The Spear Saint's Crucible
*This chapter follows Ryu's perspective.
The training yard was still dark when I arrived.
I did this every morning now—came before the light, before anyone else, and stood here in the cold until something in my head quieted down enough for me to start. Marcus had taught me that: the body can only train what the mind prepares for. So I prepared.
Except the preparations weren't working the way they used to.
Somewhere on the other side of the base, Tenki had already begun his magical training with Barden. I didn't need to watch to know how it was going. I'd grown up watching Tenki work—knew the shape of his focus, the way he got quieter and more precise as he went deeper into a problem. He was in that mode now, the one where nothing else existed. I was glad for him.
I also couldn't stop thinking about the bridge.
Silvus River. The bridge assault. I'd fought well there—I knew that. Three confirmed kills. I'd protected Tenki's left flank, cleared two archers who'd gotten a bead on him, held a position for nearly four minutes against a press that should have broken me. Vandor had mentioned my name in the official report.
I had been effective. I had been real.
But honest was honest: I'd been watching Tenki's magic perform the decisive work—the fog blanketing positions Julius's men had held for weeks, the Coriolis Shield turning arrows, the final push that finished what Julius's formation couldn't recover from. And I had known, in the part of my mind that Marcus always demanded I keep honest, that I could have not been there. The bridge would have fallen without me.
Three confirmed kills. Footnotes to what cloud magic had accomplished.
Then we'd arrived at Ironhold, and Theodric had arranged for Erwin to assess us—just a look, he'd said, nothing formal. His halberd was propped against the fence—his actual weapon, the one the camp gave a wider berth than any other piece of equipment on the rack. He walked past it, picked up a single practice sword instead, moved into the clearing, and said: *Let's see what you know.* That was all the warning I got.
Seven exchanges. I'd lasted seven exchanges before finding myself facedown in the dirt, wrists controlled, Erwin's weight pinning me at the angle where nothing useful was available. He wasn't even fully engaged—I could tell by the way he was already looking over my head toward the next thing he was thinking about. He'd been curious about what I knew, and now he knew. He let me up, watched me try four more times across the next hour, and put me down six of those seven attempts.
That had been Erwin at perhaps forty percent.
So I stood in the pre-dawn cold and breathed and tried to find the image of what I was working toward.
The fighter I wanted to become didn't have a clear shape yet. He was made of pieces of Marcus and Zagan and Erwin and the things I'd watched and studied, and he was also something none of them were—specific to the thing I'd been named: Spear Saint. Whatever that meant. Whatever I was supposed to be doing with it.
*What does a Spear Saint do that a mage can't?*
I didn't have an answer. But I had training starting with first light, and Erwin waiting.
I picked up my spear and started moving.
---
Erwin showed up as the sky turned gray, carrying twin practice swords and a cup of tea. His halberd was propped against the far fence where he'd left it after yesterday's assessment, and he walked past it without a glance.
I'd expected him to bring partners—soldiers from the camp as he'd done when assessing others. Instead he handed the tea to an aide, tossed both swords from hand to hand once to check their balance, and walked into the center of the yard.
"You," he said, "with your spear. Me, with these. This is where we start."
"Dual swords," I said. "Not what you used yesterday."
The halberd was against the far fence where he'd left it. That was the weapon—his real one, the one the rest of the camp stepped around without being asked to. Theodric's school, Theodric's style: the long blade, the hook, the weapon that required enough space to be a statement. Erwin had walked past it without looking.
"Yesterday I was watching you," he said. "Today I'm teaching you." Which was different enough that I paid attention to the distinction.
He settled into a stance I didn't recognize—loose, weight forward, both swords low. Nothing academic about it. "A dual-sword fighter," he said without moving, "is selling you a specific problem. Two rhythms at once. One rhythm your brain handles without effort. Two rhythms creates—what?"
"Confusion," I said.
"Hesitation," he corrected. "Confusion still produces action. Hesitation kills you. The moment you stop reading the threat to sort out which threat, you're already behind." His right hand moved a fraction—just shifted. My eyes tracked it. "See? You looked right. That's the point. He doesn't need to actually attack with the right hand. He just needs you watching it while the left finds your angle."
We started slowly. He walked me through exchanges at half speed, narrating as we went: what each position created, what it demanded of me, where the opportunities and the traps were. The right sword kept my spear tip occupied. The left hunted angles—the inside of my lead arm, my rear knee, the gap that opened when I turned my hips for a thrust.
"Your range advantage is real," he said during one slow exchange. "A dual swordsman has no practical answer to your tip at full extension. He cannot close that distance without taking a strike. Your job is to make sure the distance never collapses." He reset. "But distance doesn't hold forever against pressure. When he closes—how?"
I demonstrated the shaft redirection Marcus had drilled into me: two-hand grip, using the body of the spear to turn an inbound arm rather than trying to stop the force of a blade. Erwin tested it with actual pressure.
"Acceptable," he said. "You lose tip threat for a moment, but you survive the exchange and rebuild distance. Survival and reset—this is your philosophy. Not winning every exchange. Surviving the bad ones until you can return to favorable ground." He closed on me before I could reset and put me down cleanly. "The shaft was too far out. You were trying to block. I said redirect."
"Again," I said, getting up.
We ran real speed for the rest of the morning—controlled, purposeful, each exchange followed by a word or two of correction. My shoulder ached from shaft work by midday. My footwork turned sloppy with tiredness.
But something had changed: when the second sword came, I was reading it a half-beat sooner.
"Tomorrow," Erwin said, finishing his long-cold tea, "the axe."
---
He came with a heavy single-blade camp axe.
"The opposite problem," he said, testing its weight. "The dual swordsman divides your attention. The axe man collapses your nerve."
He demonstrated a full swing at the practice dummy beside us. The impact was something you felt in your teeth. The dummy's upper portion departed and hit the far fence.
I looked at the dummy. I looked at the axe. I thought about what it would feel like if that were aimed at my spear.
"The instinct says block," Erwin said. "Your instincts are wrong. An axe carries mass and speed. Absorbing mass and speed means the mass and speed moves through you. You cannot absorb it." He pointed to the arc of the swing. "Where is the axe not, at the moment it arrives?"
"To the side."
"Yes. So be to the side. Move to the unoccupied space while it finishes occupying the occupied space." He slowed the next swing so I could watch the mechanics. "After the swing: recovery. The axe is heavy. Physics requires that it return before it can threaten again. The recovery pause is real, it is mechanical, and a man committed to a heavy blow cannot fake it away. Find the pause. Reach him in the pause."
He swung. I moved wrong—forward instead of lateral—and he turned the axe into a butt-strike and sat me down.
"Lateral," he said. "Not forward. You're closing in the same plane the weapon just traveled. Try again."
We worked axe all morning. It felt cleaner than the dual swords—simpler problem, more mechanical. By afternoon I could read the recovery pause consistently, and I'd stopped flinching on the approach.
Afternoon: he set down the axe and picked up a tower shield and a shortsword.
This was worse than either.
"The shield is not a weapon," he said, advancing. "The shield is a statement. It says: I have decided to be here. Your job is to make the decision wrong."
I could not make it wrong. He stepped forward; I retreated. He stepped again; I retreated. His shield was between my tip and every vital target he possessed, and the shortsword appearing from behind it didn't have my reach but it had enough reach to punish my tip while he kept pressing.
"You're giving ground," he observed.
"You're taking it."
"Keep going. What happens when there's no ground left?"
I tried going low—a sweep at his lead knee. He dropped the shield edge and killed the angle. I tried high—the tip scraped the rim and glanced away harmlessly. I threw a feint at his left shoulder and he didn't react to the feint at all. He just watched me plan it.
"Tell me what you notice," he said.
"You're not overcommitting."
"The shield already committed. So I don't have to. The shield does my decision-making. I can watch you think." He tapped the shield face. "But it's flat. It can only cover one plane at once. What changes when the angle of threat is no longer a line?"
We spent the rest of the afternoon on that concept. He wouldn't let me use throwing spears yet—"we'll get there"—but he planted the idea clearly: a shield was designed for linear threats from a fixed direction. Variable angles, especially angles set up from a distance and approached from an unexpected direction, would stress its coverage in ways the wielder couldn't easily compensate for.
That evening, eating at the mess, I thought about mages again.
A wall of stone doesn't care about your variable angles. A fire spell occupies all approaches simultaneously. Fog blinds you regardless of direction.
*What is any of this for?*
I chewed my food and didn't answer.
---
Morning: shortbow.
He set up twenty meters back and put three consecutive arrows within a grouping I could cover with one hand. Then he looked at me over the fourth nocked arrow.
"You need to be inside three meters to kill me," he said. "I need to be an idiot to let you reach three meters. Begin."
I'd thought about this one overnight. The bow's advantage was range maintenance—exactly the thing I depended on with the spear, turned against me. The fight to close distance was the entire fight. Cover, angles, accepting one grazing hit as the price of closing, committing to ground between us.
An arrow passed my ear close enough to feel the fletching before I dove behind a post. He tracked left; I moved right, cutting his angle. He adjusted; I committed to the gap and ran.
Four steps and I was inside his effective draw. Shaft in two hands, his bow arm controlled, no room for another shot.
"Stop," he said without particular emotion. "What if that arrow had hit your leg?"
"I'd have kept running. Slower."
He looked at me for a moment. "Being slow with an arrow in your leg still closes more distance than standing still worrying about it." He nodded. "You understood the problem correctly."
Afternoon: he put the bow down and picked up a spear.
This was the hardest session of the week.
He was better than me in every dimension I could measure: efficiency of movement, tip control, reading angles. The exchanges were educational and humiliating simultaneously. I knew exactly what he was doing—same weapon, same range logic—and knowing didn't help, because his execution was layers above mine.
"Same range, same tools—technique and experience win," he said after the fifth time he'd closed my options cleanly. "You close the gap by getting better. No lateral solution at mirror distance."
He planted his spear and looked at me directly. He'd noticed something.
"What are you thinking about when we drill?" he asked. "Something's been sitting there for three days."
I stopped deflecting. "Mages. Specifically why I'm here."
He sat on the practice post like a man who has no self-consciousness about finding a surface and using it. "Tell me."
"At the bridge, Tenki's magic decided the outcome. I was effective, but secondary. Julius's position had held for weeks against everything conventional forces attempted. Tenki walked up and dismantled it in one pass." I looked at my spear. "He's in training with Barden right now getting exponentially better at something that already outperforms everything I can do in most tactical situations. I've been trying to figure out what a Spear Saint is for in a world where that exists."
Erwin was quiet for a while. Actually thinking.
"Magic," he said, "is an argument. A very loud, destructive argument. It says: the situation has changed. Everything you planned is now wrong." He stood up. "But an argument is not an occupation. After the magic argues, someone has to walk into what it left behind. Hold the position it cleared. Protect the mage while his reserves recover. Stand between the thing that didn't finish dying and the people behind you." He picked up his spear. "Tenki can argue with an army. Can he hold a single doorway while he does it?"
"No."
"You can. That's not a footnote. That's not secondary." He met my eyes. "A mage on a battlefield is a commitment. He commits to doing the thing he's doing, and for the duration of that thing, he cannot do anything else. Something has to protect the commitment. Something has to guarantee the mage finishes what he started. That guarantee—the harder you make it, the larger the things Tenki can attempt knowing you're behind him." He rolled the spear shaft once in his grip. "You want to know what a Spear Saint is for? That's what it's for. And it's enough."
I stood in the afternoon quiet and felt something rearrange itself in my chest.
Not an answer, exactly. More like a direction. The question hadn't disappeared. But now it pointed somewhere.
"Same time tomorrow?" I asked.
"Tomorrow," he said, "we do something different."
---
On the second day, in the gap between the axe work and the shield drill, I'd noticed a bundle of short spears stacked near the equipment shed. Different weight, different balance point. Not made for sustained contact. I'd asked Erwin about them.
He'd glanced at them. "Not yet," he'd said, and moved on.
He was waiting with that same bundle now.
"Throwing spears," he said.
I picked one up. "I thought a spear was a contact weapon."
"A spear is a range weapon. The only question is how much range you choose to use." He gestured at the target post thirty meters out. "Throw it."
I threw it overhand. It hit the post at an angle and clattered off.
"The grip is different. The release point is different. The rotation is different from thrusting." He took one and demonstrated—a compact motion, energy from hip rotation and wrist snap. The spear crossed thirty meters and buried itself three fingers deep into the post.
"Range weapon," he said. "An opponent who knows you only threaten at three meters plans around three meters. An opponent who isn't certain whether you'll close or throw has to plan for both. The uncertainty is worth more than accuracy."
We spent the morning on fundamentals—not archery precision, but enough to be credible. By midday I could hit the target post six times in eight attempts.
Then Erwin looked at two of the spears I'd missed with—one embedded in the dirt ten meters out, another off to the side at an angle—and said:
"What happens to those?"
"They're wasted throws."
"Are they? Where are they right now?"
I looked at them. Planted in the ground. I walked to the nearer one, gripped the shaft—solidly embedded. I put my foot beside it, felt the angle, worked out what was possible from this position compared to where I'd been standing.
"Don't think," Erwin said from behind me. "Move."
I moved. Used the embedded spear as a brace point, stepped on the shaft near the head, used the planted angle to push off and redirect my weight—and suddenly I was in a position that shouldn't have been accessible from where I'd started. I grabbed the second thrown spear out of the dirt and I was standing at an angle to where any opponent would have expected me to be.
Erwin was quiet for a moment.
"Again," he said. "Throw three first."
---
The next morning, Erwin laid three spears side by side on the practice ground.
"Pick them up," he said. "One at a time."
I picked up the first.
It was lighter than my standard weapon. The shaft felt solid enough—wood, dense, nothing soft about it. But when I swung it with arm speed, something happened at the tip: the shaft resisted the rotation a fraction of a heartbeat longer than the handle, then released all of it at once. The tip arrived late—whipping through the last arc like weight at the end of a rope, carrying the force differently than my wrist had intended. It moved my strike several centimeters off the line I'd aimed for.
"That one overruled me," I said.
"Put it down. Second."
The second was the opposite. Heavier than it looked, completely rigid—no flex, no give, nothing between my intention and the tip's destination. I thrust and it went *exactly* where I aimed. Clean. Precise.
And completely telegraphed. Anyone watching my shoulders and hips could read exactly where it was going before it arrived.
"Honest," I said.
"Too honest. Put that one down. The third."
Twin spears—shorter, matched pair, one in each hand. I stood there holding both and felt my balance shift, my body recalibrating to the different weight distribution. The rhythm they suggested was nothing like the single-spear philosophy I'd lived for years—faster, closer-range, more chaotic.
Erwin moved across from me with his practice spear. "Fight me."
Twin spears against a longer single weapon: I had close-range advantage and two separate attack angles; he had my range and reach. The exchanges were disorienting. I could tell it was disorienting for him too—I saw a recalibration in his third exchange, adjusting his distance judgement.
But I couldn't reach his range. The shorter spears had cut my distance advantage cleanly in half.
"Put them down," Erwin said after twenty minutes. "Interesting. But that's not your path."
I put them down and picked up the first spear again—the flexible one.
I held it longer this time. The flex was there. The late tip was still frustrating. But I'd spent twenty minutes fighting with different problems, and standing here now I was thinking about it differently.
He'd said the shield was designed for linear threat. He'd planted the concept of variable angles across the last two days.
The rigid spear told the opponent exactly where the tip was going. That was its flaw.
The flexible spear's tip didn't land where I was pointing. If I didn't know the flex variable, that was a flaw. If I knew the flex variable and the opponent didn't—I was aiming for point B while pointing at point A.
"If I learn where it will actually land," I said slowly, "I can aim for that point while pointing somewhere else."
Erwin had a particular expression when something was worth acknowledging. Not praise—professional recognition. "Show me."
I moved to the target post.
That afternoon session ran ninety minutes past when we usually stopped.
---
The throwing technique became useful before it became clean.
That distinction mattered. Clean—reliable, reproducible—came later, and never fully. What came first was *useful*: a pattern that worked often enough to change how an opponent had to think.
The core idea had clarified across the week: don't throw as a finishing move. Throw as architecture. Two or three short spears placed at angles ahead of me before I closed—not aimed at the opponent but positioned in the ground at calculated intervals. Each embedded shaft became infrastructure. I could step on one near the tip, use the planted angle to kick off laterally without breaking stride, redirect my body's momentum by forty or fifty degrees in a space where running patterns couldn't do the same. The result was a charge that didn't travel in a line. It traveled in a reading of what was available.
On the fifth day of this work, Erwin left the practice spears against the fence and walked to the far corner of the yard.
He came back carrying his halberd.
It was the weapon the camp gave space on the rack. Longer than the practice spear by a full body length—the blade at the angle that gave it two working edges and a hook, Theodric's school built into its geometry. His posture changed when he held it: wider base, weight distributed for something heavier, the blade carried in a way that made his real reach clear for the first time. The distance rules I'd been building all week needed recalculation.
"The range changed," I said.
"Everything changes when the weapon changes." He settled into stance. "So does your approach. Try."
The first three approaches failed in different ways. The halberd's reach meant the shaft positions I'd been using were too far in—I was arriving into his effective zone before I'd generated a useful angle. I adjusted placement: farther out, wider spread. Fourth approach: throw two, close, step off the first embedded shaft and kick hard left—and he'd already rotated to cover the redirect before I completed it. The halberd tip was there.
"Better position selection," he said. "You're placing the shafts where you plan to use them. Place them where I have to worry about them instead."
I changed the logic: threw into the space *between* us and to either side of his stance, not the space I intended to pass through. The ambiguity was the point. He had to account for every shaft in the field as a potential redirect—not just the ones I was currently moving toward.
It worked. On the third attempt with that adjustment, I reached close range.
Close range with a halberd was still not safe—the hook covered angles a straight blade couldn't reach. But it was reachable. And reachable was where the flexible spear mattered.
The whipping tip arrived late. I was pointing at his lead shoulder; the tip arrived at his neck. He deflected the strike he'd expected. The one that actually arrived met his guard half a beat behind his weight commitment.
He blocked it. He was better than me. The block was real.
But I'd released the flexible spear at contact, and the second embedded short spear was in the dirt two steps to my left. I covered those steps in the time his recovery took. Different weapon, different angle, below the halberd's working range, coming from the side his recovery had moved him away from.
He stepped back and took the edge on the halberd shaft. Exchange closed.
He stood there for a moment.
"Again," he said. "Start over."
We ran it six more times. He adapted after the second run—started positioning to make the second weapon pickup harder. I changed which embedded shaft I used for the final redirect, changed which follow-up weapon I was moving toward. He adapted again. I adapted again. Each exchange ran longer than the last.
Then something shifted.
I don't know exactly when it happened. There was no single moment I could point to. It was more like a temperature change—gradual, and then suddenly obvious.
On the seventh run, I threw the first short spear without aiming at a landing spot. I threw it into the space *ahead* of where I intended to be, and my body had already calculated the rest before the spear left my hand. I was already moving when it hit the ground. Second spear: thrown upward, high arc, not at the target—above it. The spear climbed and reached the top of its arc and hung there for the half-second that physics allows before gravity can insist.
I was already underneath it.
The shaft was at the apex. I put my foot on it—not a guess, not a scramble, a placement, the way you place a step on a staircase you've climbed a thousand times—and the planted angle launched me sideways and upward, into a position that didn't exist anywhere on the ground below me.
The third spear was in my hand. I'd palmed it mid-stride, two steps back, with no more conscious thought than breathing.
The flexible spear came first. I was falling through the position—no stable footing, pure momentum—and the shaft whipped with it, the tip arriving not where I'd pointed but fifteen centimeters lower, driven by the rotation and the falling weight, from an angle that had no ground-based equivalent. Erwin's halberd came up. He deflected it.
And I'd already released.
The third spear was already moving—not a throw, a thrust, driven by the same falling momentum that had made the flexible strike unpredictable, coming from the side his deflection had opened. Different weapon. Different height. A direction that only existed because I'd spent two seconds in an impossible position.
He stepped back hard. Shaft-parry, both hands, the full defensive commitment of someone who has run out of margin.
He controlled it.
He was better than me. He would be better than me for years. The parry was clean, unhurried despite everything, the block of someone who had met genuinely difficult problems before and knew exactly what to do about them.
But it was full commitment. Every percentage he had. And for the two seconds it took him to close out the exchange, he was not doing anything else.
He stood there afterward.
He was breathing slightly harder than he had been.
He looked at the ground: the embedded shafts behind me, the arc I'd run through them, the position I'd launched from that didn't exist on flat earth, the two weapons still in my hands given that I'd started the run with one.
"Again," he said, and his voice had a different quality than it had all afternoon.
---
Returning from throwing practice—the sequential technique finally stringing together into something that looked like intention—the sky made me stop.
Seven steps out of the practice area. Heading back toward the residential quarter. Evening air cooling fast.
Overhead, normal clouds: the patchy high drift that had been moving through from the east all day.
Except one part of it wasn't normal.
I'd grown up watching Tenki shape clouds. Garden practice, road sessions, the eighteen months of drilling before the bridge, and now every day here—weather shifting in deliberate ways above the far training areas where Barden worked with him. I knew what his clouds looked like under control.
The formation to the northeast, above the auxiliary training grounds, was not under control.
Larger than anything I'd seen him make in practice. Dark at the edges in a way that had nothing to do with the evening light. Rotating—but wrong. Too tight, too fast, with a tension in it I recognized from the moments before Tenki had to release something that was getting away from him.
Except he wasn't releasing it. He was still holding. All of it. Something clearly straining.
The formation contracted once, sharply.
A sound I felt more than heard—low, resonant, a pressure change that made the air briefly different—and then the whole structure collapsed. Not dispersed gradually. Cut off. The cloud spread flat in a ring and stopped, the vapor hanging motionless in the air for one instant before it began to dissolve.
*That's not letting go,* I thought. *That's being let go.*
I was running before I finished the thought.
---
The auxiliary training grounds were on the north end of the base—open cleared space, target dummies, practice circles. Nearly empty at this hour.
Not entirely empty.
Tenki was lying on his side in the center of the cleared area, one arm slightly extended, palm open toward the sky. The grass around him was damp. A thin vapor still drifted in the air above him, settling as I watched.
I reached him in seconds and went to one knee, hand on his shoulder immediately.
"Tenki."
Breathing. Slow and even and deep—the specific quality of breath I associated with something Marcus had described once: the body making a decision the mind didn't get a vote in. Enforced rest. Managed shutdown.
Unconscious in the way of something that had taken everything available.
I looked at the clearing. The damp ring in the grass, several meters radius, centered on where he lay. Residual vapor thinning into nothing. A faint charge still in the air that I couldn't name but could feel against my skin.
Whatever he'd done, he'd done it completely.
I sat down beside him, one hand staying on his shoulder, and looked at what was left of the cloud above us.
That was his work. Whatever the integration attempt had been—everything Barden had been building toward over these past days—Tenki had gotten there, gone all the way to the thing that had been waiting at the edge of his understanding, and the body had answered: *enough for now.*
He'd recover. I knew how he handled limits—pushed until the limit pushed back, then slept it off and came back at it from a different angle. He'd be fine.
Probably.
Somewhere across the base, Erwin's voice carried over the evening noise—something about formation spacing, delivered at the level he considered ordinary conversation. The cookfires were being lit. The smell of the evening meal was starting to move through the camp on the cooling air.
Tenki breathed slowly.
I got my arms under him—one behind his back, one under his knees—and lifted. He wasn't light. Nine years old and three years of full conditioning behind him; he had weight. I adjusted my grip and started walking toward the medical quarter.
His head rested against my shoulder. Still completely out.
I looked at him while I walked.
He'd done something today that had knocked him flat. Whatever it was—whatever Barden had been building toward—it was large enough that getting there had used everything available in a single attempt. That wasn't recklessness. That was Tenki's version of how things worked: figure out exactly how far the edge is, then go to the edge, then find out what's past it. The unconscious part was an answer. Not a failure. Data.
We'd grown up doing this in parallel. Him finding out what clouds could do, me finding out what a spear could do. Him pushing until the sky pushed back, me drilling until the footwork stopped being something I thought about.
I'd spent four days learning to see three moves ahead and fill a battlefield with infrastructure before I even closed distance. He'd spent these same days going to whatever was waiting past the limit of what he'd already been.
I didn't know what he'd touched up there in that cloud. The damp grass. The residual vapor. Whatever had made the air charge the way it had.
But I'd watched the size of it from across the camp, and it was larger than anything he'd made before.
*You're working hard,* I thought, carrying him. *I know.*
I'd spent the week learning what I was for—learning the shape of the guarantee that made his work possible. He'd spent it learning what he was capable of, right up to the physical edge of the word.
We were growing up at the same speed, aimed at the same point.
When he woke up, I'd be here.
And when the next thing came—whatever came after this, after Ironhold, after whatever Barden's training was preparing him for—I was going to be standing at his side where I was supposed to be. Not a footnote. Not backup.
The guarantee.
I kept walking.
