In Kuroinu

They'd given me clothes overnight, which was good because walking into a sword-training session in jeans and Nikes would have been a different kind of humiliating than the one I was about to experience. The shirt was linen, loose, cream-colored. The pants were some kind of treated leather that fit well enough. Boots that laced up past my ankles. I looked like a low-budget fantasy extra and I'd take it over looking like a tourist.

The training yard behind the temple was a flat packed-dirt rectangle bordered by a low stone wall. Wooden weapon racks along one side, a few straw targets at the far end that had been shot full of holes. Llusse's work, probably. Morning sun hit the yard at a shallow angle and threw long shadows off the wall.

Filia was already there. She'd swapped the plate armor from yesterday for a lighter combat outfit, padded leather over chain, and she was stretching her sword arm in a way that made it clear she did this every morning. Her sword was racked but within reach. A second, wooden practice blade lay on the dirt near my feet.

"Pick it up," she said.

I picked it up. It was heavier than it looked. The balance was wrong for my hand, or my hand was wrong for the balance, and when I took a test swing the weight pulled me forward and I had to widen my stance to stop myself from stumbling.

Llusse, perched on the stone wall with her bow across her knees, snorted.

"We summoned this," she said. Flat. Like she was confirming a fact she already knew and was still disappointed by.

"I told you I can't fight." I adjusted my grip. Tried another swing. It was marginally less terrible. "I was pretty clear about that."

"You were clear about a lot of things." Llusse's chin was on her fist and her green eyes tracked me with the focused contempt of a cat watching a bug. "Being good at any of them wasn't one."

"Llusse," Filia said.

"What? He said it himself."

Filia ignored her and walked toward me. She stopped close enough that the scar tissue on her knuckles was visible, calluses layered on calluses from years of sword work.

"Your grip is wrong. Here." She reached for my hands and adjusted my fingers on the wooden hilt. Fingers repositioning mine like she was rearranging a tool rack. "Wider. The top hand controls, the bottom hand guides. You're choking it."

"Story of my life."

She didn't laugh. "Again."

I swung. Better this time, or at least the sword went where I wanted it to go and I didn't stumble. Filia watched, mouth flat, then stepped behind me.

"Your hips are wrong."

Her hand landed on my hip. Left side, just above the bone, firm grip through the linen shirt. She pushed, rotating me into a stance that must have been correct because the practice sword suddenly felt lighter. The balance settled.

"There. That's your center. Feel it?"

"Yeah." Her hand was warm. Her palm pressed into the gap between my hip and my ribcage and she was standing close enough that her breath grazed the back of my neck when she spoke. The leather of her outfit creaked when she leaned in.

She didn't move it.

Then she pulled her hand away, cleared her throat, and walked back to face me.

"Again."

I swung six more times. Each one was bad in a slightly different way. The seventh was passable. Filia nodded once and moved on to footwork drills.

For the next hour I learned exactly how bad at swordfighting a modern human with no training could be. The answer was very bad. Filia didn't sugarcoat it and I didn't need her to. My swings were slow and my blocks were late. She threw practice strikes at me that a child could have parried and I missed half of them. My footwork would have gotten me killed in about four seconds against anything with teeth and a grudge.

What I was, though, was fit. I could keep going when most civilians would have been bent over gasping. My cardio was decent, my reflexes were quick even if I didn't know what to do with them, and when Filia accidentally put too much force behind a swing and the practice blade cracked against my forearm, I didn't drop my guard. I shifted my weight, kept my feet, and said "Ow."

"Sorry," Filia said. She looked startled.

"Don't be. You were testing if I'd flinch."

Her chin came up a fraction. "I wasn't testing anything."

"Sure."

Tianne was sitting at the edge of the yard on the stone wall, a leather-bound book open on her knees that she wasn't really reading. She'd looked up every time I'd taken a hit and I'd caught her reaching for her healing magic twice before realizing I wasn't actually injured.

During the water break I dropped onto the wall next to Llusse, who was still perched there, and took a long drink from a waterskin Tianne handed me. The leather was warm from her hands.

"You're terrible," Llusse said.

"I know."

"Your guard drops every time you swing."

"I know that too."

"And your footwork is like watching a drunk cow try to dance."

"A drunk cow." I wiped my mouth. "That's specific. Have you seen a lot of drunk cows?"

"I've seen a lot of useless men. You all move the same."

"And yet you keep watching."

Her ears went pink. "I'm assessing your weaknesses. There are many."

"You've been assessing for an hour. At this point it's just spectating."

Her mouth opened and she stared at me for a second. Then she slid off the wall and walked to the weapon rack, grabbed a training bow, and put three arrows into the center of the farthest target without looking at me.

I grinned. She didn't turn around.

After the break, Filia set up a formation drill. The three of them took positions: Filia forward with her sword, Llusse at range with the bow, Tianne in the back with her healing magic ready. They moved through a choreographed sequence against imaginary enemies, and I watched from the wall.

I knew this formation. I'd seen it in the source material. Filia leads, draws aggro, Llusse picks off flankers, Tianne keeps them topped up. It worked well against small groups. Against anything that hit Llusse's line while Filia was engaged, they had a blind spot on the left flank because Llusse naturally favored shooting right-to-left and there was nobody covering the gap.

In the anime, this gets them ambushed in episode three.

"Your left side is open," I said.

All three of them stopped. Filia turned to look at me.

"When Llusse shoots, she favors the right. If you're engaged front and center, nobody's watching the left approach. Anything that comes around that side has a clear path to Tianne."

Silence. Filia's eyes were sharp and her mouth was tight.

"That's a three-person party problem," I added, because the silence was getting uncomfortable. "With a fourth melee fighter on the left, or if Llusse repositioned to a wider angle, it closes up."

"Where did you learn that?" Filia's voice was careful.

"Common sense." I shrugged. "I watched you run it twice. The gap was there both times."

It wasn't common sense. It was foreknowledge from watching these three get ambushed in a cartoon. But Filia didn't need to know that, and what I'd said was also true. The gap was real. Anyone paying attention would have seen it eventually. I'd just seen it faster than I should have.

Filia looked at Llusse. Llusse was staring at me with a different expression than her usual contempt. Narrower. Thinking.

"He's right," Llusse said. She didn't sound happy about it. "I do favor right."

"I know," Filia said. "I've compensated for it. But a civilian who can't hold a sword shouldn't have noticed that after watching two drills."

I drank some water and didn't say anything.

The afternoon was a tour. Filia led, pointing out the village around the temple, the road that led to the capital, the farmland stretching south, the tree line to the east where the road curved north toward the fortress-cities. Tianne walked beside me and Llusse trailed behind, arms crossed, pretending she wasn't listening.

I knew all of it. Every road, every landmark, every geographic reference Filia made, I could have pointed to on a map before she finished her sentence. The village was the starting area from the game. The road north was the same road the party takes in the manga. The distant tree line was the edge of the Great Forest where, somewhere deep inside, the elves of Alfheim lived under a dying Holy Tree and had no idea a human male would eventually show up to change everything.

A woman with a basket of bread walked past us on the road and nodded at Filia. She had flour on her apron and a smear of it on her cheek and she was humming.

"The capital is a day's march south," Filia was saying. "Queen Sophie and the court are there. We'll report to her eventually, but our first mission is to head north toward the Shield Alliance territories. The real fighting is there."

"North," I said. "Past the fortress-cities."

"You know about the fortress-cities?"

Shit.

"You mentioned them yesterday," I said. "Seven of them, you said. Along a wall."

Filia's eyes held on me for a beat longer than casual. Then she nodded. "Yes. The Seven Shields. Each one is governed by a princess knight under High Queen Celestine's authority. The wall was built to hold back the Legion from the north."

"And we're heading there."

"Eventually. You need training first. You need to be able to survive a fight, even if you can't win one."

"Confidence-inspiring."

"I'm being realistic. You saw your own performance this morning."

"I did. I also saw your left flank."

She looked at me sideways. The corner of her mouth pulled up, held for a second, and then her face went professional again.

"Don't get ahead of yourself," she said.

We walked the perimeter of the village. The houses were wood and stone, thatch-roofed, clustered around a well in the center. Goats in a pen near the eastern edge, a smithy with a cold forge, a small shrine to the Goddess Larentia that Tianne touched gently as we passed. Her fingers brushed the carved stone and her lips moved. A quick prayer, private, over in a second.

I almost asked what she'd prayed for. Decided it was none of my business.

The sun was getting lower when we circled back. Llusse had said maybe twelve words the entire tour and ten of them had been variations on insulting my intelligence, my stamina, or my species. The other two had been "move faster." But when we reached the training yard again, she stopped at the wall and looked at me.

"Tomorrow," she said. "I'll test your eyesight. If you're going to be useless with a sword, you should at least be useful as a spotter."

"That sounded almost like a compliment."

"It wasn't." She turned away. Her ears were pink.

Tianne was smiling when I glanced at her.