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Another week went by with the same schedule until Joe happened to reach his next level sometime in the early afternoon. Joe had been pushing himself for almost a month and a half now and the boy had struggled beside him every day for almost two weeks straight. Joe decided it was time to take a day off. Well, maybe not a whole day, but a bit of one. Besides, there were only a few hours left in the day as it was already midafternoon.

The return was uneventful, and Joe offered Garnedell some spending cash before sending him into town. Joe went to his room to unload his daily winnings before heading back downstairs. When he came out of the inn, he saw Garnedell wandering through the streets, looking at the various stores with a combination of excited avarice and uncertainty from overwhelming choice. Joe almost laughed a bit at Garnedell’s consternation. Seriously, if he ever saw a mall, I wonder what he would do. Freeze?

Joe left the boy to his freedom and found an empty field on the lake’s edge, the glassy field a perfect place to enjoy an afternoon. He had brought his weapon harness and weapons with him and laid them against a small rock. He lay on the grass and enjoyed the afternoon for a good half hour before he finally stood up with a sigh as he decided that he would spend some time remember his training from home. Hm… maybe I should spend a good half an hour each day going over my forms? I don’t need to exercise, but I don’t want to forget my forms.

Joe took a good fifteen minutes to go through his unarmed forms then took up his spear to go through some staff forms. As he finished a set, he would shift to another weapon and go through some beginner forms for that weapon. After about a half an hour, Joe suddenly realized that he had an audience. Joe looked over and saw the group of boys with Garnedell, who was chewing on some pastry with a look of great satisfaction, staring at him. He smiled at them but returned to his final set, flowing smoothly through his forms before he finished with a sheen of sweat clinging to his limbs.

He glanced towards the boys again, smiling a bit, then beckoned Garnedell over with a jerk of his head. The young boy came running over excitedly. Joe then settled into a very simple stance, deceptively easy until one tried to maintain it for any amount of time. He settled himself well, then nodded to the boy.

“Alright, kid. Go ahead and copy me.”

The boy looked at him in confusion, but started to duplicate his posture and Joe nodded in encouragement. After the boy had gotten his stance with a decent approximation, Joe stood to correct his posture, but the boy also quickly stood, and Joe shook his head no, gesturing for the boy to return to his stance while also returning to his stance.

“OK! Don’t move. Stay there!”

Joe motioned for the kid to stay in his stance even as he spoke ultimately meaningless words. When the boy seemed to indicate understanding, Joe stood slowly, then began to walk around the boy, checking his stance and correcting him until he was satisfied. He then returned to the boy’s front, faced him, and dropped back into his stance and froze. They stayed in this stance for several minutes before the boy began wobbling in struggle, and Joe began to smile, his well-developed muscles firmly locked in place with no hint of any effort. After another few minutes, the boy began to seriously struggle before collapsing on the grass. Joe smiled down at Garnedell until he heard some derisive laughter coming from the other boys in the group.

Joe’s friendly demeanor quickly slipped as he looked to the group of boys, his smile replaced with a cold sternness. Maintaining his stance, he pointed at the group of boys and then beckoned them forward, pointing to the area in front of him.

“You think this is easy? Or funny? Get up here and do it yourself!”

The group of boys fell silent quickly, a stunned surprise overwhelming them before they all scrambled forward excitedly. As the boys settled into stance, Joe’s eyes roamed across their forms and evaluated how the stood before standing and walking around the boys and adjusting their stances to the correct form. Joe then turned to Garnedell and called for him to stand as well, quickly pressing him into the correct stance. As he did so, he noticed Garnedell’s tears of failure but did not acknowledge them, simply pressing him into the form before wandering in front of them and resuming his own form. Once again, several minutes passed by, but only half the time before the first boys were already bobbing and weaving in their struggle to stay up; only Garnedell still stood firm. The boys began dropping like flies shortly after and soon only Garnedell was left. He made it just shy of his previous attempt before his abused muscles gave out, and he collapsed into a heap next to the other exhausted boys.

“Now! Make sure you do it yourself before you mock someone else’s inability,” Joe warned with some fervent firmness to the other boys, even as he continued to stay in his stance. Joe then looked towards Garnedell and smiled widely nodding his head in approval before he lost himself once more in the stance, returning to his meditative mindset when he took these forms.

He watched with some surprise and pride when he saw Garnedell stand once more and return to his stance, not perfect but at least passable. Several of the other boys also stood and tried to join, but as before, Garnedell outlasted them significantly longer, almost four or five times longer than the strongest boys, and Joe once again smiled in approval at Garnedell as he lay collapsed in gasping sweat. Garnedell tentatively returned his smile, but once again returned to his stance, forcing himself to stand firm. The other boys tried for a little while longer, but soon despaired and left dejected as Garnedell repeatedly outlasted them. Soon, he was the last there, but he continued as long as Joe continued, although he continued to collapse. Joe felt a deep sense of pride swell as he realized how strong Garnedell was, putting forth his greatest effort into the training. His stats really did make a huge difference. He was able to easily outlast all of them, but the main factor has got to be his heart.

Joe continued on, and began counting Garnedell’s time, growing ever surprised at how strong and long he was able to last. After repeating the effort to collapse almost five times since he began counting, Joe began to realize that Garnedell was not growing weaker. He was able to last for almost the exact same amount of time. It almost seemed like his strength was a literal gauge that would exhaust itself collapsing Garnedell in the dirt before refilling almost completely to allow him to try again at almost full strength. Joe’s surprise and annoyance continued when he soon realized after counting for the twentieth time, and that was after another good dozen or so attempts that Joe had not kept track of, Garnedell was still effortlessly settling into his stance and maintaining it for almost the exact same amount of time. The difference was only that of a few seconds, although that could have easily been a counting error as Joe did not have any form of accurate time keeping.

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Joe felt his muscles begin to burn and relaxed out of his form, standing and shaking his body loose and decided to leave off the exercise, inviting the boy for supper and preparing for bedtime. Seriously? There is no penalty to continuous effort? You just have to rest and get a full ‘stamina’ bar again or something? This… what is going on!

Joe finished out the evening as he usually did, although the language learning was decidedly subdued as Joe spent most of his cognitive faculties focused on what he had learned from watching Garnedell. He ran through the ramifications and tried to understand what it all meant, but couldn’t seem to extrapolate too far, it just wasn’t his forte. He was certainly intelligent, quite intelligent, in fact, but most of his childhood and training had been focused quite strongly on the physical, and his mental education was only adequate for modern living. This was certainly important, and he made sure to make note of the fact in his journal, then spent a long night before sleep seriously considering the issue before setting it aside for future thought and surrendering to mindless sleep.

The next several days returned to their mundane similarity, a renewed vigor put towards leveling and always checking his available jobs tab for any new jobs that might now be available for him, but found the page depressingly empty.

On one day of their return, the two had made it back with some light to spare, and Joe decided to once again offer a rest day to the boy, and decided to take a slightly longer and more relaxing bath as his moment to rest. He passed some coin to the boy before heading into his room and dropping most of his belongings onto the bed. He came back out of the inn quickly and set off down the road towards the bridge and his … only… bathing place. He came to the bridge and was turning right to head up towards the lake when he heard some shouts across the river on the main frontage road that followed the river and was one of the north south main roads that bordered the river, one on each side. He looked towards the noise, and noticed the boy facing off against the gang of boys that had beat him before. They were yelling at him and seemed to be demanding something from him. Are they really shaking him down for his money?

Joe restrained himself a bit and chose to watch until the boys started coming at the boy with some anger, one even throwing a punch. Joe quickly shouted out, taking off across the bridge to come up beside the boy, even as he was yelling at them. The boys came to a stop, startled and pulled back, even as Joe laid his hand on the boys shoulder.

“You OK, Garnedell?”

The boy said nothing, seeming slightly confused by Joe’s question, as well as a bit terrified, his body shaking under his palm. Joe patted the boy to calm him down and turned towards the boys.

“Listen! It’s time you guys stop this. I’m not going to let this keep going. You guys just get! Got it!”

The boys stared at him in blank surprise before turning and disappearing into the closest alleyway. Joe clapped the boy on the shoulder then turned to look at him.

“You’re OK! Just go have fun and don’t worry about them anymore! I’m going to be right down there taking my bath, where I always go. My bath. Right? Remember? I taught you? Bath… Bath.”

Garnedell stared at him in confusion until he came to the end and repeated the word bath, and he quickly nodded, turning to follow Joe, but Joe stopped him and then tried again. Pointing at himself, he said the word “bath” and then pointed at himself and towards his bathing spot. He repeated it several times before the boy nodded, then Joe took out another lowest denominator coin and handed it to Garnedell before pointing at the boy, the coin, and then at the various stores.

“You go have fun, alright? Don’t worry about it. It’s all good.”

The boy started smiling excitedly before nodding and disappearing into the first available shop, which actually happened to be a tailor shop for women, and the boy came out a bit flustered before rushing off to the closest store with candy. The selection was miserable, only two or three kinds. But still, it was candy.

Joe smiled and turned to head towards the lake and spent an unusually long time enjoying his bath, even taking some time to settle into a slightly deeper depression in the stream to enjoy an actual, if quite cold, bath. He had finished washing himself, and was just pulling up his pants when he once again heard the shouts of the boys, this time including vicious sounding replies from Garnedell.

Joe struggled to finish up his pants before leaping quickly up the bank and onto the road. Luckily, the conflict seemed to be occurring on this side of the stream, and even as he started heading towards the fight, two of the other boys leaped forward to grasp the boy by his arms, holding him down so that a third could begin to punish his core with hard punches. Even as Joe opened his mouth and reached out a hand to interrupt, he stopped with some stunned surprise when he saw Garnedell easily pull his two arms together and had the two holding him slam powerfully into each other, both heads guided to meet each other in the most intimate of ways.

Even as the two boys' heads came together and were knocked out of the fight, Garnedell had raised his foot and slammed it into the gut of the leader in front of him. The two boys holding his arm crumpled to the ground, although the leader fell back only a few steps, grasping at where his stomach had been hit. The last three boys quickly surrounded Garnedell, but he stepped forward before anything had happened and unleashed a powerful punch to the face of the leader, immediately crumpling him to the street. He turned to continue his rampage even as the bodies of three lay rolling on the ground around him in pain. But before he was able to connect with his next target, Joe had arrived and brought the whole fight to a reasonable conclusion, although he did lecture Garnedell.

“What do you think you’re doing! You don’t hurt others! Especially not with the power I’m training you to have!!”

Garnedell seemed quite surprised by Joe’s anger, but then quickly dropped his head in remorse, although Joe quickly realized it was all feigned because there was no way Garnedell could understand. He brought the whole affair to an end before dragging Garnedell to the bathing area to finish cleaning. He demanded Garnedell to do the same as well before returning to the inn. Instead of a language lesson, Joe found himself focusing on a moral lesson that ultimately proved meaningless to Garnedell since he couldn’t understand anyway. Joe sputtered to a stop when he realized this, then spent quite a bit of time considering his moral view and how it would apply, if it ever would. Or if he even should? His struggle with applying modern world morals to such a harsh barely surviving lifestyle had him questioning for some time and it would take him quite a while before he would be able to come to a conclusion that would satisfy him.

The rest of the meal was uncomfortably silent, as was their preparations for bed, although actual sleep was anything but as Joe’s rumbling snores echoed through the room.

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