Hurrying along the road leading to the White Gate, Asay’s thoughts wandered back to the group’s argument of the day before. He felt complicated about that dispute. On the one hand, it had felt particularly good to metaphorically slap Yva in the face. On the other hand, he realized he acted like a brat. Yva was right to scold them, he shouldn’t have acted aggressively like that. They could all have died back there, Yva included. And she might annoy him, but he knew that as the group’s leader it was her duty to be a killjoy and make sure they never did such mistakes again.
After he pointed out her own failure as a leader, Yva lost her composure and finally acted as what she was, what they all were: sixteen years old brats just out of school. We’re old enough to get combat training and to die for the Valley, yet we’re too young to be considered adults or to even be granted a lodging of our own, ironized Asay. Not that he particularly wanted one, mind you. Asay simply thought it showed the hypocrisy of the Valley’s policy about the young enlistees, the tyros, as they were called.
Back then, once Yva got past her initial disarray, she exploded and basically screamed at Asay to stop being such a jackass. Of course, he didn’t let it go. The others got involved at some point and they spent the next half hour yelling at each other a few home truths. It might have been a stunning display of immaturity, but it hadn’t been useless, quite far from it actually. They were barely adults after all and what happened that afternoon had been the first true combat situation of their life. Hell, none of them had even drawn blood before! All this shouting emptied them of their emotions and allowed them to vent out their accumulated stress.
Once they all settled down, Yva awkwardly recognized her responsibility for what happened and apologized to the rest of them. They, in return, assured her that they were all at fault. They parted on these final words to get some much-needed rest. Asay came home, told the whole story to his parents later that night and broke into tears in his mother’s embrace. He knew he was now supposed to act like an adult but, for that one night, he decided it was okay to cut himself some slack.
Asay walked in silence as the sun slowly rose beyond the horizon, mildly sad at the idea he would probably never share such intimate moments with his parents again. Soon, however, he neared the gate and was forced to focus on where he was walking to avoid bumping into someone.
If asked about his opinion on the Valley’s westernmost gate, the White Gate, Asay would probably only answer that it should be renamed the “Grey Gate”, the impressive structure’s old age leaving much of its past glory to one’s imagination. Thankfully, Asay hadn’t been given yet the opportunity to display his questionable humor. It’d his only opinion on the gate because he had long grown numb to seeing the fifteen meters tall walls and wasn’t captivated anymore by the numerous decorative patterns sculpted along its stone battlements. The lofty towers sternly standing every two to three hundred meters along the walls didn’t intimidate him any longer. When he first saw the gate, though, he remembered being scared of the thirty meters tall towers because he felt like they were watching him.
Chuckling at the memory, Asay kept moving quickly. The sun was rising and he was going to be late if he didn’t hurry.
His destination today was the western’s garrison's training ground. It went without saying that space was a precious commodity in the Valley and if the garrison’s barracks themselves were situated inside the fortifications, just beside the gate, the training grounds were within the Belt. It might be more convenient but it was also dangerous: despite the Valley’s daily struggle to cull the beasts for up to a kilometer beyond the Belt, there were always half-dead monsters to be found roaming inside in the morning.
Asay wasn’t particularly worried, however. There were hundreds of the Valley’s guards and hunters to be found on the western’s training ground at all time; any wolf who’d stumble upon it would get dismembered before it got to say “woof”.
Asay was now queuing to go through the gate, more than a dozen people standing before him. Fuck, I’m going to be late, worried the boy. Among them were lumberjacks, a party of hunters, and a few farmers. It took several minutes for his turn to come.
“What business do you have beyond the walls?” said one of the gate’s guard when Asay approached. The boy knew the guard recognized him, but they still had to go through that same procedure every morning.
“Well, I’m a tyro and, you know, my party and I are expected on the training ground this morning. The usual stuff.”
“Show me your token,” replied the guard, frowning at the [Marksman]’s laid back attitude. It’s really a ritual at this point, almost sighed the boy.
He complied quickly and showed his token, a little badge molded out of vael where one could find his name, the Guard’s insignia (a shield over a wall) as well as the Valley’s (a stylized forest fire with a mountain in the distance).
After looking over his token, the guard handed it back, satisfied. “Alright, you can go ahead. Be careful on your way, there can always be monsters within the Belt.”
Thanking him, Asay started running toward the training ground. He also reminded himself to never become a guard, the job looking boring enough that he’d likely consider suicide on the second day.
The training grounds were only about two hundred meters away and Asay got there soon. He quickly scanned the crowd, trying to locate his party. Before he could, he saw someone he wished he hadn’t.
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What’s this idiot doing here? Asay’s mood soured. He had spotted Dageen, a boy he’d grew up with and that he really disliked. It’s bad enough to spend the entire day sweating here as a punishment, there’s no need for him to watch it! Fuck, a humiliation on top of an humi… Oh! There they are.
Forgetting about Dageen, Asay ran over to his group that was assembled on one side of the field. He zigzagged between hunters already dueling or guards lifting rocks and greeted them. He was happy to see he wasn’t the last one to arrive – Melaen, their [Elementalist], was still missing – but he was also worried to see their officer-in-charge standing ramrod straight in the middle of the group, eyeing him like a Prime Titan would eye an ordinary rabbit darting under his nose. In other words, with a bit of curiosity and a lot of bloodlust.
“Good morning, sir,” said Asay awkwardly when he rejoined the group.
“Don’t ‘good morning’ me, Asay. I’m really impressed, you know. How ballsy are you to arrive late for your group’s punishment, punishment you are roughly half responsible for? And on the first day, no less. Very impressive. Don’t you take what happened yesterday seriously? Did what I said looked like a joke to you?”
“No sir, I…” tried to reply the boy.
“Shut up. I’m not interested in your excuses. I’ll be personally taking care of you today, don’t worry.”
And that she did. As soon as Melaen got there and once the squad-leader stopped threatening to have his head on a wall if he was ever late again, their punishment began.
They spent the entire morning sweating without pause. She had them run around the training field again, and again, and again. And again. When they were done, they were forced to do it backward and then sideways. She got creative after that and had them run while alternating every five steps – frontward, sideways, backward, sideways, frontward. At one point, Naochem fell to his knees and puked. She had him do the alternative running part all over again.
It didn’t stop there. They circled the training ground on one leg, on the other leg, they frog-jumped around the field, they did it while jumping with both feet, and they crawled on their knees and elbows. Asay was seriously surprised when she changed the exercise without asking them to walk on their hands around the training field. They had already spent two hours running at that point. Or six months, depending on whether you asked Yva or Opora. They all felt like fainting.
We’d have collapsed in the first half an hour, had we done this last year, thought Asay amidst his dizziness. When he turned sixteen, he not only went through his two-months long initial training with the Guard, he also went through his first initial totemic strengthening. It was a painful procedure where one basked in the aether siphoned out of the protection belt by the walls’ Totems and used it to improve their body’s capacity.
They were granted a few minutes of rest and they all collapsed on the ground. They pretended not to hear the crowds’ mockery and laughter, their punishment long having been noticed by the other people training there. Asay’s mood couldn’t get any worse when he recognized Dageen’s voice among all the laughter. Too soon, they were forced to get on their feet and listen to the squad-leader's next instructions.
“Alright my sweeties, how was the warm-up?” she asked while grinning. The group sagely decided to keep quiet. “Hum, I’ll take your silence as a ‘it was a delight, sir’. I hope that two weeks of this will teach you idiots how to run properly.”
Asay, Opora, Aarus, and Seltori stared daggers at Naochem and the boy suddenly took great interest in another group’s duel.
“Now, now, we’ll be focusing on the rest of your body. Unfortunately, I can’t spend the whole day taking care of you brats, so the rest of your morning’s training will be under first-guard Ullich’s supervision. In the afternoon, you’ll be doing group training and mock fights. Yva, you’ll be in charge of that. First-guard Ullich we’ll be around all day, if he sees you lazing around this afternoon, I’ll make you regret ever being born tomorrow. Are we clear?”
“Yes, ma’am!”
“Yva, can I trust you on this?”
“Yes ma’am!” immediately replied the young girl. She wasn’t the kind to skip on training anyway and she’d have them take it seriously even without guard-leader Minell’s threats.
“Alright, Ullich, they’re all yours,” said the officer, a hand on the younger guard’s shoulder. “Make sure to thoroughly break them before lunch.”
“Yes, ma’am” answered first-guard Ullich, smiling at his superior.
Opora and Asay exchanged a look. Wait, what… ?
Despite his orders to make them suffer, the rest of the morning was nowhere near as painful as what they feared. He didn’t have squad-leader Minell’s sadistic imagination – he was likely too young to have a mind as twisted as his superior’s – and had them do mostly standard exercises that they were already familiar with for the rest of the morning. It involved both classical muscle-strengthening exercises, some stretching and a few agility-oriented running.
At one point, as they were doing some arm-strengthening by lifting rocks, Melaen whispered to Naochem:
“Hey, did you really hit your nose on a branch when running yesterday?”
Naochem sighed but didn’t answer and continued lifting his weights while counting in his head. Having a good guess of what happened, the rest of the group smiled slightly and Melaen noticed.
“What? Why are you guys smiling? Hey, somebody answer me!”
“Keep your voice down, idiot!” whispered Yva.
“Then tell me what happened!” answered Melaen, lowering his voice and starting to feel a bit vexed at being excluded from Naochem's nose’s story.
“Nothing happened, he really did hit a branch,” answered Yva. She went on with the exercise for a moment before noticing Asay’s and Naochem shares. “The branch might have looked a lot like my fist, that’s all”.
Melaen looked enlightened, a few others chuckled and Naochem refused to react, though Asay was sure he saw a bit of amusement in his eyes. The lanky boy really couldn’t bring himself to be angry at Yva, as he’d really earned it. The tyros didn’t know but the hint of disappointment in his family’s eyes last night had hurt Naochem much more deeply than their banter ever would.
The tyros stopped distracting themselves and got back to their punishment. Slowly, very slowly the sun rose up and finally first-guard Ullich dismissed them, signaling that the first part of the day was over.