Aegle trained alone. She'd always preferred training alone, away from the prying eyes of her classmates, away from the distractions of the school, out of sight and out of mind. It had nothing to do with humility or shyness, nor did it have anything to do with the more obvious reasons someone might expect someone like her to prefer solitude in practice. Rather, Aegle simply didn't like to be distracted. Her method of training had and always would be a single minded devotion to form, coupled with nearly self destructive levels of devotion and commitment. She was of a firm opinion that the hours in the day were a finite resource, which needed to be spent rather than saved, and had always tried to cram as much activity into her life as she possibly could. One necessary sacrifice to her ultimate goals had inevitably been that of time and effort, for the sake of bettering herself as a fighter and growing as a person. Of course, at the time, she'd seen her obsessive training regimen as little more than a means to an end. However, at some indefinable point, training had simply become a part of who she was, as inseparable from Aegle Vitus as her name and her love for gaudy colors. So Aegle spent hours every day, honing the skills she would inevitably put to use as a huntress and conditioning her uncooperative body to be as fine a vessel for combat as she could make it. And she'd grown to love it. While those reasons she'd initially started training had never gone away, they had inevitably been supplanted by what was a simple and genuine love for personal improvement. Aegle liked getting stronger, like getting better, and liked knowing that her hard work was paying off. She liked those mornings when it was just a little, almost imperceptibly, easier to get out of bed, and those days when she got from breakfast to supper on a lower intensity setting than the day before. She liked the idea that one day, if she worked hard enough and never gave up, she might not need the brace at all. That day was so far off that it would likely never arrive, but it was a fun thing to look forward to, and indeed one of the few things Aegle did look forward to.

So Aegle trained, and she trained alone, as her own private sacrifice to the unattainable future, free from distractions and the minutia of the world. She didn't use a boxing bag to practice, but rather she boxed with her own shadow. With the intensity on her brace turned down, it was a decent enough workout, and had one benefit over bag punching that other huntresses might not have even considered. For Aegle, the danger of over extending herself was truly pronounced, so punching empty air trained her to flow with her punches, rather than leave herself open to over extension. Bags held their own benefits, such as teaching her how to combo blows that were stopped dead by the mass of her opponent, but it was very rare that anything stood up to the impact of Aegle's blows. All a bag's other benefits, such as toughening knuckles and strengthening wrist movements, could be just as easily accomplished by punching a wall or doing knuckle push ups, both of which had their place in Aegle's implacable training regimen. Panting quietly, Aegle thought little as she exercised. She toyed with her aura, strengthening a punch here and alleviating her drained stamina there, while she switched freely from style to style and guard to guard, sometimes striking from peak-a-boo and sometimes from a south-paw open guard. It was a very dynamic sequence, which suggested Aegle were fighting multiple, or a single particular mobile, opponents. After a couple of songs, piped into her head by the headphones she wore around her skinny neck, Aegle concluded her form work and set towards endurance and strength training, which included jumping jacks, push ups, leg ups, squats, and the aforementioned wall punching. 

By the time she was done, Aegle's knuckles were bloody and a faint, almost imperceptible trembling accompanied every movement she made. She might have banished the latter with the careless application of her aura, but Aegle's heart was already racing hard enough after the taxing work out, and straining herself further would undo the whole exercise. So she stepped out of the smallish training room, which was really intended for sparring matches and not private exercise, but no one had ever complained to Aegle so she'd never stopped using it personally. She'd donned her hoodie before stepping out, but had left the brace dialed down to let her cool down simply by moving about normally. As a result, it only hummed a little as she moved, and she appeared sluggish and drained just the way someone might expect after a long and intense work out. 

Shutting the door behind herself, Aegle took a moment to rest with her back against it. She was truly tired, to a degree that even her remarkable endurance could not overcome, but that would change once her heart rate went down a little. Until then, she just needed to deal. Dressed in her baggy hoodie and oversized workout sweats, it was difficult to tell just how small Aegle was. She was short, that much was obvious, but the almost gaunt slenderness of her frame was well hidden in the voluminous folds of her clothes. Breathing out quietly, sensing that she might have overdone things a little today, Aegle moved carefully away from the door and took a couple clumsy, almost limping, steps down the corridor. She could hear the familiar rhythm of people using the bags in the nearby training cells, and considered taking a few swings for herself. Maybe she'd even hit the really big bag that was in there, if it wasn't knocked off its hook again. She found it funny that it was never any of the smaller bags, only that really big one. She made it a couple more steps, almost to the large room with all the punching bags in it, and was forced to pause as her heart banged staccato in her ears. Breathing out again, with the sort of deliberate focus employed only by the badly hurt and the very drunk, Aegle once again rested her weight on the wall. On the other hand, she thought with unusual wisdom, maybe she'd already done enough to her body for one day. Grimacing a little, Aegle pushed off the wall again and half-limped across the opening into the big room. She didn't notice the other girl, or perhaps woman was a better descriptor, until she was nearly right atop her. That was quite the feat, seeing as the other woman turned out to be as big as four Aegle's, with the sort of no-nonsense build that described a fighter well on her way to being a fully graduated huntress.
"Sorry..." Aegle said, a step away from standing right in the large woman's lap. "Didn't see you there." She wandered carefully around the taller woman, half shuffling as she did so. She wasn't sure why she felt so tired, or why her training had been so much more draining. She didn't realize that her brace was dialed into an intensity a few notches lower than normal, or that she had unintentionally gone an entire workout on a much harder level than usual. Aegle paused a few steps after the tall woman and leaned her shoulder into the wall with a quiet sigh. Her hands slowly clenched and unclenched, admonishing the intense weariness that filled her. She probably should have dialed up the brace, but she never dialed it up, not before taking it off so that she could get clean, and such habit was hard for a creature like her to break. So her bloody, bandaged hands clenched and unclenched as she waited for her heart to stop pounding and for her legs to cooperate. Then she pushed off from the wall and repeated the whole sequence again. 

Unselfconscious, despite her apparent weariness, Aegle angled a distracted grin up at the much, much, much taller girl walking alongside her. 
"Wasn't too intense..." she confessed with every appearance of open honesty, "Just a regular, daily work out." Her body language wholly failed to support the light off-handedness of her words, as the words were barely out of her mouth before she tripped over her own foot. It wasn't enough to send her sprawling, but it was about as damning a display of exhaustion as she could have made without also flopping onto her face. Aegle recovered from her less than graceful display with a couple of stumbling steps and laughed quietly at her own clumsiness. 
"Woops." She chirped lightly. Her voice was not a pretty one; It was pitched and a tiny bit shrill, and Aegle didn't seem entirely conscious of its volume. It was also a voice made for laughter and levity and quiet giggling at her own expense. She turned her luminous green eyes, which were bright and alert even despite the intense fatigue that gripped the rest of her, back upon Mizumi.
"So that's you with the punchin' bag?" She asked curiously, as if a couple of puzzle pieces had just slid neatly into place within her orange combed head. Her emerald eyes took in the whole scope of taller woman, her domineering figure and powerful physique, then gave an appraising nod, as if to say she could certainly picture Mizumi smashing a punching bag from its mount.

Then she turned her attention back to walking the straight path down the corridor, and if it seemed as though she had ignored Mizumi's offer to help her walk, it was mostly because she had. Force of habit and an ingrained sense of something, while not pride, was a lot like it, kept her from accepting even the most well intended offers of assistance. Instead, she made a visible, concerted effort to keep from tripping over her own feet, and steeled herself so that she wouldn't need to ask Mr. Wall for anymore help with keeping upright.
"My name's Aegle." She told the taller woman, when she was sure she wasn't going to trip again. She pronounced the word Eh-Glee, with all the practice one would expect for pronouncing such an unusual name when it just so happened to be their own. "S'a pleasure to meet'cha, Mizumi." She whirred softly as she walked, each step resonant with its own buzzing hum, though it was a noise she seemed entirely oblivious to. 
"You goin' to the showers too, Mizumi?" She asked absently, with a glance up ahead to confirm that they weren't very far off from her destination. It was pretty important that she got cleaned up promptly after exercising, not only because she was already starting to smell like the business end of a well worn sock, but because there was all sorts of nastiness that could accumulate on her brace if she wasn't stringent about her hygiene. 

Aegle did precisely nothing to conceal her irrepressible grin as they approached the showers, even despite the plainly mounting difficulty he was having with walking. She was well and truly beginning to entertain the possibility that she'd overdone it would training. She wondered somewhat absently what she had done differently today which may have resulted in her reduced capacity to function. Not the sort of girl typically given to introspection, the fact was that she didn't even have a singular clue as to the cause.

Looking back at Mizumi, as though to confirm that the towering girl were still following her, Aegle offered a mild shrug, with was potentially as much of a shrug as she could provide with her faintly crooked shoulders set the way they were. She really wasn't sure how else to answer the giantess' offer of letting her know which teachers should be watched out for. It took much more than a stern teacher to make her feel threatened, after all. The shrug could just as easily have been applied to Mizumi's offer to assist Aegle, given how disinclined the latter girl was to outside help. In fact, a vague shrug was also the ideal response to Mizumi's observation that she hadn't seen Aegle around much. Then, as if she suspected that her body language was not enough, Aegle supplemented it with a noncommittal, "Eh... If you want."

Having made it to the showers, Aegle ducked off the main corridor. She maintained a close distance between herself and the nearest wall, plainly not trusting her own legs, though she was also evidently reluctant to rely on the wall for support. The general effect was that of a small girl almost limping along, weaving minutely back and forth, never quite resting on the nearby wall nor straying from it either. Through the precise combination of effort, determination and evident clumsiness, she almost looked drunk. It wasn't until she reached the benches, arranged around the cluttered lockers in the middle of the changing room, that Aegle finally deigned to brace her apparently exhausted body. The orange haired girl dropped heavily onto the middle of the nearest bench, though her minute mass didn't produce so much as a quiet creak from the thickly varnished wood. "Phew... S'a real struggle today." She remarked as she directed a wolfish grin up at the taller girl. Utterly unselfconscious, the spritely Aegle dabbed absently at her brow with the sleeve of her hoodie, before she gripped the unplesantly soggy cuff in her teeth and gave it a firm yank. It was through these means that Aegle navigated one arm out of the sodden orange garment, the freed limb soon appearing from beneath the hem of the baggy hoodie.
"So're you a fist fighter too?" Aegle asked Mizumi inquisitively after spitting out her sweaty sleeve. Her emerald eyes regarded the taller girl with open curiosity upon a face which seemed determined to broadcast precisely what its owner was feeling at any given moment. Using her freed hand, Aegle carefully tugged off her other sleeve and slipped the corresponding arm out as well. Then, in a single well practiced but apparently awkward movement, she shrugged the whole hefty hoodie up and over her orange combed her and then dropped the whole thing into her lap. Without the hoodie and its obfuscating bagginess, Aegle seemed to shrink. Her exceptionally slender shoulders, plainly bared by her faded black tank top, rose and fell in rhythm with her breaths, while her nearly skeletal arms crossed carefully about her understated chest. It was also at this point that both the handwraps around Aegle fists, both of which were soaked through with spots of blood, as well as her full body mobility brace became apparent. Unbuckling herself from the brace, which crossed and separated her girlish breasts, Aegle finally took note of her bloodied knuckles. She regarded the stained handwraps without shock nor disgust, as she began carefully unwinding them to where they slipped beneath the wrist cuffs of her brace. There was a certain amount of deliberation and detachment with Aegle's actions which spoke of familiarity that had, long ago, passed into the mundane. Even when she exposed her bloodied hands and flexed the recently closed wounds on her knuckles, it was with an calm air of dispassion. From the look of her hands, which wore such a profusion of callouses and scars that it was impossible to see where one ended and another began, hurting her hands was something with which Aegle must be quite familiar.

With her fingers free and some amount of manual dexterity restored, Aegle unbuckled the cuffs that encircled each wrist, followed by the jointed cuffs at each elbow. Lastly, she pushed the brace out of the way with the two arms she'd just unstrapped, before letting her hands settle listlessly in her lap. Aegle exhaled quietly, gave a roll of her shoulders, which produced even more space between her body and brace, and then appeared to gather herself. Then, with a grunt of effort, Aegle reached up, grabbed the shoulders of her tank top, and tugged the whole thing off in a single go, slapping it back down in her lap atop her hoodie. Her arms quivered a little bit, while her quickened breathing tested the limits of her sports bra. Still, she regarded Mizumi with an unabashed smile once she'd denuded herself of her top. She was much the same beneath her tank top as she was everywhere else, skinny and frail in appearance, though her evident lack of musculature was accented by a similar absence of body fat."Now for the hard part." She murmured, perhaps to Mizumi, though it was just as likely that she was merely talking to herself. She hooked her thumbs beneath her sports bra and, with a grimace which betrayed just how uncomfortable it was to do so, jerked the whole thing up a couple of inches. Grunting softly, she jerked it up a second time, sliding it up till it was wrapped around her armpits, then reached up and tore it off of herself in the same fashion as her tank top. The almost winded, slumping pause that followed was even more severe, but Aegle soon rolled her shoulders and balled up her workout clothes.
"If only was a bit smaller." She giggled quietly, as she shifted her clothes off her lap and redirected her attention to her naked chest. "Then I wouldn't need to bother with the bra."
Looking up to see what Mizumi was up to, her utter lack of self-consciousness was evident in her unguardedly inquiring expression.
"I dunno how you manage." She said with evident sympathy, following a guileless glance at Mizumi's own assets.