“That was significantly less dope, but quite a bit more hilarious,” Albert said when the door to the treadmill opened.
Aaron, ever a paragon of eloquence, groaned on the floor.
The illusory boulder hadn’t hurt when it rolled over him, but it had definitely felt weird. It was like an extra huge bean bag chair filled with jelly had been pressed into his back then rolled up his spine. There had actually been enough force behind the illusion to scooch him along the tile floor several inches, which had also been a uniquely weird sensation on his face and body.
“Seriously, that log hit you and it was like Charlie Brown missing the football,” Albert chuckled. “Augh! Woosh!”
Kiara cut in. “It was a decent attempt, especially for your first go. Your reflexes aren’t bad; plus, you demonstrated some decent instincts and quick thinking.”
“It was obvious you were swinging back and forth on accepting the premise of the simulation, though, and that hurt your reaction times,” Griffin observed. “Do you want to try again?”
Aaron picked himself up off the floor. “Maybe later, unless you need more data?”
Kiara shook her head. “No, I think we’ve got a good idea of what your reactions are like, at least right now before you’ve got any real training or experience.”
“Out of curiosity, is it possible to get hurt on the treadmills? Just want to know if I have to be on the lookout for a computer-run-amok or Moriarty-type situation,” Aaron said.
“For the most part, no,” Kiara answered. “The physical contact isn’t a hard light situation, it’s more like there are wand-style attachments worked into the walls that can make finely-controlled attacks.”
“Which means the answer is yes,” Aaron observed.
“How do you figure that?”
Albert put a consoling — and condescending — arm around Kiara’s shoulder. “Because that means if the programming went haywire, the wands could attack at full force.” He turned to Aaron. “You don’t have to worry about that too much, though. As it was explained to me, even if something set the magic inside to full power, it would still fall way short of a fairly crappy wand.”
“Don’t take a mundane in there, though,” Griffin added. “On the default settings, they could get concussions, fractures, minor burns, maybe even internal bleeding or the loss of an eye.”
“Okay, so it’s no joke in there,” Aaron said.
“It ain’t no cake walk, that’s for sure. We’re fortunate enough to have drakus resilience on our side, so we can raise the stakes a bit. You might not have much chance of getting injured, but at higher settings getting nailed in there will still sting like a bastard.”
“Wait a second,” Kiara interrupted, turning to Albert. “Who did you ask about how the treadmills work? And why?”
Albert didn’t answer right away, which earned him a scrutinizing look from Griffin as well as Kiara. The smaller man held his hands out to the side and shrugged, the very picture of feigned innocence.
“What?! People can’t be curious?”
“People can be. You can’t,” Griffin said. “There’s no way you would’ve asked about something that complex and technical if it wasn’t to get up to some kind of mischief.”
“I knew it,” Kiara exclaimed, knocking Albert’s arm off her shoulder and jabbing him in the chest with a finger. “I knew you were planning to fuck with us. And you,” she added, turned her accusatory poking on Griffin. “You said I was overreacting!”
“Hey now,” Albert objected. “I was planning to design an adventure that I thought would be fun for all of us. I didn’t know you used to play D&D, Kiara, or I’d’ve told you I used to run games for my friends and little brother.”
“Okay, but what did you need to know so many technical details about the treadmills for?” Kiara demanded.
Albert held off answering again, chewing his lip instead, but Kiara’s withering glare and Griffin’s dubious expression convinced him to confess.
“I just wanted to know the upper limits, okay? I wanted to find out if there was a way to generate fire that would be hot enough to burn hair without causing more severe injuries. What’s the big deal?”
“You wanted to burn off my hair?!?” Kiara said, outraged.
“Dude, not cool,” said Griffin.
“Oh come on,” Albert complained. “A couple sips of a potion and it would’ve grown right back. And I wasn’t going to burn off your hair, I was going to burn off our hair. It would have been a bonding experience. For the team!”
Kiara shoved Albert, who stumbled back several steps, then she stomped right back up to him. She raised a hand as if to hit him, but Griffin scooped her up off the floor from behind.
“Okay, okay,” the big man said. “You have every right to be pissed, but let’s work it out in a healthier way. Something with more structure and less eye-gouging.”
A wicked gleam sprang to life in Kiara’s eyes and her voice came out with a heavy measure of forced cheer. “Right. Constructive! I can be constructive. Albert and I can have a constructive conversation while you show Aaron the ropes for our next assessment. Constructive and efficient.”
Albert swallowed so hard it was practically cartoonish. He looked less than thrilled from the sound of Kiara’s plan to work their shit out, but Aaron was intrigued. There weren’t a whole lot of ways he could see for her to get the catharsis she seemed to be aiming for.
It sounds like we’re going to do some kind of sparring, he thought. That could be fun and informative. Oooor… it could be wildly embarrassing. Either way.
They left the main room of the gymnasium, heading down a hallway to some dressing rooms. There were lockers with benches in front of them, showers, and even steam rooms and saunas. Everything was a couple degrees more posh than any gym Aaron had ever been to. Kiara went into a separate dressing room, muttering imprecations about Albert and his parentage.
“Are we going to be putting on a gi or something?” Aaron asked.
“Nah, we don’t need to get changed, but we keep some equipment in the dressing rooms that will be very helpful,” Griffin said.
He opened one of the lockers and pulled out several pieces of thick cloth. They looked a bit like sweatbands except wider, around three inches across. Griffin showed him the markings that indicated where they were worn: one pair went on each wrist, another pair the ankles, and the last went around the head, just like normal sweatbands.
“These are dampening bands,” Griffin explained. “They create a kind of personal shield that clings very close to the body and lets us practice without holding back.”
“It’s important to remember that they work best if both people are wearing them,” Albert added. “The dampening effect is much stronger when two sets are interacting with each other, otherwise they’d only hold up against a couple strikes using the kind of strength you or Griffin have.”
“Are you not as strong?”
“No,” Albert said sadly. “I could be, in theory, but I think a good deal of my innate magic went into agility and reflexes. I could work at it more, but it’s been pretty useful being quicker on the move and I worry I’ll get in my head if I put too much emphasis on power over speed.”
“So it’s like a finite resource? You only have so much physical enhancement and it has to be shared around?”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Griffin made a waffling gesture with one hand. “Yes and no, it’s as much about what we think of ourselves as about what we’re actually capable of. Barrett is faster, stronger, and tougher than any of the three of us, for instance.”
“He’s not faster than me by much,” Albert complained. “I mean, we’re not elves, so it’s not like we have a huge advantage over mundanes when it comes to speed.”
“So we’re not much faster than humans?” Aaron asked. “How does that work?”
“It’s not exactly well understood,” Griffin replied. “The vast majority of eidolons can’t really move much faster, in a kinesiological sense, than the fastest humans. Occasionally, you’ll find someone comparable to other mammals that have even better reflexes or the like. A lot of us can travel faster — like by running or flying or whatever — but we can’t reposition or move our body all that much faster.”
“Even if you include the few that can, like elves and vamps, you’ll pretty much never see a full-on speedster kind of movement,” Albert added. “So it’s not that big a deal if Barrett is a little faster than me.”
Griffin snorted. “Bro, let it go. He’s the Cordus Draconis and he was more badass before his Emergence than both of us are now, put together.”
“He was a soldier or something, right?” Aaron asked.
“Special forces or some such like that, back in ‘Nam,” Albert said. “Might’ve gone to work for the Company or something afterwards because he pretty much disappeared for a long time.”
Aaron quicked a brow. “Disappeared? Like, he left the Drakon?”
“No,” Griffin said. “He didn’t become Cordus until, uh, around 1980, maybe ‘81. It was more than ten years after the last record of him in the Army, anyways. He’s never shared what he was doing during that time as far as I know.”
“Yeah and there’s shit all for records,” Albert groused. “Not, uh, not that I did any snooping.”
“Wait, so people can become drakus when they’re old… er, older?” Aaron asked. “I figured from Alice and Tia that it tended to happen fairly young. I’d been thinking I was some kind of late bloomer.”
“Nah, you’re fine,” Griffin replied with a chuckle. “Your predecessor was around your age, I think, and Barrett was around 40, but then you also have people like Mallory. He was in his 60s or 70s when he joined the Drakon.”
Aaron did some rough math in his head. “That would make him… over three hundred years, in total. Do drakus generally live that long?”
“Not as much as we used to, but it’s not uncommon for a drakus to be a hundred years old before they start showing signs of being middle aged,” Griffin said. “Honestly, it’s very rare for old age to kill a drakus. I don’t know how much they’ve told you, but we’ve had a pretty awful attrition rate for a while.”
Aaron didn’t really have a response for that. Barrett, and maybe Mallory, had suggested the Drakon was facing constant hostility from enemies who remained largely unknown, but it hadn’t really struck Aaron what that meant.
They’re killing drakus, he realized. That’s real hoodlum shit.
He tried not to let the realization settle in his thoughts too deeply. For now, it was enough that people were after him; he could start thinking about how to protect other people — his people, now — once he was in a better position to do so. That meant confirming his position as the Primus Draconis. It also meant taking his training seriously.
Albert and Griffin also had nothing else to say after that morbid little statement. Kiara, however, had missed out on the gritty reboot of their conversation, and she had other things on her mind. They heard banging on the door of the dressing room, then her voice came through.
“Let’s go, weasel boy,” she called. “You and I got an appointment in the Dome.”
“What’s the Dome?” Aaron asked quietly.
Griffin laughed but didn’t answer, just slid his last dampening band onto his head. Albert rolled his eyes as he finished putting on his own bands, but Aaron thought the smaller drakus looked a bit nervous. A few seconds later they were on the move again.
Kiara was waiting for them outside the locker room, her own dampening bands already in place. She turned on her heel as soon as they emerged and stomped off down the hallway. Aaron and the guys followed her to a door that was made of thick wood planks and framed with riveted metal, giving it a much older and sturdier look than most of the plain doors in the Drakon’s complex.
The room behind the door was under some kind of spatial distortion; Aaron recognized the sensation that had been pointed out to him previously, though it was much more subtle in this case. Inside was a kind of auditorium. The walls had seating risers elevated about ten feet off the ground and it overlooked a number of spaces Aaron could only describe as arenas.
The center of the room was dominated by three distinctive fighting spaces. The first was an octagon, not unlike the ones popularized by professional mixed martial arts. The second was something like an overly-complicated, adult-sized jungle gym, a blockish structure of thick metal pipes forming a gridwork of squares and rectangles. The last was a sand pit filled with what Aaron thought of as ‘kung fu pillars’ from movies he’d watched as a kid, an array of logs set vertically into the ground like half-sized telephone poles that had been chopped in half. The pillars stood between five and ten feet high and none were more than about a foot in diameter.
“Those are the Cage, the Jungle, and the Forest,” Griffin said, pointing to the octagon, jungle gym, and wooden pillars, respectively. “We won’t be using anything so complicated today.”
“You won’t,” Kiara corrected. “Me and Albert are going to do a little sparring in the Jungle.”
Albert sighed and muttered something about how nobody had even lost any hair for real, but that just earned him another scowl from the diminutive redhead.
“Let’s start with the basics: what kind of experience do you have with fighting?” Griffin asked.
“Uh… I did about a year of freestyle wrestling in middle school, a little over two years of karate in high school, then some private, informal instruction in a couple of other styles from friends in college.”
“Do you remember the specific martial arts styles or schools?”
“Uh, the karate was Goju-ryu and the rest was a smattering of Chinese stuff,” Aaron said. “I had some friends who studied some kind of animal-style kenpo and then went to some shady garage school with a retired Navy Seal instructor. They taught me bits and pieces through sparring, screwing around, and stuff like that.”
“Oh, Goju-ryu. Good school,” Albert said. “Did you learn it because of The Karate Kid?”
“No, it was because it was the only place within walking distance of school. Why?”
“Mr. Miyagi is based on the founder of Goju-Ryu,” Albert informed him.
“I did not know that.”
“Are you sure it was Goju-ryu and not Shotokan or something?” Griffin asked.
“Positive,” Aaron replied. “Goju-ryu means ‘hard-soft style,’ right? I used to joke to my friends that I was learning Dong-do, the Way of the Dick.”
Albert wheezed a laugh and Griffin snorted, leaving Aaron feeling mildly proud of his puerile pun.
“Any weapon training?” Griffin asked.
“Nope.”
“Alright, then let’s do some goofing around to get a feel for where you’re at with unarmed CQC,” Griffin said. “After that, we can look at what kind of weapons you might like to do some training with.”
Griffin walked with Aaron around the perimeter of the room. There were a number of mats in various shapes and sizes, all with different markings on them.
They’re probably the preferred markings for different combat sports, Aaron thought. I recognize the bull’s eye-ish one from wrestling and I think the big double square is from karate.
Albert stayed with them as they walked while Kiara broke off and headed for the big jungle gym. Her steps were even heavier than usual, like she was mad at the ground, and Albert kept shooting furtive glances her way.
“So what’s with the bleachers?” Aaron asked, gesturing at the raised box seating placed around the auditorium.
“Sometimes we have tournaments, but mostly it’s so people training for one of the Orders can observe their fellows,” Griffin said. “It’s not just our own mistakes that we can learn from and it’s also super helpful to learn how to watch fights with an analytical mindset.”
They stopped at a mat that looked like many of the mats closer to the door, only a bit larger. It was almost thirty feet across, with a six foot wide maroon border and a dark blue square at the center. Two parallel lines, ten feet long with ten feet between them, were on either side of the center, marking where the opponents stood. The mat even had a smaller line for a referee perpendicular to the starting lines.
“Fancy,” Aaron said. “But why didn’t we use one of the other kumite mats we passed along the way.”
Griffin’s face split into a grin. “This one has a better view.”
Aaron followed the big man’s gaze, as did Albert. The position of the mat provided an unobstructed sightline to the big jungle gym, which Kiara had just started climbing onto. They watched for a few seconds as she maneuvered around the network of metal bars, occasionally doing practice strikes with her arms and legs.
“Let’s go, you rat fuck!” she called from the metal arena.
Albert groaned. “See you in a bit,” he said, slouching off in that direction.
“I’m betting he’s going to have a killer headache and tender nards in ten to fifteen minutes,” Griffin said, laughing.
Aaron joined him, as much because of the word ‘nards’ as because the idea of Albert getting smacked around by the tiny redhead was amusing. Both things could be true — and funny — at the same time.
Griffin stepped onto the mat. “Let’s get started.”