Divine System: Land of the Abominations-Chapter 318: Uneven Purchase.

Nero noticed things about the other candidates more slowly, the way you notice things you are not actively trying to see. The noble who had spoken back to Vane on the first day was named Corvin, and he was the best fighter in the room by a margin large enough that Vane never pointed it out and didn’t need to — it was simply present in every session, in the way Corvin moved and the way other people moved differently when they knew he was watching. He was not cruel about this advantage. He was something more difficult to navigate, which was indifferent to it in the specific way of someone who has had it so long it had stopped being interesting.

The woman with economic movement was named Sable, and she had, over the course of two weeks, said approximately fifteen words to anyone outside of the session itself. What she said inside sessions was precise and brief and directed exclusively at whatever problem was immediately in front of her. Vane had corrected her footwork once, on the third day, and had not needed to again.

The scar-jawed man was named Edran, and Nero had initially read him as someone with significant prior experience, but by the end of the first week had revised this to someone with significant prior survival experience, which was different. He moved like a person who had learned combat in circumstances where learning slowly had consequences, which produced competence that was real but uneven in the specific ways that Vane spent most of his time identifying and addressing.

Nero recognised the type because he was the type, and he noticed that Vane spent comparable time on both of them, though the time took different forms. With Edran it was the larger errors — the moments where survival instinct overrode trained response, producing habits that worked in chaos and failed in controlled application. With Nero it was smaller and more granular, the millimetre adjustments of grip and stance that accumulated into the difference between a technique that was adequate and one that was reliable, and Vane had the patience for this kind of granular work that suggested he had done it many times before and understood exactly how long it took.

"Again," Vane said, from where he stood at the arena’s edge with his arms folded, watching Nero run a basic thrust sequence against the practice post for what was either the fortieth or the forty-first time, and Nero had genuinely lost count at some point in the last hour.

He ran it again. The motion was, by now, sufficiently ingrained that he could feel exactly where it went slightly out of true — a subtle rotation in the wrist at extension that had been present since the beginning and kept returning whenever his attention moved elsewhere. It was not a large deviation. In practice it would not, in most situations, make a material difference to what happened. But Vane had explained, precisely once and without repetition, that in some situations the difference between where the blade arrived and where it needed to arrive was determined by deviations smaller than this one, and Nero had taken this explanation at its full weight and was attempting to address it accordingly.

The difficulty was that the rotation was not something he consciously produced. It was something his body did, independently, when the rest of the motion was happening, and correcting it required a quality of simultaneous awareness that was different from correcting an error you could simply decide to stop making. He had to hold the correct position in mind at the same time as he executed the motion, and hold it specifically enough that the body’s habit deferred to the instruction rather than reverting to its default.

He was getting better at this. He was not yet good at it.

"Stop," Vane said.

Nero stopped.

Vane crossed the arena with the unhurried economy of movement that Nero had come to recognise as Vane’s single consistent physical characteristic regardless of context, and he positioned himself beside the practice post and looked at Nero with the evaluative patience that was also consistent. "Show me the extension again. Slowly."

Nero ran the extension at half speed. Vane watched the wrist.

"There," Vane said, and tapped the outside of Nero’s wrist lightly with two fingers — not a correction, just a marker. "You know where it is." 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

"Yes, sir."

"The reason you can’t stop doing it is that you learned to throw from the elbow rather than the shoulder in situations where reach mattered more than precision," Vane said, with the equanimity of someone diagnosing a problem rather than assigning blame for it. "Your body learned that extending hard from the elbow produced results, and it is not wrong — it did produce results, in the specific conditions where you learned it. The problem is that the reach priority and the precision priority produce different motions, and you cannot run both simultaneously without one of them compromising the other." He dropped his hand. "So we are going to spend the next two weeks training the shoulder rotation separately, until it is as ingrained as the elbow habit, and then you are going to learn to run both in sequence rather than competition."

"Two weeks," Nero said.

"On this specific problem. There are others." Vane’s expression was entirely untroubled by this assessment. "You are working with foundations that were built by necessity rather than design. Retrofitting is slower than building correctly from the beginning. This is not a complaint, simply a description of the work." He looked at the practice post. "Again."

Nero raised the spear and ran the extension again, slowly, focusing on the shoulder, and felt the wrist rotation assert itself halfway through and pulled it back, and the motion arrived slightly wide of where it would have arrived before and slightly closer to where it needed to go. Vane watched, and said nothing, which from Vane was the clearest available signal that the adjustment had been in the right direction.

From across the arena, Corvin was running a sword sequence against his own practice post with the focused ease of someone for whom the motions had been correct for so long they no longer required active supervision, and the sound of it was a completely different sound from the sound Nero’s spear made — cleaner, lighter, the impact landing at the same precise point each time with the mechanical consistency of something that had been perfected through sheer volume of repetition.