Dawn combed pale light through Beldam's crooked eaves. The square's well chain rattled in the cold as Taro rinsed the night from his face and forearms. He braced his palms on the stone lip, drew slow air into his ribs, and let it out on a thread.
Something answered. Not magic—breath that filled more than lungs. Warmth ran the seams of his frame, like heat finding solder.
Recognized Training detected.
Martial God's Champion bonus active: +50 STR/END/AGI (training).
He shadowboxed beside the well, footwork whispering on packed earth: tip, settle, drift, cut. A tiny boy with a crust of bread stared unabashed. When Taro slipped in place—head moving like it hung on silk—the boy imitated him, then fell over laughing. Taro bowed to his audience of one and wrapped his hands.
Inside the guild hall, the registrar looked exactly the same as yesterday: ink on her knuckles, skepticism in her eyes.
"Name?" she said, already writing.
"Taro."
"Testing witness assigned," she said, not looking up. "Niya."
The name fit the woman who glided in from the side door: lean, green cloak, bow slung high, the poise of someone who disliked noise. She studied his bare fists, then his tank top and sweat-dark jeans, and made a thoughtful face somewhere between a smile and a frown.
"You're the wolf-puncher," Niya said.
"Only because they were mean," Taro said.
"I'm to witness your 'north copse' clear," she said, voice level. "We mark traps, disarm what we can, map the rest. If goblins are present, we engage only if we hold advantage."
"Understood."
The registrar cleared her throat. "Take a disarm kit." She slid a canvas satchel across the desk: a hooked iron rod, a coil of twine, a wedge of cedar, chalk, a red flag ribbon. "And this." She set down a pair of leather knuckle wraps—stitched bands meant to sit over cloth. "You punch stone again, I'd prefer you keep your fingers attached."
Taro ran a thumb along the seam. "Thank you." He met the registrar's gaze. "What do I call you?"
The eyebrow ticked, then softened. "Kelda will do."
They left through the north gate at a brisk walk. Niya set the pace without seeming to, eyes flicking from bird trace to ground sign. Her quiver's fletchings were cut short—no brush snagging—and her boots barely spoke.
"Goblins trap like they breathe," she said over her shoulder. "Off-beat. A snare where your eye refuses to settle. A pit thrust back behind where any human would put it."
"Like a fighter who throws on the half," Taro said. "Make you blink, then step where you shouldn't."
She glanced at him. "You ever trapped?"
"Different ring," he said. "Same corners."
The copse hunched out of the meadow—not a forest so much as a tangle, hawthorn and young oak knitting together. Shadows pooled under brush. The air smelled green and damp, with an under-taste of old blood.
"Stop," Niya murmured, one hand out.
He felt it too—wrong tension ahead, as if the ground were holding its breath. The game trail narrowed between two saplings. A loop of vine sat innocently off to one side, but the scuffed dirt said traffic here.
Taro took the hooked rod, held it like a jab: elbow in, wrist straight. He tapped the vine lightly—not to trigger, just to feel its flex. The line twanged. He stepped off-line, weight on the outside edge of his rear foot, and lifted the line with the hook while Niya slid the wedge under the hidden catch. Soft, clean.
Chalk on bark. Red ribbon on a twig. One down.
Synergy noted: Footwork (Slip/Pivot) → Environmental Application.
Adaptive Rhythm progress: 68% → 74%.
Niya's mouth made the ghost of approval. "Most come in with knives and bravado," she said. "You… breathe differently."
"Bad habits," Taro said, smiling.
They worked deeper. A deadfall loomed, a log thick as a man's chest held by a cunning twist of bowline and notch; Taro let the log whisper down beside him by rolling with its line instead of fighting it. A net hung invisibly above a choke-point; he tested the trigger with a faint hip-feint, then pivoted so the mesh dropped where he'd been. Caltrops waited in a clay pot wired to a sapling; a false step would have sent metal teeth singing across the path. He "flashed" his foot—half step in, heel out—to spring it harmlessly, and Niya laughed—quick and surprised—when the caltrops hissed past his shins like angry beetles and bit the mud.
Her respect came grudging to her face but easily to her hands as she tied off flags and sketched on a little wax tablet. "I'll allow this methodology," she said as she finished her notes, "you think like traps do."
"So do the wrong men," Taro said. He paused, head tilted. Something in the green quiet had turned. "Company."
Three goblins bled out of the scrub with the soundless grace of knives. They were bone-thin and quick-eyed, with grey hides and rag bundles that passed for armor. One tossed a rock high, a lazy arc meant to make you look up. The second moved on the off-beat of that toss—half-step early—spear low.
Taro smiled despite himself. "Cute."
He stepped in instead of back, popped a jab into the lead goblin's eye—not a sleep punch, just white flash to the optic—and sneaked a liver hook under the rib line as the goblin's elbow twitched north. The little warrior folded sideways with a strangled yip.
Taro saw the spear's line and wasn't there when it arrived. He slipped inside, feeling the cool slipstream of it on his ear, and poured a short right cross into the jaw hinge. The goblin's mouth tried to bite the punch and found sleep instead. The third lost his nerve on that off-beat he'd chosen for bravery and jinked away into brush, chittering.
Taro's lungs worked in long pulls. His exhale came out warmer than breath. The warmth tickled his wrists and sat in his fists.
Skill Progression:Adaptive Rhythm → Counter-Tempo I (minor advantage on disrupting enemy rhythm).
Ki Breathing (Novice) unlocked.
Niya had nocked an arrow and held but didn't loose. She swept the trail once, then again. "You don't chase," she said.
"Never chase a retreating hook," Taro said. "And he's going to tell his bigger friend."
"Bigger friend?"
"Traps this clean," he said, pointing at the deadfall's cut, "means a leader, especially with how scrappy these three looked."
They found the proof before he could finish the thought: colored twine—red for snares, blue for pits, yellow for nets—tied in marks like a language. A crude stencil lay in the dirt: three triangles pressed in charcoal again and again. Niya crouched and ran a finger over it.
"Irontooth," she said. "Decent sized Goblin Clan. Organized. They mass for war-parties; today's for theft."
"Or practice," Taro said.
Niya's jaw worked. "We could turn back and bring this in."
"We could," Taro said. He lifted the stencil, looked at the triangles' teeth, and set it gently back down. "Or we could cut out the tongue that tells them where to bite."
Her mouth tightened in that way people's mouths do when their duty is already making the choice for them. "Quietly," she said.
The clearing looked harmless: a dapple of light, leaf-litter, a stump sun-warmed at the far edge. Taro's skin crawled anyway. He stood still and let the air talk. A sound without sound—that slight drawn-bow hum of tension held too long.
He picked up a pebble and tossed it lightly into the clearing.
The forest exploded.
Lines sang. A net and two nooses snapped up, a log scythed, and a bundle of sharpened sticks sleeted into the stump with a sound like teeth clattering. At the far end, a goblin with better shoulders than his kin—broad cheeks, scarred brow—stood up from a deadfall with a bola in his hand and a whistle at his throat. He grinned wide at the sight of them, then whistled a blast that split the quiet.
"Foreman," Niya said softly.
The first catch came from behind: a loop that Taro hadn't seen, rigged so its shadow was the shadow of a leaf. It cinched around his ribs and yanked hard, pinning his arms a fraction.
He hissed. Not panic. He felt the rope's grip and the wet bark under his spine. He had been here before—under a clinch he shouldn't have entered, breathing wrong—and learned the cost.
He knew the strategy now, and he breathed right.
Slow, deliberate exhale. The ribs spread as he emptied, then settled as he swallowed air. He rotated his torso not against the rope, but with its minute give, like slipping a tight guard instead of battering it. The fibers rasped. The bark chewed his shirt and skin. He gave his hips one more shallow shift and found—there—slack.
Ki Breathing (Novice) applied: compression resistance ↑; micro-control of rib expansion.
The foreman's bola hissed through where Taro's head had been. Taro ran under it, low and weaving—slip left, slip right, a weave engine warming in his bones—and arrived inside the goblin's knife space. Left to the body (short, mean), left to the head (whip), right hand down the pipe right between the eyes.
The foreman's eyes crossed on the third beat. He stumbled and sagged against his own rig. Niya's arrow kissed the whistle out of his lips and thudded into the tree behind him for punctuation.
"Alive?" Taro asked.
"For a moment," Niya said, already at the goblin's side, tying his wrists. She flipped a forearm, revealing a brand: the same three triangles. "Irontooth," she said again, cool and pleased to have been right.
The foreman wheezed something like a laugh. "More set. More come," he croaked, teeth clacking. "You cut—we reset. You punch—we cut your fists." He tried to bite her and lost a tooth instead from her knockout palm strike. His eyes rolled back.
Niya's mouth flattened. She stood. "We flag what we can and go," she said.
They set red cloths at safe entrances and chalked kill-zones on trunks. Taro disarmed what would disarm, hands steady, breath steady; Niya recorded angles and stakes, a small map taking shape. When they turned back toward Beldam, the sun had hiked to the shoulder of afternoon and the light had that later honesty it gets when it thinks it might be done for the day.
Kelda stamped their return like a judge who secretly loved a good showing. "F-rank provisional cleared," she said, thunking seal to paper. "Coin purse, ten-count. And for once, smart people." Her gaze paused at Taro's hands, then at Niya's map, and something like relief smoothed her forehead. She slid a hooded cloak across the counter. "Wear it if you want stares to stop."
"Thank you," Taro said.
"Don't thank me," Kelda said dryly. "You'll earn it again tomorrow."
They ate stew at a vendor's cart as the square filled with the tired and the satisfied. Niya drank like someone who forgot to breathe while working and now remembered to be alive. "You move like your bones have springs," she said finally, the words coming as if someone had promised she wouldn't be punished for saying them.
"Just breath," Taro said. "And tracking with your eyes."
Her mouth did that not-smile again. "I'll mark you on the board," she said, standing. "If you're taking the south lane tomorrow, I'd go before noon." She paused. "You did well."
"You did right," he said.
She left, cloak a flicker of green among the day's browns, and Taro sat until the bowl had no heat left in it. The town light changed to evening—smoke blue, lantern gold. The bell tolled.
He rose to leave and felt eyes on him.
Not the gawking kind. Assessing. Amused.
He turned and found the owner on a roofline like a cat at rest: a man in grey wraps with a prayer cord at his waist and hands too scarred to belong to any honest scribe. His hair was rough-shorn, his face plain except for eyes that had seen a great many hits and learned to laugh anyway.
"Bare fists," the man said, voice gentle enough to shave with. "Better than most swords I see."
"Better than most swords I've met," Taro agreed.
The man hopped down from the eave like gravity was a friend, not a rule. He landed light, feet whispering. He stood close enough that Taro could have reached and touched the flat plane of his sternum, then didn't—because everything in the man's carriage said his space was not for borrowing.
"Brother Sen," he said, inclining his head. "Of the Hillside Dojo. I pour tea for the saints and punch the pride out of bandits when the saints are busy." His eyes tipped to Taro's knuckles. "You breathe the right way for a man who learned the wrong way."
Taro barked a laugh. "I'll take that as a compliment."
"It is," Sen said. "And an invitation." He lifted a hand, fingers barely flexing. The air around the hand tightened the way air tightens over a kiln mouth. "You can move your body. Now learn to move your breath."
"I've started," Taro said, remembering the rope's slip, that strange widening inside the cage of his ribs.
"You've tasted. THere is a fine line in difference for those who want true mastery." Sen's eyes smiled. "Come. Roofs see more than floors."
They went up by a narrow stair and a leap most people would not attempt. The rooflines of Beldam made a gentle ragged sea. The moon rose like a coin you could almost bite. Sen stood in the thin wind and closed his eyes.
"Ki," he said, "is breath that got promoted." He opened his eyes. "Not a separate thing. Not sparkles and chanting. If you can own your exhale, you can own what your bones do around it. That's the start."
Taro nodded. "Show me."
Sen lifted his right hand. The fist he made was not a fist Taro had seen in any gym—loose until it wasn't, like a trap that refused to be obvious. He didn't pull his arm back. He didn't twist his hips. He simply breathed out and let something happen inside that breath.
His knuckles kissed a roof beam with a sound like a carpenter's mallet. The beam quivered, then settled, a neat dent print where his hand had been.
"One-inch spiral," Sen said. "It is not the inch. It is the spiral—the subtle wind inside your structure. Try."
Taro copied the shape, accepted how stupid his hand felt, and breathed. He didn't try to hit the beam. He tried to fill his ribs like a bellows and then close them like a book and to let that closing travel his arm as a shape, not a shove.
His knuckles met wood.
It wasn't Sen's mallet. But it wasn't nothing. The wood talked back.
Technique Unlocked:Centerline Surge (Novice) — convert exhale + rib compression into short-range transfer of force.
Weave Engine I synergy: brief AGI lift after accurate micro-strike.
Sen's eyebrows tipped up the smallest amount. "You learn quickly," he said.
"I've been failing for a long time," Taro said. "You gather a lot from failing."
"That's why I like you already." Sen's mouth made a shape that wasn't quite a smile and wasn't quite not. "Again."
They worked in a rhythm that was more prayer than drill: three breaths, three taps, rest. Sen corrected him a finger-width at a time. "Your shoulder argues with your ribs. Make them friends." "No, don't push the breath. Invite it. Let the house settle on exhale." "If your wrist locks early, you will bruise your bones teaching them this truth."
Taro's forearms sang. His ribs ached not with strain, but with education. The night went on.
At some point he looked up and realized he had lost the city's sense of time. The square's last gossipers had gone home. The bell rope hummed a drowsy insect line in the tower. Sen held up a palm.
"That's enough," he said. "You'll learn to love moderation if you want to keep your hands. Tomorrow, before day-chime, we meet by the east wall. Bring nothing but breath."
"Understood," Taro said.
Sen studied him the way a craftsman studies a piece of wood he intends to make into something stubborn and beautiful. "Your blessing is loud," he said. "I could hear it before you breathed. Saints like men who work. Let it make you faster, not careless."
"I will," Taro said.
The air rippled. Panels drew themselves before his eyes, neat as ledgers. He knew the feel already: not vanity, but report.
Effort Acknowledged — Martial God's Champion The blessing recognizes applied training and successful adaptation.
Global Growth: +2 to all stats.
Warmth moved through him, not spiking, but settling. The numbers meant less than that settling did.
"Good," Sen said softly, as if he could see the numbers too. "Go sleep. Tomorrow we make your breath carry your feet."
Taro descended to the square and tugged the hooded cloak over his tank. The leather knuckle wraps sat snug and reasonable on his hands. He stood a moment with the town quiet around him and the roofline cut against the moon and thought, absurdly, of the bell he had never gotten in the old world.
A night wind moved. Somewhere a shutter creaked. The bell in its tower breathed:
It sounded like a fight about to start.
Status — Taro
Class: Junior Fistfighter
Title: Martial God's Champion (SSS)
HP: 180 → 680(derived from END; base → effective)
Ki:19
Base Stats(pre-blessing, after training)
STR:20(+2 global growth)
END:18(+2)
AGI:16(+2)
SPIRIT:17(+2)
MIND:14(+2)
LUCK:13(+2)
Effective Stats(when in combat/training; SSS bonus: +50 to physical)
STR:70
END:68
AGI:66
SPIRIT: 17
MIND: 14
LUCK: 13
Skills & Techniques
Martial God's Champion (SSS):
Dramatically accelerates combat growth and technique evolution through application.
Blessed Growth: Upon meaningful training + adaptation, +2 to all stats (edge over peers).
Physical attributes (STR/END/AGI) are amplified by +50 during recognized combat/training.
Ki Breathing (Novice): Controlled exhale stabilizes structure; minor resistance to compression/strangle effects; slow Ki regen out of combat.
Adaptive Rhythm → Counter-Tempo I: Minor advantage when disrupting enemy rhythm (accuracy/crit micro-bonus).
Weave Engine I: After two consecutive successful slips/rolls, brief AGI surge and increased counterpower.
Centerline Surge (Novice): Short-range "one-inch spiral" transfer; scales with breath timing and structure alignment.
Gear
Leather Knuckle Wraps (minor hand protection; reduces self-injury on strikes).
Hooded Cloak (mundane; helps blend).