Mikhail parsed out the information he learned as he walked through the silent tribe, occasionally passing someone as he dashed along the silent streets.
He felt sore as he did so, but he found it easy to shrug such miniscule pain off.
And soon, he was in the empty Muscle Refinement Halls. All by his lonesome.
He was quick to choose the door he had been using the past two days, sitting in front of it with crossed legs. Mikhail then put his hands together before supporting his neck with them, leaning on the door behind him as he sat there.
Though he did not sit there idly. No, he was busy parsing out information and thinking of different ideas.
Ideas involving his weapon handling skills.
Ideas involving what he might do when he finally awakens the mystical power of Aether.
Ideas involving what he'd eat for dinner later.
Ideas involving Beast Taming, like whether or not he should form a bond with Sharyl in the future.
Many many ideas as the minutes crawled onwards.
Eventually, while he was in the middle of thinking about the possibility of creating a magical User Interface for himself, someone else entered the hall.
Those heavy footsteps could have been anyone, so Mikhail turned over to see Azalea walking over from the hallway he had walked through earlier.
"Hm? Oh, hey Azalea!" he said loudly so she could hear him from across the hall.
She simply waved, staying silent as she casually walked over.
"Hey," she finally said after sitting across from him. "Anything interesting going on with you?" she asked with her usual flat tone.
"Not really. Just training."
"Right. Today's my turn to help you out, isn't it?"
Mikhail nodded. "I think so."
Azalea hummed to herself before yawning, covering her face as she did so.
There was a silence between the two, after that. But it wasn't awkward. It felt…
Natural.
However, Mikhail eventually broke that comfortable silence.
"Say, you know a lot about dragons… What's with the Wendigo?"
Azalea perked up a little, a glint of intrigue shining in her eye.
"Hm? What do you mean by that?"
"Like… I feel like it doesn't evoke the word dragon when I look at it. It looks menacing, sure… but it doesn't feel like it fits."
Azalea let out another soft hum as her eyebrows subtly knit together.
"Well, what image should the word dragon evoke?"
"Winged, scaly beast of gargantuan proportions!" Mikhail said as he threw his arms to either side in a grand motion.
Azalea snorted derisively, shaking her head.
"What about the Leviathan, or the Chameleon for that matter? And what of the Drake? None of them have wings, but the Wendigo does. And you're telling me that the Wendigo is the odd one?"
Mikhail raised his index finger as his brain tried to create a rebuttal, but it curled inwards when he failed to think of one.
"...Hm."
Mikhail's arm fell back down to his lap as he knit his eyebrows.
'Must be a lingering bias from my last life…' he thought with a bit of a frown. What if his preconceived notions were hampering his ability to adapt to this new world?
He shook his head. Surely not.
"Well, what about you, Azalea? What does the word dragon evoke?" he asked, the frown still lingering on his face.
"The word dragon, to me… Evokes the idea of power. Not an image. A dragon can look like anything so long as they have the power to match."
Mikhail could almost see the fire of ambition light up behind her eyes, but it was gone in a flash.
"Interesting… So, you want to have a dragon companion to call yourself a dragon, is that it?"
Azalea flinched, and her face began growing red.
Mikhail smirked when he saw that reaction.
"Don't be embarrassed, I think that's pretty badass."
She averted her gaze, but just as she was going to ask something, the rest of their cohort arrived. Even Tybalt, this time.
They engaged in the usual banter, passing the time by seeing what everyone had done the previous day. And then, the process of Muscle Refinement began a little while later. And after that, the usual training went down.
Mikhail, of course, got his ass beat. Despite this, though, his grip around his spear was never broken. Something that no one seemed to notice besides himself.
As the training grounds grew scarce, he looked to his hand. He could see the tendons spasming, begging him to relax his grip. He could see how both of his hands shook, and he could feel the biting pain of it all.
Yet he smirked.
"One step at a time…" he said to himself, before his training partner for the day arrived.
Azalea walked forward, her Archaeopteryx Bone Gauntlets clacking roughly with each step. She had foregone her usual double edged short sword and buckler shield for this bout of training.
"I might as well get some training in too," Azalea said in response to his questioning gaze.
"Again?" Alaya asked with pursed lips.
"Again," Mikhail said flatly.
The two instructors looked at her with intrigue.
She wanted to help this crazy dude?
What was going on between them behind the scenes? Was this some sort of revenge for some wrongdoing he had inflicted upon her?
"Are you sure?" Atticus asked while gauging her subtle cues.
"Yes."
He deliberated for a short time before nodding.
"Alaya, keep watch over them, I'll do double the work to cover for you, so take good care of them."
She rolled her eyes and huffed in exasperation. "Fine, fine. I'll watch them. Go." Atticus then seemingly vanished from where he stood.
"Go whenever, I'll heal the loser until he decides to call it quits for today."
Mikhail was shakily using his spear as support to stand up. And he shakily assumed his stance. Azalea sat there and let him, before squaring up as well. Then, the two dashed at each other.