“Fine, read the book and hurry up and get it. Then you learn to dodge. I’m sure I can get you to learn tricks the game skill won’t teach you. Then we shall see if you can force increase stats with hard work!” 

She's not providing a great incentive to learn, but he gets to work, using the bones from last night's meal. 

"...I got it." He says it like a condemned man, once he's drained his first bone half an hour later.

“Hah! Now back to training, you can use a sword if you think it will help save you.” It won’t. He might be getting stronger and faster but she has a decade of combat experience on him.

He grabs the sword and does his best to hold her off. His terror and pain are at least training up more skills that way,  as this nightmare of a girl assaults him. 

Tanya is so kind and nice for going so easy on Joon. If they weren't in a fragile hotel room she would be pushing him way harder. She is practically a saint.

Joon picks up plenty of shallow cuts that Tanya gives him as an incentive to dodge better. And to practice bone magic on.

"- all I'm saying is, you're in the kharass too, you can just ask us to cut his stupid -"

Joon is currently doing push-ups in the middle of the bloodstained floor, covered in tiny cuts all over his body, and holding a smoking bone between his teeth. He is drenched in sweat and looks worse than he ever did back in the Risen Lands.

“Pain is weakness leaving the body!” Totally untrue, but it encouraged her troops when she trained them, if it works it works. “15 more and you can take a healing break!”

"I fought his was he healing hreak!" Joon says inarticulately with the bone between his teeth. 

He really hopes she means fifteen push-ups and not fifteen more minutes of her sitting on his back. He hasn't noticed the rest of the party returning yet.

Fenn gives a conspiratorial look to Tanya, drops off the shopping, and settles in on the bed to enjoy the show.

Amaryllis crosses her arms, but then cracks a rare smile and sits down next to Fenn. 

"We can call this situational awareness practice, waiting to see how long it takes him to notice us."

Well, Tanya won’t spoil the surprise. “No, 14 more now and you get a real break! 5 whole minutes to heal yourself. Then we stop this warmup and get to the real training.” Now she is just messing with him. She wants to get her own training in of learning about Aerb from Amaryllis.

Joon eventually struggles through the last of the set, drawing on his racing heart to complete the last two, and then collapses on the floor face down. 

He waves an arm. "Can you throw me a bone here?"

“Good job” she pats him on the shoulder and hops off his back. Passing him a bone from the table.

She heads over to the princess and Fenn. “You know we may have severely underestimated his rate of growth. It is slowing down at higher skill levels but with honestly a shockingly short amount of time, a few months even, he could probably surpass a mage from my unit in reaction times. We could and did dodge bullets. And thats just from the increase in dodging skill.”

"And the Virtues," he says, flopping over to draw on the bone while holding it above his head to block the ceiling light. "Burning END specifically to heal more efficiently, no penalty to dodging magic, ambidexterity, halved penalty to parrying bullets... I got a spell for Bare Augmentation, which I think is the umbrella term for physical boosts with blood."

"Wait, when did you two get in?"

"Ten minutes ago," Fenn lies.

"We'd better buy a few bones from a butcher's before we leave, in case we need emergency healing once we reach Caer Laga's wards."

“I don’t know how fast the usual progression of learning bone magic is, but if it is anything like his other skills he will soon be putting to shame people with years of experience. The progression is so much faster than you probably think. Watching him get better at parrying in real time was slightly creepy.” It was more than a little creepy, but she doesn’t want Joon to get a big head about it.

There were times when he parried blows he had no business knowing were coming. Tanya had to pull out the real dirty tricks just to keep up with him. Not that she let him know that.

"This is... More research is needed. If that affinity of his is for all magics, there are combinations that have probably never been tried because nobody has ever trained up to be a multimagus of them. Vibrational and Velocity magic - no, those would both have to be unlocked. Warding, Star, and Rune magic, though..."

This is perhaps the most excited anyone has seen Amaryllis. 

"Are you any stronger now?" Joon asks Tanya. "Because if all that training is doing double duty already, it's even more worthwhile."

Tanya throws a bone at his head, but not in a dodge training kind of way. “Don’t get a big head, I could still take you”

”I don’t think I am any better at anything compared to yesterday? Besides the regular practice of getting used to an unfamiliar sword. I am also unsure what differences from my previous world are the lack of my mage potential or just this body being subtly different from my old one.” At least the lack of scars in this new body was nice. She never cared that much about her appearance, but there used to be one burn scar on her belly that was really unsightly. 

"In a fight, right?"