find solace (belong) [KNY/BNHA]

[19] a pledge we've made

Recently, I've decided to keep a journal for Nezuko as I've been training hard under the guidance of Urokodaki, alongside Char.

Every day, Tanjirou woke up to the sight of an empty futon that was nicely folded up behind the neutral-toned divider. It was a telltale sign of the black-haired girl already up and training.

Tanjirou didn't know how Char's body was built, but within the past couple of weeks, he was beginning to think that she wasn't even human. Somehow, even if he willed himself to wake up even earlier, she was still missing from where she should still be sleeping. Until when does she even sleep?

If he didn't know better, he'd think that Char didn't even sleep at all.

After descending the mountain repeatedly day after day, I've grown accustomed to the traps and I'm learning to avoid most of them.

With every run he completes down the mountain, the more he feels himself get stronger. His muscles tear and strain, but they heal tougher and better. His bones creak under the pressure and ache at the joints, but he remains sturdier each time he heals. Though he's sore at the end of the day, he can noticeably see an improvement on the first day.

He was getting better at detecting scents too.

Even so, the traps are getting more and more dangerous. What used to be blunt rocks that were thrown towards me are now sharpened knives. Now, the pits that are dug out into the mountain floor have blades protruding from the ground.

I'm really starting to think that Urokodaki-san wants to kill me.

If the way his body groaned and moaned when he lay on his futon was anything to go by, it may be true.

Today, I went down the mountain with a sword in hand. It was more difficult than expected. It hampered my movement and interfered with my rhythm, I was caught in lots of traps that I could usually avoid.

I don't know how Char managed to do this kind of training a month before me.

Now that Tanjirou thought about it, he didn't really see the girl often since her training schedule was different from hers. It wasn't that they were doing significantly different things as in the first two weeks Char and Tanjirou had trained together under Urokodaki. It was just that it changed afterwards when Char progressed faster than Tanjirou.

If Tanjirou was descending the mountain, she was probably swinging a sword a few thousand times. When Tanjirou was swinging the katana in the later afternoon, she would be nowhere to be seen.

She started having blades introduced into her mountain traps earlier than him, and she had started carrying the katana with her down the mountain quite a while before him.

Somehow, this fact makes me want to work harder to catch up to her.

I've been working hard so that I won't die during the Final Selection, but I feel like Char's working even harder than I am.

She wakes up earlier than me, sleeps later than me, undergoes harsher training than me.

Tanjirou thinks back to when he did get to see her swing her sword. Her voice was firm and smooth as she got up to one thousand and three hundred and continued counting each swing she did. Each movement of her arms spelt grace and strength. Her posture was really good too. Even if she was tired, she was sure to put a hundred and twenty percent into every single one of her motions.

It was watching her that made him notice some things he did differently.

Swinging the sword just a thousand times made Tanjirou feel like his arms were going to fall off, but he could often hear Char's voice counting up to two thousand, three thousand, four thousand.