That was putting it lightly. In his state, Barnaby would more likely roll down a roof than jump on it. But that was why I was needed, to fix this ridiculous mess he was in.
I stood and tugged him along with me. The past didn’t matter. Only the deadline, the now, and the discipline he needed to have. “You are soft. You are doughy. When I look at you, I don’t see a legendary guardian of the season. I see a liability.”
His nose began to twitch uncontrollably. There it was. The tell. Good. He wasn’t paying me to be his friend. He was paying me to chisel a warrior out of… whateverthiswas.
I walked to the bench press, a flat rock I’d sanded smooth. Forked branches flanked it, supporting a heavy ironwood trunk. A clean station was a sign of a clear mind. I grabbed a rag and wiped down the bark with methodical precision. Hygiene was the first law of the gym, even if the gym was a magical forest.
“I can’t,” Barnaby wheezed from where he was swaying on his feet, clutching his chest like a dying Victorian waif. “Brok, I can’t do another set. My soul is bruised.”
I let out a deep sigh. Proper recovery was as critical as the exercise itself. An exhausted muscle was a useless muscle. He needed fuel and a reset, whether his soul was bruised or not. “Grab your bottle.” I hooked a thumb toward the bright pink, ridiculously oversized water bottle hanging from a low branch. “Hydrate. Youhave sixty seconds to pull yourself together. Then we hit the burpees.”
“Burpees?” Barnaby’s eyes widened, showing the whites all around. “You said today was Leg Day. Burpees are… everything day. It’s a full-body assault.”
“It’s metabolic conditioning.” I snatched my clipboard from the rock.Time to document the suffering.
Barnaby’s numbers worried me. They were an insult to the very concept of cause and effect. His endurance was still barely registering above ‘comatose,’ and his strength gains had plateaued weeks ago.
I tapped the charcoal pencil against my tusk, the sharpclick-click-clicka rhythm for my building suspicion.
The math didn’t lie. For two weeks, I had ramped up the intensity and doubled the volume. I had put him on a strict caloric deficit. By every rule of the flesh I knew, he should have dropped three pounds of fat.
He hadn’t. Why?
I lowered the clipboard, my gaze narrowing on the subject himself. Barnaby was guzzling the water, the liquid spilling down his chin to mat the fur on his chest.
It wasn’t just that he failed to get leaner. I squinted. The curve of his midsection seemed to be actively mocking my efforts, defying gravity and logic simultaneously. It confirmed the theory that had been forming in the back of my mind for days. He seemed… denser.
“Barnaby.”
“What?” He wiped his mouth with the back of a paw, panting.
“How is the diet going?”
He froze. A tiny tensing of the shoulders. A flicker of the left ear. The exact same microscopic flinch a marsh vole makes just before the hawk strikes.
My new client was a terrible liar. It was almost disappointing.
“Great,” he squeaked. “Fantastic. I love kale. Can’t get enough of it. Big fan of roughage.”
“And the cravings?” I lowered the clipboard, careful not to make any sudden movement that might startle him. “Any desire for… sweets?”
“Pfft.” He waved a paw, a gesture too wide, too performative. “Sugar is a mirage. I have transcended flavor. I ate a raw carrot for breakfast. It was… spiritually fulfilling.”
I let the clipboard fall from my hand. It hit the rock with a sharp crack that cut through the rest of his performance. The time for talk was over.
“Explain something to me, Barnaby.” I closed the distance between us in a single step. “If you are eating nothing but roots and leaves, and we are crushing two hours of cardio a day, why is your waistline expanding?”
“Muscle confusion?”
The excuse was so fundamentally stupid, it was the fitness equivalent of claiming a troll could be reasonedwith. “That is not how muscle works. You don’t confuse your abs into turning into a spare tire. That is soft tissue. That is stored fuel.”
His gaze darted past my shoulder, toward the mossy stones that marked the edge of the grove. If I hadn’t known any better, I’d have thought he was mapping an escape route. I took another half-step, cutting off his line of sight.
“Lift your arms.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
