“Hard work done for your own behalf is the one thing that will never betray you.” - Old folk saying.

“Good. You keep this up for another couple years and work on your stamina more, and you’ll be fit to fight with us all right,” said Elfriede in a rare praise of her daughter, as she was a particularly harsh trainer who rarely if ever gave any praises at all unless it was truly deserved. When Erycea’s performance reached a stage where she could no longer poke into the mistakes made by the girl though, she gave the praises freely enough.

The repeated noise of wood meeting wood - neither of them practiced with their real weapons, the weighted wooden analogues used not out of safety, but to spare their real weapons from unnecessary damage - resounded rapidly as Erycea whipped the pair of weighted sticks in her hand, their weights adjusted to match her real weapons, towards her mother. Despite the hefty weight of the sticks, something an adult human would have had issues controlling even with both hands, she swung them around one-handed with relative ease, if with obvious effort to maintain the speed she went with.

Even Elfriede no longer took on her daughter lightly. She used training weapons in both hands, and carefully parried or deflected Erycea’s swings rather than how she casually blocked them one-handed in the past. The young girl was already physically stronger than her mother, thanks to her mixed-blooded heritage, and she would only grow even stronger in the future. The speed she whipped around the hefty weighted sticks in her hands placed enough force in them that a strike could likely break bones, hence Elfriede’s careful, measured response to them.

She could no longer afford to directly block them like before, after all, as the blows came with far too much weight and force behind them.

At the moment, Erycea had displayed that she could fight with her weapons well, well enough that even an experienced and skilled fighter like Elfriede had to take her on seriously. The only thing the girl lacked was the stamina and strength to keep at it for prolonged periods of time, as her hefty weapons tired her out rather quickly compared to before. Still, those were problems that would solve themselves as the girl was still growing, and with her diligence in training Elfriede thought that by the time she was fully grown, Erycea would prove to be more than a match for her unless they fought for keeps with lives on the line.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

In some ways, Erycea’s choice of weapons, something Hogarth had forged based on designs out of the same old book Elfriede’s weapons were from, was a prescient choice. With the young girl’s strength it would have been a waste for her to use bladed weapons that required finesse in their use. A blunt weapon on the other hand allowed her to fully use her strength, regardless of the angle of the blow, and also gave her far more flexibility in dealing with armored opponents.

“That’s good. Keep at it. You won’t need to think too much on where to land a blow since any blow will work with what you got,” said Elfriede as she narrowly parried off a strike that went low towards her shin. Indeed, as she said, a blunt weapon combined with the power and speed Erycea placed behind her blows would likely hurt or incapacitate someone regardless of where she hit, regardless of whether they wore armor or not. “In fact you can try to aim for the spots people usually didn’t think much about, throw them off-balance either way with that.”

“I thought you said to aim for the fatal points when we can in the past?” asked Erycea with some doubt, though to the girl’s credit, her swings neither slowed nor paused while she talked, as she kept Elfriede busy parrying and deflecting her blows.

“When there is a chance to go for them, then sure. Most people know of the points that would kill them or worse when struck, though, so they would keep those places under guard when they could,” said Elfriede casually as the training weapons in her hands smoothly deflected a forceful blow from her daughter. “On the other hand, people who wear armor, especially those with good armor, would usually place a good bit of trust in the protection they gave. You can abuse that mindset to land blows that debilitate them and make them easy to kill instead.”

“After all, if you cripple or even temporarily disable one of their limbs, chances are it would create openings that you can then make use of, and with those weapons of yours, a good hit, even through armor, has the potential to do that. If once wasn’t enough, just hit them again,” she added as she turned a blow aside and used the movement to slip in an attack of her own, which grazed Erycea’s cheek as the girl only barely managed to avoid it. “Also you will still need to keep your defenses in mind. While such a flurry would likely cause most people to panic, the experienced ones would see the flaws and make use of them, just like this.”

“Understood, mother,” said Erycea with a nod as she used a vicious strike to force Elfriede to draw back and make some distance between them. Even at barely twelve years of age, Erycea already grew as tall as her mother, with greater strength to boot, so she knew that in the near future she would likely further eclipse her mother physically. Physical ability was no replacement for learned skill and experience, though, and in those regards, her mother remained her superior by far.

She still had much to learn from her mother, she knew that much. That said, even Erycea herself noticed that while her mother taught her a way of fighting similar to what she herself used at first, later on she shifted to something else. She played more the opponent to overcome rather than the goal to achieve. Erycea understood why. Her mother wanted for her to find a path that was entirely her own, rather than walking down the path already trodden by others.

It was a wish the girl strived to fulfill, partly out of her own desire to be strong.