Sunset bled into dusk, and dusk sank past midnight, yet the clang of steel rang across the Everhart Training Arena.
People began to watch as Joji sparred without end.
The gardener stood with trowel in hand. The maids clutched their aprons, stained with flour.
Daisy kept refilling his pitcher when she could. Lips pursed with worry.
She watched every exchange, every hard eting of steel on steel, and each strike landed in her chest as if the knights were hamring her heart flat.
None of the knights eased. rcy was not what they were here to practice.
To soften now would not only stain their own nas.
It would spit on the virtue they claid to uphold, that very iron tenacity they preached.
Aurelio, the knight in battle with Joji, saw a small opening. He feinted a lunge, then kicked him in the side.
Joji rolled across the stone arena, his body thrown like a used rag.
Head Knight Gregorius still wore his stern expression as he watched.
His hands moved chanically as he raised them and announced.
"Victory to Knight Aurelio. Next."
Joji barely heard it due to fatigue. His eyes wanted to close and never open again.
Still, he forced his lids up to look at the Sir Engine panel through lashes that kept slipping shut.
{asure of Completion: 81 of 100}
Joji forced himself to stand. His hands shook, but he clenched one into a fist to hide it.
He could not feel his arms, could not feel his legs, could not feel much of anything except the strange dead numbness.
Eighty one. That number should have ant sothing. Instead it only showed him the distance left.
He was beyond spent. No amount of water could top off a body that had bottod out its stamina.
"Anselm of Everhart. No surna," the knight said.
Across from Joji, Anselm did not attack at once.
He knew Joji had been clinging to willpower since the seventieth round.
"Are you still fit to fight?" Anselm asked, concern plain beneath his discipline. "Can you hold your ground?"
"I. I am," Joji replied, conserving even his words as he pushed through.
Head Knight Gregorius started toward them, counting the bouts in his head.
He gave Joji a breather, a short mont of silence.
After a dozen breaths, Joji took a stance and introduced himself.
"Joji of Sins Crossroads."
As the Head Knight’s hand lowered, Joji moved first. He lunged.
Anselm tried to pivot, but Joji jumped and drove an overhead slash down.
The blows ca heavy, but Anselm was unfazed. He let his sword push him down.
Then his legs flared with the Everhart Tempest Arts.
The montum of the blow above halted as Anselm’s legs acted as a spring.
Joji still tried to win. Green aura flared wildly on the training sword, and he let his own blade break.
The blade chipped and cracked. Joji let his pauldron bite into Anselm’s countering blade.
His broken edge aid for the neck.
Then Head Knight Gregorius raised his hands.
"Draw."
{asure of Completion: 82 of 100}
Anselm was not a prideful man. He thought it was his win, then he realized sothing.
He was not as hungry as Joji to win. He gave Joji a silent thanks in his mind and moved on.
Joji bent and picked up the broken sword and the shards.
He forced himself back to the center of the training yard.
Another knight stepped forward and gave his na before the steel even settled.
"Theobald of Everhart," the man announced.
Theobald did not raise his blade. He stood and waited, giving Joji a little ti to rest.
At the edge of the stone arena, Daisy clutched the hem of her dress until her knuckles whitened.
She bit her lip hard enough to taste iron. She knew Joji’s stubbornness.
She knew that if she told him to stop, he might stop, and hate her for it afterward, hate her for stealing the last thing he could still call his own.
"Joji, please, be alright," she breathed, so low the words barely left her.
Joji had been an old man before all this. He saw Daisy’s eyes and chuckled. It was sincere and pure, sothing that made him warm inside.
What more, she was pretty. Hazel eyes, curly hair, curves in the right places.
Even the original Joji had not even given the woman a kiss, not even held her hands.
’Ain’t complaining, though. She’s my type. Definitely a big W.’ Joji muttered with a little grin.
He was trying to gas himself up on the scraps of energy he had left.
Joji took a deep breath and looked at Theobald.
"Joji of Si..." The words cut off.
The back of his head suddenly felt too light, like sothing essential had slipped loose.
The training sword that had once weighed twenty pounds might as well have been a stone pillar in his hands.
Black crept in at the edges of his vision. His knees stopped listening. His body refused him.
’Please... I’m already... So. Close.’
He tipped toward the ground. The knights saw Joji’s face and understood.
It was the slack pull of a man about to fall from extre fatigue.
Yet his jaw was still clenched. A body that had surrendered before his spirit did.
Then he straightened. He stood back up as if pulled by a string no one else could see.
His eyes opened. Alert. They were hollow, vacant, the look of a man who beca a shell of a machine.
Inside his skull, the Sir System chid.
{Summon the Ergency Sir Engine Reserves...}
{I shall take the helm of this weary body and see this mission done.}
{Chances to Snatch Life from Death grows thin.}
{Three were set. One is spent, two still remain.}
As the Sir Engine took over, Joji found himself trapped inside his own body.
There was no pain. No breath. No weight. He floated in a dark space that felt like the inside of a closed eye.
Ahead of him hung a single screen, showing him only what it wanted him to see.
His gaze slid off it anyway, dragged by words that burned across the dark like stamped iron.
Joji was no poet, but he had finished college. He knew what those lines ant.
"This..." His tongue felt useless, like it belonged to soone else.
’Spare lives? So he had died?’
Questions popped one after another. He then voiced his doubt to the Sir Engine.
"Sir Engine, just to confirm, I literally died from exhaustion? Just like that?"
{You are not dead, yet I have taken up the helm, of mine own accord.}
{The reason is plain enough. In place of sparring three days in succession, you chose to have it finished in a single sitting.}
Relief washed over Joji, but more questions rose with it.
If he spent these two remaining chances, what then? Would he co back to Earth? Would he wake in his old body again?
He rembered the tanker again, the sudden bloom of fire, the roar that swallowed the street.
He had been dead center, swallowed whole.
’What am I even going back to though?’ he thought.
However, Joji had not voiced any of the questions anymore.
He wasn’t certain if there was a limit the Sir Engine could answer.
Joji chose to play safe right now.
Not because he was afraid, but he did not want to take the chances on a maybe.
Outside, the knights saw the change before any words were spoken.
The air around Joji felt intimidating, as if he were only a flickering ember hiding a raging inferno right below the earth.
Hands slid to hilts without anyone giving the order.
Joji, possessed now by Sir Engine, lifted both hands in a placating gesture.
He shook his head once, slowly, then bowed.
"I have been lacking in courtesy," he said to the crowd, his vowels polished and old-fashioned.
He bowed once more, then deeper to the man before him.
"Sir Theobald, pray forgive . I have kept you waiting."
Theobald blinked at the voice. Everyone did. It was Joji’s mouth, but the sound that ca out carried another weight, older and steadier.
Still, Theobald gathered himself and gave a stiff wave.
"This knight bears no pettiness in his heart toward you. Think no more on it."
Both n turned their eyes to Head knight Gregorius.
"Start," Gregorius said.
Theobald moved at once, a lunge like an arrow released from a bow, his aura pulling in fast as wind in a narrow alley.
Steel flashed. His aura slashing diagonally, the steel even sang at how fast he ca.
Yet Theobald struck only an afterimage. Theobald’s blade cut empty air.
Then cold steel kissed the his nape, gentle as a lover’s finger.
Joji stood behind him, close enough that Theobald could feel the heat of him.
"A splendid match, Sir Theobald."
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