Chapter 60:

When I walked down the stairs from my sitting room to the courtyard, I stopped briefly to look out of the window. I'd spent a little bit of time back in my own county after the siege, but that didn't last long. There was no real connection to it for me, so I was more than comfortable leaving the captain and my advisors to run everything in my absence.

Now, I was halfway across the country in a borrowed castle that belonged to the King. It might have been a nice vacation, but I was kept busy. Most of my time was spent wrangling all the different personalities in charge of providing troops for the war I was executing. So far, there had been an endless number of minor feuds and incidents. By some miracle, nothing major had blown up yet despite my unorthodox methods. But I didn't hold my breath.

We still had several weeks to go, and my counter had reset. Now, it was definitely high enough that only mass slaughter or war was going to satisfy it. If I agreed to be Loki's champion again, I would make sure there was a less aggressive curve.

None of my problems bothered me as I looked out over the mile or so of forest that I could see from the castle before it turned to plains. The battle would be out past the forest's edge and on said plains. We would be maneuverable, but so would our enemy. That was perfect, though, I had many, many plans with the forest behind us.

Still, despite my complaints, I had enjoyed my break from Valhalla's violence and uncertainty. However, the fact that this was temporary was starting to wear on me. I had avoided making any real personal connections besides anyone with Alana, and she really hadn't given me a choice.

I respected a few people, the captain being one of them. I actually had avoided learning his name because, at this point, it was just funny. But even with the generals and my other vassals, I had many degrees of separation despite having a more casual time around them every once in a while.

Alana followed me out of the room a minute later. This would have been annoying if I had been trying to get away from her. Even though she could be a bit much, I really did enjoy her company. It was nice having a friend who thought about things other than drinking and women.

She had decided to attempt to learn the sword with me. Not that I had seen much progress from her, but she was trying and never missed a session. I guess I wasn't the only one who found exercise cathartic.

Alana caught up to me, and we continued down the stairs to the courtyard.

Word spread the second I left my room, and I found a line of twelve of my students waiting for me in the training yard. They varied mainly in their states of readiness. Some were still wearing their fancy clothes. Others had changed, and some were sweating, panting, having raced to beat me here. I was surprised at their discipline, and I knew that not every one of them wanted to be here, but many of them did. Some parents were forcing them or had forced them, but as a whole, they seemed to enjoy my practices.

It was different than the regular combat practice because I was bored with the standard drills. So, instead of endlessly smacking a dummy or doing one-on-one spars, I usually fought three or four of them at a time. Sometimes, I even gave myself other handicaps.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

That was only one of the reasons they liked practicing with me. A large part of it was that I didn't make them only learn the rapier. Instead, I gave them halberds, spears, maces, and flails. I even made a pair of nunchucks and made some of them use it as a joke. They were horrible with it. I had never figured out how to use it either, but they didn't have to know that.

Sometimes, I even provided one or two of them with a bow and padded arrows that they could shoot at me during the fight.

The real secret to keeping them engaged was the chalkboard off to the side. There, I kept a record and a ladder board with points assigned to each person. Points were assigned by an endless number of criteria, depending on my mood. Sometimes, it was how many strikes they managed to land on me; sometimes, it was how many times they got hit or dodged. Everything was tallied, and sometimes, I would shout out bonus points mid-fight for particularly clever maneuvers. The competition was fierce. For the most part, it seemed to be bragging rights, though the prizes I offered were coveted as well. Personally, I didn't see the appeal and thought they were pretty lame rewards, but they didn't agree with me.

I offered leadership positions in certain training exercises, along with temporary slots among my retainers. Other rewards included opportunities to sit in long, boring meetings with me. Despite the fact that I would never have wanted a lot of these rewards, they jockeyed for them with almost religious fervor. Alana was always picking my brain about the gamification of training, as I called it. She had started to try to figure out how she could use this to implement training for other troops. I wasn't sure how this would work more on adults, but older teenagers seemed to be obsessed with this much more than any other motivation I could find. At least I was having fun.

Alana, though, wasn't really making much progress in her own martial combat, which was not surprising. A month was barely enough time to gain enough muscle to properly hold the sword. I had offered to teach her just daggers or rapiers, but she insisted on trying everything. I never let her actually spar yet; she just didn't have control. So, while I played with my students, she had a padded dummy reserved just for her, where she would drill constantly.

For her, the repetition wasn't as boring as it was for me and everyone else. She could fall into a trance, hitting the dummy over and over. After a few weeks, her strikes slowly became less clumsy and more fluid. Now, I just took a few minutes to give her a few drills and left her alone for the session. She would often take breaks just to watch the rest of us before continuing on. Her small and thin frame hadn't changed much, but you could see a slight bit of definition in her arms now, much to the consternation of many other ladies of the court.

The gossip never seemed to bother her. When I asked her about it, she just told me that I should have seen it when she was just buried in her books. I let it go but kept an eye on it. Despite it being none of my business, I felt oddly responsible for her.

One of the students fetched the ball I had been carefully making over the past week. He threw it at me, and I bounced it a few times on the packed earth. I grinned, satisfied with its bounce and heft. It wasn't perfect, but it would do.

"Jared and Mike, you're team captains," I said as servants wheeled out the hoops on either side of the courtyard. The team selection began, and I could see the students smile more as we began our warm-up with something not combat-related.

Eventually, we had to stop with basketball and actually get into swordsmanship. Even the crowd-watching had gotten pretty into the game. We tallied up the points on a separate leaderboard before we began with the spars. Unfortunately, though, before we could even finish the first round of combat, a messenger rushed into the courtyard.

I walked over to greet him.

"Sir, the scouts' reports have come in, and it appears the enemy has arrived early," he said, handing me a slip of paper. I skimmed through it, deciphering the code words that I had drilled into the scouts, and frowned. Early was a bit of an understatement. I beckoned, and one of my followers came forward with paper and pen.

I put it against the wall and started writing instructions, handing them off to one messenger after another as soon as I finished writing them. It appeared that we were in more of a rush than I thought. The battle probably wouldn't actually take place early, but we needed to be in a position now to make sure that we chose the field. I'd have to say goodbye to the comforts of living in a castle and get used to living in a tent again. At least they'd be able to move my bed.