Luke began his training the day after absorbing the Sparda bloodline.
Riven had served in the Noxian military for years—fought in campaigns, survived battles that killed soldiers ten times as experienced, and eventually risen to command her own warband. She knew how to turn raw recruits into warriors.
Her concern was whether Luke could handle Noxian methods.
"The training regimen I know is... intense," she said carefully, watching Luke stretch in the basement gym they'd converted from one of the mansion's unused spaces. "Noxian soldiers are expected to push past their limits daily. Many wash out. Some die."
"Don't worry about it." Luke rolled his shoulders, feeling the unfamiliar power coiled in his new musculature. "I'm a Sparda demon now. This is exactly what I need to unlock my potential."
He wasn't worried about side effects or lasting injuries. Even with his bloodline power still dormant—slowly, continuously remodeling his body at a cellular level—he should already be tougher than most of Marvel's street-level heroes.
And there were a lot of street-level heroes in Marvel. Especially in New York. The comics had introduced thousands of them over the decades, and most fell somewhere between Blade and Kick-Ass on the power scale. Vigilantes with slightly enhanced abilities, fancy gadgets, or just really good martial arts training.
Luke should be able to handle that tier now. Probably.
Riven considered his words, weighing enthusiasm against inexperience. She wanted Luke to be capable of protecting himself. Or at least... capable of enduring certain activities without injury.
Her face flushed slightly at that thought. Luke noticed but wisely chose not to comment.
"In Noxus, we train through sparring," she said, grabbing two iron rods from the weapon rack and tossing one to Luke. The metal was cold and heavy in his grip—not a proper weapon, but close enough for training purposes. "Direct combat. No padding. No holding back."
Luke blinked. "Shouldn't we start with basics? You know, swinging the weapon a thousand times, running laps, doing forms?"
"That produces soldiers." Riven's expression was utterly serious. "Competent fighters who can follow orders and hold a line. True warriors are forged in combat. You learn to fight by fighting."
Skadi watched from the sidelines, her massive sword resting against the wall beside her. As a bioengineered Abyssal Hunter, she'd never experienced conventional training—her abilities had been implanted rather than developed. The concept of systematic skill building intrigued her.
"I see." Luke adjusted his grip on the iron rod, trying to remember everything he'd learned from watching martial arts videos and playing fighting games. "That actually makes sense. Alright, here I come!"
He charged.
What happened next was too fast to process.
One moment, Luke was closing the distance with what he thought was decent speed. The next, his weapon was spinning through the air, his hands were numb from an impact he hadn't even registered, and Riven's arms were wrapped around him from behind.
She'd disarmed him and caught him in a single motion. He hadn't seen either action clearly.
"What—" Luke tried to turn his head. "Did you just—"
"You're too tense." Riven's voice was soft, almost apologetic. "Your shoulders telegraph your attacks. Your footwork is predictable. And you close your eyes right before striking."
"I do?"
"Most untrained fighters do."
Luke became acutely aware of their position. Riven was pressed against his back, her arms encircling his chest in what was technically a restraining hold but felt more like a hug. Her breath was warm against his ear.
She hadn't hit him. She couldn't hit him, he realized. Even in training, even with weapons designed to minimize injury, Riven couldn't bring herself to cause him pain.
So she'd improvised this instead.
I should probably tell her that's not an effective training method, Luke thought. Pain and injury are supposed to reinforce lessons. Getting comfortable every time I screw up is the opposite of conditioning.
But he also very much enjoyed being pressed against Riven's chest, and he wasn't about to complain about that.
"I want to try."
Skadi's voice cut through the moment. She'd stood up from her observation post, her expression curious rather than competitive.
"No." Luke extracted himself from Riven's embrace with some reluctance. "Absolutely not."
"Why?"
"Because you might accidentally knock my head off, Titi." He picked up the fallen iron rod, rolling his sore wrists. "Dante and Vergil are tough, but I don't think they've ever demonstrated surviving decapitation. Let's not test that theory with my actual neck."
Skadi tilted her head, considering this. "I would be gentle."
"Your version of gentle probably still involves broken bones. I'll stick with Riven for now."
The Deep Sea Hunter accepted this without argument, settling back into her observation position. Luke appreciated that about her—she didn't push when he set boundaries.
"Again, Riven!" He raised his weapon, trying to correct the issues she'd identified. Shoulders relaxed. Eyes open. Watch her weapon, not her face.
He lasted approximately four seconds longer this time.
Two hours later, Luke lay in Riven's arms like a corpse.
Every muscle in his body screamed. His lungs burned. His heart pounded so hard he could feel it in his teeth. Sweat had soaked through his training clothes, pooled on the floor beneath him, and generally made him feel like a wrung-out dishrag.
Combat was exhausting.
He'd known this intellectually—professional boxers only fought for minutes at a time, with mandatory rest periods between rounds. MMA matches were stopped after fifteen minutes of ground fighting specifically because the athletes were too spent to continue safely.
But experiencing it firsthand was different. The constant adrenaline, the explosive movements, the mental strain of tracking an opponent who moved faster than his eyes could follow—it drained energy at a terrifying rate.
In two hours of continuous sparring, Luke hadn't landed a single hit.
Not one.
He couldn't even track how Riven disarmed him. Every exchange ended the same way: his weapon spinning away, his hands stinging from impacts he didn't remember, Riven catching him before he could fall. The gap between them was astronomical.
If Riven was this strong, how powerful were Noxus's actual champions? Darius, the Hand of Noxus, could cleave through entire battalions. Garen of Demacia was considered his equal. The Runeterra power scale was genuinely terrifying when you thought about it.
But the Sparda bloodline showed its worth in recovery.
Three hours of rest. No food. Luke woke up feeling completely refreshed, as if the brutal training session had never happened.
He remembered the lore. Dante had been knocked unconscious by Urizen—his brother Vergil's demonic transformation—and slept for an entire month. When he woke up, he'd immediately engaged in combat without eating, drinking, or even stretching first. The Sparda physiology simply didn't require conventional sustenance the way human bodies did.
Those Saiyan monkeys from Dragon Ball had to stuff their faces after every fight. Sparda demons just... recovered.
Luke wasn't quite at Dante's level yet—sleeping off a month-long coma probably required the full Devil Trigger—but he was already far beyond human norms.
"Again, Riven!"
She looked at him with genuine concern. "Luke, perhaps you should rest more. I've never seen anyone recover from exhaustion this quickly. Are you sure you're not... pushing yourself too hard?"
"I'm fine. Better than fine." He bounced on his feet, demonstrating his renewed energy. "This is the bloodline doing its thing. Trust me."
Riven hesitated, clearly worried that this was some kind of delusional last burst before total collapse.
"Please," Luke added. "I need this. I need to get stronger."
She couldn't refuse him when he asked like that.
The days blurred together after that.
Every morning, Luke sparred with Riven. They rotated through different disciplines—weapons work, boxing, grappling, close-quarters combat. Riven's military experience covered all of it and more.
She'd fought against Sett, the half-Vastayan brawler who ran the underground fighting pits. She'd traded blows with Vi, Piltover's enforcer with her hextech-powered gauntlets. She'd survived encounters with Noxian champions, Demacian knights, and everything in between.
There was nothing Luke could throw at her that she hadn't seen before.
But that was the point, wasn't it? Training against someone vastly superior forced adaptation. Forced growth. You couldn't develop bad habits when every bad habit got you immediately punished.
Luke's personal preferences leaned toward visceral, physical combat. His heroes were people like Rorschach from Watchmen—the uncompromising vigilante who fought with brutal efficiency and never backed down, no matter the odds. He also admired elegant swordsmen: Vergil with his iaido-style quickdraws, Sephiroth and his impossibly long Masamune, Sesshomaru from Inuyasha with his poison claws and superior attitude.
He wanted to master both styles. Fists and blades. Brutal and elegant.
Riven was more than capable of teaching him.
Her evaluation, delivered after roughly two weeks of daily training, was cautiously optimistic.
"Your growth rate is abnormal," she said, watching Luke practice forms with a training sword. "When we started, your combat capability was... minimal. Perhaps a one, on a scale of one to one hundred."
"Ouch."
"Now?" Riven tilted her head, considering. "Ten. Maybe twenty on a good day."
A tenfold to twentyfold improvement in two weeks. Luke supposed he should feel good about that.
"So I've gone from 'completely helpless' to 'slightly less helpless.'"
"You've gone from 'civilian' to 'trained soldier.' That's significant progress." Riven's expression softened slightly. "Most Noxian recruits take months to achieve similar results."
The demon bloodline was definitely doing something, then. Enhancing his learning speed, his muscle memory, his physical adaptation. Even without the Devil Trigger, the Sparda heritage provided tangible benefits.
Luke discovered just how much he'd changed when he started testing his limits outside of training.
The mansion had a small home gym—weights, machines, the standard equipment you'd expect in a rich person's fitness room. Luke had ignored it until now, preferring to focus on combat skills rather than raw strength.
But curiosity got the better of him.
He approached the weight rack, selecting a barbell that would have been impossible for him to lift a month ago. His old body had struggled with regular dumbbells. This thing was meant for serious powerlifters.
Luke gripped the bar, lifted, and—
It came up like it was made of foam.
He stared at the weight in his hands, barely believing the feedback from his muscles. There was resistance, sure, but it felt... manageable. Easy, even.
His grip tightened instinctively.
The metal crumpled.
Luke watched in fascination as his fingers sank into the steel bar, leaving deep impressions like he was squeezing clay. The structural integrity of the barbell gave way completely under his grip, bending and warping around his hands.
"Holy shit."
He dropped the ruined equipment and immediately moved to the nearest wall—a section of reinforced drywall that definitely wasn't designed to be a punching surface.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
Each punch left a crater. Not deep, but visible. The wall material compressed and fractured under impacts that would have shattered his knuckles a month ago.
Luke stepped back to admire his handiwork, grinning like a kid who'd just discovered fireworks.
This was real. This was his.
All those years of dreaming about supernatural power, of watching anime and playing games and imagining what it would be like to be more than human—and now he was living it.
"This is amazing," he breathed. "This is actually amazing."
His excitement probably looked childish from the outside. A grown man punching walls and giggling about it. But Luke didn't care. He'd spent his entire previous life feeling powerless, trapped in a body that couldn't do anything impressive. Now he could crush steel with his bare hands.
Some reactions couldn't be suppressed.
"If only I could get a Kamen Rider belt," he mused, returning to the damaged wall for another round of experimental punching. "Then I could actually shout 'HENSHIN' and mean it."
He'd played plenty of Kamen Rider games back in his old life. Ultraman fighting games too. But the chances of dropping transformation devices from those series were astronomically low.
The problem was variety. Luke had played too many games over the years—thousands of hours across hundreds of titles. Each game added to his potential drop pool, diluting the odds of getting any specific item. The fact that he'd pulled Skadi directly from a gacha game was already miraculous.
Everything else would have to come randomly. Luke had accepted that.
Besides, he wasn't in any particular hurry.
Vampires were still plentiful, both in New York and beyond. Criminals existed everywhere. And looking at the bigger picture? Thanos's Black Order was out there somewhere, waiting to invade. The Chitauri army that would attack New York during the Avengers movie. The Kree Empire—one of the three great cosmic powers in Marvel—with their vast military forces.
All of them were potential drop sources.
All of them could be farmed.
Kill them all, Luke thought, the grin never leaving his face, and eventually I'll get everything I want.
It was a simple philosophy. Maybe even a sociopathic one.
But it worked for him.
PLZ THROW POWERSTONES.
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