It took the hooligan teens three days to return to Rhonda's shop, where they did not repeat their stunt from before. Instead, they opened the door, had one of them poke their head in, and saw Luke performing deadlifts into overhead presses, pulling a barbell with 80 pounds on it from the floor, to a standing position, then up to his shoulders, over his head, and reversing. One of the more demanding exercises in his daily routine, though not the most demanding he performed over the whole week. He could only go for a little over an hour, even with his superhuman endurance.
Seeing he was there, they opened the door all the way and walked in.
Hearing the bell on the door, Luke looked over. When he saw who it was, he gently put the weights down. "Good, you held up your end. We'll head outside the city-"
"Who's here?" Rhonda asked from the back.
"The teens from before. We'll be leaving in a second," Luke responded to her, turning toward the doorway behind the counter.
"Make sure they don't break anything again," Rhonda said.
"Of course," Luke said before turning back to the teens. "Anyway, we'll head outside the city and find some woods to practice in. It won't be exactly the fraxion arena, but it will be similar, at least. Perfect training location. The primary goal of this training is to get me used to using my magic in a combat scenario. Obviously, you're not fraxions, I'm not a fraxion, and you're going to be fighting as a team, so it won't be perfect training, but it's the best we can do as our little group."
"Why let us go?" The teen standing in the middle asked. Luke noticed that they stood in the opposite order he fought them in. A consistent marching order that he came up to from behind. "You could have easily just kept us here until the police got here, or at least one of us. We'd have been screwed."
Luke walked toward the door and waved for them to follow along. "I saw an opportunity to better both myself and some promising youths of the next generation. I'm currently doing everything I can to become a defensive wall with the ultimate goal of holding down a single fraxion for as long as humanly possible. I want to get good enough at magic to keep myself alive for years while my opponent either kills themselves overdrawing their magic or simply takes a break every time they reach their capacity."
Once they were all outside, he picked them all up and flew straight up, where Luke scouted for the nearest patch of woodland, and began flying that way. "During the time I buy the rest of humanity, they will advance significantly in their ability to use magic. We went from hand farming everything to badly self-driving cars in around 100 years, most of which we didn't have the internet for. We went from landlines to smart phones in just a few decades. How far do you think we'll advance magic, given even just a single decade with internet access alongside the new magic?
"Ultimately, my goal is to be the last human to die in the fraxion arena. That's the best case, unrealistic scenario. Realistically, someone invents the equivalent of a magic nuke while I'm in there and general combat magic becomes to guns what guns were to swords, and losses to fraxions come at least one for one, if not a human-favored matchup. If I can help part of the next generation reach that point while bettering myself at the same time, I don't see why I shouldn't.
"Your hooligoonery is something you will need to stop, though, as it could lead to someone dying, even if you're careful. Take up magic boxing or something, I don't really care what you do with your free time beyond come to Rhonda's every week," Luke finished as they landed in the middle of some woods, trespassing on who knows who's land.
Luke turned to the three teens and said, "Now, let's get started. I will occasionally take an intentional injury so I can practice my healing magic. We will go until you are all near your magic capacity, then I will heal what I can, and I will fly us back to Rhonda's."
"That confident you can outlast us?" Middle said.
"Fully. I only know of one person with a larger magic capacity than I have. If you're not going to throw the first attack, I will," Luke said, telekinetically snapping a branch off a recently fallen tree and launching it at right.
With no continuous force behind it, right caught it out of mid-air after slowing it down with telekinesis of their own. They ran in as left telekinetically threw up a wall of leaves from the ground, blocking the teens from Luke's view. Luke stepped to the side before right bust through the wall swinging.
Luke sent a burst of telekinetic power at right, sending them flying and making them wince from the impact on their side, evenly distributed across the entirety of their side to avoid injury, before stopping themself mid-air, touching down gently only a couple feet from where they got launched.
Luke tried to find middle and left, but they had disappeared. "Until meeting you, I didn't know invisibility was possible," Luke said before busting up the dirt below his feet and throwing it out in a disk around him. In the only two places where the disk split open, he grabbed the leaves and lifted, using them as one solid mass, to flip what he assumed were the invisible teens away from himself.
As he was distracted finding and attempting to deal with the invisible teens, right flew in below the cover of the dirt disk and tackled Luke's legs, causing him to fall. Right took advantage of this to ankle lock Luke, who had no experience in wrestling to know how to escape.
He attempted to fly both him and the teen upward, but he was smacked downward by middle, coming out of invisibility with a double arm downward strike to Luke's stomach. The unexpected attack knocked the wind out of Luke and made him lose concentration of his teklekinesis, causing him to fall back to the ground.
That half a second of vulnerability was all middle needed to send a kick straight into Luke's side, causing Luke probably the most damage out of both fights so far.
Right telekinetically raised himself up, holding on to Luke's leg, but Luke send a blast of telekinetic force toward the two visible teens, ripping right off his leg and causing middle to almost face plant directly into Luke's now-raised knee, but he was caught by left's telekinesis as he landed his own kick on Luke's other side.
Luke began mending the bruises on his sides before they even had time to fully form and flew upward, around 10 feet off the ground, before whipping the leaves up into a storm, taking many sticks and small rocks with them.
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The teens created telekinetic barriers around themselves, avoiding getting cut by the various projectiles, and simultaneously slammed down on Luke's shoulders, trying to knock him out of the sky. It was enough to cause him to fall a few feet, but not fall out of the sky entirely, where right got a running jump and caught Luke's leg, using telekinesis and momentum to flip himself around and bring a knee directly to Luke's face.
Luke attempted to bring his hands up to block, but middle kept them at his sides, so he used his own telekinesis to block the knee, dropping the leaf storm and getting hit in the back by a stump left picked out of the ground, which turned to pulp on Luke's back, having been old and severely decayed already.
Luke attempted to counteract the teen's telekinesis in the way they described at Rhonda's shop a few days prior, but was unable to properly implement the advice, this being his first ever attempt at doing so.
As he struggled to get his arms out of middle's grasp, right brought his other leg down toward the top of Luke's head. He tilted his head out of the way, simply taking the hit on his shoulder, instead, before forcefully throwing the teen holding his leg toward the nearest tree. His own flight combined with middle holding his arms in place meant right was unable to hold on, stopping themselves a few feet from actually impacting the tree.
Luke telekinetically grabbed middle and flew them at left, continuously increasing the force he used as middle fought against his grasp. Half way through the forced flight, middle gave up on Luke's arms and left got out of the way. Not wanting to give the teen whiplash, Luke let them go rather than redirect them into the other teen last second.
A force grabbed onto Luke's ankle and, long before he could react, slammed him into the ground at high speed, breaking his ankle. He screamed in pain as he grabbed right, the culprit, and forced them to face plant into the ground.
He pushed himself off the ground, revealing a bleeding, though unbroken, nose as left physically tackled Luke to the ground. Middle attempted to pile on, but left was launched upward, directly in to middle's chest, knocking the wind out of both of them. As they caught their breaths, Luke launched a couple nearby rocks at their sides and turned to right, getting a chest full of telekinesis. He stopped his trajectory back and yanked right toward him, increasing the pressure to make sure he arrived in punching range, and sent a punch toward his stomach.
The punch was blocked by the teen's knee, eliciting a yelp of pain from both of them as fist met knee, Luke's fist encountering a significantly harder target than he'd expected and the teen's knee receiving significantly more force than expected.
During this exchange, middle caught their breath and stood up before flying into Luke's exposed back, sending his stomach ingo the extended knee of right. After Luke flung them away with telekinesis, they stopped their momentum and tapped out saying, "That's my limit."
They walked a few paces away while right dragged Luke toward him, going for a kick to the side of Luke's head. Luke overpowered the teen's telekinesis, not through countering the force, but by simply forcing himself back harder than the teen was forcing him forward, causing painful compression on his torso as the kick missed.
It was at this point that left finally caught their breath and rejoined the fight, picking up every rock they could see into a big ball and beginning to machine gun them into Luke's back.
Luke's peripheral vision just barely caught one of the rocks flying back into the ball, and he turned in time to make the first rock impact his side, rapidly followed by a second, before he put up a telekinetic wall between him and the teen.
Right used the distraction to telekinetically launch himself toward Luke, going for a punch to the jaw, which Luke caught with his hand. While rocks plunked ineffectively into his shield, he pulled on the teen's hand, trying to bring them in for a punch to the chest, but the teen in his hand used telekinesis to spin himself around, the punch missing below his side, as his shin landed squarely on Luke's ear.
This caused him to drop his shield and let go of the teen, left's machine gun of rocks making impact on his side once more. Luke flung himself back and realized the gunner was retrieving the rocks that had already been shot once, giving him effectively infinite ammo.
Luke sent a blast of telekinesis at the ball powerful enough to completely scatter left's ammo ball, sending a few rocks into the teen. While he was distracted by the impacts, Luke sent a telekinetic blast into their back, pulling them closer, as he flew toward them.
Right was having none of that, creating another leaf wall between the two and covertly pulling left off-course toward themself. Luke bashed through the leaf wall, prepared to have crossed arms meet teen stomach, only to hit air.
Catching his bearings, Luke saw right running - not flying - at him, with left nowhere to be seen. He flew back and raised all the leaves in the area up off the ground, attempting to find the probably invisible teen in a similar manner to his dirt disk from before, only to be met with an invisible knee to the back.
Sending a spinning elbow into the t6en, backed by telekinetic force, left was sent flying back from the force. Dropping their invisi9bility and stopping their momentum, they tapped out, saying, "Can't fight anymore, I'm all out of magic." They slowly backed away as Luke turned back to right. Left made their way to middle as the fight continued on in these woods.
Right used the time Luke wasn't looking at him to close the gap non-magically before sending a jumping knee toward Luke's face, acceleration magically assisted by telekinesis. Luke caught them mid-air and slammed them into the ground, where his grip on the teen was countered.
The downed teen began sitting up while keeping Luke's grip of him loose and throwing the entire tree Luke broke a limb off of before at Luke. The incoming tree made Luke let go of the teen and stop the tree, which the teen used as an opportunity to reach up and grab the ankle he broke before, causing Luke to flinch in pain and drop the tree to the ground with a large thud.
Yanking Luke down, he sent an uppercut directly into Luke's stomach, unguarded as Luke fought through the pain of having a broken ankle viscously pulled. Luke decided to end the fight before any more damage he could not heal was done, starting an attempt to crush right, resulting in them staring at each other as Luke put on continuously more pressure on the teen until they tapped out, reaching their capacity.
After mending what wounds he could, starting with those on the teens, Luke said, "Good fight. You work well together, though I'm not really a fighting expert. Never was into MMA or boxing, magical or otherwise. Unluckily for me, I can't mend bones yet, and you," Luke gestured toward right teen, "broke my ankle slamming me into the ground like you did, so I'm going to be on legless exercises until I learn to fix it. I don't really have pointers because, again, not a fighter, but it really felt like... I don't know your names to call out who did what."
"Jessy," left said.
"Brendon," middle said.
"Dalton," right said.
"Really felt like Dalton here already knew a bit about fighting," Luke said. "They were by far the most effective solo; though, again, your teamwork was great. Sadly, the fights against the fraxions are one on one, so maybe spend some of your free time sparring against each other, though maybe to a less damaging degree. Maybe join a boxing club or something, I'm not going to put too much thought into a plan for you guys. Buy the book Shoeberts wrote that got published after his death, 'Masterclass In Training.' He was my personal trainer before he got taken by the fraxions, getting me where I am, physically."
Luke picked up all four of them and began flying back to the city as he continued, "The book has been very useful in furthering my physical condition, and magical capacity is at least partially tied to your physical abilities. A bit of working out would do wonders for your magic capacities, especially Brendon's. He was the first to tap out in our first fight and now. And on the way back, could you describe to me how to properly counter telekinesis on my body? Just about knocked myself out brute forcing myself out of Dalton's yank at one point."