3/26/54
ALEXANDER GALDUR
Walking down the many hallways of the DME’s main building that I was slowly becoming accustomed to, I thought back on the previous two days. They were nice, being a pleasant reprieve from the training. The dentist appointment yesterday was pushed up by two weeks because of a family emergency. Training days—while I still needed to get used to them—were becoming an annoying part of my routine. This “vacation” was welcomed with open arms.
Now though? Now I was already feeling tired thinking about what was to come. That tiredness stuck with me, even through the anxiety that was the changing room, the physical exhaustion of basic training, and the overall exhaustion that was magic training. That tiredness only disappeared when I read what was on the agenda for combat training.
“‘Fuck shadow boxing?’”
As soon as I read that line aloud, the floor beneath rumbled while a shadow raised from the ground behind me. Whipping around as quickly as I could, I, by instinct, ducked beneath a fist that soon impacted against the wall. Looking up at the figure, I realized it was a golem of sorts, shaped like a professional boxer. Shorts, boxing gloves, shoes, though no shirt.
Looking up at the thing’s helmet clad head, I was surprised by its completely blank face. Odd that Trainer Masako chose to give this thing abs, pecs, a bellybutton, and nipples, but no facial details. Priorities I guess.
None of that mattered though; it was fighting time. Activating my magic and feeling my body fill with magic, I quickly regretted it when a rock hurtled into my skull. The dense thing pushed me off-balance, and I tipped over, landing my face right against the construct’s knee.
Well, that would’ve been the sequence of things to happen if its knee didn’t come to meet my nose first, though thankfully lightly. Not lightly enough to not make my head spin as I was sent backwards into the wall. As soon as my head bounced off the wall, the dirt golem crumbled to dust and was reabsorbed into the ground.
After taking a minute to just lie there, stewing in annoyance, pain, and anger, I lifted myself off the ground and took another look at the board. “Fuck shadow boxing.” Got it.
Shadow boxing is basically facing off against an imaginary foe to train, but Trainer Masako decided to opt out of that style of training and went with summoning a golem to kick the shit out of her trainees. Fun.
In addition, it looks like using magic while training martial arts is prohibited, punished by a rock to the head. Fun.
So much fucking fun.
This time, watching the ground swirl into a humanoid puppet, I got prepared to fight. Dropping into my stance, the two of us circled the small enclosure moving counterclockwise. The standoff was broken when the golem started sprinting at me. Seeing it moving, I pulled my guard up more, so when the two jabs followed by a straight cross came, I was prepared for it. On a related note, fast moving earth hurts. Like, a lot.
After enduring the quick combo, I retaliated with a jab followed by a cross. It saw this, took the jab like a champ, but it weaved under the straight and launched its own. The earth met my nose, somehow not breaking it, and when the offhand uppercut came, I was already too stunned to try and dodge out of it.
I was sent backwards, impacting the wall like before, and just like before, the golem disappeared into nothingness. My head was spinning, and I could only loosely grasp the fact that everything hurt. After taking a solid five minutes to recover, I thought about the previous match.
The golem started well with a swift combo to make me let my guard down. I did, and once it blocked and evaded my attacks, it stunned me with a straight to ensure that its uppercut would land. I danced into the palm of its hand and was crushed in its grasp.
I needed to be able to both predict my enemy's plan while also giving them the illusion of choice and making them move to my tune. A valuable lesson, but it’s easier said than done.
Getting up, I winced as I felt my knuckles feeling sore and raw. Looking at them, they were all scraped up.
… I mean, I did kind of punch a moving mass of dirt.
Grimacing at how I knew the rest of today would go, I got ready to fight again. This time, instead of circling each other, I made the first move with two jabs and a straight. Seeing the golem’s arm shoot out in a jab, I blocked it and the straight after it. Deciding to probe the waters before committing to any big attacks, I jabbed twice and left it at that.
The golem blocked both attacks and retaliated with a straight. An instant after the straight came, I could see a practiced movement I had done quite a few times before. A left hook came rushing from the side, and I saw my chance. Reacting off of instinct, I sent out a combo of a jab, straight cross, a left hook, and another cross.
The golem slipped by the jab, weaved under the cross, but it got caught by the hook and other cross. It looked stunned, something that must’ve been programmed into it by Trainer Masako being it was just a moving lump of dirt, and I decided to end it.
Going straight for the kill, I sent out a cross, a left hook, and a lead uppercut. This time—because I had already dazed the golem—all the attacks landed, and the uppercut sent the golem off its feet and onto the ground with a heavy thud. Dust and dirt billowed from beneath it, and I stared on in satisfaction once my defeated opponent dissolved into the ground.
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After that, the sparring continued for a while more, though it was really just me losing most of the time. That first win must’ve been a fluke because I only managed to barely win a few more times after that. Eventually though, with my knuckles and raw and red, all the dirt around me crumbled away, snaking towards specific areas to make the arenas.
Arenas started forming all over the place, all of them in the same position as the last few days; this time, though, a new branch formed. The earth streamed across the ground, and the new branch formed a circle right around Trainer Masako. Suddenly, a massive pillar elevated her into the air, and from up there, she hollered across the court, “Alright, would Summer Valdez, Jennifer Oak, Andrew King, Terry Read, and Elizabeth Grant all come on over here?”
Five people split off from the grid that had formed, one of them being the blonde-haired girl, and they all gathered in a loose group around Trainer Masako’s pillar. Lowering the structure to the ground, she exchanged a few words with them, too quiet to hear from the great distance between us, and all of them left for a door on the opposite side of the training court. Wondering what was happening, Deimos had snuck up behind me and answered my unspoken question, “They’re being taken for their finals. Remember? She’ll grab a group of trainees and a group of staff and have them fight.”
“Oh, right. I do vaguely remember you saying something like that.” I recalled.
“Mhm,” Deimos nodded, “Those are the people who she thinks are ready.”
“And not you?” I questioned, my eyebrow raising.
“I’ve already passed it. I’m just doing the training again to keep an eye on you.”
Groaning, I mumbled, “Yeah, yeah.”
After that short interaction, we walked towards our platform, and like the many times before, the battle began at the end of somebody’s count.
Immediately, everyone—excluding the blonde-haired girl—made their presences known. Deimos had already beaten somebody black and blue and proceeded to Sparta-kick them off the platform. The tall, muscular woman who was the third best since the beginning of training summoned up a full set of plate armor along with a longsword and shield. Max, while definitely not the strongest nor the most attention-attracting, had clearly already set up a number of runes and traps to take out those who would try and approach him.
The person with the flame-sword from my first training day was dueling against some guy with quite the pronounced forehead. The forehead-guy had his hand on the ground, and spikes of glass burst from the earth platform. I saw the man with the gun I fought the other day with his ice-rink power activated, pelting one girl who was at least eleven feet tall as she slipped on the frozen ground.
One woman was dodging and weaving past tentacles of water that seemed to come from the water bottles that one guy had on his belt.
After taking all of this in, I knew that now was my chance. With the blonde-haired girl gone, I had an actual chance of taking some people out and gaining some combat experience. Picking out a target amongst the crowds, I chose the girl who was weaving her way towards the water guy.
Dancing across the arena to get to them, I eventually wound up close enough to finally make a move. Sprinting in, I activated my light-body magic, jabbed twice, and followed it up with a straight. I was attacking her from behind, so I expected her to get caught in my surprise attack, allowing me to take the advantage and get her out. Instead, however, she rolled to the right, and I ended up punching one of the water tentacles.
Now that I was up close, I noticed that they weren’t really tentacles, but instead, they were more like streams of water flowing through the air that followed some magical current. Of course, I didn’t have much time to note how neat this fact was because of the two other streams that were racing towards me.
Weaving past the first one that I had punched, I slipped by the next, and a swift side step let me bypass the last of the attacks. That was when one water stream looped around behind me. How did I know this? Because I felt something wet and forceful hit the back of my head.
After almost being knocked to my feet, I managed to regain my balance, only for the girl who had dodged my attack to sweep my feet out from under me. Once I was facing up with her smugly looking down, I felt something boil up inside of me.
My magic flared in the air, a flashbang blinding her and the water-guy. A moment beforehand, her eyes opened in shock, and while she tried to get them shut in time, she couldn’t move faster than light, and suddenly I was left with two blinded opponents.
I lunged for her leg, but she lifted it before I could get there. How did she know what was going to happen while blinded, I didn’t know. What I do know, however, is the fact that I could still attack her other leg. Clamping down on it, I yanked, dragging her to the ground with me.
She was pulled down to the ground, and using my still-heightened speed, I leapt to my feet, and dragged her across the arena. With how hard her head was on the metal, she should be pretty out of it, and that meant I had a pretty good advantage at the moment.
Locking onto my new target, I sprinted as quickly as I could, abandoning my form altogether, and with as much speed as I could muster while dragging the human equivalent of a sack of potatoes, I rammed into him.
Still off-balance, surprised, and blinded from my flashbang, he toppled over with a loud thunk. From there, I swapped targets again, focusing back on the person I had been dragging along, but before I could stomp on her gut, she yelped out, “Wait, wait! I surrender, okay? Chill!”
Surprised by her response to my soon-to-be action, I stuttered out, “O-oh, uh, okay. Cool.”
Choosing not to look a gift horse in the mouth, I dropped her feet with all the grace of roadkill in Texas, and I went back to the guy who was still recovering from his sudden fall. I dropped onto his torso, and once deactivating my magic to lessen up on its consumption, I started beating the shit out of him. He was still pretty messed up from my previous attacks, and he was also tired from fighting the woman from earlier. At this point, he shouldn’t be able to put up much of a resistance.
After about the ninth punch, his voice wavered as he yelled in fear, “I give up! Please, stop!”
Then, after the eleventh punch, I registered his words and realized he had been trying to tell me this from the fifth hit, but I was so relentless up to that point that he couldn’t form the words without being punched in the mouth. Taking a moment to bask in the joy of my first two K.Os, I rode that high as I stood up, only to be met with a person in medieval knight armor. Having to crane my neck to look up at their face plate, I saw this intimidating form that was way past six foot.
She said a single thing and then put a sword up to my throat, “Do you surrender?”
“Yes.” I spoke as soon as she finished speaking.
“Good.”