The Overnight Prodigy

Chapter 21: Six Weeks

Coach Nguyen posted a training schedule the same day the roster went up, and it was longer and more demanding than anything Ethan had attempted in his life up to that point five days a week instead of the usual three, extra conditioning sessions before school on top of the regular afternoon practice, a list of solo drills he was expected to run through at home on the days the gym wasn't open.

"This is insane," Ethan said, reading it over Priya's shoulder outside the locker room.

"Welcome to competitive season." She didn't look up from her own copy, already highlighting sections with a pen she'd apparently brought specifically for this purpose. "Coach doesn't mess around once there's an actual tournament on the calendar. Last year Marcus said he lost like eight pounds in six weeks just from conditioning."

"That's not reassuring."

"It's not supposed to be reassuring. It's supposed to make sure you don't get embarrassed in front of three hundred people at the Athletic Center." She finally looked up, taking in what Ethan assumed was a fairly visible amount of dread on his face, and softened slightly. "You'll be fine. You've got Coach's attention for a reason. Just don't skip the morning conditioning. That's the one everybody wants to skip, and it's the one that actually matters most."

Ethan took her advice more seriously than he took most advice, mostly because six weeks felt like an almost comedically short runway for the amount of ground he needed to cover, and comedic was not a tone he wanted associated with his tournament debut. He started showing up to the pre-school conditioning sessions at six in the morning, dragging himself out of bed in the kind of gray, half-conscious state he hadn't experienced since his old habit of staying up too late scrolling his phone, except now the exhaustion came from actual effort instead of nothing at all.

Jason, true to his word, appointed himself something between a training partner and an extremely enthusiastic cheerleader, showing up to watch Ethan's morning runs on the days he didn't have his own early class, timing laps on his phone with a stopwatch app and shouting encouragement from the sideline that ranged from genuinely useful to actively distracting.

"You're doing great!" he yelled, on Ethan's third lap around the track, phone held aloft like he was documenting something historically significant. "Like, objectively, scientifically great! I'm gonna put this on my story!"

"Please don't put this on your story."

"Too late, already posted. You look like a guy who's about to punch destiny in the face."

"I'm jogging, Jason."

"Exactly. Metaphorically. You're jogging toward destiny." Jason grinned, unbothered by the eye roll this earned him, and kept pace alongside the track on his bike, which he'd started bringing specifically for this purpose, weaving alongside Ethan's laps with the kind of loyal, slightly ridiculous commitment that Ethan had honestly started to look forward to more than he'd ever admit out loud.

The evenings were harder. Ethan ran through Coach Nguyen's solo drill list on the small patch of open floor in his room, footwork patterns and shadow combinations that felt stupid and self-conscious the first few times he did them, less stupid by the second week, until eventually they became just another part of his evening the same way homework had once been, if homework had ever involved throwing invisible strikes at his own closet door.

His parents noticed the shift in routine, obviously, and reacted in their own characteristic ways. His mom left protein bars on his desk without comment, a small, quiet form of support that Ethan appreciated more than any actual conversation would have accomplished. His dad, for his part, watched a few minutes of one evening drill session from the doorway before eventually saying, in the careful tone of someone trying not to overstep, "You look like you know what you're doing."

"I'm getting there."

"Your grandfather used to do something like this. Not exactly this, but footwork, stance stuff. I remember watching him when I was a kid." His dad said it almost offhandedly, like the memory had surfaced without much warning, and then seemed to catch himself, adding, "Anyway. Keep it up. I'm proud of you for sticking with something this hard."

The comment about his grandfather lodged itself in the back of Ethan's mind in a way his dad's praise usually didn't quite manage a stray thread he filed away without immediately understanding why it mattered, though something in his gut suggested it might, eventually, matter quite a bit.

By the fourth week, the accumulated conditioning had started to show in ways Ethan could actually feel his sparring matches at club practice lasting longer before his form started to break down, his footwork drills executing with a fluidity that had taken real, grinding repetition to build rather than arriving whole the way the System's understanding always did. He thought, more than once during those weeks, about the distinction the dream's voice had drawn on the very first night understanding is given freely, mastery is earned and understood it now in a way that no longer felt like an abstract warning but like the actual, physical texture of his daily life.

Marcus, for his part, watched Ethan's progress with an expression that had settled somewhere between grudging respect and genuine curiosity, occasionally offering small, unsolicited corrections during practice that Ethan hadn't expected and was careful not to make a big deal out of, in case drawing attention to the gesture made Marcus stop doing it.

"Your hips are still slow on the redirect," Marcus said, catching him after a sparring round in the fifth week. "You understand the mechanics I can tell, you set up right every time but your body's still a half-beat behind your head. That's not something I can fix for you. That's just reps."

"I know."

"You'll get there. Faster than most people, probably. But there's no shortcut through the reps part. Everybody who tells you there is one is lying to you." He said it without any particular warmth, matter-of-fact in the way Marcus said most things, and walked off toward the water fountain before Ethan could respond, leaving him standing there with the strange, specific satisfaction of receiving something close to a compliment wrapped inside a piece of genuinely useful advice.

Six weeks had felt impossibly short standing at the corkboard on the day the roster went up. By the time the tournament actually arrived, it felt like it had gone by even faster than that, every early morning and every stiff, aching evening compressed down into a version of Ethan that looked, on paper, only marginally different from the one who'd signed his name below eleven others two and a half months earlier, but felt, underneath the surface, like an entirely different person putting on his gear the morning the Ashford Interscholastic Cup finally began.