We started again with empty hands. Julius insisted. It felt strangely disrespectful to Valeria, like leaving a part of my own mind in the other room.

She forgave me, on the grounds that watching me get humbled would be highly entertaining.

"No blade," he said, stepping to the center of an imaginary circle on the floor. "Swords let you hide the truth in steel. Today, we hide nothing."

I mirrored his stance. Feet set under hips. Hips stacked under the spine. Hands loose at my sides. The only metronome allowed was the steady four-in, six-out of my own breath.

"The tower leans on you," he said, his voice calm and instructional. "It pushes with threads, lanes, and suggestions. You've learned to ignore the push. Now, you must learn to deny the pull."

"How?"

"Stop needing help," he said, and moved.

It wasn't speed. It was simply arrival. He was suddenly where my guard thought it was going to be, without ever taking the path I was prepared to read. I reached out to frame his shoulder, to establish a point of contact. He wasn't there, because the shoulder I had reached for was a courtesy he extended only to people who had not yet been introduced to consequences.

"Don't chase," he said.

I didn't. I set my weight softly on my front foot and offered him a space that both invited a line and refused to host it. He tested it. The test arrived with no story attached, a simple pressure against my forearms. I felt it with the part of me that had stopped trying to narrate the fight.

"Better," he said. "Now, take the tempo away from me."

I tried to steal the half-beat I had been living on for years. He simply refused to publish one. I tried to start the exchange instead. He was already standing in my start, like a person who had arrived at the designated spot early and brought coffee.

"You begin with breath," he said, analyzing my failure. "Good. Then you tell your hips what you are planning. Less good. Let the breath tell the hips later, as an afterthought. First, let your breath tell the floor to stop caring about your plans."

"Stop caring?"

"The floor should accept you as geology, not as drama," he said.

I exhaled and let the end of the six-count tip my weight forward. My hips followed a moment later because I had been kind enough to inform them after the fact. He moved again, his interest piqued. His hand rose, not to strike, but to indicate a corridor of opportunity I didn't know I had just opened in my own defense. I closed it without changing my shape. He approved with his eyes, a look more flattering than any compliment I had received in a month.

"Again," he said.

We danced without stepping, shifting weight and pressure in a space no wider than a doorway. Then with steps so small the tower couldn't properly tax them. He let me try to steal the tempo again. This time, I didn't chase the beat. I let my attention widen until his readiness looked like a puddle in a parking lot that I could simply choose to walk around.

"There," he said. "Now, add steel. But don't let the blade become the point of the exercise."

Valeria slid home into my grip. She hummed in a register that said she would be dignified about this and also that she would be taking names later. "Short guard," he commanded. "Tip quiet."

We began. I started. He denied the help I subconsciously expected from the air at the edge of my reach. I didn't apologize with my posture. I made the blade a quiet, simple truth instead of an argument. He let it arrive near his coat. The point stopped exactly where it should. He nodded. The nod said: you can be trusted to exist near other people with that thing in your hand.

"Next," he said. "Don't steal the half-beat. Remove their right to start."

"How, without swinging?"

He simply stepped into my life without speed, just arrival. Suddenly, any start I wanted to take would have been a gift I was giving him. My first attempt died in my chest. My second lived only because I kept it small and deeply uninteresting. "There," he said. "Stillness that hurts. Own that space. Again."

He stood with his feet in a place I would have called neutral. His shoulder line was honest and uninteresting. He looked like a man deciding whether to pour tea. And I could not find a way to start an attack without giving him a piece of information I didn't intend to. I hated it. I also loved it.

We drilled until sweat made my collar honest. He never changed his speed. He simply changed my need for speed. By the end of the lesson, my own starts were small, and my follow-throughs existed only because they were already over. "Now we test," he said, and drew his blade. His sword was ageless, a simple length of steel that had no interest in being famous. It sat where it sat, and the lines of the world became simpler when it was there.

He attacked. It wasn't a flurry. It was a walk through a room that happened to be my guard.

I met him at short guard, tip quiet, wrists loose. He tested the place where my wrist would normally panic. It didn't. He tested the habit that likes to turn a good bind into a better speech. I kept the speech for later. He approved. And then he removed the concept of 'later' entirely. He broke my sense of time into individual grains. Not with magic. With sheer, unrelenting insistence. Each grain, each tiny moment, had to justify its own existence. I ran out of justifications by my third habit. He watched my third habit arrive, find itself without a purpose, and die. He did not gloat, which was somehow worse.

"You don't owe the future anything," he said softly, his blade resting in a place that would have become my throat if he had decided to finish the thought. "Pay now. Leave exact change."

We restarted. I paid now. I didn't tip. It felt mean. He called it clean. He showed me a way to turn my own stillness into a pressure that bent his choice of attack, without it looking like I was doing anything at all. I began to treat my blade like the last honest thing in a noisy day. The blade approved.

"Again," he said.

By the time we stopped, I wasn't out of breath. I was out of shortcuts. It was a better kind of tired. Julius wiped his blade once on a cloth, and it became scenery again. "You have the frame," he said. "What keeps you back from the next step fits in a handful of words: you still expect cooperation from the world, and you still apologize with flourish when it doesn't arrive."

"Stop expecting, stop apologizing," I recited.

"Yes," he said. "And stop asking distance to help. You love to change the range of a fight. So do demons. Serve them boredom instead. Boredom is very safe."

Valeria chuckled in my mind. "Imagine, the world's strongest swordsman winning through sheer, weaponized boredom."

"Not winning," I said to myself. "Surviving."

'Proceed,' Erebus said, which in his language meant he was proud.

Julius nodded to a door that hadn't been there a moment ago. "Water. Then we put knives back in the world and see if your feet remember the lesson."

We drank. We stood in a silence that wasn't empty. He watched the hall until it behaved. I felt the tower's own threads of Order lean in, curious and irritated at this pocket of unauthorized instruction.

"Ready," I said.

"Again," he answered, and this time he didn't add 'please.'

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