The sun rose and slept as time continued to move.
Cain got up every morning to continue his training with Sonia. Each day was a new hell, but for every hell he passed, he felt himself getting stronger.
While the training initially consisted of normal running and lifting, it evolved as Sonia directed him to run up and down the mountain with the occasional hide-and-seek game.
The hide and seek was essentially Cain running for his life, while trying to do everything he could to not get found by Sonia, or he would get a small beating. Cain eventually gave up on running and started to find a good hiding spot, but realized she would find him every time. She would even come out of nowhere to hit him.
While it may seem as a way to fuel Sonia's satisfaction in beating him up, Cain slowly learned that it was designed to help build up his senses and spatial awareness.
He had started to improve on noting his surroundings and not always trusting his eyes, but Sonia had changed her game plan and would only start attacking when Cain got tired. This had started to teach him that even when exhausted, he could never let his guard down.
There was even a time when Sonia said she had an appointment today, and while Cain felt reluctant to finally get a day off, she simply threw him into a den of wolves and said, "Good Luck!" before heading off.
Cain had never run so fast before.
Six months had passed since Cain started his training.
While each day of training was more difficult than the last, Cain worked up today with a small smile on his face.
"Today's the day, Sonia said she would teach me a new technique."
Cain had constantly asked about learning a new technique, but Sonia had declined each time, saying he needed to build up his strength first, before entering a small beating for asking a repeated question.
Quickly rolling out of bed and putting some pants on, Cain looked at the mirror to see his nearly shredded six-pack, as all his muscles had become a lot more defined over the training and even growing a bit taller.
Putting on his shirt, he headed downstairs to prepare a quick breakfast, as Tess said she would be gone for a couple of days.
Cain had wondered where she was going, but he put that thought aside as he was sure it involved some kind of small relaxing adventure from all the work she does to help him and the chores around the house.
Cain laid out a small fruit on the cutting board, something enough to fuel him, but not overfill him.
Grabbing the knife, Cain quickly cut the fruit into pieces, but with too much excitement about what the day contained, his mind wandered, and the knife slipped, and a deep cut appeared on his finger.
'Damnit!' Cain yelled as he ran his finger under the sink water.
After washing the blood off, Cain saw that the cut started to vanish almost instantly.
Pulling his finger closer to his face, he rotated it to see that the cut was completely gone.
"That's some absurd healing."
Cain knew his recovery rate was increasing, as most of the scraps and bruises he got from training started to heal faster, but for a full-on cut, it surprised him a lot.
"I wonder what the limit of this is? No… What happens if Sonia finds out how fast it is exactly?"
Sonia had talked about how it was getting a bit harder for her to eject mana into him, as it was getting to the point where she would have to use enough Mana to cause damage at this point.
That scared him a bit, as the stronger his body got, the harder it was rejecting mana.
But Cain never gave up hope, he couldn't. He wouldn't until all the opportunities he had left were exhausted.
After cutting a new piece of fruit, he headed out to the training ground.
Upon arriving, he quickly leapt into a run around the track as it became normal to get a small warm-up in before the true training began.
While it would have been normal for a small stretch, Sonia had labeled that as useless, as he had the entire walk here to do that.
With sweat dripping off his forehead, he headed to the center where Sonia stood and sat down in front of her to recover his breath.
"Now, Cain, as I told you yesterday, I will begin teaching you a new technique. As you already have a weapon technique, I will be teaching you something to help support that."
Cain stared at Sonia with gleaming eyes, almost telling her to hurry up.
With a small disgusted face at Cain's small performance, she finished.
"I'll be teaching you my personal movement technique, Ethereal Dance."
Cain's left-sided lip rose a bit as a questioning look appeared on his face.
"I'm learning a dance move?" Cain asked with a tilted head.
Wha-Bam!
"While you would normally need mana to use this movement technique to its highest potential, the first step is just a foundation step, in which no mana is needed. This is what I will be teaching you."
Rubbing his head, Cain quickly nodded.
"Now, the reason we learn movement techniques is because it's the foundation of fighting. Every time you swing, you allocate a certain amount of strength into that swing, all the way from the arms to the rotation of our hips, to how strong we stand to build that force."
"It allows us to build in more rotation in different ways, so that your fighting is not simply done by standing straight up. It allows us to attack from different angles related to our body's position and build in more versatility for our attacks."
Checking to make sure Cain understood what you meant, she continued.
"Besides making our attacks stronger, it also helps with our speed. Increasing how fast we run, or even escape. Each movement technique is different, but they all lie around the same principle. Some allow you to walk vertically up a mountain, or use shadows to transverse. There are even some rare ones that allow you to walk across the sky. While this is possible at a certain strength, it can be used to essentially fly even faster."
With a curious face, Cain asked.
"What does yours do?"
With a soft smile, Sonia responded. "Mine mimics."
"Huh?"
"My movement techniques allow one to understand the flow of the opponent, enabling them to see the direction of their attack, and dodge accordingly. That's why it's more of a dance, as there is no strict step to this technique. You simply adjust based on what you sense."
"It's more of a fighting technique, really, but to be able to dodge quickly enough, it needed to be a movement one. You need an insanely fast reaction time to pull this off, but that's just a partial requirement. The true underlying of this is the amount of reduction you take from the forces around, which leads us to our first step.
With an up motion from Sonia's hand, Cain stood up.
"The first part is learning how to reduce the forces around. Say the friction on your feet with each step, or the winds and natural forces that push against you when you start to run, as gravity pushes you down. We need to learn how to weave between these forces, so that they don't affect us."
"You never really know how fast you can become when you can move unaffected by the forces around you."
With a ready stance and a determined mind, Cain asked, "So what's the first part of learning it?"
"To be able to feel the gaps of the forces, and also sense the flow, you need a good reaction time… Which can be trained."
"And how do we train that?"
With a deep smirk, Sonia answered.
"By dodging my swings, of course!"