It’s wrong."

Kael didn’t need to say it loud for it to carry. The mountainside did that annoying thing where sound either died in the wind or snapped back at you as an echo, never in between.

The morning air was thin and sharp, cold enough to bite the sweat on his skin, warm enough near his abdomen that the heat of Ki felt like a second climate living under his ribs.

He stared at the rock in his hand like it had personally offended him.

Then he cursed as he gripped the rock this time, and crushed it to dust.

Not cracked. Not fractured. Dust. His fingers tightened and the stone gave up in a breathless crumble, grit sifting through his knuckles and down his palm like sand.

It wasn’t even satisfying anymore, he’d been doing that kind of thing long enough that raw destruction had lost its novelty. The only thing it did now was remind him of the gap between breaking and doing it correctly.

He took a deep breath, and decided that cursing at his master wasn’t the right thing to do right now.

That decision cost him. He could feel the complaint rise, automatic, reflexive, born from a year of getting thrown off cliffs and being told it was "character building", and he swallowed it anyway.

His throat tasted faintly metallic from exertion, lungs still carrying the damp memory of lake water from earlier training.

"Fine, fine, show me how you do it... again," Kael asked.

He tried to keep the edge out of it. Tried. The words still came out with the tone of a man asking for mercy while already bracing for none.

The Fist King sighed, "My master only showed me a thing once, and I had to learn it. This is the fifth time I’m showing it to you, never again."

The sigh wasn’t tired.

It was annoyed in that calm way only monsters and ancient men managed, like disappointment had long since become a default setting.

The Fist King’s posture didn’t change. He didn’t look strained, or winded, or even mildly bothered by the altitude. He looked like the mountain existed for him to stand on, not the other way around.

Kael’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t argue. Arguing with the Fist King had taught him two consistent truths:

He would lose. He would learn, whether he wanted to or not.

The fist King said as he placed one of the rocks from Kael’s back on top of a boulder and placed his finger against it, he didn’t push it, he didn’t shove it, he simply pressed it there.

It was insulting how casual it looked.

The boulder was the same one they’d been abusing for weeks, scarred with shallow craters and hairline fractures, its surface chalked white from pulverized stone. The rock he set on top was about the size of Kael’s fist, dense, river-worn, hard enough to survive most blunt impacts if you hit it wrong.

The Fist King’s finger touched it like he was checking if bread was done baking.

A simple muscle flex, and the rock blew up into dust, debris flew everywhere.

No windup. No punch. No violent motion.

Just a ripple of pressure so subtle Kael almost missed it, until the stone disintegrated and the air filled with grit.

Dust burst outward in a tight bloom, peppering Kael’s face and sticking to the sweat on his chest. The debris didn’t fly like shrapnel, either. It scattered like a controlled release, as if the stone had been told to stop being stone.

Kael blinked through the dust and tasted sand on his tongue.

Kael had an ugly scowl on his face, ’How the hell does that even help!’

His hands flexed and unclenched, fighting the urge to do something stupid like punch the boulder in frustration. The rings on his wrists and ankles sat heavy and warm, a constant reminder that his "natural" strength was still being kept on a leash. They weren’t just weights anymore. They were shackles with a purpose.

"You already are able to destroy twenty rocks underwater using your fist, now you can’t internally explode one with a finger? How are you backtracking when you’re supposed to be moving forward!"

The Fist King’s voice sharpened in the middle, not loud, but heavy enough to make the words feel like they landed inside Kael’s chest. It wasn’t encouragement. It was a demand disguised as instruction.

Kael’s temper flared, then stalled. Not because he didn’t want to snap back, but because the point stung.

"It just doesn’t make sense! The reason I’m able to do that underwater is that the water offers resistance; more impact is transferred to the rock before it starts flying or swimming forward. This is just air, man!"

His explanation came out fast, like he’d been rehearsing it in his head during every failed attempt. Underwater, the medium helped him. Water punished wasted motion. It forced his force inward, made every strike cleaner whether he liked it or not. Air did nothing. Air let his mistakes escape into the distance.

The Fist King didn’t look impressed.

"That’s because you’re focusing too much on the power you exert forward, instead of the structure of the object you’re trying to inject with Ki!"

Kael’s brows pulled together. The word structure sat wrong in his head, like an answer that didn’t match the question.

"Ki, this, key that, it just doesn’t make sense for something to..." Kael stopped for a second.

The frustration hit a snag. Not relief, something else. A thought snagging his mind by the collar.

He frowned, thinking, ’structure? How does that make sense?

He could already feel his own Ki; the last year and a few months had made sure he was able to do that. He also started earnestly training the Iron Bone Marrow technique and mastered its first level.

That part was real. Concrete. He could feel it like a furnace in his abdomen, heat pooling low, then rising when he breathed wrong or moved too fast. He could pull it into his limbs now. Not perfectly, not elegantly like his master, but enough that his fists didn’t split and his bones didn’t complain the same way they used to.

He could feel the heat of Ki in his abdomen. And could even galvanize it to his fists, making them sturdier, harder, and also punch faster.

That was still inside. That was the easy part, relatively speaking. Keep the fire in the furnace, direct it through pipes you were slowly reinforcing.

But, to allow his Ki to leave his body and inject it into a non-material thing. That’s different.

That was the part that made his brain reject the lesson like it was poison. He could smash. He could crush. He could batter a thing into submission.

But "injecting" something invisible into a rock until it died from the inside? That felt like magic. And Kael had grown to distrust anything that felt like magic without rules.

But, didn’t he do that before? With the gauntlets.

The memory snapped into place sharp enough to hurt. Runes. Slots. Fists. The sensation of internal energy traveling a path, being translated into an effect. It wasn’t that different from what his master was describing. Different medium, same principle.

"Do I have to use a finger?" Kael asked.

The master didn’t answer; that was answer enough.

Kael exhaled through his nose. Of course. Of course it was "yes" without being said. The Fist King didn’t care what tool Kael used. He cared that Kael understood the concept.

Kael placed a new rock on top of the boulder.

He chose it carefully, dense, smooth, the kind that didn’t crumble from bad contact. He set it down flat so it wouldn’t roll, then adjusted it again, annoying himself with the precision. His hands hovered a moment above it, and he forced them still.

And instead of a finger, he placed his knuckles against it.

Not a punch. Not a strike. Contact. Pressure. Like he was trying to push something through a keyhole without breaking the door.

He remembered the sensation of when he used his gauntlets, and how the runes translated his internal energy into spells.

He didn’t have runes now. No metal lanes, no carved Tongue of Gods to do the thinking for him.

So he gave himself a crutch that wasn’t really a crutch.

What if he, for the briefest, most foolish instance, imagined the rock in front of him as not a rock, but a rune?

Something that could accept input. Something with a "structure" that could be read, invaded, and overwritten.

Just then, the energy that rushed out from his fist embedded itself into the rock, and it pulverized itself into debris and dust.

The rock didn’t explode outward the way his sloppy attempts usually did. It didn’t get launched off the boulder. It didn’t skitter away.

It collapsed. From the inside. Like it had been hollowed in a blink.

Dust poured down around his knuckles, gritty and warm. Kael’s wrist tingled, and his forearm felt that odd aftershock, like the Ki had left him and came back slightly different.

Not only that, but the boulder underneath it cracked.

A sharp tink of stress ran through stone. A hairline fracture crawled outward from where his knuckles had been, spidering across the boulder’s surface in a thin, branching line.

Kael pulled his hand back and stared, breathing hard for a reason that wasn’t exhaustion.

It worked.

Not cleanly, not exactly like the Fist King did it, but it worked.

"Hmm, different way, but the same concept. Good. That’s acceptable." The Fist King said.

The approval landed like a weight lifting off Kael’s shoulders. Not fully, his master didn’t do "fully", but enough that Kael’s scowl loosened into something almost human.

"Really?"

Kael asked it before he could stop himself. He didn’t trust compliments in the tower. Compliments were usually bait, or a prelude to getting kicked in the ribs.

"Yes, why? Do you want more training?"

The Fist King’s tone made it clear what the answer should be.

"No, I’m exhausted," Kael said as he looked at the building he had just completed. With all two stories of it, beds, chairs, walls, ceiling, and all.

The house sat a short distance away, ugly in that practical way, built from trunks and planks, joined with stubborn effort and a lot of trips up the slope. It wasn’t "nice." It was functional. A shelter that didn’t leak. A place where Kael could sleep without waking up half-buried in rainwater. A place that smelled like sap and smoke and sweat.

And looked at the faraway forest that became even further away since he carved a great deal of those trees for this house as he tracked up and down the slope.

For a year and some.

The forest line had retreated like a defeated army. Stumps dotted the lower hill like scars. Kael had hauled those logs with rings on his wrists that made every lift feel like punishment. He’d done it anyway, because his master had demanded a "home," and because Kael had learned fast that complaining only bought him new ways to suffer.

He then looked at his toned body, the massive rings on his wrists and feet, and sighed.

The rings had grown with him. What once felt like iron cuffs now looked like deliberate restraint, thicker, heavier, carved with faint lines that caught the light when he moved. His muscles were corded and dense, not inflated. His hands were rougher than ever, calluses layered like armor. Even standing still, he felt coiled.

"What’s next?" Kael asked.

There it was, the instinct that wouldn’t die. The tower had taught him that a pause was temporary. Even resting was a strategy. He needed to know what pain was scheduled next.

"I thought you were done..." the Fist King replied.

Kael didn’t like the way he said it. Like "Done" was a word that didn’t belong in Kael’s life.

"There is always something..."

Kael said it softly, almost like a superstition. The moment you believed you were safe, the tower reminded you you weren’t.

"No, there isn’t," the Fist King said.