Training Begins

"I will follow you… On one condition, though" Annabeth responded, her eyes sparkling like a puppy that had found a new chew-toy.

After seeing what he was capable of during the fight with Lord Ollie, Annabeth was simply astounded. She wanted his ability… its mysteries… its destructive capabilities.

"Hoh?" Canning raised an eyebrow, the excitement in Annabeth's face made her seem like she had forgotten about her father's funeral and this bothered him a little.

"Ah snap, maybe I overdid it," he inwardly thought. He wanted to distract her from the fact that her father was gone for just a little bit but now it seemed she had forgotten all about it.

"You'll have to teach me magic," Annabeth replied.

"I can't. You'll die. Did I ever tell you about the time I almost died during training?"

"I'm sure you won't let me die. And no, you didn't. I'm not really interested in hearing…" Annebeth tried to respond but was interrupted.

"Well… it was back when I was about 7 years old and I had just managed to get my master's acceptance to teach me magic. My master had decided that I should…" Canning had already started telling his story. He looked far into the distance in the same way old people do when they are lost in their thoughts about their childhood.

"You won't scare me that easily. So, is that a yes or no on trai…?"

"… that I should begin with strength training by using these really heavy bracelets. Each of them weighed like 5 Kgs at first and then…" Canning ignored Annabeth's interruption and happily continued telling his story.

Her insides were boiling at this point. She just wanted to know if he would train her or not… not about how he almost died during training.

If she had not seen how powerful he was she would have walked away in a heartbeat.

The longer the story went on the stronger her urge to just tear him into pieces grew. He was really similar to that hole punching bastard in how much he infuriated her, only that Canning used his words instead. Maybe extremely powerful people were naturally annoying to her.

Canning could sense her killing intent, but he was not really one to let an opportunity to tell a story to pass by just because someone was upset with him.

He smiled at Annabeth and finished telling his story.

***

1 year later, somewhere outside a mansion in Alpane City, Annabeth was controlling a heavy rubber ball trying to make it reach a blackboard that was 30 meters away. An elastic rubber rope attached to her and the ball was making things extremely difficult.

Looking at how much sweat she was drenched in, one would not think this was the girl's 60th day of doing this training exercise without completing it even once. Canning had only agreed to start training her for just 2 months and she already felt like he was trying to kill her.

After the two funerals had ended, Canning was eager to return to his home in Alpane City. After the confrontation with Lord Ollie, no one dared speak about the inheritance. A representative from the city of Xenotar (Lord Ollie's City) had even come to apologize for the trouble caused by one of their Lords, promising to educate them so that such events never happened again.

When Canning was about to leave for Alpane City, he had still not given Annabeth an answer on whether he agreed to her condition or not. However, her own thirst for power was more than she expected and she ended up following him anyway.

For the first 10 months, he had repeatedly avoided her training requests, saying at times that he had business to take care of while at other times avoided the topic with stories from his past.

Annabeth would practice using her own knowledge but she still felt something huge was lacking. Her heart was filled with doubt about her chances of defeating the boy who kept showing up to kill her in this life. She needed power and she needed it now. If all else fails she would not travel to that forest to face her arch-nemesis.

However, every day her desires to cause havoc would haunt her. The need to obtain power first was the only thing keeping her in check. Although she managed to avoid acting on the urges, Canning's personality always made her want to murder him.

Lord Canning tried to interact with her a lot more than she actually would have wanted. He paid too much attention to her that she could not develop any forbidden magic techniques. After all, forbidden magic was punishable by death.

***

After 10 months of pestering Canning, he finally gave in. He agreed to train her as long as she could follow his orders and complete every task he gave her without fail. Disobedience or failure of any task would mean an ending to the training.

Furthermore, he decided that he would manage all her inheritances as payment for the training until it ended. Lord Canning never worked for free.

Annabeth was overjoyed to hear this that she herself was surprised. Never had she thought that she could find joy in merely hearing about something; after all, the only other joy of hearing something she had experienced was from hearing the screams of her victims.

Little did she know at the time that she was nothing but a moth drawn to a flame. Lord Canning's training was hellish.

The first thing he did was reteach her the basics.

"Everyone thinks Tier 1 magic is the beginning of magic right? But that's wrong! There exists a Tier 0," he said on the first day of training.

"The more talented you are, the harder it is to grasp it. You're a genius at magic so I can almost say for certain that you're going to die trying to grasp it," Canning would say, his smile getting wider as though the thought brought satisfaction to him.

"You're naturally attuned to wind magic eh? Hahaha, you're definitely going to die then little one," Canning would tease.

The three months of training would involve relearning how to control small objects using magic only. This was in short Tier 2 magic (Also known as Basic control magic) with a touch of Canning's maliciousness.

A large blackboard with rings drawn in white on it like a shooting target for an archery competition had been placed 30 meters away from a line drawn on the ground which would show where Annabeth would stand. A thick elastic rubber rope of about 3 meters in length would be tied around her waist on one end and a rubber ball that looked like and weighed as much as a bowling ball would be attached to the other end.

Annabeth had to stand on the line at all times, lift the rubber ball using wind magic and control it until it touched the innermost ring on the blackboard. The blackboard would then turn yellow and signify the end of the first training. Hitting anywhere else on the board made it turn red or blue depending on what ring the ball touched.

Canning told Annabeth she had 90 days to complete the task using wind magic only and just left her with a servant to monitor her.

Annabeth felt he had underestimated her magical abilities. She would complete the task in one day, she thought.

Annabeth stood on the line, raised the rubber ball with her wind magic spells and started pushing it towards the blackboard. By the time the rubber ball reached 4 meters or so from where she stood, the rubber rope attached to her and the ball had started stretching and progress was getting harder due to elasticity effects.

After pushing the ball past 5 meters from where she stood, her control over the ball started to loosen and pushing the ball further was almost impossible. This was the effective range of her magic and the elastic rope was making things harder.

The more she struggled, the more she felt her magic being consumed. She was feeling exhausted within 10 minutes of trying and her magic was being drained quickly. In her panic, she thought of a trick to quickly finish the exercise.

If she could use her Tier 3 Wind Strike spell to launch the ball towards the blackboard, she could probably hit it, she thought. Although accuracy was not guaranteed since her control was wobbly, if she brought the ball back into the 2 meters zone, her control would stabilize and hence offer more accuracy.

Annabeth started executing her plan and it was going flawlessly until it was time to hit the ball with her Wind Strike spell. She hesitated. She wondered whether or not using Tier 3 magic would be going against any instructions Canning had given her.

"He just said to make the ball touch the blackboard in the inner ring while standing on the line… there was nothing about which Tier of magic to use," she convinced herself.

Focusing on the ball, she performed a flawless Wind Strike spell, launching the ball towards the blackboard.

She braced herself for an instant pull from the elastic rubber rope, which when it happened forced her to take a few steps forward.

She knew deep down this would automatically not count even if the ball touched the blackboard since her feet were no longer on the line.

Unfortunately for her, she had been focused on her feet that she did not see rubber rope stretch to 17 meters and then recoil, bringing the ball back with it.

The unsuspecting and tired Annabeth was hit in the stomach with a tremendous force, instantly knocking her out for 4 whole days.