"Do you think they all got the message?“
Cogar shrugged. "It seems to me there is much more bottled up hatred in the eyes of your warriors.“
We looked over the gathered warriors, who stared at each other with barley veiled distaste and aggression. We had not been able to find Simue. If she didn‘t want to be found, she would not be. It was as easy as that.
So we had improvised, and had called two dozen younglings from the Bear Clan down, to fight the warriors under Gideon in mock battles. Both sides were in dire need of training and levels, so we had seen no reason not to pitch them against each other.
It would at least foster eagerness to win and healthy competition. Well, I say healthy. The way they were clubbing each other out there was anything but healthy. We had given them sticks to emulate spears and clubs to emulate swords and axes. They were using them with reckless abandon.
The group of around fifty [Hunters] and [Archers] led by Grim was snaking up the Needle as we spoke, Grim barely tipping his head with his bow as he saw me watching. It was a rather miserable lot. Especially the pure [Archers], who would have to learn a lot in a really short time. Their gear was miserable as well. Plundered bows, just a dozen or so longbows between them, reused arrows and a knife or two.
"Are you leaving soon?“ I asked my brother, as he finished shouting at one of the Wyldlings who had tried to hit a fallen human.
He nodded. "I have to. I know that there is much to do here. But I cannot ignore the task that Bear has given me. I need to gather more of the aimless clans. I can feel Bear sleeping. We have not enough people.“
“How is Kara?“ I asked, switching the subject.
“A little fuming fire of shame and hatred if I read her correctly. She is all but recovered. She has not many nice things to say about you.“
“Why? I killed Barak, after all.“
“Yeah. That is the reason. She feels like the opportunity to kill him was taken from her.“
I shook my head. Crazy.
We fell silent, watching the full-on brawl in front of us. “This is not working.“ I finally said.
“Just because it doesn‘t resemble the orderly training yards of your past, doesn‘t mean it‘s not working.“ Cogar laughed. “I would argue that they learn a lot. At least they will have felt pain before entering a battle for real.“
“They do know pain. Better than most. They all stormed the Wreckage, remember?“
Cogar shrugged. “I am not a warrior. This is the way we handled things after the clans had broken down, with no warriors around. What do you suggest?“
“Stop!“ I shouted, climbing on a rock at the side of the training field. And once again, as they failed to hear me the first time.
“New exercise.“ I said as they turned to me. “Two humans and two Wyldlings pair up. Four versus four. Winner gets to rest. Loser goes again.“
And a hundred warriors groaned. There! I found the one thing they had in common.
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I sparred with Gideon, while the mock battles were underway, trying to give some of the formal teachings I had received as a boy to the [Guard]. It was a disaster. The first round, I had pommeled him into the ground with Kingsbane, overpowering him with the weight of the blade and the strength I had put behind it.
I still was not used to the new strength I had acquired. I had woven enough Essence to bring all my Core Skills to level 3 in the days after the battle against Barak. In a sword fight, especially in a formal duel and not in the chaos of a battlefield, the control you had over your body and the slightest shifts in your body weight and strength, as well as micro movements and feints, mattered. A lot. And I was still adjusting.
And it was not a fight on equal footing. I beat Gideon with strength and speed, not with my skill with a blade. I changed my sword after that first fight. Which now meant that I would have little to none benefit from the sparring, as I would not train with the weapon I would wield into battle.
I asked Lily if I could turn off my Core Skills. We fiddled a while, but found a solution as we practically build a floodgate out of Essence, which would stop any interaction between reality and my Demesne, for my Core Skills only. It took a few minutes to change it every time, though. And only Lily understood how it worked.
As I fought with Gideon on equal footing now, normal sword and no enhanced body, I felt weird. Like a weak sack of meat. No coordination, no strength. The step back into my mortal body was more disorienting than every new level of a Core Skill had been. I had grown so used to my supernatural agility and speed, that I felt like wading through molasses or mud. Every movement a chore.
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Somewhere deep down inside me was the training hidden I had received as a boy. But it was buried under the muscle memory of surviving and fighting creatures I had not dueled but smashed to death. Even in the fights with the skeletons or the Wyldlings, I had used my feral instincts and superior Core Skills to overpower them, not really beaten them in a sword fight.
Even Gideon had a look of shame in his eyes, as he watched me pick up the sword he had beaten out of my hand. Inside my mind, a cold laughter echoed. The Betrayer watching me. Laughing at me. Judging me and finding me not good enough.
If the Abyss could not break me, humiliation and pride would not either.
“Again.“ I said. And our swords clashed once more.
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Training had been a disaster. But I was aware of a weakness now I could work on. My skill in sword fighting was abysmal. Not only had I not learned much, the simple moves and stances I had once known had deteriorated. I would spar every morning with Gideon, who was the best sword fighter we still had. Higgins and Locksley were much better with a cutlass, of course, but Higgins was walking around with a wooden peg-leg and crutches and Locksley was on the Albatross, hunting Wyldling transports.
To get my mind off the disastrous morning, or so I felt, I wandered over to the pier. One of the longboats was out in the bay, with Bosun Marge on board, teaching a crew of volunteers the ins and outs of sailing and rowing. While Higgins sat on a crate on the pier, where the second longboat was tethered. A group sat on the ground, practicing knots, another jumped to and from the bobbing boat, to familiarize themselves with the unstable ground.
The recruits for the big ships were on the Albatross, as there was no better place to get shown the ropes, than a ship on a mission. The men and women here were training with the longboats.
As he saw me coming, Higgins struggled to his feet, fumbling with the crutches. But he smiled warmly at me, as I greeted him without much decor.
“How are things on the waterfront?“ I asked him, leaning beside him at the crate.
“Good, my lord. The Bosun just makes the maiden voyage with the newbies. These ones will go out after. Longboats are a very different thing to the big sailing ships, my lord. No specialists. Everyone has to do everything. We hope to make them receive appropriate classes.“
“Like what?“
“We don‘t really now. We do not use longboats in the empire, and what we know about them is that they are steered by a crew of rowers, sailors, and warriors. All in one. Where we would have separate [Sailors], [Marines] and [Naval Officers] and so on.“
He took his crutches again. “But I do have to show you a little gem we found by chance.“ He smiled back at me. I followed him around a larger rock jutting out of the rolling waves and saw a group of ten men and women throwing large harpoons into a target leaned against the rock.
Higgins grinned. “One of the slaves had been a [Whaler].“ He indicated the man who was correcting the stance of a woman and her grip on the long shaft of the harpoon. “And a [Harpooner] as well, a damn good one. And even better than that, my lord, is the fact that we found a whaling ship in the Wreckage. With harpoons and chains, ropes and pulleys, and all kind of equipment.“
“That is excellent! Do you reckon that there could be whales in the bay?“
“I doubt that. It is rather shallow around the pier and the rocks. But further out, why not? But it is better than that, my lord. The ocean is a dangerous place, always has been. Our ships seldom get attacked, because they are so big. And if they get attacked we have ballistae and pikes to fend of the monsters. But here? With ships this small? Even our home is swimming.“ He gestured to the Wreckage in the distance, hidden behind the bigger ships that were tied to the pier, where the carpenters could better work on them.
“This is new for all of us.” He continued. “We cannot use our old methods and we have an environment that is new to us as well. If [Harpooners] can hunt whales, they can fight off other creatures. We plan to use them in the crews of the longboats, who would be much more vulnerable against attacks from below.“
“You know what, Higgins? You gave me an idea. We are not in the empire anymore. Not even in the Wyld as the Wyldlings know it. We must discard our old ideas and come up with new ones. We are not defending against other fighters here. We are defending against creatures and Nightmares.“
“Quite right, my lord.“ Higgins beamed, satisfied with his role in my enlightenment.
“If they are not fighting other warriors, they should not train against other warriors.“
“What does that mean, my lord?“
“That means that tonight we go Nightmare fishing.“ I grinned.
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I talked a bit longer with Higgins about the intricacies of educating sailors and the different naval classes and how you could make sure the new recruits would get them. The thing with longboats was, that you did not need any kind of expertise to sit on your oar and pull in rhythm. But it helped. Not to talk about Skills, which could make a longboat shoot over the waves like an arrow, if the [Rowers] had enough levels under their belt.
But it was stupid to man a longboat with [Rowers] only, because in the case of battle they had to pick up a weapon and fight. Or do whatever else the mission of the longboat would be. So the plan was to make the new recruits get a class specialized in handling a longboat and everything that entailed. Because it was culturally not something we knew about, we had to hope that the system would step in and help us there. Trial and error. We knew that other cultures had something like that. Fierce warriors as good on the oars as they were with an axe and a shield. I had never heard of them, but then again, they were not climbing a mountain now, were they.
Suddenly screams were carried over the waters by the wind. We ran back to the pier and looked over the bay, searching for the longboat dancing on the waves, just a couple of miles out from the dry land.
Something arose out of the water under them. A tentacle, thick as a tree trunk, feeling around the mast and the hull. A creature big enough to just lift the longboat out of the waves as he dove back down and his back scraped away under the ship. Suddenly a wave crashed into the longboat and the tentacle jerked violently and got dragged away under the surface by force and with speed. The longboat danced on the wake of whatever had dove underneath them, the waves higher than the ship itself.
Oars broke and sailors went overboard. You could hear the screams of the crew trying to get their mates back on the ship, throwing ropes into the water and dragging them back with long sticks. Louder than anyone, you could hear Bosun Marge scream orders. Her voice carried loud and clear to the pier, and her choice of words would make a sailor blush.
“I want to see Cogar eat the heart of that thing.“ I murmured.
Higgins looked at me with an eyebrow raised in concerned confusion.