Mana Reaver System-Chapter 62: Different Kind Of Hunger

The aches from the beating were gone by nightfall, smoothed away by the insidious, healing power of the stolen mana. It was a perk of the curse Eric hadn’t fully appreciated—his body was becoming resilient, quick to mend. The bruises Styles had painted on his ribs were only faint shadows. The real damage was deeper, quieter.

Lying in the dark dormitory, listening to the symphony of his roommates’ sleep, Eric felt a new kind of hunger. It wasn’t the ravenous, hollow void that demanded mana. This was sharper, more focused. A thirst for competence. Styles had danced around him like he was a training dummy. Eric’s survival instincts and stolen strength were useless if he couldn’t channel them into something that looked like skill. He couldn’t rely on playing the weakling forever. Eventually, someone would hit him hard enough that pretending to fall would turn into actually breaking.

He needed to learn how to fight. Really fight. Not the broad, basic forms Lancel taught, but the sharp, efficient language of actual conflict. The kind Silk might know.

The thought of asking Silk for combat training felt presumptuous. The man was teaching him to be a shadow, a listener. Asking for blade work now might shatter the fragile understanding between them.

But there was another option. A memory, surfacing through the pain and frustration of the afternoon: the steady, powerful clang of Borus’s hammer. The smith had spoken of a weapon’s story, of the spirit in the steel. He understood violence not as a show, but as a craft. A brutal, honest craft.

The next day was a free afternoon. Eric went to the forge not as a supplicant with a question, but with a proposition.

Borus was at his anvil, beating a glowing strip of metal into a curve that would become part of a breastplate. The rhythmic, earth-shaking CLANG... CLANG... CLANG didn’t pause as Eric approached.

Eric waited at the edge of the heat zone, the new, bare dagger a familiar weight in his inner pocket. He waited until Borus plunged the metal into the quenching trough with a furious hiss.

"What?" Borus growled, turning, his face sheened with sweat and soot.

"I need to learn," Eric said, his voice cutting through the steam.

"Learn what? How to stand there and waste my time?"

"How to use this." Eric pulled out the dagger. The bare steel caught the forge light, gleaming with a cold, hungry light. "Not how to bond with it. How to make it cut. How to make it hurt."

Borus’s eyes flicked from the dagger to Eric’s face. He saw the fading yellow on Eric’s cheekbone, the tight set of his jaw. He saw the quiet, simmering fury that wasn’t about anger, but about inadequacy.

"Academy’s full of sword-tutors," Borus grunted, turning to stoke the fire.

"They teach dueling. Form. I need to learn... forging." Eric chose the word carefully. "Taking raw material and making it into a tool that works. I’m the raw material. I’m slow. I’m clumsy with their forms. I need a different shape."

Borus was silent for a long moment, the only sound the crackle of the coals. "You want me to teach you dirty fighting."

"I want you to teach me effective fighting," Eric corrected. "The kind that happens when the rules are gone and the only principle is to walk away."

A slow, grim smile spread across Borus’s soot-stained face. It wasn’t a nice smile. "And what do I get? More of your silver?"

"I’ll work," Eric said immediately. "I’ll pump your bellows. I’ll sort your scrap. I’ll clean your shop. Every day. For an hour of your time."

Borus considered him, the grim smile lingering. "An hour of my time is worth more than an hour of your scraping. But..." He rubbed his bearded chin. "I dislike waste. And you, boy, are currently a waste of good steel." He nodded at the dagger. "Alright. We have a deal. But my lessons aren’t in a circle. And they don’t start with a bow."

He walked to a cluttered rack and pulled out two objects. They weren’t practice swords. They were short, heavy cudgels made of dense, hard oak, with leather-wrapped grips. He tossed one to Eric, who caught it awkwardly. It was much heavier than it looked.

"That’s not a dagger," Eric said.

"Principles are the same," Borus said, hefting his own cudgel. "Pointy end goes in the other man. But first, you have to be able to get it there." He pointed to the open, soot-stained yard in front of the forge. "Stand there."

Eric moved to the spot.

Borus didn’t adopt a stance. He just stood, cudgel held loosely at his side. "I’m going to hit you."

"What?"

"I’m going to walk over and hit you with this," Borus said, as if explaining the weather. "Your job is to not get hit." 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

"How do I—"

"Figure it out." And Borus moved.

It wasn’t a lightning-fast lunge. It was a deceptively simple, direct stride forward, the cudgel rising in a short, brutal arc toward Eric’s left shoulder. There was no flourish, no telegraphing. It was just... force, applied.

Eric flinched back, raising his own cudgel to block. The impact was staggering. It felt like being hit by a falling tree. The shock vibrated through his arms, numbing his fingers. He stumbled, his boots slipping on the greasy dirt.

"You blocked," Borus said, not pursuing. "Blocking is receiving the other man’s strength. Stupid. If you’re weaker, you lose." He reset. "Again."

This time, Eric tried to dodge. He sidestepped, but Borus’s blow adjusted mid-swing, clipping Eric’s ribs. The air left his lungs in a pained gasp.

"You moved where I could still reach you," Borus observed. "Moving is good. Moving to the wrong place is worse than standing still."

For the next forty-five minutes, it was a brutal, repetitive tutorial in failure. Borus attacked with simple, unadorned strikes. Eric tried to block, dodge, parry. He failed, over and over. Each impact was a lesson painted in pain. His arms were soon a network of fiery aches. A blow to the thigh sent his leg buckling. He tasted blood from where he’d bitten his cheek.

He never landed a single strike of his own. He was too busy trying to survive.

Finally, breathing heavily, sweat stinging his eyes, Eric held up a hand. Borus lowered his cudgel, not even winded.

"What’s the principle?" Borus asked, his voice a gravelly rumble.

Eric spat blood into the dirt, his mind reeling. "Don’t... be where the blow lands."

"Closer. The principle is: the fight is already over by the time the swing starts." Borus tapped his own temple with a thick finger. "It’s won here. In the seeing. You’re watching my arm. Watch my eyes. Watch my feet. The story of where I’m going to hit you is written there before my muscles move. You have to read it."

Eric thought of the reed, of listening for the subtle vibration in the water. This was the same, but for violence. Reading the intent before the action.

"Tomorrow," Borus said, turning back to his forge. "Same time. And you’ll clean the slag from the quenching pits before you go. The lesson’s free. The cleaning is for the privilege of my time."

Eric nodded, his body screaming in protest. He hurt everywhere. But as he limped toward the filthy water pits to find a shovel, a strange fire burned through the pain. It wasn’t the hunger for mana. It was the hunger for understanding. For a skill that was truly his own.

He had learned to be still. He had learned to listen. Now, he would learn to see. And then, he would learn to strike. The blank dagger against his chest felt suddenly less like a promise, and more like a student, waiting for its master to learn the first word of their shared, violent language.