"Left Ander! Left!" Tom was yelling from the side as I was frantically dodging a fox.
"It's got a bum right leg so pressure it on your left!" I was training with Tom and Sylvia while Gus and Kara procured some supplies for another desert patrol we were going to take at the end of the week. The group had adopted me as a part of their band once I joined the guild and offered to train me in return for a half share.
I had been facing off against all sorts of creatures over the last three days but this fox was the most annoying. It was fast, liked to bite at my ankles and Tom and Sylvia were only stepping in if it looked like my life was going to be on the line. And thanks to my new to me armor was rarely the case.
I lunged forward, heedless of any tactics and just grabbed for the fox to try to trap it. Thankfully, as I lunged forward the bum leg got caught a rock and the fox collapsed, allowing me to get a bearhug on the creature and stab it with my short sword. As I stabbed the creature puffed into smoke and Sylvia began conjuring another for me to practice against.
"You'll never learn proper skill if your just grabbing the things and using brute force. That works on weak summons but if we are fighting for real you'll be dead in 10 seconds flat." I could hear a note of resignation in Tom's voice "I know it can be tiring just fighting creature after creature without seeing any gain but you need to get your basic skill down before moving on to more dangerous foes. These summons are perfect to start training on">
"Why can't I learn skill by sparring with you?" I had asking a hundred times as it seemed much easier to learn basic skills in a controlled environment like that than against feral animals, even if they were tuned down by Sylvia's spell. But Tom had the same answer every time "If you were going to be fighting people then that would be great, I could show you how to stab a man 15 different ways and you could practice them all. But we aren't bandits, and we aren't soldiers. We fight monsters and beasts, not people. We need to make sure your foundation is set for keeping yourself alive in the wild against all sorts of threats, then you'll naturally be strong enough to fend off any bandits or highwaymen that try to rob you".
Sylvia decided to chime in at this point. Usually it was difficult for anyone to maintain control of a summoned beast and explain tactics at the same time but her insights between bouts were some of the most insightful. Tom seemed to just say the same thing over and over until it drilled into my head from repetition alone but Sylvia watched, saw my mistakes and helped me overcome them.
"You are treating your sword as a simple tool. Something that you can use to swing and poke. You need to visualize what the sword is able to do for you and make the weapon the foundation of your attack. Right now you are relying on your physical strength and size over the creatures you have been fighting, stop using that as a crutch and embrace the sword as an extension of your intent. Once you have more skills you will need to trust in your blade and its ability to do the work for the skills to be effective". As she was explaining this she was starting to form the next creature. So far I had been going up against smaller animals, fox's, wolf's snakes and things like that. This time however whatever she was making was big. Much bigger than myself. I started to backpedal a little as the mist solidified and condensed a little bit into the shape of a grizzly bear. this thing had to be at least 500 pounds, if not twice that.
As I stood frozen for a moment the bear lunged forward, at the last moment I shook out of my terror and raised my shield to activate the block skill. Unfortunately blocking only does so well when the creature I am blocking has three to four times my mass. I was slung to the ground and slid five feet while the bear charged towards me. I had dropped my sword in my panic but Tom threw me a spear he was holding onto. I scrambled to pick up the spear but the bear was already barreling down on me. All I had time to do was point the sharp end at the bears face with the other end planted in the ground while I was still laying on my back.
Snap The spear snapped in half and the bear fell right on top of me. Just as I was sure I was about to get mauled in the face the bear disappeared in a puff of smoke.
"You actually managed to finish it!" Tom sounded surprised and a little bit proud "Next time try to do it while your still on your feet though. You'da been dead if I wasn't here to throw you that spear and Sylvia hadn't slowed down its charge at the end."
"Don't listen to everything he says, you did fine for your third day training. Pointy end to the threat is the first step in learning how to fight properly. He is right about staying on your feet though".
"Look, I know you wanted to show me that i am not always going to be the biggest and strongest in the fight. But did you have to go straight to grizzly bear?! At least give me some warning next time. My shield was useless and the block skill did nothing".
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"Tom continued his lesson "It wasn't useless, you still have an arm, don't you? Without a shield your arm would have been swiped right off and you still would have been sent flying to your back. You need to set your feet though. your footwork is the groundwork of fighting. If you have your feet too close together and knees locked like you just had them then of course you are going to get knocked to kingdom come. But if you set your feet under your shoulders, bend at the knee and embrace the impact you can use your body like a spring to absorb the impact over a greater time. Making the effect of it less. The block skill doesn't magically take the force out of a hit, it helps you absorb the momentum of whatever you are blocking. If your footwork is garbage then the skill wont absorb anything. Stand up". I was still laying on the ground, recovering from the dread of thinking my second life was going to end so soon after it began.
Slowly I got to my feet. "What now. Are you going to send a charging bull at me?"
"Hah! while I think that would be funny the point Sylvia was trying to make has been made. You are going to start on your footwork without any sparring matches for the rest of the day"
Wait, so no more fighting beasts and animals today?" I was starting to feel a glimmer of hope that maybe I would only add the three bruised I had accumulated today to my collection instead of the dozens I had been getting over the last couple days.
"Don't think that because you aren't fighting anything it'll be an easy day. I still need to make sure that you are ready to survive the desert in three days. It's obvious that you wont be able to make it there and back by yourself, but maybe we can get you to a point where you wont be an active hinderance."
That sounded good. As long as I was able to start learning something in this forsaken world I would be happy. All of the new toy excitement I felt after selecting my class and affinities was gone after three days of getting beat up by conjured wildlife.
I spent the remainder of the day going through drills on footwork while always with a weapon and shield in hand. Apparently swordsman didn't mean I had to use a sword specifically, but any melee weapon. It was just the name of the common fighter class. I didn't get any practice with them but I became very familiar with the weight and clunkyness of longswords, shortswords, spears, maces, rapiers, warhammers, mauls, the list goes on. The most important lesson I learned was how to absorb an impact and redirect force away from my body. After thirty minutes of Tom and Sylvia showing me how to move I was apparently ready for practical's.
Practical's were Sylvia summoning another bear, but instead of having me spar with it, shoe would just have it charge me at various speeds and I had to either absorb the impact with the help of Block, or redirect it so that I could create an opening for attack with whatever weapon I was carrying at the time. It took five tries for me to not just jump out of the way before the bear got to me after what it did earlier but I finally managed to test myself and was surprised by the result. The first charge that I managed to hold in place for was coming like a snail, but it was still a several hundred pound monstrosity lugging it's way toward me. I set my shield and leaned into the charge so that I could brace and slowly give land as I absorbed the bear's momentum. It managed to slide me about six inches back but I stopped it and was still on my feet.
Several hours later I was able to either stop the bear without sliding, or sidestep partially while redirecting its charge so that I had a clear attack angle at the bear's neck when it passed me by. By this time we had been going for almost seven hours straight after lunch. I was out of energy and Sylvia looked completely drained as well. I felt bad that she was working so hard with her magic to help me train but when I confronted her about it she was happy to be a help. She needs to practice her summons anyway and this lets her both train her summoning skills and endurance while also helping a new teammate learn. This was something her mentor did for her and she hoped I would return the favor to someone new to the guild when I was the one capable enough to teach.
Something I had come to notice over the last couple days however was how long the days were here. It felt like there were closer to thirty hours in a day, instead of the twenty-four that I was used to on Earth. That mixed with the longer hours of sunlight caused by the two suns made for me becoming completely exhausted before it was even close to dark out. Luckily the rooms were equipped with blackout curtains due to part of the year having no darkness when the planet was positioned just right getting light from their second sun a couple hours before the first sun set each day. I was not looking forward to what the locals called "True Summer". Luckily it only lasted a few weeks, and not three months like summer back home.
I guessed I was sleeping about 9 hours a day, which still didn't feel like enough but it was all the time I had with the training regimen. We would wake up at dawn, go for a little run through the streets to the guildhall then rent a practice field for 8 hours. The morning was spent exercising and going over technique and after we broke for lunch we resumed practical applications for about another six to eight hours, until either I collapsed or Sylvia was too exhausted to summon any more spirit animals.
Sylvia only gave in before me once however, and that was on our fifth day of training. I took that as a major victory, despite barely being able to walk myself home I was so tired. After I cleaned up and was about to pass out on top of the sheets I noticed a flashing Icon on my status screen I hadn't seen before.
There was a little up arrow flashing next to my block skill.