjustment — frustration, recalibration, and then a particular focusing quality that Nero recognized as more useful than either of the first two.

"Again," the boy said, and reset his stance, and this time he adjusted the front foot.

He was young, and he corrected fast when shown rather than told, which suggested someone had given him good foundations even if the refinements still needed work. Nero found himself adjusting his own approach accordingly — less about testing the reach of the boy’s attention and more about presenting problems that were worth the time to solve.

They went on like this for a while, working steadily through the kind of exchange that does not make for a dramatic account but does, over sufficient repetition, build the specific texture of competence that has nowhere to hide. The yard was loud with the sound of wood on wood and the occasional sharp instruction from Vane, and the morning light came in low over the western wall and made the packed earth look almost warm.

At some point — Nero had stopped tracking the time precisely — Vane called a pause, and the yard went quiet.

"You," he said, and Nero looked up to find Vane looking directly at him for the first time since the session began, with the focused attention of someone who has been watching from a peripheral angle for a while and has made a decision about what to say. "Where did you train?"

"I didn’t," Nero said. "Not formally."

"You hold a weapon like someone who trained."

"I held weapons for two years as a town guard," Nero said. "Before that I taught myself what I could, when I had the time."

Vane looked at him for a moment. His expression had not changed from the evaluative blankness it had worn throughout the morning, but something in the quality of the stillness shifted slightly — not warmer, exactly, but differently attended. "Self-taught," he said, and it was not a question or a compliment.

"Yes, sir."

"Then you have a number of habits that feel correct to you because they have functioned adequately in situations that were not designed to expose them," Vane said. "That is a specific and inconvenient problem, and we are going to spend considerable time on it." He looked back at the yard. "Resume."

The red-haired boy gave Nero a brief sideways look as they reset — something that was not quite sympathy and not quite satisfaction, and was probably some mix of recognition that Vane’s specific attention was a double-edged thing regardless of who received it.

Nero accepted this and raised his spear.

The cohort met every morning except the fifth day of the week, which the Church designated for doctrine instruction and which Nero found significantly less interesting than the yard, though he was careful not to show it.

The doctrine sessions happened in a low-ceilinged room off the main corridor, with a chalkboard on one wall and eight chairs arranged in the semicircle that the instructor, a thin man named Brother Edric, apparently believed encouraged discussion. Brother Edric was not a Templar; he was an ordained Brother of the White Prophets, which meant his manner was precise and his knowledge of Church history was thorough and his expectation that anyone in the room cared about either of those things was, by the end of the first session, clearly in tension with reality.

The other candidates were not stupid people. They were, by varying degrees, bored, sceptical, and already too invested in the combat training to have much patience for the symbolic framework the Church used to explain what Templars did and why. One of the scale-armored candidates — a woman named Dasha, who had been placed first in the recent trials and seemed to regard most conversations as an obstacle between herself and whatever she was actually thinking — had a habit of asking questions that were technically relevant to the material and practically designed to move the subject somewhere more interesting, which Brother Edric interpreted generously as engagement and which Nero suspected was something else entirely.

He sat at the end of the semicircle and listened, and he wrote nothing down, because he had learned in the weeks before the trials that the most useful things to write down were the things nobody was supposed to notice you writing, and the doctrine sessions did not contain many of those.

What they did contain was the shape of the Church’s understanding of itself, which was useful in a different way.

Brother Edric spoke about the five Orders as distinct instruments serving a single purpose, using the metaphor of a hand — fingers that looked separate but were connected at the foundation and were directed by a single will. He spoke about the Grey Cloud, carefully and with the circumspection of someone who had been trained to discuss it without triggering panic in an audience, explaining that the corruption spread through spiritual contact first and physical contact second, and that the Templars’ role was to maintain the barrier between the two. He spoke about the Divine Will in the passive, evasive language of someone describing an authority that had not spoken to anyone in living memory and about whom the speaking was done largely in the past tense.