CHAPTER 19 - Training

I wake up in the afternoon, my memory still a bit fuzzy. It takes a few seconds to remember what happened to me to put me in this state I am.

I don’t feel tired anymore, but I still feel my body hurting and sore. I can move just fine though, so at least I can move around, finish some projects off while I recover and then focus again on my main goals.

I get up from bed and leave my room after washing up my face. I open the door to discover one of the guys that follows Jake around in front of it. He delivers me a message from Jake to go and see him first thing after I wake up to talk.

First, I think nothing of it, but when the guy follows me around even after letting me know I get to the conclusion that is their upfront way of saying that I am under their watch. Not that it matters much, in the end it will only be here for a few days. If the guy still insists and tries to follow me when I go out… Well, that would be annoying.

“What was your name?” I mean, at least have some decency and greet me like you should.

“Jordan.”

Well, what do we have here? I am not to talk, but isn’t this guy the most talkative guy in the whole camp by any chance?

“Guess we're gonna be sharing a lot of time together Jordan. Let's keep it simple, my name is Leo as you probably are aware. Let’s get along from now on.”

The guy is as stoic as you can get, I get no facial expression whatsoever, and I feel like I could look straight at his face for a whole day and still not see him blink.

“Sure, it will be my pleasure.” His response is as bland as his facade, this guy… Jake sure knows who to choose for each mission.

I don't delve in pleasantries and after getting an apple from the canteen to quench my hunger I go straight to look for Jake. However, it doesn’t take much time to do so. I find him on the outer wall of the base helping to dig, with what purpose, I have no idea.

“¡Jake!” I call to him to get his attention and he comes my way the moment he hears me shouting. He passes the hoe he was using to another guy next to him and comes my way.

“Glad to see you are up again. When I got the news about your arrival in shambles I was worried that you may have some serious injury. I was told that you went straight to your room without saying anything so I figured you were just exhausted.”

“Thanks for the concern, and yes, I was beaten everywhere, but it will not stop me from going on. It will just delay some things, but maybe that's for the better.”

I assure him of my well-being, but I am honestly impressed as his worry seems truthful. I was expecting something different after he sent someone to watch over me, probably he is just being careful.

First things first, I need to warn him about the dangers that going inside the city implies as of now. I barely got out alive, and by faking my own death at that. Any other of the survivors of the settlement in that position and I am sure only 1% will survive to see the light of day, and that already while being humble.

There is always something or someone who you should never mess with, and this time around the leader of those monsters that I so proudly called lesser proved himself to be that guy.

I warn Jake and the others about the dangerous individual and his underlings that may ambush anyone within their reach once inside the city. I am kind of dubious about what they consider their territory so I am scared to say anywhere in specific.

I just give them the info and leave to do my own things, Jordan in tow. Oh boy, I might as well start calling him Shadow.

----------------------------------------

I was pondering over letting our dear Shadow watch the process of stripping my test subject of everything little by little as I looked for clues, at first deciding not to.

At the end of the day, he will probably just relay that only to Jake and maybe the higher-ups. If those guys can’t look this far into the future to prepare themselves, maybe it’s for the better to be prosecuted now instead of later on after investing in them. Yeah, let's do it anyways.

With that choice being made and leaving those useless thoughts out of the way, I finally finish inspecting the armless guy before it gets too dark. No luck this time either… Maybe I need to start thinking of other ways or look at it from another perspective.

Anyways, I clean it all up under the nerve-inducing eyes of Jordan. The guy doesn't even leave a hint of shame on his face as he watches idle from a corner.

I leave it there for the day and chill a little till it's time to go to sleep. I will be needing that refreshing 8 hours of sleep at least. The less amount of time I waste the better.

I wake up and leave to start working on my stuff the moment I get up. Jordan shows up out of nowhere not even a quarter of an hour after I leave my room. At least he wasn’t waiting on my door like the other day.

I can deal with someone near me for now, but keeping an eye on me while I sleep it's a darn whole different level of stalking someone. I will definitely set some boundaries here, not letting that happen anytime soon. Not now, not ever.

Apart from my dear Shadow following me all around, my plan won't change much. Now that I got the anatomy experiments out of the way it's time to get some training done. I still have some issues while moving too much like stinging pain when doing most wide range motions, so I will keep it down a notch for the day.

I start by doing some warm-up exercises and then I go to the training grounds. The place is far from being the best place to train, yet at this place and time, is the best you can ask for.

I take one of the few training dummies that have armor on them and take it with me, not forgetting to ask Shadow to bring me a wooden shield too.

I find a secluded place and I place the dummy on the ground facing me. I said it was armored, but that is not the best way to describe it, it is just a wooden pole shielded with metal plates in an awkward manner.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

I am not one to complain too much, I personally told them when we were making them to not put that much effort into the armor of the dummies and instead focus on their own armor first. It would be super dumb to equip our training dummies with better equipment than our own soldiers, yeah, super dumb indeed.

The dummies are all pretty much built the same, they all try to simulate the standard shape of a human with some kind of stable base made of wood at their feet to make them stay put while striking at them.

Why human-shaped dummies one may say? We are fighting pretty much everything but humans, right? Well, first, you never know, and second, baby steps. We have no one with the skills required to do statues of monsters at a 1:1 scale. Even worse mass produce it.

We are looking into an efficient or creative way to make up for our lack of skills and manpower, yet sometimes you just have to deal with it. The human-shaped dummies do the job just fine, and a few hard-working individuals can make them on their own with some time.

It's not like we are gonna start breaking them on purpose, they are made of wood after all, they should be durable enough. Better yet, getting some semblance of a human being seems to be easier than that of a beast for some reason, maybe it has something to do with the dimensions and its difficulty to measure them.

That being said, I will be trying to replicate what I did with the metal plate. I had tried it before, but I got underwhelming results every single time. Hopefully, I got better at it and am now able to get a better result. However, I don’t think it will be that easy either.

As I am not fully recovered yet, I will be using a low amount of qi on me and will be focusing on the one directed at my equipment.

I choose to start with my bare hands. Thinking that I may notice the differences between using it on me and the equipment if I do both one after the other. At the time I used it on the metal plate yesterday to save my life, I did it only on the plate, forgetting about my body. Even while doing so though, it was extremely complex and taxing on my mind to do so.

‘Hmm, let’s just start.’

I start focusing only on myself. Little by little I strengthen my body with qi one part at a time trying to look out for any places where the effect is stronger or weaker. I start upwards and go down little by little till I get to my feet before moving it all to my hands.

I feel like it's not enough and repeat the process two more times. The energy on my hands gets to a point where I start to feel some resistance when trying to infuse more qi so I just decide to attack with it.

I hit the metal plate of the dummy in front of me with all the strength I can muster and a little banging sound sounds as my fist collides. *clang*

The dummy is well planted on the floor so it doesn’t fall, it just does a little pendulum motion a few times before stabilizing and staying still again. The good part about the use of qi is that even if you may not deal all that much damage against some sturdy things, is the fact that your fists are strengthened by it so it doesn’t get hurt nearly as much as you would if you were to do it without it. I wouldn’t punch metal otherwise.

I take my time to try and decipher two things I notice that may be useful. First, now that I have better control I managed to detect a stronger reaction of my qi when I was focusing it on my feet and heart.

It's interesting, one may think that I am delirious saying that there is a stronger connection with the energy with my feet than with my head for example. However, far from the truth, the feet are the spot where the energy comes out stronger than anywhere else.

‘Weird.’ I can understand it being stronger the closer it is to my heart, in the end it is the thing that pumps the blood all over my body so maybe that somehow relates, but then the theory crumbles. The stronger connection doesn’t come from the heart, so it has to be something different.

‘Am I missing something here? What do my heart and feet have in common?’

I came up with a few theories after some time pondering over it, yet nothing seems to make any sense. Every possible solution I can come up with only makes sense for one of the two body parts.

Finally, I leave it aside for later and try the other thing I notice. It is not even something specific, it is more like a new way of using qi.

‘What if instead of using it over the span of a few seconds I do it with short blasts of power when the attack is going to connect? It has its downsides obviously, but the pros may surpass the cons.’ I can’t make anything based only on theories, so I just try it.

I focus again, but this time I don't cycle it all over my body. I choose to try and group together a big chunk of qi, now starting from the nearest one of the two hot spots for it, namely the heart. I wait till I get a good amount of it and then get into position to deliver the blow.

I clear my mind and attack with my bare hands again. I hit the same spot as before, but the moment that my fist is about to touch the thing I infuse all the accumulated energy into it.

The qi goes to the fist at an amazing speed, passing through my arm at lighting speed like it was nothing and improving my punching power by leaps milliseconds before the impact.

*Clang!*

The dummy gets hit with a lot more power than before, making it produce a sound a lot louder than before and forcing it to slide a couple of meters till it stops, miraculously not falling over.

For a second I stay still, looking at the result, clearly taken back. I can’t even help but grin at the outcome of what I expected was going to be another bust. Even my dear Shadow takes a couple of steps back, astonished by the result, even if the only change in his expression are his wide eyes.

I try the same attack again but only boosting my knuckles to try and get an exponential result, but the result is not that different and if I were to use it in a real scenario it wouldn't be practical at all.

I get myself fully absorbed in training, and later on, after eating something, I keep going at it. I spend pretty much the whole day enjoying each breakthrough, and later on, something else rings a bell. My qi itself, after the fights I had these few days, the amount of it I can hold at the same time it's a lot more than before.

I have no idea if it has something to do with the fights to the death with the orcs or what, but the quantity nearly tripled in the course of these few days, and with it the recovery rate got better too. Each day I am closer and today I took some big steps to achieve my goals.

I leave the training for the day, exhausted and famished. Luckily I still have time to go have a quick bath at the river while dinner is not ready. I even take a moment to stop and look at how the construction of the canal is going. Surprisingly, it is already more than halfway there, and now that I think about it, that's probably the reason why they were preparing the land at the base for farming.

The plan was to cultivate on the river bank, yet after a considerably long debate, we decided on another approach to secure the food from possible river inhabitants that we aren’t aware of. Who knows what might jump at any moment from the waters, that won’t stop me from cleaning up in there though.

----------------------------------------

“I was told you got some good news?” Says Jake as he munches on his food next to me.

“What do you mean?” For a second I can’t recall anything, but then I remember that probably it was Jordan telling him about my power after all the training I did.

I want to enjoy my meal in peace, but it seems like it will be difficult to be able to do that.

“Yeah, I guess.” Not telling, leave me alone. You expect me to tell you even more than your guys are spying on? Not today, thank you.

I stack my whole mouth with food and focus on my plate like my life depends on it then rush to bed after eating. ‘This whole leader ordeal thingy is a pain to deal with.’

‘Whatever, that for my future me to deal with.’