"Hagh."
"One more, young Master. Just one more."
'Is it really just one more?'
Andreas gritted his teeth and pushed himself up for what felt like the thousandth time.
"Hagh."
He collapsed face-first onto the ground and stayed there, cheek pressed against the cool stone of the training grounds, willing his arms to stop existing.
"Congratulations, young Master. Please rest for a few minutes and then we will do another fifty."
Andreas genuinely wanted to cry.
"Kaela, can't we just stop for today?"
"No can do, young Master. Captain Peruguis said you are to reach the five hundred mark today."
"Haghh."
Peruguis was the knight captain of Valekor, a Spearmaster of considerable renown. Under normal circumstances he would have been the one overseeing Andreas's physical training personally. But these past few weeks he had been away on an expedition with a neighboring archdemon family called Ashspire, investigating something that had not been explained to Andreas in any detail. In his absence his daughter Kaela had taken over the training.
By human standards Kaela looked like an ordinary girl of around twenty, save for the horns and the firm, dense muscle that looked perpetually on the verge of splitting her clothes at the seams. She ran training sessions the way her father apparently ran expeditions.
Andreas rolled onto his back and stared at the sky.
"Hey, Kaela."
"What is it, young Master?"
"What level is your spearmanship?"
A brief pause.
"Well... it is a little embarrassing to admit, but I am only at quasi-expert level."
"Why aren't you an expert? I heard from Peruguis that you could beat most experts."
"You see, young Master, my physical strength already exceeds that of most experts. It is simply that I have a very low mana reserve and even lower aura control, so I am not considered a true expert by the formal standard."
"But if you can beat experts, how can you not be one?"
Kaela considered this for a moment, turning over how best to explain it to someone who needed it to actually make sense rather than just sound correct.
"Young Master, do you know what knights use aura for?"
"To strengthen themselves and increase their durability, right?"
"That is only half correct for knights below expert level."
Rather than explaining further she decided it would be better to show him.
"Could you move to a safe distance, young Master?"
Andreas dragged his thoroughly exhausted body to the shade of a tree at the edge of the training grounds, settling about fifty meters away and watching with what energy he had left. Kaela moved to the center of the training ground, which had been built specifically for use by the direct Valekor line and was reinforced accordingly. Then she paused, made a gesture of covering her ears, and pointed at Andreas.
'Does she want me to do the same?'
Andreas covered his ears.
Kaela moved.
A deep blue hue emerged from her dantian and traveled up her arm with visible effort, the aura thickening and seeming almost to solidify as it settled over her fist. It took around five seconds for it to fully settle. Then she punched downward.
BOOOM.
The shockwave erupted from the impact and swept across the training ground in an instant. Andreas felt it hit him even at fifty meters, the force pushing him back a full step despite the distance. Debris scattered outward from the point of impact and skipped across the stone, and for a moment the entire area was obscured by a rising cloud of dust.
Fortunately the training grounds were enclosed within a barrier spell. Nothing reached beyond the walls.
As the dust settled Andreas saw the crater. Kaela stood at its center, brushing dirt from her clothes with her uninjured hand.
'Is her arm bleeding?'
"Kaela, are you okay?"
She crossed the distance between them quickly, her expression composed and unbothered.
"I am okay, young Master. You need not worry."
'She says that, but her arm is torn to shreds.'
It was. Her knuckles were split to the bone, several of them visibly broken, blood running freely down her fingers and dripping from her hand in a steady rhythm. She held it at her side with the casual indifference of someone who has broken things before and found the experience unimpressive.
Seeing Andreas's eyes fixed on it, she waved it slightly.
"You truly do not need to worry, young Master. There is a surplus of healers in the palace these days, more than battle mages at this point, I think, so this is nothing that cannot be addressed immediately."
She was not wrong. The number of healers in the territory had been increasing steadily for years now, and their presence in the palace had grown dense enough that finding one was never a matter of searching. Kaela flagged one down and treatment began without ceremony, the mage working efficiently while Kaela stood and spoke as though nothing particular was happening to her arm.
"You see, young Master, a knight's physical power is unfortunately not proportional to their durability. The difference is significant enough that a careless punch thrown by a Spearmaster like my father could kill him if he struck without protection. And if he used his full force with strengthening aura active, the sheer speed of his arm moving through the air would be enough to ionize it. From a single swing."
She waited a moment, letting that settle.
"So because of this, after the expert threshold, strengthening aura becomes essentially useless for offense. Every knight past that point uses aura for protection rather than power. What you just saw, that is what happens when I concentrate my aura into my arm for defense and then strike with my full strength. That punch used nearly a third of my total mana reserve. Yes, I could kill another expert with a few strikes like that, provided I could land them. But as you can see the cost is considerable."
She flexed her fingers experimentally as the healer worked, testing what had been repaired.
"And that five seconds you watched me spend getting the aura into position, in a real match between experts, five seconds is an eternity. If I throw without the protective aura, there will not be enough arm left to throw a second punch. So I am caught between options that both have significant drawbacks, and my low mana reserve means I cannot sustain either approach for long."
'So that was it. That was why she is quasi-expert on paper but something else entirely in practice.'
"Kaela."
"Yes, young Master?"
"How large is your mana reserve?"
"The last time I checked, it sat at around 250 UM."
'Compared to Barderossa's 2,300 that is very small. Her strength must be something extraordinary to compensate for that.'
"Thank you for explaining. But you really did not need to hurt yourself to show me."
Kaela looked at him with the expression of someone who considers this point entirely beside the point.
"Please do not concern yourself, young Master. This genuinely is not much." She straightened, her healed arm flexing once at her side
, and fixed him with a look that offered no room for negotiation. "Now. Rest period is over. Let us continue."
':( '