Several hours had past before Dei was able to stumble her way to the doorway without grasping onto the walls for dear life. She looked out onto the forest floor with dead lifeless eyes as Matthew closed his book and casually put it away for safekeeping. With a single teetering step, the girl made her way down the stairs to the crypt. Three thin stairs between her and the dirt floor, yet she still took a couple moments each step to catch her balance on uneasy joints that creaked at the effort. Her arms hung limp as she shambled her way forward over the course of several minutes, only to stop in front of Matthew once again.
He looked up at the pallid beauty that simply stared down at him until he finally got up from his roost. Now more than a foot taller than her he looked down on her fine features, more than a little surprised at the interest he was starting to feel for the girl. Regardless, he reached up with his hand to putt it square on the center of her chest as she obviously looked at him in confusion. And then he pushed.
Dei rocked back on both heels with the force of his push, toppling backward with all the elegance of a falling tree before she hit the ground with a dull thud. Matthew snickered just a bit as he looked down on the awkward corpse as her legs began to spasm at the knees like she had only just started to try and catch herself, several seconds after the fall was already done with. Still, he remained there, standing above her as she slowly contracted at the hips, raising her upper body into a sitting position, then started to set her feet below her with bent knees.
It was an odd sight to be sure, like a puppet that had lost its string slowly learning how to get itself up, but she did manage to get one foot under her, then the other, and slowly rose back to a standing position. This time, she angled her head to stare up at the man as he looked down into those plain brown eyes that had become almost entirely red around the irises like they hadn't been blinked in days. Then he pushed her down again.
Dei was thrust onto her back another four times before she was able to even fight back. That time she got her foot back a couple of inches first before the knee buckled under the weight and she collapsed back all the same. She had stopped arguing internally with Fei after around the third drop, and they merely set their focus to trying to control this mess of a body with all the aptitude of a bunch of floating motes of fire.
So it was that on the seventh fall, they managed to get the left foot back in time to really fix the joint in place. The key was letting Fei contract the knee just enough to get the foot off the ground as Dei rotated the hip joint to get the back foot on the ground. Fei then had to let go of the contracted knee to instead set the ankle joint in place while Dei angled the torso forward and down just far enough to counteract the backward force. Dei nearly contracted the neck joints in time to stare up at Matthew before the brute of a man smiled at her and pushed on her shoulder this time, sending her sideways into the ground all the same.
Seething as she was, Dei abandoned Fei's efforts to stand the body back up, and instead chose to focus on manning the monstrous looking hand that they hadn’t yet turned back to normal. With but a passing thought Dei released the connection to the wrist area and started to run forward with the small spiderling towards the base of Matthew’s thin boot. It seemed strange to her that piloting this small contraption was so much easier than a human body, but then she realized that the center of gravity was just so much easier to manage on five legs than it was standing upright on only two. Regardless, Matthew looked down on her impassively as his hand brought itself up to his scabbard in a flash.
The man had no right to be as fast as he was, because he seemed to have all the time in the world to spin the sword in a full circle with the flick of his wrist, grab it in reverse grip, and still managed to ram it down the center of Dei's spider body before she even reached his ankle. She could remotely feel some sort of pain in the back of her head as her creature was skewered to the ground, but mostly she just felt annoyance as her fingers continued to reach for the man, pinned as she was inches away from his boot. After a couple more seconds of this Fei began to whine that she wasn't helping and Dei had to resign herself to returning to the main body. Matthew merely watched the couple of them stand up for the seventh time, as he left the sword impaling the hand to the ground.
For the next couple of hours Matthew casually noticed that every once in a while when the girls had a particularly bad fall he would see the fingers on the spider twitch just a little bit like they still wanted to rip him apart.
—-------
Dawn had risen by the time Dei could withstand three pushes in a row without falling.
Push, contract, post foot, pivot, recover.
Push, twist, post arm, extend leg, raise chest, recover.
Push, raise leg, extend other leg, one step, two step, balance, recover.
Dei glared at the man where she stood a couple of feet away now as he finally pulled his sword out of the ground and allowed the hand to rejoin the rest of the body. She felt a moment of satisfaction at the recognition he was showing her in that moment, until he leveled the sword at her chest with a bent arm, and took his first step forward. If dead eyes could go wide in that moment, they would have, but by then they probably would have started falling out.
With his next step forward he started to swing the sword horizontally at her right side, making the slash like it was in slow motion towards her shoulder. So slow that she was able to step backward, angling her body just out of its range. He followed up with a back handed downward slash towards her hips which caused her to take another half step back as she angled her waist out of the way. This time his hand twisted in a sweeping motion to swipe upward with the sword, all of which was still at only half speed. This time she stepped forward and to the left of his sword as she closed the open space in front of him.
They continued like this for some time, each swing getting a fraction of a second faster until the swings started to look like genuine sword slashes from a real fighter. A minute passed before she messed up for the first time, and the sword glanced off her shoulder removing a chunk of leftover flesh and cutting a slashing line over the bone underneath. Regardless, after a momentary breath from the two of them, the cracks in her shoulder bone knit back together and they started the dance at half speed once again.
The next time he broke one of her legs, cutting straight through the knee joint at an angle, dropping her to the ground on her remaining leg and an arm, but after a moment's rest again this time she didn't get up. A thin white string wound out from the knee cap to pull the rest of the leg back into place, but still the girl raised her other hand up to Matthew and opened her fingers in a stopping motion.
He took a step back and set the tip of his sword on the ground as sweat dripped from his brow onto the black jerkin he wore. In another moment Dei raised her hand in an upturned gesture, raising her shoulder at the same time, but Matthew simply raised an eyebrow at the movement.
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Shaking her head, Dei bent down further, already crouched as she was, to bring her finger in contact with the dirt and started drawing.
“Why”
“Why what?” matthew said.
“Fight?”
“Because you need to be prepared.” he responded.
Dei cocked her head, before pointing back at ‘Why’.
“Because the next people that see you might not be quite as willing to meet you as I am.”
Still confused, Dei pointed back at the second word again, ‘Fight?’.
“Yes, contrary to what you may believe, most corpses don't rise from the ground to start learning how to walk again. I'll be frank with you so we can skip the awkward questions. Five countries stand on the brink of war right now, and I just happened to find your crypt right in the damn center of where all those nations' borders meet. So when I tell you we might run into problems the first moment we set foot in the closest town, I mean for you to know how to handle yourself. Sound good?”
Dei took it all in, slowly standing up from her scribbles to accept the end of his explanation with a soft crouching position. A short nod of her head brought the man back into his own fighting position, and they continued the day in silence except for the whistling of a sword in the air and the soft thumps of bare feet hitting the ground.
—-----
Matthew had grabbed a sizable chunk of cheese from his bag in one hand and he started munching on it as he continued to swipe at her absentmindedly. What had once taken a bare couple of minutes in between breaks in her guard had now escalated into bouts that lasted nearly fifteen minutes before his sword became a blur before her vision.
‘This isn't just some random man who found you in the wood Dei.’ Fei thought aloud.
‘Perhaps, but he seems to mean well. You know, all that follower nonsense and trying to prepare us for war.’ Dei shot back, even as they stepped around the lazy swings near the start of the newest fight.
‘Yes, cause every princess trapped in a coffin gets a knight charming to come teach her to become a fighter while he casually breaks all her arms and legs repeatedly for a day straight with hardly any rest. Just what is this guy?’
‘Hah, knight charming my ass. His clothes look like he stole them off a drying rack on the way out to find us.’
‘Yeah sure, but what kind of man just walks into the middle of the woods seemingly sure of the fact he's going to find a dead girl waiting for him at the other end?’
‘...The type of man who also said he can't tell us why he knows things?’
‘Dei, this sounds insane. Even to a dead person.’
‘Look, it doesn't matt-’ A sword swing finally connected with the girl as Matthew sliced through the upper part of her head from the tip of her ear through her hairline. For once he seemed a little bit ashamed of the blow, as her body lifted fully off the ground to land a couple feet away in a pile. She was still getting better at reacting to these things, so she quickly rolled in the dirt to a half standing position within the moment, but a bit of gray ooze had started leaking from her open head down her face and onto her shoulder.
A couple of steps quickly brought her over to the detached slice of cranium lying on the ground which she picked up and brushed off on what was left of her shirt. The twin essenses stared for a moment as they looked down at their body after what had been half a day of fighting at this point, only to realize the thin dress that had originally covered her was in tatters. Another passing glance from the third person revealed a frothy gray liquid was sloshing around in the open goblet of her head on top of everything else. Feeling at least a little bit uneasy at the sight, Dei tilted her head to the side like one would do to try and get water out of their ear, and a small mass of flesh flopped out of her head onto the ground.
Raising her head back up to look at Matthew, she bent down again to scribble in the dirt.
“Clothes?”
“Uh, I don't particularly have any spares right now other than what I'm wearing. And between you and me, its not like you've got much…left to cover.”
Taking another look down at herself, Dei realized that the majority of both sides of her pelvis had already been cut away from the hip bones, leaving only a thin strip of torn skin hanging to the bottom of her pelvis. It was far too covered in blood and dirt to tell what was down there anymore, but she still felt her metaphorical eyes narrow as she stared up at Matthew once again. Without another word between them, Dei quickly walked over to the campfire that Matthew had kept going throughout the day, and sat down ass first into the coals.
Mathew at least had the decency to avert his eyes as she stared him down from the fire, and then he did his best to distract himself from the acrid stench as he kicked dirt over the gray flesh that came out of her skull. Without looking back, he started making his way towards the crypt.
Dei had, perhaps, not thought this through as much as she had hoped and a couple moments after she had started burning away her lower abendages something felt like it had droped out of her rib cage allong with a shocking amount of body liquid. The mass hit the coals below her as the fire quickly erupted into a blinding mass of steam that clouded her vision. Taking the moment as her cue to finally stand up, Matthew came back out of the crypt holding an old looking sword and scabbard in his hands. His smile quickly dropped when he looked up to find an ashen stained skeleton girl from the rib cage downward standing in front of the remains of his precious fire.
—----
The strange man had tossed the sword into her open arms as he grumbled to himself about something like "waste of a perfectly good fireplace". Even still, as she slowly unsheathed the sword to the side of him, he ignored her as he started placing pieces of wood into a rough teepee a couple feet away from the old fire. She decided to ignore his fascination with a fire that he barely used between their sparring fights as she looked at her new weapon.
‘That's ancient writing isn't it?’ Fei thought as they stared down the length of the sword at a cursive script running along its side. Dei hardly answered as they both looked down at the sword, uncertain why it looked so familiar to her at that moment. She obviously could speak the native tongue of this land due to her conversations with Matthew, but why would she be buried with a sword she couldn't even read? Still, appart from the ancient writing, there wasn't much of note to the sword as it held a rough dull edge and a rapidly deteriorating hilt wrapped in leather strips. She took a few practice swings with the sword, and was solidly impressed by her own ability to make it move how she wanted.
Her steps and arm movements certainly weren't graceful quite yet, but the day of sparring with Matthew had obviously shown progress as her sword chopped through the air at roughly the angle she had been hoping for. Still, it was surprising how cleanly many of the lessons she had learned from moving her legs to dodge blows applied similarly to her arms, albeit in a somewhat backwards fashion. Regardless, she had reached the point where it was starting to become easier to settle into the muscle memory of moving limbs as opposed to planning out each individual joint movement.
A couple more minutes passed before Matthew managed to get another fire going, and a wide grin split his face as he looked up to Dei in pride. What looked down at him at that time was a thin skelton frame that still bore the face of a young girl, and little else in the way of skin or flesh. Along every joint and connection between bones a thin gray putty had emplaced itself and glowed with faint bursts of blue and purple light as the girl raised her sword in a skeletal hand that was just a little bit too elogated to be natural, ending each finger tip in a sharp white spike. Still, the man held her dead gaze as her rose from the fire to continue their sparring.
One more day.