The aning and purpose of training had changed over the years for Fuyuko.
When she was young, it was just sothing fun she did with her parents and was a part of them telling stories about their past before they settled down and had her.
After that night of fire, it had been sothing she'd done with other kids, whose features and nas were blurred and hazed in her mory. That training had been simply what they could figure out to do with sticks, stones, and their bodies and had been about survival on the streets.
They'd done it because there were other kids their age on the streets, those who did not hear or refused the call of Sanctuary. Those kids were usually junior mbers of a gang, and conflict could get violent. Plus there were always the older ones who were often even more violent as they beca more useful to the gangs.
Not that the caretakers wanted them to fight. If they got into trouble, they were supposed to run ho. But that wasn't always easy and sotis one had to fight their way free. But they always worked to keep each other safe and never left one of their own behind. And with shadow's luck, one way or another they had always escaped, even if sotis one or more of them had to be carried or dragged by the others.
The mories were still vague and spotty, but they were slowly returning.
After she'd left, Fuyuko's training had been those weeks on the farm and she had continued it almost every day while she traveled, up until she'd been injured fighting the peryton. When Fuyuko was well enough, Gil had started training her as well. She had to admit that nothing before that compared to the intensity and precision of his training. All of that training had been simple practicality, she had no way of knowing what her future held, and she might need those skills.
Now, here, in her new ho, she continued to train, though in ways more varied than everything else together. At first, that training had been partly to make sure she could do what she wanted in the future, and to do her part in being soone that others could rely on.
However, her training had slowly grown into a purpose for its own sake. It felt good to be able to accomplish things she'd not been able to do before and to feel herself beco stronger and faster. Fuyuko was now in an ongoing competition with herself to ever improve, and in a competition with her friends to see who could improve the fastest and the most.
Well, that competition was mostly with Galan and Derek, once Derek had arrived with a caravan on the schedule that Shizoku had broken in her outrage over Aia's pregnancy. They certainly weren't going to send her back on her own and there was no point in trying to find a group for her to travel with when she'd be due to co back so soon.
Shizoku was diligent, but she didn't get competitive about this sort of thing. Even in the bookish stuff, Shizo wasn't really competitive, she just loved learning and reading a lot and didn't need to compete to keep improving.
Still, Fuyuko found that she loved the rush of pushing herself and continually improving.
Usually.
There were so days that made her feel differently about the matter.
Right now, Fuyuko was sprinting across an open field with a light coating of snow while the sun shone bright in the sky above her.
While she kept shadows wrapped around herself as well as she could while the bright light tried to burn it off.
Again.
Fuyuko had lost count of how many tis she'd done this exercise today, but it had been enough that Fuyuko had to dig deep into her will and the powers of her heritage to stand at all, let alone sprint as she currently was.
The agony of her protesting body might make her resentful if Mama M wasn't pushing herself just as hard and in a similar way.
Her adoptive parents had discovered that a sufficient amount of earth-attuned mana canceled out Moriko's ability to walk through the air without effort. She could still do it with a little bit of effort, but the more earth-attuned energy she had on her person, the harder it was to simply step up into the air.
Moriko was currently wearing a thick, padded outfit covered with heavy plates of enchanted stone and tal as she sprinted across the field while several feet above the ground.
This was how most training days with Mama M went; she would find sothing difficult for both of them to repeatedly do that was similar in so way, and they would both do it until one of them couldn't move anymore.
So far, that was always Fuyuko, no matter what insane challenge Moriko gave herself.
Once Fuyuko was unable to continue and often unable to move, Mama M would take care of her until the evening reset. Combined with her own healing powers, that ant that they could now train in unard combat. This was Fuyuko's favorite part, because Betty also trained with them for this now that she'd had her child, and Betty always brought her son Boril with her.
Fuyuko always managed to find a way to sneak in a little bit of ti with the adorable usagisune baby boy with dark, blue-gray hair.
Boril's arrival had surprised Fuyuko at first, but she'd only been vaguely aware of the fact that dungeon inhabitants had accelerated pregnancies.
Mordecai had comnted during that night's dinner to Kazue and Moriko that his personal biases seed to have tweaked the usagisune default form as Boril was born in his almost-human form. With Betty being a first-generation usagisune, Gil being human shouldn't have influenced her child's base form.
Betty said that she'd picked the na because it ant, roughly, 'to fight' and it contained parts of her na and Gil's na. Though she'd also ntioned that it was similar to a word in a different language that ant 'wolf', which Fuyuko rather liked.
While she wasn't interested in having one of her own, Fuyuko liked babies a lot. Especially since she could hand them back when they got slly. Her nose was sensitive enough to notice that fast and early.
Training days with Kazue were very different from those with Moriko. Mama K mostly focused on reviewing what Fuyuko had learned from other tutors like Horace, the librarian orangutan zone boss, and touching up anything Fuyuko was having trouble with.
But they did do so training too, it was just not focused on pushing themselves. Instead, Mama K wanted to test things like having Fuyuko figure a way around a warding spell or Kazue trying a spell to see how well Fuyuko could resist or shake off its effects.
These were all done very carefully and any experints were called off imdiately if it seed like sothing might have gone wrong.
Neither one of them felt confident enough to try direct sparring, their combat styles were too opposite without having a great understanding of the other one. They just couldn't spar safely unless they both chose to do only unard fighting. Fuyuko won the few tis they tried that, but she still felt foxfire was cheating, even if it was a natural weapon for Kazue that she always had available.
Bellona's training was great as far as Fuyuko was concerned. A lot of fighting practice, exactly what she wanted. Not that Bellona always trained her directly; a lot of the ti she wanted to have Fuyuko work with one of the rabbit folk who had a specific style that Bellona wanted Fuyuko to get used to.
Even better was the occasional training with 'Gramps'. Thinking about Ricardo's expression when she'd called him Gramps still made Fuyuko want to giggle. Still, they had a similar fighting style and the 'old man' seed both eager to both prove he still had what it took to keep up with Akahana and to teach a new disciple more than a few tricks.
Fuyuko had not tried to give Akahana a nickna. She'd paused after calling Ricardo 'Gramps' and given Akahana a questioning look.
"Auntie," Akahana had said, resolving the matter firmly.
The only reason that Fuyuko didn't get to train with Gramps more often was that he was often delving. This was also why Fuyuko didn't get to see Shizoku, Derek, and Galan more often, though she always got a free day whenever they returned from a delve. Right now this ant every few days as they couldn't delve very far, even with a team.
Mordecai had beco her rarest trainer, but he had also beco a specialist for Fuyuko. He was the one who brought all her disparate lessons together and taught her how to things like combine her dagger work with her shadow powers and the techniques she'd figured out from working around Kazue's shields.
Whenever Fuyuko mastered one of these synergies, she always felt a little stronger and more confident. It could take weeks to master them after Mordecai had taught Fuyuko enough to continue practicing on her own, but Fuyuko had so very good reasons to spend a lot of energy mastering them.
They also unlocked a little more of her mories.
She'd considered asking Mordecai about it when she realized what was happening, but Fuyuko waited to give it so thought first as the idea felt familiar. After thinking about it for a while, she rembered that Mordecai had already told her that her mories would return when it was safe for her to have them.
Being strong and self-sufficient was the best way for her to be that sort of safe. The techniques and skills that combined different aspects of her training into sothing that was hers were the most concrete advances in her personal power.
Fuyuko was hoping to have most if not all of her mories back by the ti they finished their trip to the southern dungeon. Mordecai had said that since they were going to be going up to Trionea, it would be best to make a visit to where she had lived before they dealt with the wizard who held Deidre's core in thrall.
He had two major reasons. First, ti mattered when it ca to the scrying of past events. While a few months might not make much difference at this point, a few more years easily could. This brought up his second reason: They didn't know what was going to happen after the dungeon raid, and they might not have the luxury of vising the city afterward.
There was one problem: Fuyuko wasn't sure she could rember where she lived more than six years ago. She'd only been eight!
But she had a potential solution to that problem that would also involve doing sothing she wanted to do anyway: see Caretaker Yvonne again, and maybe so of her friends too, if she could rember them well enough.
So she trained as the weeks rolled by without major incident.
Mostly.
Shizoku only stayed in Fuyuko's room for two nights, but that was enough.
Her room was now permanently contaminated with white fur and sparkling faerie dust from Shizoku's tails. It was only occasionally irritating, but one ti she had been particularly annoyed about it and tried to purify at least what she was wearing by being extra selective when taking a small shadow jump. Fuyuko had been trying to filter out anything 'foreign' to her, other than her gear.
Fuyuko didn't entirely rember the end of her test, she mostly rembered feeling particularly awful almost imdiately. It wasn't pain exactly, but it was weird, uncomfortable, and a little panic inducing.
Papa had swooped in imdiately of course, but normally Fuyuko would have expected her Mamas to nurse her beyond the first monts of crises. Instead, Mordecai was in more often than they were to check up on her.
More than once she'd heard him muttering sothing about the short life spans of prodigies.
Hey, at least she was a prodigy?
It turned out that by filtering everything that was supposedly 'not her', she'd filtered out a lot of symbiotic life that was a normal part of everyone's bodies. For her, this was about three pounds of weight according to Mordecai.
She found that number disturbing to think about.
Unfortunately, Fuyuko had a few days to think about it. The dungeon's reset didn't really see the missing life as damage, and Mordecai had made her repeatedly take pills through each day, along with a few very herbal-tasting drinks and giving her a few injections.
That was a new and scary experience. She didn't know that there were dicines you could inject like that. But you could inject poisons, so why shouldn't you be able to inject good stuff?
Oh, and between repeated visits by both Shikoku and Kazue, Fuyuko's room was now infected with both white and red fur.
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