(Come again. This time with everything you have got.)

Tetra said to Hou Yi after putting him on the ground.

A few months had passed since Tetra became his sparring partner, and the difference was already showing. He was faster, his movements had more intent behind them, and the accumulated experience had started filling in gaps that books alone never could.

Hou Yi got back up and closed in on Tetra with a dagger in hand. He drove it toward her face, aiming for the eye, and she deflected it without much effort.

He kept moving, rotating his body and feeding his momentum into his left elbow. She caught that too.

A palm strike to his ribs forced the air clean out of his lungs. He spat on the ground and felt something crack in his side, followed by a sharp, deep surge of pain.

He went down again.

(Why are you still hesitating?)

Hou Yi let out a short laugh from the ground.

"Of all the things I am not, that is not one of them. If I were hesitating I certainly wouldn't be lying here with a fracture in my side."

(Is that so. Then walk me through your last attack. The thought process behind that brilliant attack.)

Hou Yi was not sure why she was asking but answered anyway.

"My first move was simple, just trying to stick the dagger in your eye. When that failed I went for a rotational elbow to catch you off guard. That didn't work either."

(Why the eye.)

"No particular reason. Just instinct."

(The extraocular muscles are the fastest reflexes in the human body.)

She said, pointing to her own eye.

(If you genuinely intend to land a strike, your best chance is to stay out of your opponent's line of sight until you are close enough that evasion is no longer possible. Coming in a straight line the way you did gives your opponent every advantage. And even if you had landed it, it is unlikely to be fatal. They back up or step sideways, you disable vision on one side, and now you are completely open to whatever comes back at you.)

(With what you know, I am certain you already understood all of that before you attacked.)

"This is hand-to-hand combat. The majority of people out there are going to be fighting with Chi. And even those who aren't, I doubt any of them would be composed enough to counter right after taking a blade to the eye."

(And that is exactly where you are wrong. You do not know your enemy. You do not know their capabilities or what they are thinking. Only a fool assumes the person in front of them is weak.)

Hou Yi sat with that for a moment.

(And none of that explains how pathetically weak that elbow was.)

"That was improvisation. The first attack failed, I had to come up with something on the spot."

(Your footwork was completely misaligned. With the way your body was rotating and your weight distributed the way it was, you might not have shattered an egg if one was sitting right in front of you. You could have retracted the dagger on the way through and drawn it across the back of my neck. I know you are capable of that movement.)

Hou Yi stared at the dagger in his hand.

Just the thought of deliberately cutting across someone's neck sat uneasily in his chest.

"Isn't that a bit much? Cutting someone across the neck? I want to win a fight, not necessarily kill the person. Not if the situation doesn't call for it."

Tetra shook her head.

(If your attack is not meant to finish your opponent, you are better off not making it at all. Win or lose is beside the point.)

(Let me tell you something. Two rulers, one ambitious and honorable, the other weak-willed and ruthless. The honorable king won battle after battle, but every time he defeated an enemy he let them go, believing mercy was strength. In a single night, every enemy he had ever spared rose against him together. His kingdom fell, his family was taken, and everything he had built turned to ash.)

(The weak-willed king won far fewer battles. But every enemy he defeated stayed defeated. He was feared, avoided, underestimated, and he died on his throne with his kingdom intact.)

(We angels are superior to you humans not only because of our power, but because we are not subject to the emotions that cloud judgment. Remember this: the value of a life is nothing more than your own consciousness of its importance.)

Hou Yi was quiet.

He understood the lesson right away. That was not the problem. The problem was that understanding something and being willing to act on it were completely different. He had been alone for more than a decade. In all that time, killing had stayed an abstract thing, something in the pages of books, something that happened in other people's stories.

Now Tetra was telling him to build his instincts around it before the moment came where he had no choice.

He looked at the dagger.

"I too will not hesitate, when I have things I want to protect."

It came out quieter than he intended. Not a declaration so much as something he was working out in real time, saying it aloud to make it real.

Tetra held his gaze for a moment, then looked away without a word.

From her, that was as close to approval as anything.

...

"Again!"

Hou Yi shouted as he pushed himself back up off the ground.

Dust and bruises covered most of him.

Something else had started showing too. Subtle but there. Although physical change during the time stop was not supposed to happen, the rules were clearly not absolute. His hair had thickened noticeably, and his beard and mustache had come in to a visible degree. A strange inconsistency, while his muscles stayed locked in their teenage state, the dead keratin kept advancing quietly, giving him the look of a weathered traveler wearing a boy's body.

The angel standing a few feet away raised her arm, and a flash of light streaked toward him a moment later, catching him full in the chest and knocking him flat.

Sigh.

Hou Yi lay where he had landed and made no move to get up.

I can track the trajectory. I can see it coming. But this body just will not move fast enough.

(Don't be too hard on yourself. It is already remarkable that you can trace a guiding bolt at all.)

"Which I could only do after... four years? Five?"

(Six years, seven months, and four days.)

"That is so much worse."

(As I have said before, a guiding bolt does not carry much raw power, but in terms of speed only a handful of skills can match it and fewer still can surpass it. Dodging one would require either magical enhancement or physical augmentation well beyond what you currently have. Rest. We can go again tomorrow.)

Hou Yi got to his feet slowly.

"You don't understand."

"Everyone is out there right now. The whole population, learning to channel Chi, getting stronger by the day, while I am stuck here with no way to improve my body physically. If technique and instinct and reflex are the only ground I can actually gain, I want to be so far ahead of everyone else in those areas that it doesn't matter."

"So let's go again."

With sparring, projectile evasion, and stealth training all available to him now, Hou Yi finally had the real-world practice he had needed. The angel could deflect or avoid anything he threw at her and put a counter on him before he had time to reset. It did not matter whether he came with a weapon or empty-handed, nothing was landing.

It frustrated him deeply, more than he had expected it to. He had been desperate for a real sparring partner, but being consistently dismantled by someone operating on a completely different level grated on him to the point where he started cutting into his reading time just to train more.

Eventually he asked her to strip out whatever magical enhancements she was running and fight him purely on technique and movement, no power behind the attacks, the same restriction applied to himself. As close to a level field as they could get.

Angels were beings built from raw magic. Removing all her enhancements was not entirely possible since some were woven into her at a foundational level. As for Hou Yi, his attacks were not fatal by any stretch, but he still pulled them when they looked like they might actually connect, partly to keep things fair and partly because of his own ego.

...

It turned out to be far more useful than the old arrangement where she simply deflected at the last second and countered on the spot.

He was learning twice as much from each session. And humans were built to either progress or decline, there was no neutral, so as long as the determination held, the improvement followed. For Hou Yi, it held.

In the twenty-first year he landed a hit. A side kick that caught the angel in the ribs after a chain of feints that finally drew her weight the wrong way.

For a being whose primary strength was magic, a battle angel with most of her buffs stripped was still a serious opponent. Landing a clean strike on one was not a small thing.

The year after that he went deep into the mechanics of the feint itself, pulling his movements back, taking out the excess, making as little telegraphed as possible while giving up as little stamina as he could manage. Economy of motion. Making each movement do more work.

Four more years and countless sessions of grinding through failure, Hou Yi had reached a point where he was holding his own against her in extended exchanges. Going toe-to-toe with an angel fighting without magical offense and most of her buffs removed, and overpowering her at times.

"Cast something on me. Doesn't matter if it kills me. Something of a common attribute, I want to see if my body can build up resistance."

He wanted to test something. If he exposed his body to magic repeatedly, something that could actually kill him, would it eventually adapt? Build tolerance? He was not going to die here anyway, so when else was he going to get the chance to find out?

The question visibly shook her.

When she had first offered to spar with him she had not seen this coming.

Physical attacks could be scaled. A punch was strong or weak based on how much force and intent went into it, easy enough to control. Magic did not work that way. Casting a skill meant putting a set amount of Chi into an incantation, and once it was cast the damage output was already fixed, built into the skill itself. The majority of her skills were built to kill. There was no dialing them back to a non-lethal level.

In short, she would almost certainly kill him.

For the next few days Hou Yi kept pushing. She kept refusing, and rightfully so. She reminded him each time that magic resistance was not something the body could develop through exposure alone, that the right time to pursue it was after the time stop ended and he could learn it properly.

But Hou Yi had been stranded alone on a planet for decades and still had every piece of his mind working against him. Even an angel eventually ran out of ground to hold.

(Fine. I will use one skill, this once, to test whether your idea has any merit. Something I consider unlikely to be fatal, enough to bring you to the edge but not over it. I will monitor what happens after.)

Hou Yi gave a firm nod.

"That is all I am asking."

(The skill is called Gravity Strain. Weaker than single-target offensive skills but stronger than recon-class ones like guiding bolt. At worst it should leave you subdued and unable to move. It should not kill you.)

...

Tetra raised her arm and released the skill.

The pressure hit instantly, slamming down around Hou Yi from every direction at once. His knees buckled and he hit the ground in quick succession, unable to slow it.

It did not stop there.

In a split second the full weight of it came down and drove him into the earth. Bones snapped. Muscle tore. The descent was total and immediate.

Tetra cut the skill the moment she saw what was happening, but it was already done.

What was left of Hou Yi on the ground was barely recognizable.

(!!!..)