They needed momentum. Not politics, not charm, not the theater of a staged miracle — momentum. In the life Aras used to have, momentum meant getting from one joke to the next before an audience noticed you'd taken too many. Here it meant pushing a ragtag band of reborn people past fear and into fight — and fast.
"Training," Serane announced at dawn, voice like a bell and twice as sharp. "No theatrics. No flirting. Real drills."
Aras rubbed his eyes and peered out of the barn. The morning mist hung like a curtain. Lina was up, sleeves rolled, brandishing a broom as if it were a spear; Mara and Fina were already setting traps. The twins wore matching scowls that matched every shōnen rival's angry younger siblings. Lira tuned her throat as if singing dragons awake. Even Lady Celine had a determined look that said she'd rather face bandits than a scandal.
"You're really turning this into a dojo," Aras muttered, but he smiled. Shōnen energy had a rhythm he didn't dislike—loud, embarrassing, and useful.
Serane's first drill was simple: sprint, draw, disarm. They ran a course that made old soldiers curse politely. The awakened stumbled at first; mouths opened, lungs burning, their bodies rusty from lives that had never realized they'd been paused. Aras ran alongside them, footing the pace not because he needed the exercise but because he liked to watch determination find its shape.
"Breathe from your belly!" Serane barked. "If you are breathing from your throat, you will shout like a poet and die like a man who preferred rhyme."
They laughed between panting, because laughing is how people survive when they've been given second chances. Even the shoemaker managed a wheeze that sounded suspiciously like a battle cry.
Aras took Lina aside. "Form," he said, and showed a simple stance. "A punch is a promise. Make it mean something."
She mirrored him, stiff at first and then smoother, as if waking a muscle memory that had belonged to a previous life. He liked teaching because it let him give away tools that didn't require charm—only repetition, heart, and the stubbornness to try.
Keen pulsed like a metronome. You're turning them into a chorus of blades, it said.
"We'll be a choir," Aras replied. "But louder."
They trained until the sun bled gold across the river, then Serane gave them something harder: a sparring round with the twins setting traps across the field. It was Shōnen in its purest form—a gauntlet, a test, a scene meant to let someone find a spark.
The first skirmish happened sooner than anyone planned.
A patrol of temple guards, sharper than the usual clerical muscle and drunk on righteousness, had followed rumors. They burst from a copse of alder with spears upright and faces arranged into piety. Their captain wore the angry certainty of someone who had never been denied.
"You harbor thieves!" he barked, voice brittle. "You shelter blasphemers! On pain of the Light—"
Aras stepped forward, grin working its way into place like a practiced spell. "We offer hospitality," he said. "And bread. Would you like a sample?"
The captain snarled and lunged. He expected an insult, a scuffle, maybe a sermon of penance. He did not expect a barn to explode into choreography.
What happened was fast and stupid in the best way. Lina ducked under a swing she'd learned to read like a grammar rule and kicked a guard's knee; Mara and Fina's trap flipped his spear and wrapped his legs in rope like a slapstick gag with consequences; the shoemaker threw a boot with surprising accuracy, hitting a wrist and sending a jolt through the formation. Lira's song—trained not merely to charm but to distract—found a note that made the captain blink in confusion.
Aras danced. He moved with the ridiculous theatricality of a man who knew he could be handsome and dangerous in the same breath. He deflected a spear, rolled through a guard's legs, and let Keen sing along, a sharp, ringing line that made steel against metal sing like an oath. When he kicked a guard back into his comrades, the whole thing felt like a comic panel come to life.
Serane, when she entered, was a clinical storm. She moved with the efficiency of someone who could make decisions in one breath and enforce them in the next. Her blade struck with the economy of a man who has eaten poverty and learned to cut only what matters. The captain, who'd expected to make a moral example, found himself on his knees with two guards tangled like broken puppets.
"Enough," Serane said, voice steeling to a level the captain felt in his teeth. "Lay down arms."
The captain, humiliated, did so. The rest exchanged a look: the kind of look that in shōnen manga reads as "we underestimated them." It was a useful expression. Pride is an enemy that is easy to cut.
They bound the patrol, not cruelly but thoroughly, and left them with firm instructions to report that they'd been bested by miscreants who performed miraculous acts of theater. The captain would tell his superiors the version that helped his pride survive. Pride makes men lie better than any scribe.
After the fight, adrenaline made faces soft. They returned to training, hearts pounding but higher. There's a specific thrill in a successful defense: it's the mixture of fear and the ecstatic knowledge you didn't break. Lina's hair stuck to her forehead; she laughed, then cried a little, the emotion messy and honest.
"You did well," Aras told her, voice low. "You moved like someone who remembered why they fought."
She cocked her head. "Because I don't like being counted?" she asked.
"Because you prefer people to ledgers," he corrected. "There's bravery in that."
Keen hummed in the aftermath, proud and a bit indignant about the dirt on its edge. You fight theatrically, it observed.
"I fight for the curtain call," Aras said. "And also because I might get to kiss a few people who deserved better."
Serane's mouth twitched in a nearly-smile. The barn felt alive in a new way. They had proven to themselves what the priests had predicted: that stealing souls would invite divine paperwork. But it had also shown them what they could become when they stopped pretending the world could be understood by ledgers alone.
That night, another surprise.
A rider came to the river cottages with a banner none of them had seen: a black sun crossed with a thorned spear. The rider dismounted with the slow grace of someone used to attention. From his saddle he produced a sealed letter meant for Aras.
Aras slit the wax with Keen. The letter was brief: Return the souls or the soil will answer for them. —A Friend.
The handwriting was small and cold.
"A friend," Aras murmured.
Serane read it and did not smile. "Someone with better pens than priests," she said. "Or a threat."
Aras folded the letter, eyes bright like coals. "Either way," he said, feeling the shōnen blood in his veins—the part of him that loved a challenge—"it means we're important."
Lina slid closer and grabbed his sleeve. "Important can be bad."
"So can being boring," Aras replied, and kissed her knuckles like a pledge. "We'll take the risk."
Keen vibrated, the blade eager. Quite the dramatic escalation, it said.
Aras stood beneath the skipping moon and felt, for the first time, the particular burn that shōnen heroes know: a resolve sharpened by small victories and large responsibilities. They had won a skirmish. They had roused a few sleeping men and women to life. Now, with the letter in his pocket and a tricky insignia on the wind, the stage widened.
"Tomorrow," Serane said, voice steadying like dawn, "we train harder. We plan smarter. We move faster."
"Tomorrow," Aras echoed, grin returning, "we make sure the world knows we aren't a punchline."
They stood under the willow and made a plan—a shōnen promise in the quiet: to shout, to sprint, to slash, and to protect the messy, living things that made this rebellion worth the risk.
Beneath their feet, the river moved, patient and indifferent. Above, stars watched like judges and fans both. Aras tucked the letter into his boot, felt Keen hum approval, and looked at his
strange, growing family.
"Let them try to count us," he said. "We'll just be louder."