While I navigated the increasingly complicated web of tournament politics, royal attention, and now a fellow otherworlder's careful confidence, Kael Drenmoor had been quietly, obsessively training for his own upcoming bout — a fact I only fully appreciated when I stopped by the Guild's practice yards one evening and found him still drilling well past the hour most competitors had called it a night.
"You're going to exhaust yourself before your match even starts," I said, leaning against the yard's fence as he ran through the same lunge-and-recovery sequence for what looked like the fiftieth consecutive repetition.
Kael didn't stop, though his breathing had gone ragged enough to suggest he'd been at this considerably longer than I'd initially assumed. "You told me I telegraph my wind-up. I've spent every night since our match trying to fix it."
"That's dedication," I said. "It's also going to get you hurt if you push through fatigue this severe. Even Wind Affinity has limits when the body underneath it is running on empty."
He finally stopped, doubling over slightly, hands braced on his knees. "I have to be better," he said, quieter than his usual confident volume. "You understand that, don't you? Everyone in this city already talks about that exhibition match like it's the defining story of my entire career. 'Kael Drenmoor, beaten cleanly by a nobody Bronze rank.' I can't walk into my first tournament bout carrying that reputation and lose again."
I understood the feeling better than he probably realized, in its own strange way — the particular, gnawing need to prove something to a world that had already decided your worth before you'd had a real chance to demonstrate it yourself. I'd spent a trillion years training partly because I genuinely enjoyed it, and partly, if I was honest with myself, because some small, stubborn part of me had never quite let go of dying alone at twenty-two without having accomplished anything that felt like it mattered.
"You're not going to fix a lifetime of technique in three weeks of exhausted overtraining," I said. "But I can help, if you actually want it. Properly, this time. Not just advice shouted across a training yard."
Kael straightened, visibly surprised. "Why would you do that? I'm not exactly in a position to offer you anything worth the effort."
"Because you asked for genuine feedback after I beat you instead of making excuses, and because you've spent three weeks actually working on it instead of just being angry about the loss," I said honestly. "That's rarer than you'd think, and it deserves better coaching than shouting from a fence."
We spent the following week's evenings working through his technique properly — not the god-tier corrections I could have offered if I'd let my actual understanding of combat show through, but careful, plausible advice that a talented Bronze-rank swordsman might genuinely have accumulated through hard-won experience. Kael absorbed every correction with a hunger that reminded me, uncomfortably and not unpleasantly, of my own early days of training back on that endless sunlit floor.
"You know," he said one evening, wiping sweat from his brow after a session that had visibly tightened the gap between his wind-up and his actual strike, "my father doesn't understand why I keep coming back to train with you instead of just accepting the loss and moving on like he would have. He thinks pride should have made me avoid you entirely."
"What do you think?" I asked.
Kael considered the question with more seriousness than I'd expected from him during our first meeting. "I think losing to someone who then chooses to make you better instead of just enjoying the win is a considerably more interesting kind of pride to have. I think my father's never actually lost cleanly enough to understand the difference."
It was, I realized, watching him return to his drills with renewed focus, the exact kind of small, human growth that made all the political complications of this tournament feel worthwhile beyond the information I was hoping to gather from it. Kael Drenmoor's first-round bout, when it finally came three days later, ended in a clean, hard-fought victory that owed nothing to his father's name and everything to three weeks of exhausted, dedicated work — and watching him celebrate it from the stands, I found myself grinning as widely as anyone in the crowd.