It took Sunny four months to touch Anvil.
Not because the answer took that long to find. He'd suspected the truth after the first session, and by the end of the first week he was almost certain. The invisible force didn't create a barrier around Anvil. It seized the sword itself, locking the blade in place no matter how fast or cleverly Sunny swung it. His hands kept moving after each impact, jolting forward until his own grip stopped them, which meant the force had no interest in his body at all. It cared about the weapon and nothing else.
The answer was simple: let go of the sword.
But Sunny didn't act on it immediately, because simple answers to tests set by dangerous men were usually the wrong kind of simple. If the solution was that obvious, Anvil either expected him to find it quickly and was measuring something else entirely, or there was a second layer to the exercise that Sunny hadn't identified yet.
So he spent four months swinging, and watching, and thinking.
He tested every variable he could isolate. He swung fast and slow, high and low, with one hand and two. He tried throwing the sword from across the room. Every time, the blade froze in the air as though caught in amber. Every time, the force engaged the instant the weapon entered a certain radius around Anvil's body, and released the instant Sunny pulled it back. The radius was consistent. The response time was instantaneous. There was no fatigue, no degradation, no gap in coverage.
And every time, the force touched only the sword.
After four months, Sunny was as certain as he could be. He'd also grown a centimeter and put on lean muscle from the daily sessions, which meant he was faster than he'd been and considerably more confident in his ability to close a distance quickly.
On the morning he chose, he entered the training room, picked up the wooden sword, and charged.
Anvil stood in his usual position, hands behind his back, grey eyes flat and patient.
Sunny swung. The sword froze. And in the same instant, he released his grip, let the locked blade serve as a pivot point, and threw himself forward with his arms outstretched.
His open palm slapped against Anvil's forearm.
The contact lasted less than a second.
Anvil looked down at him. For a long moment, neither of them moved.
"You knew within the first week," Anvil said. It wasn't a question.
Sunny, breathing hard, nodded.
"Why did you wait?"
"Because you gave me a sword and told me to hit you. If the answer was to not use the sword, you either wanted me to figure that out on day one, which meant the test was too easy and I was missing something, or you wanted me to be sure enough to commit. I wasn't sure until now."
That wasn't entirely true. He'd been sure for weeks. But the remaining time had taught him things the answer alone hadn't: the exact radius of the invisible force, its response time, the way it behaved when the sword was moving at different speeds. He'd mapped the defense the way he'd once mapped the patrol routes of Bastion's guards, because information was always worth more than a quick solution.
something shifted in Anvil's expression. It was not warmth. It was closer to the look a jeweler might give a stone that had turned out to contain an unexpected facet.
"Get up," Anvil said. "We're done with wooden swords."
That afternoon, Lira brought a new tray to his room. On it, beside the usual food, was a knife.
It was small and plain, with a dark handle and a blade no longer than Sunny's hand. There was nothing remarkable about it. It had no enchantments, no special properties, no hidden mechanisms. It was just a knife, the kind of tool you might use to cut rope or prepare food.
But Sunny understood what it meant.
He picked it up and felt the weight of it, the way the handle sat in his palm, the precise balance point where blade met grip. He turned it over, watching the lantern light slide along the edge.
He had memorized every major blood vessel in the human body, the lethal dosages of forty-seven poisons, the structural weaknesses of fourteen different lock types, and the political genealogies of every Awakened clan with a seat in the Dream Realm.
And now he had a knife.
The question he'd been not-asking since the night Anvil handed him the anatomy primer finally surfaced, not because he chose to confront it, but because ignoring it any longer required more effort than acknowledging it.
He knew what he was being trained to do.
He'd probably known since the second week, when the anatomy book's diagrams started making a certain kind of sense that had nothing to do with medicine. He'd known and he hadn't known, the way you can be aware of something without admitting that you're aware, holding the knowledge at arm's length so it doesn't contaminate the simple pleasure of a warm room and a full stomach.
Sunny sat on the edge of his bed and looked at the knife for a long time.
Then he began practicing with it, because practice was what Anvil would expect, and meeting Anvil's expectations was what kept the meals coming.
The next few years blurred together in a rhythm of escalating difficulty.
Anvil replaced the training room exercises with something more structured. Three hours each morning were devoted to bladework, taught not by Anvil himself but by a series of Awakened instructors who rotated in and out of the east wing without explanation. They were all different, male and female, young and old, each with a distinct style and set of techniques, and Sunny realized after the fourth rotation that this was deliberate. Anvil didn't want him to learn one way of fighting. He wanted Sunny to learn how fighting worked as a system, so that he could adapt to any opponent rather than relying on a single rehearsed method.
The afternoons were devoted to what Lira called, with characteristic brevity, "applied studies." These were practical exercises built on the theoretical knowledge Sunny had been accumulating since his arrival. He practiced picking locks with improvised tools until he could open the standard deadbolt in under nine seconds. He learned to identify thirty poisons by smell, and another twenty by the way they altered the taste of food or water. He studied the architecture of Bastion until he could navigate the outer rings blindfolded, mapping his position by the echo of his footsteps and the direction of ambient sound.
Anvil allowed him out of the east wing for these exercises, always accompanied by Lira, always during hours when the corridors were least populated. Sunny saw more of Bastion in fragments and glimpses: the bustling markets of the lowest ring, the training grounds where Awakened soldiers drilled in formations, the forges where Valor's artisans shaped Memories into weapons and armor with techniques that bordered on sorcery.
He was never introduced to anyone. No one spoke to him. On the rare occasions when someone noticed the small, pale boy trailing behind Lira through the quieter passages of the citadel, they glanced once and looked away, as though his presence had been pre-explained and pre-dismissed.
Sunny was a ghost in the most populous human city in the Dream Realm, and the loneliness of it settled into his bones so gradually that he stopped noticing it was there.
The evenings belonged to Anvil.
Not every evening. The patriarch appeared two or three times a week, always without warning, and these sessions were different from everything else in Sunny's education. There were no textbooks, no drills, no structured curricula. Anvil simply talked.
He talked about the Dream Realm, its geography and dangers and the alien logic that governed its ecosystems. He talked about Nightmare Creatures, their classifications and behaviors, the hierarchy of ranks from dormant to divine. He talked about the Spell itself, its capricious intelligence, the way it tested and rewarded and punished according to rules that no human had ever fully deciphered.
And he talked about people.
Not specific people, not names and histories, but the mechanics of them. How they formed loyalties and how those loyalties could be severed. How fear functioned as a tool and where its effectiveness plateaued. How trust was built and how it was most efficiently destroyed. How the gap between what a person believed about themselves and what they actually were could be exploited by someone patient enough to find it.
Sunny listened to all of it with the same focused attention he brought to everything, and he stored it the same way he stored the anatomy diagrams and the poison dosages: as useful information, filed away for future application.
He did not think about the fact that Anvil was teaching him to take people apart the same way the anatomy primer had taught him to take bodies apart. He did not think about what that meant. He was ten years old, then eleven, then twelve, and the question of what he was becoming grew larger and heavier with each passing month, but he had gotten very good at not thinking about the things he couldn't afford to think about.
It was the few skills Anvil hadn't taught him. He'd brought that one with him from the outskirts.
On his twelfth birthday, which Anvil acknowledged with a slight nod and nothing else, Sunny was given his first real assignment.
There is a man in the outer ring," Anvil said. "A merchant. He sells salvaged Nightmare Creature materials to Awakened at inflated prices, and he's been skimming from the clan's taxes on trade goods. You will find him, observe him for three days, and then deliver a full report on his habits, his vulnerabilities, and the method you would use to kill him if I asked you to."
Sunny waited.
"I am not asking you to," Anvil clarified, and there was nothing in his tone to indicate whether this distinction was meaningful or temporary. "Not yet. For now, I want the report."
Sunny delivered the report in two days. It was thorough, precise, and correct in every detail.
Anvil read it in silence. When he finished, he set it aside and looked at Sunny with those flat grey eyes.
"The method you chose," he said. "Explain your reasoning."
Sunny had recommended poison, administered through the merchant's evening tea, which the man purchased from the same stall at the same time every night. The poison would mimic a cardiac event, leaving no trace that would survive a standard examination. The merchant lived alone and would not be found for several hours, by which point the active compounds would have metabolized beyond detection.
"It's clean," Sunny said. "No witnesses, no evidence, no disruption to the surrounding area. The target dies and no one knows why."
Anvil regarded him for a moment.
"And if I wanted it to be loud?"
Sunny blinked. "Loud?"
"If I wanted everyone in the outer ring to know that the merchant was killed, and to understand that he was killed for a reason. What would you recommend then?"
Sunny thought about it. The answer came quickly, because he'd already considered it and discarded it as inefficient.
"A blade. In his shop, during business hours. Leave the body where it falls and the weapon beside it. Something recognizable that carries a message."
Anvil nodded.
"A weapon is a tool," he said. "But it is also a language. The quiet kill says one thing. The loud kill says another. You must learn to speak both, and you must learn to know which one is being asked for."
He stood and moved toward the door.
"Your instinct for the quiet kill is good. We'll need to develop the other."
The door closed, and Sunny sat alone with the report in his hands and a feeling in his chest that he couldn't quite name. It wasn't guilt, because guilt required a victim, and the merchant was alive and would remain so. It wasn't fear, because fear required uncertainty, and there was nothing uncertain about what had just happened.
It was something closer to vertigo. The sensation of looking down and realizing that the ground you'd been standing on was much thinner than you thought, and that there was a long way to fall if it broke.
He folded the report neatly, set it on the desk, and went to bed.