The next couple of months while Raha’s house was constructed were a very busy time for me, I was constantly either training, studying, or using my magic to speed up construction.  In my very rare moments of free time I did my best to talk to the Susi amongst the work crew and on guard duty.  Living on the farm and deep in Vuohian territory had left my view of the world a little skewed and I wanted to find out how my kind thought…

It wasn’t pretty, they had a fairly casual view on the value of life, the most important thing was the strength of the clan and your position within it.  My people loved to fight and hunt, they like to push themselves and challenge those who they thought were weaker.  They did not appreciate differences, they simply tolerated them.  I wasn’t going to be walking into civilization where the rule of law was sacrosanct instead I was going to be walking into the middle of a pack of wolves and I was going to have to prove that I was the alpha.  If I managed that I had a shot at changing a few things, if I didn’t they were going to eat me alive.

Despite that rather bleak discovery my plans didn’t really change very much while I was at home although I did realize I couldn’t just let the humans walk home, they would be killed on the road without me along to protect them.  So after my visit to the capitol I was going to have to walk them to the border and then send them on their way.

Speaking of the humans I’d made some progress learning their language which was called Ilati by the way.  I wasn’t by any means fluent, but I’d learned enough to have simple conversations with my captives.  I let them know that we would be travelling together soon, though I had yet to be able to properly convey that I would free them at the end of the journey.  I tried but they looked more scared than anything else by the end of the conversation, I’d need to try again to explain things since I’m pretty sure there was some sort of miscommunication going on, you can be the judge because while it was a busy time in my life there were three incidents the really stood out to me.

First there was the fight; it happened a few days after construction started on the new house, I’d just finished leveling the ground where the construction would stand when Raha stopped me from doing anything else.  He grabbed my hand and shouted, “Ladies and gentlemen I have a brief announcement to make.  As part of an agreement between Swift and myself, he needs to prove his martial prowess, in order to do that I have decided that a small exhibition is in order, so in two hours he is going to battle the captain of my guard until one of them either yields or is knocked unconscious.  There are a few rules to the battle that will be explained to you fine folks before the bout begins.  So grab some food find a place to sit and get ready to watch a fight between two warriors.”

Some cheering broke out right away as Raha was basically offering the workers an extra-long paid break.  I also heard the quiet whisper of bets being exchanged, I was apparently not a favorite to win as most of the initial offers were two to one against me.  I looked down at Raha and said, “A little more notice would be appreciated next time you want me to fight… Do I get to know the rules of the match before we start or will they also come as a surprise?”

He looked up at me mischief and a hint of malice clear in his eyes, “Well of course you will know the rules of the match ahead of time, I’ll be announcing them to the crowd right before your match.  After all a true warrior is always ready to fight.”

Great, Raha was stacking the deck against me, probably because I’d passed the first two trials in under a week.  He was also probably a little sore about the prices I’d set for some of my services.  Magically clearing and flattening the foundation of his house had earned me ten silver hopea, and that was the least expensive thing on the construction list.  Of course I’d saved his crew close to six hours of leveling so it was a net gain for him, but I don’t think he liked giving out lump sums like that for simple things.

I responded to Raha’s goading, “You are right Raha, a true warrior is always ready to fight, I on the other hand while trained by a true warrior have rarely tested myself and never in a real battle.  I do not have the instincts of a man who has trained for twenty years so I find myself less prepared than I should be.  This is a valuable lesson and I appreciate your guidance.  I will go home, eat and rest so that I do not disappoint you in the coming battle.”

Raha grunted, I don’t think he was ready for that response, and thus he had no comeback ready.  I walked home remembering the abuse I’d suffered for antagonizing Raha in our previous meetings.  I claimed I’d only done it to discover more about the character of the man, my father responded with an extended sparring session to prepare me for a life of constant battle.  Only after the bruises practically covered me from head to toe did he explain that Raha’s character was well known to my parents.  I’d thought them naive and dad proved me very wrong.  He explained that my tack with Raha while sure to pique his interest would also make him hostile and inclined to test me.  I’d basically managed to push all of Raha’s buttons I was likely to suffer for it soon.

Then came Mom’s lessons in etiquette.  They went on for hours, from how to properly use silverware to how to recognize a man’s rank based off his bow.  It was simultaneously exhausting and boring.  It reminded me of my study sessions in college, except instead of learning about Plato’s ideal republic and how souls and people come in three flavors, bronze, silver and gold, blech… I was instead learning about how I could insult a Vuohian simply by staring into his eyes for too long.  Yeah that’s right, they regard it as a challenge if you maintain eye contact for more than ten seconds.  Of course that also lead to how Susi can be pissed off if you angle your tail down and to the left while bowing to greet them as a stranger.  Stupid etiquette lessons…

Needless to say I apologized to my parents for antagonizing their friend and they in turn toned down the lessons a little bit.  Anyway back to the fight preparations.  I got home, ate a big meal and then began meditating.  I’d expended quite a bit of mana leveling the earth so construction could begin and I needed to regain as much as I could before the fighting started.  I also used the time to heal all of my injuries.  While they were mostly small bruises and strained muscles I wanted to be able to move without anything holding me back.

When I headed back to the construction site there was a crowd waiting for me.  It was a little shocking how much had changed in two short hours, it was almost like walking into a baseball stadium ten minute before the game started, people were still milling about, finding their seats grabbing food and just gossiping before the game started.  I even heard some more betting take place, apparently Mom found out about the odds against me and planned on making some money.  I just hoped I’d be able to live up to her expectations.  As I got close to the stage on which my martial prowess would be judged I did my best to clear my head.  I focused on remaining calm and keeping fears and doubts from affecting me.

One thing my father taught me was that before a fight the worst thing you could do was doubt yourself if you went into a fight thinking you were going to lose then by the gods you would find a way to lose.  That isn’t to say you should approach every fight overflowing with confidence, but you need to know that no matter who the opponent is, no matter how much stronger, faster or more skilled they are, they are still mortal, they make mistakes and they can be beaten.  He never taught me to use a weapon because to quote him, “You my son are the weapon, a sword may extend your range, a mace may increase your power and armor may improve your ability to take a hit, but I want to train you to be as strong as possible and not to rely on crutches.”

So I entered the circle in the clothes I wore every day I centered myself and prepared to prove that my father had trained me well and that I could win against a man who’d been training for at least two decades longer than me.  I wasn’t exactly overflowing with confidence, but I knew that at the very least my father was likely more skilled and I had gotten the occasional hits in on my father.  While my experience was bound to be less than my opponents, I was probably faster, my knowledge of Susi biology was better and my reaction speed would be superior.  I had advantages and I needed to make the most of them if I was going to win.  Plus I had magic, I kind of doubted that Raha would let me use it but if I could then I’d likely win without any trouble.

I entered the arena, well I entered the flat space that everyone surrounded while sitting on logs, but hey in my head it was an arena because drama and gravitas and all that jazz.  I looked at my parents sitting in the front row, really the only row, but still it was the front row, and I gave them a thumbs up.  As I approached the center of the ring Raha got out of his seat next to my parents and joined me.  The guard captain Muuntaa joined us in the center of the ring and I sized him up as he approached.  He was wearing light leather armor, it was well worn and something he was probably used to fighting in.  It covered most of his body and would likely limit the effects any impact.  He was tall, not quite as tall as my father, but he still had an inch or two on me, he was also built along different lines.  While I was tall and lean, with muscles designed more for endurance and speed, Muuntaa was covered in bulky intimidating muscles.  I realized right away that if I let he close with me he would be able to use his strength to its’ greatest advantage.  He grinned at me for while he didn’t seem to be holding a grudge I think he was looking forward to our fight.

I knew that feeling was correct when Raha started talking and Muuntaa’s smile just got bigger and bigger.  “Ladies and Gentlemen, today we will have a match between Muuntaa Taisteluson, the captain of my guard and wrestling champion of the Soturi clan and Swift Aattoson prospective heir of the Jalo clan.  There are a few rules to the match that I will relay to you now.  Number one, no using offensive or defensive magic, Swift is a skilled mage and Muuntaa is not, this is to be a martial contest and in order to keep things fair he may not attack or defend with magic.  Rule two is in regards to the battle field, earlier today Swift began preparing the foundation for my new home, the earth that he worked so hard to prepare shall be the extent of the battlefield.  Should either contestant leave the area for more than ten seconds the fight will end and he shall be declared the loser of the bout.  As I do not wish to hamper the contestant too much, there will be no time limit, the only way to win this fight is to knock your opponent unconscious, keep them out of the ring for ten seconds or force them to admit defeat.  Now contestants if you both agree to the rules as I have stated them please go to opposite sides of the ring.  The match will begin on my mark.”

I sighed knowing that my biggest advantage had been taken away but he didn’t take away my ability to use healing magic as it was neither offensive nor defensive in nature so there was always that.  I walked to the side of the foundations that my parents and the Taika’s were seated.  When I got within a few feet of them Gurt said, “I bet all my money on you Swift, give him hell.”

I smiled at the confidence my friend had in me and I felt it surge even more when Dad chimed in, “He is slower than you and his endurance is worse, pick him apart Son, your mother bet all of our money on you as well.”

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I started lightly jumping up and down, doing my best to get the blood flowing through my veins, I’d need to move fast and often if I was going to beat the burly guardsman so I began regulating my breathing as well.  When Raha left the ring he yelled out, “Ready… FIGHT!!”

I charged toward my opponent as fast as possible, I wanted to see how fast he was capable of reacting and hopefully get in a hit before he properly got his guard up.  As I closed the distance between us I decided on my target and threw a left jab straight at his right eye.  He swayed a bit dodging my first strike and responded with a slash aimed at my extended arm.  I pulled the arm back before he could connect and was displeased with the information I’d gathered so far.  Muuntaa was apparently out for blood hoping to bleed me instead of break me.  Not exactly the strategy I figured the stronger Susi would aim for.  Fortunately my attack was more exploratory in nature and I had enough speed to avoid his counter, had I attacked with my full strength I likely would not have been able to retract my arm in time.

I launched a series of strikes aimed at his eyes and body, he dodged the strikes aimed at his head countering where he could and absorbed the strikes aimed at his body.  He was obviously confident he could take the hits I was dishing out and he might have been right.  Throughout the exchange of blows I did my best to move in and out of his range, ready the whole time in case tried and grapple with me.  I was definitely faster than him, unfortunately I wasn’t hitting him hard enough to do any real damage.  My strikes were simply too light, sure I could hit harder, but that would slow me down, and I didn’t want to test my grappling skills with a wrestling champ.

I kept up my assault, allowing myself to fall into a pattern of left, left, left, right, head, head, head, body.  I wanted him to get used to my strikes so that he would try too hard on a counter and I could potentially exploit the opening.  I varied the time between each attack, but kept the targeting the same.  It only took him three sets before he attempted the counter I was hoping for, a right cross aimed at my head while I went in for a strike at his body.  I was ready for him though and shifted my forward momentum, dodging forward and to the left, throwing off the timing of his counter.  As his fist sailed past I aimed a punch at the back of his head, put all of my strength into the blow and was struck in the face by his spinning backhand.  I hit the ground and rolled for a bit before I pushed myself back up and jumped to my left dodging the kick aimed at my formerly prone body.  I jumped back to create some space between us but I was not in good shape, my vision was blurry and my sense of balance was impaired.  That hit had rattled my brain and it was going to take me a minute to recover.

Of course there was no way I had a minute to recover as Muuntaa was already charging at me again.  I jumped further back and started running away, all the while sending mana into my head to check the damage.  The blood vessels in my brain had compressed and my nervous system was firing way more often than it needed to, so my first step was decompressing the blood vessels. It’s a relatively simple task when you have mana to play with, but tough when you have to dodge an attacking giant while simultaneously trying to not fall over.  I managed it before Muuntaa was finally able to close with me but I was going to have to recover from the other effects of the blow naturally as I no longer had time to focus on healing and instead had to defend against Muuntaa’s powerful strikes.

He focused most of his attacks on my body, I did my best to brace myself and block the blows, keeping my hands up and my muscles tensed.  I would have tried dodging but my coordination was still off and I didn’t want to risk giving the large grey Susi a bigger opening.  Each hit felt like a sledgehammer was being driven into me.  My human body would have been broken after the first blow but I’d been training my entire life against someone just as powerful as Muuntaa.   I felt my ribs flex with each blow and my internal organs shake with each strike to the stomach.  But I’d taken beating before in training and I wouldn’t let a few blows finish me off.  Sure he had surprised me with his counter and he wasn’t letting up anytime soon, but then neither had my father.  As I focused on defense and recovery Muuntaa continued to rain down blow after blow, they were powerful, they hurt a lot, but I would survive.

Eventually I felt my balance fully return, I’d dealt with the worst effects of the blow with my initial healing so I didn’t have to suffer under the attacks for too long.  When Muuntaa threw his next punch I tried a move my dad warned was risky but if I was fast and my opponent was swinging as hard as he could it would cripple the guy.  As another right cross came toward my body I grabbed his wrist with my right hand and pulled it along my stomach, my torso pivoting the whole time continuing the motion and fully extending his arm.  While I was doing that with his right arm my left elbow was hurtling toward the point in space where his elbow would be when fully extended.  I felt bones snap as I shattered his elbow, the pain must have been excruciating because it caused Muuntaa to pause for close to a second as his body processed the damage I’d just caused.

My next move was only possible because of that pause and something a buddy of mine taught me who’d joined the army while I went to college.  Now I am sure most people are familiar with the carotid arteries; they’re in your neck and supply blood to your brain.  Fun fact Susi have a set of veins just like them, I knew this from expanding my mana channels throughout my entire body, it gave me a lot of time to examine my innards.  Now my buddy once showed me one drunken night how you can use the knuckles of your two index fingers to cut off the blood supply to the brain by firmly pressing them into the carotid arteries right under the jaw and then twisting up.  This method is extremely effective, in fact I only lasted 2 seconds before passing out.  It could have been that the alcohol aided in shutting off my brain so quickly, but med school quickly disproved that theory.  When blood flow is completely cut off from the brain it can remain conscious for up to 2-3 seconds.  Knuckles to the carotid artery happen to be a very effective method of cutting off blood flow to the brain.

So after I broke Muuntaa’s elbow and got behind him I took a risk.  I could have gone for a standard chokehold and tried to crush his windpipe between my forearm and bicep, cutting off his supply of oxygen and eventually forcing him into an unconscious state.  But while I was trying to do that he would likely be clawing the shit out of my arms.  A chokehold might work on humans because our nails suck at doing deep damage, but when your nails can sever tendons it becomes a lot riskier.  Who knows it might have worked out, I might have crushed his carotid arteries in the process and he would be out in those 2-3 seconds we talked about earlier but if he managed to get his hand in there I had no real shot of choking him out.

So I jammed my knuckles into his neck right beneath his jaw then twisted.  If he hadn’t been reeling from the pain of having his elbow shattered I doubt the move would have worked, he might have moved or twisted his head thus making it difficult for me to place my knuckles so perfectly but he paused and I took advantage of it.  He started to reach for my hands and run forward in order to get me away from his back, but I was already in the process of jumping onto his back, he wasn’t getting away from me.  By the time he got his hand on my wrist he was already blacking out.

I rode his limp body to the ground and then released the pressure, I then grabbed him by the throat nails digging into the skin underneath his fur and yelled, “He’s unconscious which I believe makes me the winner.”

I looked up at Raha who nodded his head in confirmation, he looked stunned by the sudden turn of events.  Here I was getting wailed on by the head of his guards and then in less than fifteen seconds I’d knocked said guard out was poised to kill him.  It had to have been shocking to say the least, and by the silence of the crowd I think they were all very surprised.  I took a second to enjoy my victory and the rush of surviving the onslaught of punches delivered by Muuntaa then I got serious and started working on the fallen guard.

I sent mana into his elbow and began examining exactly how bad the damage was… It wasn’t pretty, I’d broken his Ulna into three pieces, knocked his Humerus out of joint and torn his ulnar collateral ligament.  There was some other damage done, but those were the big problems I had to fix.  I focused on fusing the bone back together first, without a solid Ulna I wasn’t going to be able to repair anything else.  I slid the bones back into place, coating them in mana so they would cut the already damaged muscles they’d slid into.  Once the bone fragments were back in place I used my mana to speed up the natural healing process.  I go into the technical details of what I was doing, but the last time I tried that with someone that hadn’t gone into medical school they’d hit me in the arm called me a nerd and we went back to drinking.  Quick side not, is it bad that so many of my flashbacks involve me drinking?  Oh well, it was college, any the process involves chondroblasts and osteoblasts and a lot of other technical terms you won’t hear outside of a biology class.  Needless to say I got the bone put back together and then moved on to putting the Humerus back into its’ socket.

The process is normally pretty painful, but fortunately for Muuntaa he was still unconscious, so he won’t have to remember the pain of having a joint put back into place.  After that I moved on to ligament repair.  If I didn’t fix it now he’d never be able to be a serious guard again, two fully functioning arms were kind of required for the job.  So I used my mana to shift things around a bit and reconnect the broken pieces this involved a little something called fibroblast cells and a lot of mana.  But after maybe five minutes of work I was finished returning Muuntaa’s arm to functionality.  He’d be a little tender for the next few days and he would be really hungry but he’d also make a full recovery.

I got up from my kneeling beside Muuntaa, opened my eyes and found my parents smiling at me.  Well, my mom was smiling at me, my dad was smirking at me instead.  He said, “I told you that you needed more experience your setup was too obvious and that’s why you took that backhand.”

I nodded, “Yeah I know I should have realized that someone with that much experience would recognize a setup like that.  Looking back I’m pretty sure I was banking on him being a little overconfident and not giving me any credit.”

Dad nodded, “Understandable, but if he’d been fighting with daggers instead of his fists you would be dead right now.  Try and avoid underestimating your opponents in the future…”

I nodded again and said, ‘Yes sir.”

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AN: Sorry for the chapter delay it's longer than i thought it would be so I decided to split it into two parts.  This is the first half, the second half will come soon, I'd like to say before the week is over, but I'm a little busy searching for a new job and apartment at the moment so I might not be able to finish as soon as I'd like.  Btw, part two picks up when Raha joins the conversation.