A true warrior

Hayato slowly opened his eyes, facing a ceiling that was very familiar to him already. Once he came back to his senses, fully awake, he felt a little bit of pain throughout his body, but nothing major.

He got up from the bed with no difficulty, unlike in many previous days when he would barely be able to blink an eye.

Hayato spun his shoulders and stretched his arms to different sides, testing the lubrification of his joints and the current state of his muscles. Everything seemed to be ok as well.

"Good, good...", he muttered as a small smile appeared on his face. It was a smile of relief. He finally would have a little bit of time to feel less like trash and more like a healthy and strong young boy.

Now, there was one more test remaining. The last and most important one.

'Daichi has been aiming for my legs more often in the past weeks, so they are sore 90% of the time. However, now that I took the time to rest them and could time his attacks way better than before, I hope they are not as bad...'

Hayato sat on the edge of the mattress and took a deep breath, preparing himself to propel his body upward. He needed to prepare his mind for such a simple task as getting up due to the pain he felt while doing so on many occasions. He had to have mental fortitude if he was to feel the same pain he did previously.

Hayato gritted his teeth and got up, standing on his feet for a few seconds before starting to walk around the room.

"Yes!" he closed both his hands into fists and threw them upward, celebrating his good condition.

Hayato heard the door of his bedroom opening with a sound creaking. He turned over immediately.

There stood Hina, glaring at him with a small pout.

"Ah... Good morning, Hina", Hayato waved.

She put her index finger in front of her lips...

"Hmph!" then snorted as if energetically scolding Hayato.

The boy stood there with a guilty expression and scratched the back of his head.

"I am sorry. I know you don't like it... B-But I was loud for a reason! See? I am walking and moving around just fine. I am 100% again, just like the day before I started my training with Daichi. Isn't it great?"

She stared at him from top to bottom as if analyzing whether he said the truth or not. Of course, the most evident proof that he was fine was the fact that he could stand by himself or celebrate so loudly. A few weeks ago, Hayato would barely be able to talk, let alone yell.

Hina nodded her head, softening her expression. Hayato took that as the acceptance of his apologies, so he got relieved.

Then, the woman showed him a spatula she held in her right hand. With the left hand, she pointed at the spatula, then to the lower floor with her thumb.

"Oh, so you did breakfast? Thank you very much. Soon I will go downstairs."

Hina nodded, then left the room.

'She is being way more proactive these days. It looks like she is getting used to being around us. But... Daichi still didn't tell me the reason why she is here, the purpose of forcing her to stick around with us. Besides, I don't know why she doesn't try to retaliate or run away. I never saw her even trying...'

Hina's very existence and utility were still a mystery to Hayato that sometimes made him spend several hours of the night awake and worried.

Sure, Daichi was training him just fine. The training was showing its results faster than Hayato expected. He was a humorous man, sometimes a bit contemplative or overly serious. He showed to be wise and preferred calmness over turmoil. Judging by his hobbies (fishing and gardening), which Hayato saw him doing every single day, his patience and attention were top-notch. He looked like a normal old man in his years of retirement. If not for his strangely acute ability to cause harm to others and the assumed hatred for the empire, Daichi would pretty much be an ordinary person.

Nevertheless, it was this exact wavering between ordinary and dangerous that made Hayato so wary of Daichi's true intentions toward not only Hina but him as well.

Such contradictions in his personality made Daichi hard to read. Hayato never knew what he was thinking or planning to do. His destiny after he finished that training was uncertain, too.

Sometimes, he felt more like a paw than a disciple, and the same goes for Hina.

'Argh! I guess I will only frustrate myself if I keep thinking about such things. I will never get to a proper answer only by overthinking. However, Daichi won't disclose anything to me. He keeps an eye on me and Hina to prevent us from talking too much... or to prevent her from doing something to me.

'And that's the other issue here. Daichi says that Hina is dangerous, even though she doesn't seem in the least. But Daichi doesn't seem dangerous, too. Nonetheless, this old man killed so many robbers so easily and beat the shit out of me every day. I don't know what to believe anymore.'

Hayato looked at his own hands. They were now very calloused and thicker than before. Using a heavy wooden sword every single day made it to him.

His hands were not the only thing that had changed on him, however. His entire body answered the intense training he had to go through day after day.

'When I noticed that I was lacking swinging strength, I began to timber every morning and exercise with my body weight to gain more muscle mass. I also increased my weight not to get knocked back by Daichi's attacks. Finally, I created the habit of running around the perimeter and swimming in the lake, thus increasing my stamina.

'Without realizing it, Daichi's strange training program, which only consists of fighting against me and making me learn from my own mistakes by myself, made me gradually improve. All the power I obtained was due to my ability of learning and my good memory.

'Because I could see my own improvement, I unconsciously began to trust Daichi more and more. These past three months living with him and Hina also made me get more relaxed around him. Only now did I realize how much biased I got.'

Hayato opened his eyes not only from his heavy sleep that morning. He opened them to reality. Finally, he felt like he could think with enough clarity.

"I should go get some food..." he thought as he looked out of the window, seeing the sunlight invading his room through the small openings of the curtains.

"It's about time to go train again."

****

Hayato stood in the middle of the wide yard in front of the house. The emerald green grass was still spotted with the redness of his blood from previous fights. The soil had footprints all over the place. Any plant that dared to be in the way got trampled mercilessly and broken.

The boy took his sword from the ground and stared at the person in front of him, his master. The latter had the same unfazed expression as always, completely nonchalant, though his eyes remained sharper than razors. Before, Hayato found that kind of expression quite disturbing and unusual, but he grew accustomed to it.

'That's how he is when he is going to get serious about something. I can assume that he will give it his all. He recognized that I am not the same injured and inexperienced young boy I was.'

Hina stood on the veranda of the house. Sometimes, she came to watch their sparring, maybe to kill time, maybe because she was worried about Hayato... or, then, she hoped that Hayato would finally land a blow on Daichi, which surely would satisfy her greatly.

'Well, I think it's the latter or the first. Or both. I can overlook the second option. There is no way in hell that she is actually worried... Or is there?'

Hayato shook his head as strongly as he could, then took a deep breath.

'Forget about this shit. You need to focus! Today is the day you will finally land a blow on him and go to the next stage of your training. After three months, I finally feel capable of, at least, grazing my sword on his skin!'

Hayato took a fighting stance while always staring into Daichi's eyes. No matter how sharp the latter's eyes were, Hayato learned that he shouldn't stop staring at him no matter what. Once he dodged his eyes, he would lose.

'A battle to the death doesn't have space for cowardice... And that's why you would lose anyway, even if you decided to fight against your demons in your past life.'

Hayato understood now that the only thing that kept him weak and created a space between him and the power he always wanted, was his own mind. Fear, frustration, anxiety, insecurity... all of them stood in his way like thick barriers. However, he broke each of these barriers during those three months.

Now, he felt like a true warrior.