By the time the seventh day arrived, Ren had stopped counting hours slept and started counting hours not spent in visible pain, which was, he privately decided, a far more useful metric.
The week had begun with Mount Shredder and the basin of miasma, and if he'd believed, in that first exhausted collapse at the mountain's peak, that he'd already glimpsed the worst the academy had to offer, the following six days had disabused him of that notion with brutal, methodical efficiency.
First Period never got easier. If anything, it got worse by design — Instructor Grael adjusted the suppression bands' calibration daily, shaving away whatever small margin of adaptation each student managed to claw back the day before, so that no one was ever allowed to feel like the conditioning had become routine.
Ren's legs, which had screamed in genuine betrayal that first morning, now merely ached with a dull, familiar throb he'd learned to run through rather than around.
