The courtyard sat empty beneath the deepening evening sky. Stone tiles, cracked from years of training, stretched between the old walls of the estate. Wind carried dust in slow circles across the ground — and nothing moved.
Until Mr. Oceayne stepped forward.
His coat hung loose over his shoulders, hands resting at his sides. He looked at Rowan the way a man looks at a blade still being forged — with interest, not urgency.
"Why are you pushing yourself so hard?" he said, his voice calm, conversational even — as though they had met for tea. "Why do you want to become stronger so desperately?"
Rowan stood ten paces away, jaw tight, fists already clenched. "Is there any rule that says you can't push your limits?"
"No." Mr. Oceayne tilted his head, just slightly. "But no one does it without any reason either." His gaze sharpened — the casual air didn't leave, but something behind it shifted. "Whatever the reason, let's see how strong you became in these years. We are students of the same Master, after all." A pause. "Let me show you — how much of his teaching actually reached you."
He moved first.
No warning. No stance. One moment he was standing still — the next, his palm was driving toward Rowan's chest with enough force to crack ribs. The air between them compressed with a low thrum, the kind of sound a body makes when mana floods through muscle and bone all at once.
Rowan barely caught it. His forearm came up just in time, absorbing the blow at an angle — but the impact sent a tremor through his entire frame. His boots scraped back across the stone, grinding two hard lines into the dust.
…Fast.
Mr. Oceayne didn't pause. A second strike came — low, aimed at the ribs. Then a third, cutting upward toward the jaw. Each one carried weight that didn't match the man's lean frame. Each one hit like something far heavier than a fist.
Rowan kept defending and stepping back — until he decided he wasn't stepping back anymore.
On the fourth strike, something shifted inside him. His heartbeat dropped into a slower, harder rhythm. Mana moved through his arms like current through wire — not wild, not wasted. Controlled. His muscles pulled taut, his reflexes sharpened, and the faint vibration that hummed just beneath his skin became something Mr. Oceayne could feel from a full step away.
Rowan caught the fifth punch in his open hand.
The impact cracked the tile beneath his back foot.
"Not bad," Mr. Oceayne murmured.
Rowan didn't answer. He twisted the caught fist aside and drove his own into the space it left — a clean, brutal shot aimed straight at the centre of Mr. Oceayne's chest. The mana behind it released on contact, not as a glow or a light, but as force. A sound like a muffled thunderclap punched through the courtyard, and for the first time in this fight, Mr. Oceayne's boots left the ground.
He slid back five full paces. Dust exploded around his heels.
Silence — for one breath.
Mr. Oceayne looked down at his own chest, at the faint impression left on his coat. Then he looked back at Rowan. His expression hadn't changed — but his eyes had. Something behind them recalculated. Reassessed.
…At that age?
He had been younger than Rowan when he learned the Primal Body — also known as the Iron Body Technique — from Guru Tavish Iron. It had taken him years. Years of bleeding, of torn muscle, of nights spent unable to move — before he could land a hit like that. And even then, it hadn't carried this kind of weight. Not this early. Not this raw.
He's not refining it. He's forcing it open with sheer will. And it's working.
But then Mr. Oceayne's gaze dropped — just for a moment — and he noticed something Rowan hadn't.
Rowan's right arm was trembling. Not from exhaustion. The muscle along his forearm twitched in irregular spasms, and the skin near his knuckles had flushed a deep, angry red — the kind of colour that comes from the inside. His breathing had changed too. Still fast, still sharp, but uneven now. One shoulder sat slightly lower than the other, as if the body beneath it was already beginning to argue with what its owner was demanding of it.
Ah. There it is.
Mr. Oceayne straightened his coat. "You hit harder than I expected," he said, his tone shifting — no longer conversational, not quite clinical either. Something between the two. "Harder than anyone your age should." A pause. "But your body can't keep up with your own technique."
Rowan's jaw tightened. He didn't respond — but the twitch in his arm answered for him.
"Who taught you to channel mana like that?" Mr. Oceayne asked. It wasn't a real question — he already knew the answer wasn't simple. "Master would never let a student push this much force through a frame that hasn't been conditioned for it. Which means you've been training ahead of your level." A brief pause. "Alone, I'd guess."
Rowan shifted his stance, trying to mask the way his left knee had begun to soften.
"I learned what I needed to learn."
"You learned the wrong technique," Mr. Oceayne said, flatly. Without cruelty, but without kindness either. "Or rather — you learned the right technique in the wrong order. You've sharpened the blade before tempering the steel." He took one step forward, casual, unhurried. "If you keep going like this, your body will burn out before you ever reach your ceiling. You'll tear yourself apart from the inside — and no amount of willpower will hold you together."
The words hit somewhere deeper than the fight had reached.
Wrong technique.
Rowan's jaw clenched — and for a moment, he wasn't standing in this courtyard anymore.
—
He was twelve. Standing in his room. A book open in his hands, its pages warm and soft from how many times he had turned them.
Seven techniques. Seven paths.
He had gone back and forth for weeks. Read each one carefully, watching their strengths, dissecting their flaws, weighing every one of them — their cost, their demand, what they would take from him over time. And still, he couldn't choose. Six of them made sense in his mind. But there was one that caught his focus more than the others.
The third one.
The Primal Body — also known as the Iron Body. One of the strongest. And the most punishing — internal damage, torn muscle, fractured bone in the wrong hands. In extreme cases, permanent injury. To learn it, you needed a body already built to hold that kind of pressure.
Rowan's body was not that strong. Not yet. Not close.
But every time he tried to close the book and walk away from that page, his hands wouldn't move. Every time he tested another technique's foundation, his mana resisted — like water being forced through the wrong pipe. And every time he came back to the Primal Body's first exercise — just a simple pulse through the forearm — the energy moved like it had been waiting for him. Like coming home.
He couldn't explain it. He just knew — the way you know your own heartbeat — that this one was his.
His fingers tightened on the page. He thought about his father's face after meeting other nobles — how they had humiliated him, and how his father had said nothing. He thought about his mother's smile — the heavy one she wore when no one was looking. He thought about his little brother stepping into this cruel world, and how he never wanted Ahaan to face what he had faced.
To change that, he needed to become stronger.
He closed the book.
And then he chose the one that could destroy him.
—
Back to the courtyard. Rowan's eyes flashed. "Now — stop holding back and show me how far I can go."
Something flickered across Mr. Oceayne's face — not a smile, but the ghost of one.
"As you wish."
The air changed.
It didn't shimmer. It didn't glow. But the pressure in the courtyard doubled in an instant, as though gravity itself had thickened around one man. Mr. Oceayne's veins darkened beneath his skin, faintly visible along his forearms and neck — not bright, not theatrical, but unmistakable. His heartbeat became audible. Not metaphorically. Rowan could hear it — a low, rhythmic drumbeat that pulsed outward like a second presence in the space between them.
Every muscle in Mr. Oceayne's body had shifted into something beyond human tension. He stood perfectly still, and yet the air around him moved — pressed outward in subtle waves, as though his body was generating force simply by existing.
Rowan's instincts screamed.
— move!
He did. He threw himself sideways just as Mr. Oceayne closed the distance — not with a step. His fist hit the ground behind him and the recoil launched his body forward like a bolt from a crossbow. The stone where Rowan had been standing shattered. Not cracked.
Shattered.
The first real punch came before Rowan had finished turning. It connected with his guard, and this time, blocking meant nothing. The force tore through his forearms, rattled his skeleton, and threw him into the courtyard wall hard enough to leave a dent in the old stone.
Rowan gasped. His vision swam. But he pushed off the wall before the second strike came — rolling low, coming up with a counter aimed at Mr. Oceayne's exposed flank —
It didn't land.
Mr. Oceayne caught his wrist mid-swing, pivoted, and drove an elbow into Rowan's ribs with surgical precision. Then another. Then another — a rapid chain of strikes, each one landing before the pain from the last had time to register. Every hit carried more pressure than the one before it, compounding, stacking, until Rowan's body screamed with a kind of hurt that went deeper than the skin.
He hit the ground.
The stone was cold against his cheek. His arms trembled. Blood marked the corner of his mouth — not much, but enough. His lungs burned, and every breath felt like swallowing broken glass. But worse than the pain was the sound he could hear beneath it — a faint, wet tearing somewhere deep in his right arm. Muscle separating from tendon.
His own technique, eating him from the inside.
Mr. Oceayne stood over him, barely winded. The pressure around his body had already begun to settle — the veins fading, the audible heartbeat receding back into silence. He looked down at Rowan the way their guru used to look at both of them. Not measuring the fall. Measuring the will to stand again.
"You feel it now, don't you?" he said quietly. "The technique consuming more than you can give. That's the price of forcing the body beyond its foundation." He crouched, resting one arm across his knee. "Our guru didn't teach us to be strong, boy. He taught us to last. And right now — you can't do either."
Rowan's fingers curled against the cracked stone. His body ached — not just from the fight, but from the distance. The gap between where he stood and where Mr. Oceayne stood without effort.
…I thought I was getting closer.
He pressed his forehead to the ground. His teeth clenched until his jaw ached.
Still so far. Still so weak. Still—
Mr. Oceayne rose from his crouch and stood there a moment longer, looking down at the boy on the broken stone. Then, slowly, he turned away.
He exhaled.
Talent without patience. Power without a vessel strong enough to carry it. Master — what were you thinking, teaching this boy the Primal Body before his frame was ready?
He gazed toward the far wall, where the last light of the day had begun to soften against the stone. His mind had already moved past the fight. Past Rowan. Past this moment entirely. There were larger things in motion, and this had been —
A sound.
Behind him.
Not a footstep. Not the scrape of a body dragging itself upright. Something quieter than that. Something that had no business existing in the space where a beaten man had just been lying still.
"You should've kept your eyes on me."
Mr. Oceayne's shoulders went rigid.
The voice was Rowan's. But the tone wasn't. Gone was the tightness, the strain, the breathless edge of a body pushed past everything it had. What remained was something cold. Calm. Stripped of everything except intent.
Mr. Oceayne turned.
And what he saw made his mind go quiet.
Rowan stood five paces behind him — not swaying, not trembling, not held together by stubbornness alone. Standing. Straight-backed and still, as though the beating had never happened. But that wasn't the impossible part.
The impossible part was the light.
A faint green luminance moved beneath his skin — not on the surface, not around him, but through him. It traced along his veins like water finding old riverbeds, pooling deepest where the damage had been worst. The torn muscle in his right arm — the one Mr. Oceayne had heard separating — was knitting itself back together. The bruises across his ribs were fading, not slowly, not gradually, but visibly. In real time. The blood at the corner of his mouth dried, cracked, and fell away — and the split beneath it was already closed.
That's regeneration. A healing ability. But alongside the Primal Body — how?
The Primal Body worked by driving mana inward — through muscle, bone, nerve — until every ounce of energy became force. There was nothing left over. No surplus. No split focus. A Primal Body user channelling healing mana simultaneously would be like a river trying to run in two directions at once. The currents would destroy each other. This wasn't a matter of skill or rarity. It was a violation of how mana itself was supposed to behave. Not difficult. Not uncommon. Impossible — the way breathing underwater was impossible.
And yet.
Rowan raised his head. And when his eyes met Mr. Oceayne's — the breath that had been sitting in the older man's chest refused to return.
Purple.
Both irises. Fully, deeply, unmistakably purple.
—He actually has that ability.
The word repeated through his mind like a crack spreading through glass, slow and irreversible. A Primal Body user with a healing current running alongside the combat flow. Two opposing mana channels in the same vessel — not tearing each other apart, not collapsing under their own contradiction, but coexisting. This wasn't talent. This wasn't genius. This was something that shouldn't exist. Like a shadow cast in total darkness. Like a heart still beating outside the chest.
What are you, boy?
For the first time in this fight — for the first time in longer than he cared to admit — Mr. Oceayne felt the ground beneath his certainty shift.
He steadied himself. Forced the shock below the surface. And when he spoke, his voice was level — but only just.
"A Primal Body user… with a regenerative ability." He said it aloud, as though hearing the words might make them feel less insane. They didn't. "Do you have any idea what you are?"
Rowan said nothing. The purple eyes watched him and waited.
Mr. Oceayne let out a slow breath. "If you can truly sustain that — if that ability is real and not your body burning its last reserves in a single flare — then you have a chance. A real one." The gravity in his voice hadn't been there before. "The one weakness of the Primal Body has always been the cost. The damage. The burnout. But if you can heal what the technique breaks as fast as it breaks it…" He let the implication hang in the air between them.
Then — barely, faintly — he smiled. Not the cold smile. Not the measured one. Something smaller than either. Something that, in another man, might simply have been called respect.
"But don't mistake potential for power," he said. The smile didn't leave, but it sharpened at the edges. "Before any of that matters — before you even begin to dream of what this ability might let you become — you still have to get past me." He rolled his shoulders, loose and easy. The way a man does when he finally stops holding back. "And that won't happen."
Rowan looked at him. And smiled — cold, quiet, and certain in a way that had no business being on the face of someone who had just been lying on the ground.
"Let's see."
To be continue…