“You’ve been at it all day already, so I’ll go easy on you,” the captain told her in a condescending tone and she scoffed.

“No need,” she told him and pushed up her already short sleeves, casually holding her black training sword, “I’m feeling chipper and ready to go.”

Captain Harumi laughed wholeheartedly, as if she had just said something incredibly funny, but she could see Seren tense up on the sideline from the corner of her eye. Slowly but steadily, his opinion of the captain kept worsening.

“Same rules as last time,” the captain told her and she tilted her head.

“You didn’t give me any rules last time.”

He showed her an evil grin. “Exactly.”

She swallowed, but refused to let herself be intimidated so easily, so instead, she tightened her grip on the weapon in her right hand and ran towards him. Their training consisted of learning sword fighting, but all they had been doing so far were endless straight swings that left her arms numb. So, just like last time she had faced the captain, she had no technique and no abilities whatsoever. All she could do was just swing her sword at him and watch him nonchalantly slap it aside and push her over.

She slapped the floor with her arm to break her fall and jumped back to her feet in the same movement, surprising even herself. It wasn’t that she had gotten stronger or faster, but her body felt… lighter. It moved easier. It didn’t protest and cry out in pain the way it usually did when she forced it to move like that.

Something the captain seemed to have noticed as well as he watched her with one brow arched. Not that he felt the need to comment on it, apparently. He just waited for her to charge at him again.

She thought it would continue like that until she would eventually collapse again, but it’s strange what you can notice when all your energy isn’t wasted on simply staying upright. The captain favored his left leg, for example. And whenever she attacked from the front, his first reaction every time was to lean towards her, rather than away.

She took a few steps back and wiped her hand over her forehead, looking at the sweat she had collected. So, she was still able to sweat at all, even though it was only a little. She sighed, somewhat relieved for some reason.

She bent through her knees slightly and ran at him from the front again, keeping her sword low like she kept doing. This time, however, instead of continuing like that, she waited for the very last moment, the moment he leaned towards her. With a complacent grin, she avoided his hand and shot towards the left, past him, where she stopped right behind him.

She stared at his back with wide eyes for a flash of a second before he swung around to her with his sword defensively raised in front of him.

She did it. For the first time in what must have been over an hour now, she didn’t get blocked and thrown onto the floor. No embarrassment, no new, commemorative bruise.

She chuckled haughtily, raising her head in the air a little so she could at least pretend to look down on him, completely forgetting herself or her position.

“What are you staring so smugly at me for?” The captain asked with a deadpan face. “Why did you just stand there after you got behind me? Swing your sword.”

She flinched, that stupid look frozen on her face as the reality of his words sank in. Idiot, she cursed inaudibly. She had been so happy about passing him, about being able to figure it out, that she had completely forgotten her real objective; trying to land a hit on him.

“Pfft.” The captain covered his mouth with his hand, although he clearly had no real intention of hiding his laughter from her.

“Well then,” he suddenly lowered his hand, an excited gleam in his dark eyes, “I guess it’s time to get a little more serious.”

“Wha-”

Before she could even finish asking him what that meant, he disappeared from her sight and appeared right behind her, as if he teleported. He swung his sword through the air and hit the flat side against the back of her head.

She groaned, grabbing her head to stop the sudden ringing in her ears. She managed to stagger a few steps ahead before falling to her knees, the world around her spinning.

“Hey, what the hell, you ass-“” Seren swallowed his enraged insult. “Captain.”

“Ass captain?” Captain Harumi repeated with a crooked grin, resting his sword on his shoulder. “Don’t freak out, she’s fine.”

He crouched down next to Hyrin. “Sorry about that, Rin, tiring you out until you’d collapse didn’t seem to work anymore all of a sudden and now that you got something out of this as well, I don’t wanna waste any more time. I get tired too, you know.” 

He leaned to his left so he could see her face despite how she had lowered it to keep her balance. “I wonder where all this new energy came from, though,” he added in a low voice and she couldn’t help but flinch.

“I… I’ve been training,” she muttered, avoiding his eyes. “Building stamina.”

“No,” he took his sword off his shoulder to bury the point in the ground and leaned on it with both hands, resting his chin on them, “you were utterly defeated by me, got yourself stabbed, and have been lying in a hospital bed ever since.”

She felt her heart beating in her throat, grateful for the way her hair fell next to her face, hiding her expression from him.

“I… just feel really well rested, you know?” She tried the same lie she had told Row earlier that day and demonstratively swung her arm up and down. “It’s insane what a good night’s sleep can do for your body, huh?” She chuckled awkwardly. Until that day, she had never known how bad of a liar she was. She wasn’t sure yet if that was a good or a bad thing, but it sure was inconvenient at that moment.

“Hmhm.” The captain tilted his head slightly. “You usually stare back at me all stubborn and determined. Any reason you’re not meeting my eyes now?”

She clenched her teeth, but then took a deep breath and looked up at him with the brightest smile she could muster up. “Just tired,” she told him in too high a pitch, “catching my breath.”

“Oh?” He looked deadly serious, but she could see the ever so slightly amused gleam in his eyes. “I thought you were so well rested?”

She felt her eyes spit fire, she couldn’t help it, even though she tried not to look at him directly. If he wanted to say something, he should just come out and say it. She didn’t know herself well enough to figure out if this was a situation she’d be able to navigate safely until the end. If he was going to make her suffer for what she had somehow done to that monster in the alley, she wanted him to just do it already and get it over with.

He sighed and suddenly got up, as if he had somehow figured out what she was thinking and got bored.

“We still haven’t found the shrine class that attacked you,” he told her in a normal tone. “Is there really nothing you can think of that can help us? How did it act, for example? Did it have any kind of power?”

She sat up straighter, not sure why his attitude had suddenly changed so much.

“Like what?” She asked cautiously.

“Like an unnatural amount of stamina?” He tilted his head up, glancing down at her.

I knew it. The thought echoed through her head, despite how scared she was to even form it. Saying she had been training and sleeping well may have been enough to fool the other recruits who barely knew this world or themselves, but no matter how much she had tried, there was no way she could have ever fooled herself or the person who had kept an eagle eyed watch on her from the moment she had arrived in the base.

“I…” she hesitated for a moment, but then lowered her gaze and shook her head. “Sorry, nothing really comes to mind.”

He stayed quiet for a frighteningly long time, just staring down at her like that, but then he suddenly sighed.

“I can’t tell how disappointing this is,” he told her in a soft voice, and then turned around and walked away, closing the door to the training room harder behind him than he normally would.

“You okay?” Seren knelt down next to her. “Do you need me to get something cold for your head? You don’t seem to be bleeding.”

She shook her head, slightly moving away from his hand patting her hair where the captain had struck her. “It’s okay. It doesn’t even hurt anymore.”

He suspiciously narrowed his blue eyes at her. “You sure?”

She nodded. “Super sure.” She leaned back, actually feeling a little worn now that she could relax again.

“Seren, what do you think about the captain?” She asked in thought.

“I think he’s an absolute turd,” Seren immediately answered and she couldn’t stop herself from bursting out laughing despite the situation.

“Obviously not what I meant,” she reprimanded him, wiping a finger under her eye.

“Do you think he’s someone trustworthy?”

Seren sat down opposite her, crossing his legs, giving it a surprising amount of serious thought.

“I think we don’t really know anything about him,” he eventually admitted, twiddling his thumbs. “But from what I’ve seen so far,” he added reluctantly, “he’s not the type to be two-faced. If he were, the face he shows us would be a lot more pleasant.”

Hyrin chuckled. Her train of thought had been something similar.

“The same goes for all of us,” she said softly. “That we don’t really know anything about each other, I mean. Do you trust me?”

He looked up at her, his ice blue eyes piercing into hers. “I do.”

She swallowed. “Even though you don’t know me well enough t-”

“It doesn’t matter,” he interrupted her with that same unbending conviction. “I don’t care. It’s a choice I made and I know I won’t end up regretting it, so it doesn’t matter. That’s all.”

She quietly observed him. His shoulders had lowered slightly, but he held his head up high and had stopped fiddling.

“Okay.” She gave him a warm smile and got up. “Let’s go. This day has been way too long, I’m so tired I’m about to collapse.”