Divine System: Land of the Abominations-Chapter 325: The Trials Begin (6).

The arena smelled the same as it had the first time.

Cold stone and old iron and something underneath both of those things that Nero had decided not to think too hard about, the particular quality of air in a space that had absorbed a lot of impact over a long period of time. The dark stains on the packed dirt floor were in the same places. The weapon rack along the western wall held the same selection of blunted practice weapons, worn smooth at the grip from years of hands that were not his.

He had been in this room once before. He had left it on a stretcher. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

Sergeant Vane was already there when Nero arrived, standing in the arena’s centre with his arms at his sides and the particular stillness he carried everywhere — the stillness of a body that had stopped wasting motion on things that didn’t require it, sometime in the distant past, and had arrived at a permanent and unsentimental arrangement with itself. He was looking at the far wall. He did not look at Nero when Nero came through the door.

The other candidates filed in behind him — ten of them in total, a mix of faces Nero had seen around the Red House corridors without having reason to know. Most of them were in leather or light armour. All of them moved with the ease of people for whom a yard like this was simply a yard.

Nero went to the weapon rack and took a practice spear.

Vane looked at him then, briefly, and looked away again.

"Line up," Vane said, and they lined up, and the session began.

---

The Crimson Crucible’s doctrine was, at its core, very simple. You moved forward. You struck hard. You committed to the strike fully, because a half-committed strike was worse than no strike at all — it cost you position without delivering damage, and position was the thing the doctrine valued above almost everything else. You drove the opponent back, you maintained the forward pressure, you gave them no space to recover and no time to think. The whole style was built on the premise that aggression, executed with sufficient technique, was the most reliable path through a fight.

Vane demonstrated this the first morning with a practice sword and a post, running the same three-strike sequence at different speeds — slow enough to see every component, then at half speed, then at full, the final version hitting the post hard enough to send a crack through the air that made two of the candidates flinch.

"That is what committed looks like," he said, and turned back to the line. "Most of you have seen versions of this. Most of you have been trained in versions of this. The version you have been trained in is almost certainly wrong in at least one significant way, and we will spend the next several weeks finding out which way that is." His gaze moved along the line and paused, briefly, on Nero. "Pick up your weapons."

They picked up their weapons.

"Again," Vane said, and they ran it.

The problem announced itself almost immediately.

The sequence — a downward driving strike, a lateral check, a forward thrust — was designed for a sword or a heavy one-handed weapon. Run it with a spear and the geometry changed. The downward strike became awkward, the lateral check required a grip adjustment mid-sequence, and the forward thrust, which should have been the sequence’s point of arrival, came in at an angle that would have, in any honest application, gone wide of where it needed to go.

Nero ran it three times and then stopped.

Vane was beside him before he had finished stopping. "Problem."

"The geometry doesn’t translate," Nero said.

"No," Vane agreed. "It doesn’t. What are you going to do about it?"

Nero thought about it. "Adjust the sequence for the weapon."

"Wrong," Vane said, without heat. "You’re going to learn the sequence correctly first, so you understand what it’s doing and why, and then you are going to learn how a spear accomplishes the same objective through different means. You cannot adapt a doctrine you don’t understand. Run it again."

Nero ran it again, with the spear, the geometry still wrong, learning the shape of what the sequence was trying to accomplish rather than the form it took. Vane watched without comment.

Across the arena, the other candidates moved through the same sequence with varying degrees of fluency. Some of them were clearly very good. One in particular — a broad-shouldered young man with the relaxed focus of someone for whom the technique was long since automatic — ran it with the kind of economy that made it look effortless, which Nero understood was the point at which the work stopped being visible.

He filed this and kept going.

By the end of the session his arms ached from the shoulder down and his hands had developed the particular rawness of skin that had been gripping something unfamiliar for two hours. He racked the practice spear and rolled his shoulders and was moving toward the door when Vane said, without looking up from whatever he was examining on the weapon rack, "Your instincts pull left when you’re pressing."

Nero stopped.

"You’ve been trained by something that moved unpredictably," Vane said. "You learned to read lateral movement because that’s what kept you alive. In this doctrine, lateral movement is what you’re imposing on your opponent, not what you’re reacting to." He set the weapon down. "Tomorrow."

Nero left.

He walked back through the Red House to the mess hall, collected a bowl of whatever was being served, and sat at the end of one of the long tables and ate without tasting it, thinking about the sequence and the geometry and what Vane had said about instinct, and about the difference between surviving something and being trained by it.

Outside, somewhere in the city, the evening bells were starting to ring their solemn song.

Dusk had come.