27 Chapter 6.1

Hell was real, and it was contained within the castle's training ground. I have no idea how people can do this to themselves willingly for a lifetime. I found the entire process to be miserable, and the thought that people enjoyed this horrified me.

I found myself wandering back to my bedroom in a daze after my shower for the day, glad to finally be able to stop and read one of my books. My clean room was the one thing that I appreciated from the conditions given, and I would take advantage of it for as long as it was physically possible. The clothes were uncomfortable at best, the fighting was miserable, and life simply was currently awful overall.

My bones always felt as if they had been removed by a particularly violent torturer by the end of every session, and it took everything I had not to fall onto my bed in a state of utter stupor before I could take a shower and remove the caked-on layers of sweat and dirt that I had accumulated over the day.

It had only been about two weeks since my intensive training started and nothing has improved. It seemed wildly unfair that I had to suffer so much- every protagonist in the stories I have read made it seem so easy to pick up useful skills, and the fact that I couldn't felt like a failing on my part. I had found my quest, and unlike before I was motivated to pick up the skills of swordplay. It seemed only reasonable that I would be able to pick this up just as easily. But it appears that every teacher I had ever had was quite correct- books were stories and life was the reality I had to live with.

After the first day of training, Captain Orion had abandoned me to the wolves. He refused to teach me personally and he allowed anyone who wanted to watch to come in without question. My motivation was crushed anew every day as a lesser ranked guardsman yelled insults at me while the onlookers cheered and jeered at my mistakes and pain. The entire process was humiliating, and in the end, the only thing that kept me going was feelings of spite and stubbornness.

It was rare for me to see the Captain after the first day, but I swear I could feel his gaze on me from somewhere every lesson. He was always gone when I went to check the area from which I felt his gaze, but the feelings of judgment and disappointment emanating from him remained to poison the general area. Somehow the disappointment hurt more than all of the yelling and the jeers combined.

At this point, I was hanging on out of sheer stubbornness. I knew I was awful and I wasn't going to get any better, but there was nothing in me that would allow me to surrender at this point. I would become as good as I possibly could even if I had nothing keeping me going but spite, and I would be victorious.

Through all this, one thing kept me going: the search for answers. I didn't know why I felt such a strong need to find Cinder, but it had become an obsession that carried me through every bump in the road I had come to so far. The search for Cinder had become my quest, and I was the protagonist that would see it to its end.