The meaning and purpose of training had changed over the years for Fuyuko.

When she was young, it was just something fun and playful she did with her parents and was a part of them telling stories about their past before they settled down and had her.

After that night of fire, it had been something she'd done with other kids, whose features and names were blurred and hazed in her memory. That training had been simply what they could figure out to do with sticks, stones, and their bodies and had been about survival on the streets.

Although it was often still play, they also trained with a purpose. They'd done so because there were other kids their age on the streets who were not with them; those who did not hear or refused the call of Sanctuary. Those kids were usually junior members of a gang, and conflict could get violent. Plus there were always the older kids who had grown in violence as part of being more useful to the gangs.

Not that the caretakers had wanted them to fight. If they got into trouble, they were supposed to run home. But that wasn't always easy and sometimes one had to fight free just so that they could run. But they always worked to keep each other safe and never left one of their own behind. And with shadow's luck, one way or another they had always escaped, even if sometimes one or more of them had to be carried or dragged by the others.

The memories were still vague and spotty, but they were slowly returning.

After she'd left, Fuyuko's training had become a whole lot more intensive and involved. During those weeks on the farm, she had to unlearn tricks that were useful for a pack of kids and learn new ones suitable for a hunter with a bow. Fuyuko had continued training with what she had been taught almost every day while she traveled, up until she'd been injured fighting the peryton.

When Fuyuko was well enough, Gil had started training her as well. She had to admit that nothing before compared to the intensity and precision of his training. All of Gil's training had been simple practicality; after all, she had no way of knowing what her future was going to hold and what skills she might need, so he made sure to give her a solid base to grow from.

Now, here, in her new home, she continued to train, though in ways more varied than everything else together. At first, that training had been mostly to make sure she could do what she wanted in the future, and partly to do her part in being someone that others could rely on.

However, her training had slowly grown into a purpose for its own sake. It felt good to be able to accomplish things she'd not been able to do before and to feel herself becoming stronger and faster. Fuyuko was now in an ongoing competition with herself to ever improve, and in a competition with her friends to see who could improve the fastest and the most.

Well, that competition was mostly with Galan and Derek, once Derek had arrived with the scheduled caravan. Notably, the caravan that had arrived just days after the caravan Shizoku would have been arriving on had she not flown off the handle and arrived early to air her outrage over Aia's pregnancy. They certainly weren't going to send her back on her own, and finding a group for her to travel back to the clan with made no sense when she'd be due to come back again so soon.

Shizoku was diligent, but she didn't get competitive about this sort of thing. Even in the bookish stuff, Shizo wasn't really competitive, she just loved learning and reading a lot and didn't need to compete to keep improving.

Still, Fuyuko found that she loved the rush of pushing herself and continually improving.

Usually.

There were some days that made her feel differently about the matter.

Right now, Fuyuko was sprinting across an open field with a light coating of snow while the sun shone bright in the sky above her.

While she kept shadows wrapped around herself as well as she could while the bright light tried to burn it off.

Again.

Fuyuko had lost count of how many times she'd done this exercise today, but it had been enough that Fuyuko had to dig deep into her will and the powers of her heritage to stand at all, let alone sprint.

The agony of her protesting body might make her resentful if Mama M wasn't pushing herself just as hard and in a similar way.

Her adoptive parents had discovered that a sufficient amount of earth-attuned mana canceled out Moriko's ability to walk through the air without effort. She could still do it with a little bit of effort, but the more earth-attuned energy she had on her person, the harder it was to simply step up into the air.

Moriko was currently wearing a thick, padded outfit covered with heavy plates of enchanted stone and metal as she sprinted across the field while several feet above the ground.

This was how most training days with Mama M went; she would find something difficult for both of them to do repeatedly that was similar in some way, and they would both do it until one of them couldn't move anymore.

So far, that was always Fuyuko, no matter what insane challenge Moriko gave herself.

Once Fuyuko was unable to continue and often unable to move, Mama M would take care of her until the evening reset. Combined with her own healing powers, that meant that they could now train in unarmed combat. This was Fuyuko's favorite part, because Betty also trained with them now that she'd had her child, and Betty always brought her son Boril with her.

Fuyuko always managed to find a way to sneak in a little bit of time with the adorable usagisune baby boy with his shock of dark, blue-gray hair.

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Boril's arrival had surprised Fuyuko at first, but she'd only been vaguely aware of the fact that dungeon inhabitants had accelerated pregnancies.

Mordecai had commented during that night's dinner to Kazue and Moriko that his personal biases seemed to have tweaked the usagisune default form as Boril was born in his almost-human body type. With Betty being a first-generation usagisune, Gil being human shouldn't have influenced her child's base form.

Betty had been pretty bored those last few weeks before giving birth and had spent a considerable amount of time in the library researching names. She said that she'd picked the name because it meant, roughly, 'to fight' and it contained parts of her name and Gil's name. Though she'd also mentioned that it was similar to a word in a different language that meant 'wolf', which Fuyuko rather liked.

While she wasn't interested in having one of her own, Fuyuko liked babies a lot. Especially since she could hand them back when they got smelly. Her nose was sensitive enough to notice that fast and early.

Training days with Kazue were very different from those with Moriko. Mama K mostly focused on reviewing what Fuyuko had learned from other tutors like Horace, the librarian orangutan zone boss, and touching up anything Fuyuko was having trouble with.

But they did do some training too, it was just not focused on pushing themselves. Instead, Mama K wanted to test things like having Fuyuko figure a way around a warding spell or Kazue trying a spell to see how well Fuyuko could resist or shake off its effects.

These were all done very carefully and any experiments were called off immediately if it seemed like something might have gone wrong.

Neither one of them felt confident enough to try direct sparring, their combat styles were too different without either of them having a great understanding of the other's style. They just couldn't spar safely unless they both chose to do only unarmed fighting. Fuyuko won the few times they tried that, but she still felt foxfire was cheating, even if it was a natural weapon for Kazue that she always had available.

Bellona's training was great as far as Fuyuko was concerned. A lot of fighting practice; exactly what she wanted. Not that Bellona always trained her directly; a lot of the time she wanted to have Fuyuko work with one of the rabbit folk who had a specific style that Bellona wanted Fuyuko to get used to.

Even better was the occasional training with 'Gramps'. Thinking about Ricardo's expression when she'd called him Gramps still made Fuyuko want to giggle. Still, they had a similar fighting style and the 'old man' seemed both eager to both prove he still had what it took to keep up with Akahana and to teach a new disciple more than a few tricks.

Fuyuko had not tried to give Akahana a nickname. She'd paused after calling Ricardo 'Gramps' and given Akahana a questioning look.

"Auntie," Akahana had said, resolving the matter firmly.

The only reason that Fuyuko didn't get to train with Gramps more often was that he was often delving. This was also why Fuyuko didn't get to see Shizoku, Derek, and Galan more often, though she always got a free day whenever they returned from a delve. Right now this meant every few days as they couldn't delve very far, even with a team.

Mordecai had become her least frequent trainer, but he had also become a specialist for Fuyuko. He was the one who brought together all of her disparate lessons and taught her how to do things like combine her dagger work with her shadow powers and the techniques she'd figured out from working around Kazue's shields. That one let her attack with one of her daggers and let a shadow of the dagger pass through many physical and magic barriers, with some limitations.

Whenever Fuyuko mastered one of these synergies, she always felt a little stronger and more confident. It could take weeks to master them after Mordecai had taught Fuyuko enough to continue practicing on her own, but Fuyuko had some very good reasons to spend a lot of energy mastering them.

They also unlocked a little more of her memories.

She'd considered asking Mordecai about it when she realized what was happening, but Fuyuko waited to give it some thought first as the idea felt familiar. After thinking about it for a while, she remembered that Mordecai had already told her that her memories would return when it was safe for her to have them.

Being strong and self-sufficient was the best way for her to be that sort of safe. The techniques and skills that combined different aspects of her training into something that was hers were the most concrete advances in her personal power.

Fuyuko was hoping to have most if not all of her memories back by the time they finished their trip to the southern dungeon. Although she could tell that Mordecai had some lingering reluctance to do so, he wanted to gather as much information as possible to allow Fuyuko to choose if she needed vengeance. To this end, Mordecai had said that since they were going to be going up to Trionea, it would be best to make a visit to where she had lived before they dealt with the wizard who held Deidre's core in thrall.

He had two major reasons. First, time mattered when it came to the scrying of past events. While a few months might not make much difference at this point, a few more years easily could. This brought up his second reason: They didn't know what was going to happen after the dungeon raid, and they might not have the luxury of visiting the city afterward.

There was one problem: Fuyuko wasn't sure she could remember where she lived more than six years ago. She'd only been eight!

But she had a potential solution to that problem that would also involve doing something she wanted to do anyway: see Caretaker Yvonne again, and maybe some of her friends too, if she could remember them well enough.

So she trained as the weeks rolled by without major incident.

Mostly.

Shizoku only stayed in Fuyuko's room for two nights, but that was enough.

Her room was now permanently contaminated with white fur and sparkling faerie dust from Shizoku's tails, all of which showed up easily against Fuyuko's mostly dark clothes. It was only occasionally irritating, but one time she had been particularly annoyed about it and tried to purify at least what she was wearing by being extra selective when taking a small shadow jump. Fuyuko had been trying to filter out anything 'foreign' to her, other than her gear.

Fuyuko didn't entirely remember how her experiment ended, she mostly remembered feeling particularly awful almost immediately. It wasn't pain exactly, but it was weird, uncomfortable, and a little panic-inducing.

Papa had swooped in immediately of course, but normally Fuyuko would have expected her Mamas to nurse her beyond those first moments of crises. Instead, Mordecai was in more often than they were to check up on her, though they were both there frequently as was Shizoku.

More than once she'd heard him muttering something about the short life spans of prodigies.

Hey, at least she was a prodigy?

It turned out that by filtering everything that was supposedly 'not her', she'd filtered out a lot of symbiotic life that was a normal part of everyone's bodies. For her, this was about three pounds of weight according to Mordecai.

She found that number disturbing to think about.

Unfortunately, Fuyuko had a few days to think about it. The dungeon's reset didn't really see the missing life as damage, and Mordecai had made her repeatedly take pills through each day, along with a few very herbal-tasting drinks and giving her a few injections.

That was a new and scary experience. She didn't know that there were medicines you could inject like that. But you could inject poisons, so why shouldn't you be able to inject good stuff?

Oh, and between repeated visits by both Shizoku and Kazue, Fuyuko's room was now infested with both white and red fur.

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