Chapter 520 | The Renewable Resource

Chapter 520: 520 | The Renewable Resource

The resistance bands hit different when Vale stopped pretending to be nice.

Bronze tier meant the tension scaled to match my stats, which meant my C-rank strength had to fight for every inch of movement while my off hand held a spiral of condensed stamina that wanted to collapse every time my concentration slipped. The first ten reps burned. The second ten made me question my life choices. By rep thirty I had stopped counting and started surviving.

"Spiral dropped," Vale said from his chair. "That one doesn’t count."

"It flickered."

"Flickered is dropped. Start over."

I started over. The spiral reformed in my palm, blue-white and unstable, a basketball of compressed energy that cost me stamina just to maintain. Wave Motion was supposed to be my trump card. Vale had turned it into a torture device.

"You’re thinking about the pain," he said. "Stop thinking about the pain. Pain is information. Process it and move on."

"Easy for you to say. Nothing touches you."

"Everything touches me. I just don’t let it land." He set his tablet down and walked over, standing close enough that I could smell his expensive cologne and the coffee on his breath. "Again. Fifty. Off hand. And this time I want you to hold the spiral at level three intensity the entire set."

"Level three will eat through my stamina in four minutes."

"Then finish in three."

I finished in two forty-seven, and by the end my arm was shaking so hard the spiral looked like a strobe light, and my vision had gone grey at the edges, and Vale was already pointing at the next station.

"Legs," he said. "Squats. Same deal. Spiral in your off hand. Fifty reps. No drops."

"I’m going to pass out."

"You’re not going to pass out. You’re going to get close to passing out, and then you’re going to drink some milk and heal yourself, and then we’re going to do it again, because that’s the entire point of having you as a student." He smiled, and it was the smile of someone who had found a new toy and intended to break it. "Most students I have to hold back. Most students I worry about permanent damage. You?" He gestured at me with his coffee mug. "You’re a renewable resource. I can run you into the ground and you can fix yourself with a single cup of essence. Do you understand what that means for your training?"

I understood. I understood that the gloves were off, that Vale had been pulling punches for six weeks while he assessed what I could handle, and now that he knew I had a reset button he intended to push me past every limit I thought I had.

"Squats," I said.

"Squats."

The squats were worse than the bands because they used bigger muscles, and bigger muscles complained louder, and by rep twenty I could feel my quads threatening to simply detach themselves from my skeleton and file for divorce. The spiral in my off hand pulsed with every descent, and Vale watched me like a scientist observing an experiment that might explode.

Rep thirty. My legs were on fire.

Rep thirty-five. The fire had spread to my lower back.

Rep forty. I couldn’t feel my feet.

Rep forty-five. The spiral dropped.

"Start over."

"Vale."

"Start over or I add another fifty."

I started over. Somewhere around rep twelve my body stopped complaining and entered a state of pure mechanical function, the way it did during the worst parts of gate runs when conscious thought became a luxury I couldn’t afford. The spiral held. My legs moved. Vale drank his coffee and made notes and occasionally said "good" in a tone that suggested he was grading a mediocre essay.

Rep fifty landed with a sound that was half grunt and half prayer, and I collapsed onto the mat with my thighs screaming and my stamina gauge somewhere in the red zone.

"Drink," Vale said.

He tossed me a cup. Not a regular cup, one of the special containers Yumi had designed for essence storage, insulated and sealed and filled with the Silver-tier milk I’d banked from last night’s session with Naomi. I cracked the seal and drank, and the System pinged in my vision.

[Consuming stored essence: Silver-tier]

[+25 points per mouthful]

[Lifespan extended: +6 hours]

[Physical recovery initiated]

The effect was immediate. My legs stopped burning. My stamina gauge climbed from red to yellow to green. The grey at the edges of my vision cleared, replaced by the sharp clarity that came with a full tank and a functioning body.

"Fascinating," Vale said. He was watching me with both eyes visible, the sunglasses pushed up onto his forehead. "The recovery is almost instantaneous. No residual muscle fatigue. No microtear accumulation." He walked closer, studying me like I was a specimen. "If I pushed you to complete muscular failure and you drank immediately after, would the damage reverse entirely?"

"I don’t know."

"Let’s find out."

The next hour was the worst of my life.

Vale pushed me to failure on every exercise. Arms. Legs. Core. Back. Every major muscle group, driven past exhaustion into the territory where my body simply stopped responding to commands. And every time I hit that wall, he handed me another cup, and I drank, and the wall rebuilt itself somewhere further away, and we started again.

By seven AM I had consumed four cups of stored essence and gained more strength than the previous two weeks of normal training combined. The System notifications blurred together in my vision.

[Strength training detected]

[Limit Breaker multiplier active: 3x]

[Progress: Strength [B] ▰▰▱▱▱▱▱▱▱▱ (2/10)]

[Endurance training detected]

[Limit Breaker multiplier active: 3x]

[Progress: Endurance [C] RANK UP READY]

[Agility training detected]

[Limit Breaker multiplier active: 3x]

[Progress: Agility [C] ▰▰▱▱▱▱▱▱▱▱ (2/10)]

"Rank up," I said, staring at the notification. "Endurance is ready to rank up."

"Then rank up." Vale was making notes on his tablet, fingers moving fast. "Pull the trigger. Let’s see what happens."