“Ten laps. Run.” Kueren said bluntly. I had been unconscious for the remainder of the day yesterday from my bout with Lira. Now I found myself with the other students in front of Kueren once more, and this was his greeting. Abruptly the other students began to jog off through a gate found in the side of the church’s fenced training grounds. I wasn’t sure where we were supposed to run, so I just followed them.

The students were far faster than me, even though they appeared to be of the same age group. I picked up my speed in an attempt to keep up. We steadily moved away from the church and began to see structures in the distance. I was already breathing hard from the pace the other students set, yet most were barely sweating or laboring to breathe.

My lungs were aflame as we began to pass many structures. I found it hard to concentrate on any details other than the fact that the buildings seemed endless to me. Perhaps it was a trick of the mind, or my intense exhaustion catching up with me. My legs burned and ached, my sides burned, and my lungs were seared with with every ragged breath I managed to take.

My vision began blurring. I strived to push onward, to catch up with the students. They were out of sight now, but I needed to catch up. I was not sure where I was or where the church was. If I were to get lost I may find myself without a home, without a way to survive. My legs thudded against the ground with each heavy step. The burning sensation in my legs began to be replaced by a dull aching sort of numbing sensation.

At some point I tripped over a small dip in the ground, falling forward into coarse grass and weeds. I lay there, panting heavily, my vision swam in a sea of blurry confusion. I attempted to push myself up, but not even my arms had strength any longer. I began to weep in frustration and swiftly lost consciousness for the second day in a row.

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I woke in my room in the church. My body ached all over. I could barely move. I struggled to sit up and somehow managed to get myself upright. Elation swept over me to find I was indeed back in my now familiar room. It appeared to be sometime during the night based on the amount of light coming from my small window. My stomach roared with the desire to be satiated.

I squinted my eyes in the dark room and found a bowl sitting next to the door of my room. It was the usual rice Gin had been bringing me, however there was only about a bite and a half in the bowl. I wolfed down the rice with wooden chopsticks. While carefully looking over the bowl for even one more grain of rice, I caught something in the corner of my eye. A note that was under the bowl.

‘One and a half laps gets you this much. If you want more, perform better.’ I could almost hear Kueren himself saying it as I read it.

I went to sleep starving for more food. I made a mental note to do better tomorrow.

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I woke to hearing the latch of my door being opened. I got up rather slowly, my muscles still aching from yesterday’s excursion. The man who opened the door was Gin. He held in his hand a full bowl of rice.

“Eat quickly and report to Kueren.” Gin said, handing me the bowl and silently leaving. He did not have to tell me to eat quickly. I wolfed down the rice readily. After having had a full bowl of rice I felt as though I was still starving. At least this seemed to indicate breakfast was the same regardless of performance.

I did as Gin had instructed and found Kueren. I and several other students had left the church at the same time, dividing towards the Templars that were training them. All of Kueren’s students had gathered next to Kueren who stood next to a row of human shaped wood and straw objects.

“Two hundred strikes.” Kueren said, blunt and nondescript as ever. The students scurried to select bokken and then their target, myself included. How hard could it be to hit this thing two hundred times? I began wailing on the target, feeling a satisfying thwack with each strike. I mind-numbingly continued to strike, putting all my strength into each strike.

Around seventy strikes I lost count of where I was. Eventually I decided it was just best to continue and hope I could guess correctly the number of strikes. My hands were numb at this point, with the exception of a burning sensation. Why did the training have to always burn? My hands began feeling stiff.

Upon one strike, my hands slipped. The bokken bounced back off the bouncy straw of my target and struck me across the temple. I dropped, and moments before losing consciousness once more, I was able to wonder at my bad luck of blacking out three days in a row.

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I saw a Templar. Fully garbed in his samurai, sword sheathed at his side. His sword appeared rather new and unused. He was fighting, yet not with his sword. Black demons much like the ones that devoured my village were swarming him. His strikes were fast and powerful, literally blowing apart any portion of a demon’s body his fist connected with.

The demons swarmed as an unending tide, yet the Templar held fast, striking so swiftly as to leave after images of his blurring fists. Why did he not use his katana? The demons swarmed endlessly, with no end in sight.

The Templar let out an ear-shattering roar, a shock-wave of some sort spread out from his body, emitting a red aura of hate. The shock-wave gave the Templar space to maneuver, and he took the opportunity. The Templar dashed forward at an outstanding speed, bringing his shoulder down to tackle through the demons like a comet using his Sode shoulder piece.

The Templar’s red lacquered Samurai was further accentuated by the demon’s foul black ichor as demons were smashed to unrecognizable clumps of twisted flesh and bone.

There, in the distance, could be seen a man wearing a black robe, bearing the insignia of the continent Balumar. Countless more demons rose up from the ground around him, rising out of darkened earth. The demons were serving as a wall between the man and the Templar.

The Templar roared once more, a sinister and hateful shock-wave again pulsing out from his core. The demons redoubled their efforts to halt the Templar as the man in the black robe was chanting some sort of mantra.

Abruptly the earth quaked, and a massive black scaled hand rose from the earth. The Templar’s advance was halted by the quake, forcing him to stop and regain his stance. The scaled hand scraped at the earth, attempting to pull out whatever was attached to it. Another hand rose from the earth, and the ground continued to shudder.

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Between the hands a head began to rise. It was massive, as big as a house. Sprouting from the head were four horns, two pointed up towards the air, while the other two curved back and followed scale plates towards the back of the head. The head had a massive lizard like maw and three glowing red eyes, one on each side of its head and the center of its forehead.

The creature let out its own ear shattering roar…

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I woke with a start. I was in a cold clammy sweat. It appeared I was once more in my room in the church, and daylight was beginning to peek through my window. I remembered… I remembered that dream, that nightmare, so vividly, each time. Was it a message, a vision? I had been receiving it for years since becoming an Acolyte.

I told Gin about it too, and he was convinced it was a vision from Turian, a path I should take. I couldn’t imagine myself fighting like that whatsoever. Sure, I was terrible with the katana, and eight years of intensive training built my body very well, but I had no battle sense, much less against those terrors.

In fact my battle sense was so terrible the other Acolytes would sneer at me and say things like “You’re pathetic”. Eventually I got tired of their snide comments and exercised harshly to outdo any of them in physical ability. While my skill in combat was very lacking, my strength and speed was greater than anyone’s, only rivaled by Lira.

Lira. She was the only one who kept her comments to herself. In fact, she didn’t say much, and when she did she was as blunt as Master Kueren. Most of the time her comments were helpful as well, such as “Parry”. I would then attempt to follow her advice and promptly fail. At that point she would shake her head and thwack me across the nose.

I received plenty of beatings during training. My skin and bones are pretty tough, and while I often find myself in situations that should knock me out, it is very rare for it to happen anymore. I often found myself getting knocked out back in the day.

Unfortunately, this trait prompted the other Acolytes to nickname me ‘brain dead’. Maybe they were right, after all the only thing I manage to do with bokken is break them. I broke bokken so frequently Kueren started calling me ‘splinter’. Whether this was an euphemism for being a pain in his ass or more straight forward I wasn’t sure.

Maybe today i’ll take the advice of the Master Templars and begin to train with my fists. I haven’t done so yet because the other Acolytes saw it as dishonorable. While the Masters confirmed that a sword is a Templar’s soul, they also said Turian accepts all forms of combat. This was their way of saying ‘fight how you can, as long as you fight’.

Some of the other Masters even specialized in mounted combat, using recurve bows, Nodachi, and Naginata to name a few.

I briskly stood up and proceeded to stretch. I was fairly short and stocky compared to others, only coming up to five feet in height., but not stretching before my personal training regiment was begging for cramps and potentially torn ligaments or muscle.

I was one of few to leave the church so early in the morning. A few Masters and Acolytes dedicated to the art of combat would be found already training at the barest hint of sunlight. The first portion of my regiment was thirty laps around the small town of Yunir. Although I say it is small, Yunir has a decent selection of large buildings dedicated to their trades and crafts. The town sprawled over about five miles.

I made it a policy to always push myself. At this point in the training regiment by Master Kueren, he trusted us to hone our physical ability by ourselves. He would only aid us in honing our technical skills, usually by beating it into us with a bokken.

I finished my laps in about two hours. I breathed heavily from quick pace, but it felt good, exhilarating even. My body did not ache or burn like it did so long ago.

I needed to learn some hand to hand combat techniques. Most Masters taught by beating the knowledge into you rather than using words, so I returned to the church to look for Kueren. I found him striking a training dummy, sending violent vibrations through its every fiber.

“Master Kueren? I would you be willing to spar?” I spoke to him, and he continued to strike the dummy. It appeared as though he had not heard me and his attention was focused on the dummy, but I knew better. Kueren, most of the Templar Masters for that matter, were extremely observant. Chances are he even saw me approaching him quite some time ago.

“Fine.” He said with a final strike on the dummy fifteen seconds later. He turned to me, sheathing his bokken into a cloth around his waist. “Weapon?” he asked.

“My fists.” I replied. He nodded, placing his hand on his bokken and taking a wide stance. Master Kueren preferred a style the Templars called ‘Iai’, a style that prepared for combat at anytime. Most maneuvers would begin and end with the sheathe, and emphasized a quick fluid kill.

I balled up my fists and also took a wide stance. Having a solid foundation was important, for a man who misplaces himself is easily knocked off his feet. As soon as I had taken my stance, I leaped at Kueren, right fist raised to strike. Kueren unsheathed his bokken from the cloth at his waist and deflected my strike in the blink of an eye. Kueren stepped to the side, allowing me to pass by him, as he turned for another strike across my back. The strike with Kueren’s full power behind it stung and sent me stumbling forward a bit further as he sheathed his bokken once more.

Kueren’s strike had certainly left a welt. I attempted to continue striking Kueren, but I was dodged or countered every time. I tried to be faster in my strikes, to move faster,while retaining my power, but that just caused me to lose my footing. I tried to trip up Kueren with my own legs, but received a rain of blows instead. I tried to grasp at Kueren and overpower him, but he was always out of my reach.

Many beatings an hour later, and Kueren called it quits for me, saying “Everyone has a limit.” Whether he meant me or himself was beyond me. Sure I could keep getting up and taking beatings, but eventually the strength behind my strikes would lose power and meaning. At the very least, I fared no worse than with a bokken or another weapon.

Certainly, I would need far more training. Maybe Gin had some tips.