That had been the end of that conversation.
Nero did not mind. The work suited him in a way that the earlier conditioning had not quite managed — the conditioning under Lyon had been about making the body capable of enduring, which was its own kind of discipline, but this was about making the body capable of applying what it had built, about the translation between raw capacity and actual function, and that distinction mattered enormously to a man who had spent months surviving by finding the gap between what an opponent could do and what it could do to him.
The other candidates were a complication.
Not a serious one, but present nonetheless.
