Chapter 31: What the Schedule Demands (Part 2 of 2)

  What It Costs

  Laurent tried to wake before the bell.

  He failed.

  Not badly—only by minutes—but the sound still cut through the room sharper than it should have. He sat up too fast, muscles protesting, breath caught somewhere between annoyance and guilt. Minutes mattered now. He knew that.

  He dressed quickly, movements uneven. Stretching came next, remembered late, done poorly, then repeated when his body complained enough to force the issue. On Earth, he would have shrugged it off. Here, the thought didn’t even finish forming before he corrected himself.

  Discipline didn’t arrive all at once. It scraped in, uneven and unwilling.

  The day pressed forward without pause. Instruction flowed into drills. Drills bled into conditioning. Time for self-study appeared exactly where the schedule said it would, and vanished just as cleanly.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Laurent kept up. Barely.

  He lost count once. Missed a repetition. Caught it, redid it, ignored the burn that followed. Around him, no one commented. Everyone was too occupied with their own limits.

  Cael swore quietly during a break, breath heavy. Eren sat with his head lowered, eyes closed, counting something under his breath. Aila rolled her shoulders again and again, chasing a knot that refused to loosen. Seris drank slowly, carefully, like she was measuring how much she could afford to take.

  Laurent watched, then looked away.

  Self-study was the hardest. Not because it was difficult—but because no one watched him fail. His attention drifted. Movements blurred together in his head. He replayed the sequence once, then again, realized he’d skipped a step, and forced himself to start from the beginning.

  This was the part he hated.

  Not pain.

  Not fatigue.

  Structure.

  Eighteen years of lax habits didn’t vanish because he wanted them to. They resisted quietly, in small moments. In minutes lost. In effort delayed.

  He clenched his jaw and reset. Again.

  There was no satisfaction in it. No feeling of improvement. Only the knowledge that stopping would be worse.

  By the time the day ended, he was exhausted in a way that didn’t show. No triumph. No failure. Just accumulation.

  That night, as he lay staring at the ceiling, Laurent accepted something without relief or pride.

  He wasn’t disciplined.

  But he would choose to be.

  Tomorrow.

  Again.