The ship was in chaos, and Leo had been shocked to learn that Maxwell had tried to kill a woman, claiming that she was messing with his mind, before falling to the ground limply.
Most believed the man- after all, he was a tier seven awakened and a government agent, but a few people didn’t. For some reason, none of them seemed to acknowledge that the woman in question had disappeared without a trace mere moments after Maxwell’s attack, and hadn’t been seen since. Or that Maxwell had simply fallen unconscious afterwards.
From what Leo could tell, the only people that believed Maxwell were the guests on the ship, and those who were powerless. Like him. It seemed incredibly obvious to him that Maxwell was telling the truth, but when he’d brought it up, Erich told him there were things about Maxwell that Leo didn’t know.
That didn’t change how strange it was that the woman had simply disappeared, and how strange it was that nobody of import noticed the discrepancy. It scared him, too.
Maxwell was in the ship’s med bay now, and Erich had fully taken over Leo’s teaching. Today, he was supposed to be practicing with a sword, but even when he was showed the very cool weapon, Leo couldn’t entirely take his mind off of it all.
It wasn’t like he could simply ignore Erich’s instructions, though, and so he tried his best to pay attention.
When he saw the ‘longsword’, one thing stood out to him: that it wasn’t very long.
“Why’s the longsword not long?” Leo asked, confused.
“A longsword isn’t actually that much longer than the average sword; it’s called that because its handle is long.” Erich explained, “I get your confusion, though.”
For a half hour or so, Erich explained what he should be doing before finally releasing him to practice as he had told him to. Leo did the best that he could, trying as hard as he could to learn, and it even eventually devoured his fear and confusion.
The sword was pretty simple, but that was fine. The blade was made of a light, durable metal and was eleven inches long, so that he could hold it with greater ease. There was plenty of room on the handle for him to hold it in both hands, but it also wasn’t particularly difficult to hold it with one.
He did as Erich instructed, and swung the sword in the same way as every other time; cutting across above the shoulders, with the thumb beneath the blade. Erich didn’t say anything this time, but on his next cut, Erich sternly pointed out that he had forgotten to place his thumb properly, and that his left foot had been placed too far left.
“I don’t understand why this matters so much,” Leo complained, but he already knew why; he was simply complaining.
“Let’s practice the Zwerhaw first,” Erich had suggested, “It is a simple horizontal cut, above the shoulders, with the thumb placed beneath the blade, like this,” Erich demonstrated using Leo’s sword, and the blade passed through where a man of equal height’s head or neck. “It’s meant to target higher openings, and the thumb placement facilitates the stronger structure for attacking these higher targets.”
As such, Leo completely ignored the man’s response- until the end, where he suggested something interesting.
“Do it flawlessly ten times in a row, and I’ll let you try imbuing the blade with your soul.” Erich told him. It was something that had been gone over in one of their previous lesions; apparently, awakened could enhance their weapon using their soul. It had actually been the inspiration behind Leo’s idea to use his soul to be able to transform his weapon mid-fight.
After that, Leo worked even harder. Once he started actively paying attention to how he performed the strike, it felt like he improved with every one, and over the next hundred strikes- he had begun counting-, Erich started to complain less and less. Leo still made mistakes frequently, but while he only did one in five decently enough before, and received multiple complaints per strike, it gradually reduced to half of his strikes, and only one or two complaints.
“Start stepping forward as you do it,” Erich instructed, and Leo frowned. How was he meant to do that and maintain the placement of his feet that Erich had described for the strikes he had been doing? Part of him felt like Erich was trying to sabotage his efforts so that he didn’t have to fulfill his end of the bet, but Erich had already told him that this would happen as he improved.
Erich wasn’t stupid, and answered his question even before he asked it. “You’ll need to change the way you perform the strike slightly, from the footwork to the arm placement. The strike will need to be placed a tiny bit higher to adjust for the fact that you’ll end up a tiny bit lower in the process of stepping forward.” He demonstrated- using a sword that he had gotten elsewhere, so that he didn’t have to constantly steal Leo’s-and Leo got back to work.
His body was becoming tired quickly, but Leo didn’t stop to rest. He was determined, now, and hardly even noticed that his watch read 1:34 P.M. now, despite the lesson having started at eight A.M.
After one hundred and thirty seven strikes moving forward, Erich had him return to striking ‘normally’- he made sure to clarify that he wouldn’t normally be standing perfectly still, anyway- and it was strangely difficult for him to return to it, requiring fifty three more strikes before Erich decided to finally have him learn how to do it while stepping to the sides.
After seventy-eight strikes while stepping to the left and seventy-four while stepping to the right, Leo finally gave in and let the sword, which had previously felt as light as a feather in his hands and now felt like a bar of lead, fall to the ground. Erich shouted at him not to do that, because he risked cutting his feet or legs, and he tiredly nodded and promised not to do it again.
He hadn’t dropped it because he didn’t want to set it down, but because he simply couldn’t hold it anymore, but he didn’t bother to argue with Erich on it.
“That’s enough for today. You’ve improved a lot today, although you won’t be reaching the goal I gave you before the ship lands in a week, most likely.” Erich told him.
A fire lit up in his chest. Erich had commented a few times that imbuing one’s soul into a weapon was taxing enough that nobody but he, a healer, would allow an eight-year-old tier one awakened try it… which meant that, if he wanted to be able to try it, he needed to become really good in the next week.
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Awakened improved at a vastly greater speed than normal people, for the soul would begin to absorb everything that they learned, making it like an instinct or second sense, in some ways.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
And yet, while Leo’s improvement was monstrous even for an awakened, he was still nowhere near being able to perform ten perfect strikes in a row. It was a bit unfair, since Erich had only decided the rules after a while, but Leo had no room to complain when he was partially cheating.
Every one of Leo’s visions of Verin were crystal clear in his mind even now, and when he thought back on them, it was as though he could relive the experience again.
He relived the vision of Verin’s battle with transcendental beings, and immersed himself in the feelings as much as possible.
Verin had perfect control over his body- every cell, atom, and quark obeyed his command, moving almost before he even thought, and with a fluidity akin to water. It was as though he moved instantly and slowly simultaneously, and while it was impossible for Leo to do anything even remotely similar to this, he could still engrain the feeling of moving nigh-perfectly into his body.
After days of immersing himself in the short memory dozens of times, Leo was still uncertain whether it was working or not. The way he moved was more efficient and, when training, his footwork and reactions were better and better, but that most likely came from the training and not the visions.
Still, he did it, since there was no reason not to. There was another benefit, too; Arthur. Verin had been deliberately dulling his senses and soul throughout the fight, but there were still a few brief seconds where Arthur’s every movement was encompassed in Verin’s soul.
Leo had tried to mimic what the man had done a few times, but it was simply impossible- not impossible in the ‘very hard’ sense, but truly impossible. The man had been moving at speeds transcending light, striking with power that Leo couldn’t fathom, and with precision that even Verin’s admittedly casual movements couldn’t match.
…So, basically, Leo only might have been cheating, but he still felt guilty enough not to complain.
Instead, he devoted everything to trying to absorb every facet of swordsmanship that he could. In front of him, a four and a half foot tall training robot stood, having taken the place of a dummy a few days ago. It was two or three inches taller than him, which meant that he generally only ever used the Oberhaw, the Zwerhaw or the Mittelhaw against it, and almost never the Wechselhaw. Unfortunately, the Wechselhaw was still a strike that he needed to learn in order to fulfill Erich’s terms, and so he tried to force it in whenever he could, which generally resulted in being lightly struck by the training robot.
Leo had also discovered where Erich was getting all of his swordsmanship information from, although by accident; the Kolnir Fachtbuch, a book on swordsmanship written a few thousand years ago. Many superior swordsmanship books had since been written, but the Kolnir Fachtbuch was generally considered a good starting point.
The majority of the book was dedicated to methods of fighting with the soul and sword simultaneously, ranging from simple methods of imbuing the sword and mental techniques that would make it easier for one to split their attention and attack both soul and body simultaneously, but its four basic strikes were what Leo was learning; Oberhaw, which consisted of strikes from above, Zwerhaw, which consisted of cutting across, above the shoulders, Mittelhaw, which consisted of cutting across below the shoulders, and Wechselhaw, which consisted of cutting from below and changing into another cut from another angle. Of course, these weren’t meant to be used independently of one another, but were meant to be chained together and used consecutively; the Wechselhaw typically being the start, and the Oberhaw typically being the last.
It made it significantly easier to understand why Erich had made it so that Leo needed to perform multiple of these strikes in multiple different scenarios in a row; he wasn’t cheating, but trying to get Leo to use the strikes properly. This was what Leo was struggling to do now, and he struggled the most with using the Wechselhaw.
Leo was too short; he couldn’t properly perform the cut. Many times, it would accidentally strike the ground or his shorter arms would cause it to miss entirely, in which Leo adapted and used it to stab, but still failed to use it properly, because it was meant to be a cut.
In fact, that was something that Leo found very strange; there were very few stabs in the techniques he was being taught, but from what he could tell VIA searching the interplanetary internet, which was considerably slower than the normal internet, one of the longsword’s big benefits was that it could do both with both ends of the blade.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t as though Leo had an actual copy of Kolnir Fachtbuch; he was simply going off of articles he found on it, and so he couldn’t find out why it didn’t use stabs, or if they simply came later.
Leo was pulled from his thoughts as a ‘Whap!’ resounded through the relatively large training yard and a dull pain throbbed in his shoulder. The robot had swept past his guard with relative ease, as he had not been paying attention, and struck at his arm a bit harder than it should have, expecting him to block or parry it.
It was a good thing that the robot’s sword was extremely dull, and that it had an extremely good control over its strength. If it had struck him with everything in its might, the bones in his arm would have doubtlessly cracked, heedless of the skin-tight black suit meant to stop exactly that.
Leo was finding it harder and harder to fully immerse himself in the training. There was so much going on in the ship; Maxwell had finally been released by the hospital, causing the discussion of what was happening, which had fallen by the wayside after a couple of days, to reignite, and the theories surrounding the seemingly peaceful death of one of the ship’s guests.
He glanced in Erich’s direction as he and the robot returned to their starting positions, and he felt annoyed as he looked at the disappointed expression he had.
Leo closed his eyes and tried to calm his mind. He cast aside his meticulous research on what he could find of the Kolnir Fachtbuch, and his fears and doubts of what was happening on the ship. Instead, he brushed against the vision of Verin fighting the group of transcendental beings. He tried to hold onto the feeling of calm and concentration and Verin exuded as the vision quickly played out and faded away in his mind, and he opened his eyes and focused in on nothing but Leo, the robot, and the two swords.
His concentration wasn’t anywhere even remotely near perfect, though. He could hear Erich whispering to someone a few dozen yards away, and the uncomfortable itching on the soles of his feet were still distracting. Remnants of his previous distractions- the Kolnir Fachtbuch and the ship’s many worries, primarily- still made his heart beat faster.
But time waited for no man, and a ‘Beep!’ from the room’s ceiling announced that it was time to fight.
The robot and Leo weren’t very far away, and so they closed the distance in only a second or two. The first few strikes were probing, and yet it’s third strike almost rapped his wrist, but Leo managed to just barely stop it using the sword’s guard.
And then, the robot went on the attack. Leo blocked its first strike, aimed at his throat, with relative ease, but had a harder time stopping the kick directed at his stomach. It wasn’t like he hadn’t noticed that the robot’s footwork had been weird, though, and so he reacted faster than he usually would’ve; just fast enough to barely dodge.
The robot was his superior in almost every way, and it was because there were no training robots meant to fight eight year olds; this one was meant for people two years older than him, which was the age when the most talented children would begin awakening.
The robot bounced away the moment its kick failed, since it had been in a bad position for a follow-up attack, but was back a moment later. Leo was the one to strike first this time, giving him a bit more control over how the fight would go. He struck first with the Wechselhaw, which the robot took a step backwards to dodge, but the strike had, as it’s description said, been the set-up for a follow up strike. Leo almost struck its neck right then and there with the Zwerhaw, but it was barely blocked.
That was fine, though; the robot had managed to block by putting itself in a worse position for attacking, which meant that Leo still had free reign to beat it up. He used the slight momentum generated from the blade bouncing off of it’s to strike at it from above, but the robot only had to adjust its sword slightly in order to block it. In the brief second that had passed between the strikes, the robot had gotten itself into a better position, and made the dangerous decision to stab at his ribs.
Leo should have lost here, as he had many times before, but for a brief instant, it was as though his entire body was moving in sync as his body twisted and his sword slammed against its titanium skull, knocking the robot off balance just enough for its strike to miss his moved body.
He had won the fight and prevented the robot from turning it into a tie.
It wasn’t much, since Leo only beat the robot one in ten times, but the final moment of synchrony made him feel like he had just cut the robot’s metal head clean off.