Chapter 128: Stone Fist

After afternoon classes ended, Richard followed Warren down the corridor behind the gymnasium.

A handwritten poster was taped to the door. "Greenwood Combat Club" was scrawled on it in thick black marker, right next to a drawing of a clenched fist.

The drawing was crude; the five fingers varied in thickness, making it look more like a string of sausages.

Warren pushed the door open, and the mingled scent of sweat and old leather washed over them.

The club room wasn't large, roughly the size of two standard classrooms pushed together.

Two punching bags hung against the wall, and a few sets of dumbbells and barbells sat piled in a corner.

The barbell plates were all different sizes; some had even been cast out of homemade cement.

Five or six people were inside the room.

Two were hitting the bags, one was doing push-ups in the corner, and three more sat chatting on the mats.

One of the guys on the bags was heavily built, with shoulders as wide as a door.

Every punch he drove into the canvas drew a heavy, muffled thud.

"Fraser!" Warren called out to the heavily built guy.

The guy with the door-wide shoulders stopped his punches and turned around.

Fraser wiped the sweat from his face with a bandaged hand and sized Richard up.

"Who's this?"

"My classmate, Williams," Warren introduced him. "The one who took second place in the Cicero Cup."

Fraser raised an eyebrow.

"The Latin one?"

"Yeah."

Fraser looked Richard up and down, taking in his arms and shoulders for a couple of seconds.

"What are you doing at the Combat Club? You want to learn how to fight?"

"I want to borrow your equipment for strength training," Richard said honestly.

Fraser's expression shifted from scrutiny to confusion.

"Strength training?" He took in Richard's physique. "With your build..."

"I know it's a weak foundation," Richard said directly. "That's why I need the equipment."

Fraser shrugged.

"Fine. Use whatever you want."

He jerked a thumb toward the pile of dumbbells in the corner.

"Grab any dumbbell or barbell you like. Get in line if you want to hit the bags. And no eating on the mats."

"No membership dues, but it's five pence a month for maintenance. We use it to buy bandages and patch the bags."

"No problem."

"One more thing," Fraser added.

"If you get hurt in here, you're on your own. Don't go complaining to the headmaster that we beat you up."

"Understood."

Fraser nodded and turned back to pound the punching bag.

Richard walked over to the corner and picked out the lightest pair from the dumbbell pile.

He sat on the edge of a mat and began doing dumbbell curls.

His movements were slow; he deliberately controlled the speed and range of motion for every single repetition.

The rhythm of his Breathing synchronized with the motion—inhaling on the way down, exhaling on the way up.

First set, ten reps; his arms ached slightly.

Second set, eight reps; his biceps started to burn.

Third set, six reps; the final two were ground out through gritted teeth.

He placed the dumbbells back on the ground and shook out his arms.

The guy doing push-ups nearby looked up at him.

"Seven pounds?"

"Yeah."

The guy said nothing else and went back to his push-ups.

But he was clearly fighting back a smile.

Where did a seven-pound dumbbell rank in the Combat Club?

It was roughly equivalent to a kindergartener strolling onto a construction site with a plastic shovel.

Richard didn't mind.

Everyone had to start somewhere. His starting line might be further back, but his recovery was far faster.

After finishing his three sets of curls, he did two sets of dumbbell presses and one set of dumbbell rows.

He used seven pounds for all of them, pushing every set to absolute failure.

By the time he finished, his arms were shaking from shoulders to fingertips.

He sat on the mat to catch his breath, feeling the warm current of Healing begin to flow through his arms.

Having finished with the punching bag, Fraser walked over, grabbed his water bottle, and took a massive gulp.

He looked down at Richard sitting on the floor.

"Your breathing rhythm is pretty steady."

"What?"

"When you were doing those curls, your breathing rhythm never broke."

Fraser wiped his neck with a towel. "Most beginners hold their breath when they push to failure. You didn't."

Richard didn't explain why.

"A steady breathing rhythm means your core control isn't half bad."

Fraser draped the towel over his shoulder. "Strength can be trained, but core control is innate."

He thought for a moment before adding,

"If you're interested, we have our final sparring session before the Christmas holiday. You're welcome to watch."

"Sure."

Once Fraser walked away, Warren came over.

"How was it?"

"The equipment is fine."

Warren had also tested out some of the equipment and was now shaking out his sore arms:

"Last time we had a new guy, he wanted to hit the bag on his first day. Fraser dropped him onto the mat with a single punch and told him, 'Do fifty push-ups first before you even think about touching the canvas.'"

"What happened to the guy?"

"Never came back."

Richard chuckled.

He returned his dumbbells to the pile and got up from the mat.

His arms were still trembling, but Healing was already doing its work.

By morning, the microtears would be repaired; his muscle fibers would knit together slightly thicker and stronger.

When he came back the day after tomorrow and did the same sets with the same weight, he would hit failure a few seconds later.

A few seconds here, a few seconds there—it would all add up.

He jogged the whole way home. His [walking] progress was only a hair away from reaching level two, while [Breathing] and [eating] had also seen improvements.

The three skills had formed a synergy during his workout.

Training consumed stamina → eating replenished nutrients → Breathing optimized oxygen supply and repaired damage → physical condition improved → the endurance ceiling for the next workout increased.

The foundation of a positive feedback loop was already spinning up.

His physical training was on the right track, but his recent practice with Stone Armor was stuck at a bottleneck.

Mr. Hutton's standard for complete proficiency in the Spell Formula required three things: stably covering the entire arm, maintaining it for over thirty seconds without dissipation, and initiating the armor without touching the Gargoyle.

He could barely manage the initiation without the Gargoyle, relying on his unlocked [Perception] to observe and mimic the statue's Ether layer. Covering his entire arm, however, was a puzzle he still couldn't piece together.

Only after unlocking the [Healing] trait at Breathing Lv.3 did he finally find a breakthrough.

That night, Richard practiced the Stone Armor in his bedroom.

He first completed three full Breathing cycles, allowing his Ether circulation to stabilize.

After the third cycle, he relaxed his hands and turned his palms upward.

Initiation began.

Ether condensed at the center of his palm, forming a thin, glaze-like sheen.

He tried extending the Ether further down his wrist and forearm.

Just as before, the Ether began to dissipate halfway down his forearm.

This time, Richard didn't drop the spell to start over.

Maintaining the initiation, he slowly sank his focus into the inner forearm to carefully "look" at the exact point of dissipation.

An old injury sat there—he had caught his weight on his elbow during a childhood fall on the stairs.

Under the Ether theory Richard now understood, physical defects and pathologies disrupted Ether conductivity.

He even wondered if a Hunter who lost a limb was permanently crippled in combat.

Richard had considered repairing his old injuries before.

But conventional medicine in this era was limited, and he had no access to the occult's specialized healing techniques.

Now, however, he had the combination of [Healing] and [Perception].

Richard dropped the armor, letting his right arm hang loose.

Locking onto the old injury with [Perception], he let [Healing] go to work.

He could feel the Ether repeatedly "brushing" over that patch of tissue as it flowed through his forearm.

Richard let the circulation run for a while before stopping.

The next day, Richard attempted the full-arm initiation again.

Ether traveled from his palm, through his wrist, and down his inner forearm.

When it reached the old injury, Richard held his breath, sensing it carefully.

The Ether flowed right through.

Forearm, elbow, upper arm... The armor condensed layer by layer, paving its way from fingertip to shoulder.

He tapped his left fingernail against the armor layer on his right upper arm.

Ding! A crisp, porcelain-like sound rang out.

Richard stared at his fully armored right arm, counting silently.

At thirty, the armor held strong.

At forty-five, it began to show slight signs of dissipation.

He didn't push it, voluntarily withdrawing the Ether.

The armor faded away layer by layer, retreating from fingertip to shoulder.

Richard slumped in his chair and exhaled a long breath.

Mr. Hutton's standard had been "stably covering the entire arm, maintaining it for over thirty seconds without dissipation."

Forty-five seconds was comfortably past the mark.

This was just the beginning. His body carried more than one old injury.

He had scraped a knee in a fall once, leaving slight calcification around the kneecap.

A scar sat near the bridge of his nose by the brow bone, from a collision with a handrail.

And a small patch of hardened scalp on the back of his head dated back so far he couldn't even remember the cause.

Every old wound corresponded to a section of Ether pathway with lower conductivity.

Every single one of them could be slowly smoothed out.

Richard gathered his Ether, condensing it from his full arm down to his palm and knuckles to form a "stone gauntlet."

He tapped his left fingernail against his right knuckles; the resulting sound bordered on metallic.

Down the dead-end branching off Slag Alley stood an old cast-iron streetlamp.

The fixture had been abandoned for years and stripped of its lamp head, but the thick iron pole remained solid.

Walking home from school that afternoon, Richard took his familiar detour into Nail Alley.

The winter wind howled through the mouth of the alley, carrying his white breath up past his scarf.

The alley was empty.

He stepped up to the iron pole, running his left hand over its surface.

Beneath the rust, the cast iron was leagues harder than any ordinary brick wall.

Initiation, concentrated on the knuckles.

He took a half step back and adjusted his Breathing.

He held back his full strength on the first strike.

The armor provided a cushion, but it couldn't completely negate the reaction force.

His fist struck the pole.

Clang!

A heavy, metallic impact echoed in the alley.

The iron pole shuddered slightly, shedding a thin flake of rust. His knuckles were completely unscathed.

He circled to the other side of the pole, adjusted his angle, and threw more weight into it.

Clang!

This time, the cast-iron pole dented inward.

Richard looked at his unmarked fist in surprise.

This was cast iron, far harder than human bone.

If his armored fist struck a person with that same force, he would have to worry about shattering their bones in a single punch.

Richard withdrew his Ether, letting the armor fade away layer by layer.

As a defensive measure, the full-arm armor could deflect conventional cold weapons like swords and clubs.

As an offensive tool, concentrated knuckle armor packed considerable destructive power into a single punch.

But then again, he was a Scholar, not a Hunter. Would he ever actually find himself in a situation where he needed to throw punches?