Waking up the next day, I was in a much better condition than before; only the deepest wounds remained as deep scars on my skin. My back still hurts a little bit, but inside I felt fine, so there was nothing to worry about. But my caring parents thought otherwise, and the moment I stepped outside my room and they saw me, I was overthrown with questions from them. Even after explaining that I felt alright and most was fine, they insisted that I drink another healing potion and afterwards stay in bed to recover. And so I did for the whole day; it was quite boring, and nothing happened, other than that in the evening, my parents came to me to speak about my training ban. They told me that they saw how desperate I was to get stronger and thought their punishment through. In the end, they came to the conclusion that I would just do training in secret even when it was forbidden – which is definitely true. But still, they decided that as an alternative, I wouldn’t get any pocket money any more for the next two months, which I accepted without complaining.

Day after day flew by, my birthday came, and I turned 12 – sadly there were no really cool gifts. Then again, training, training, and even more training all day long until the day came when the competition was held for advancing to the next class. This time, I set myself a goal: to win against the boy I lost to last year. He was the hurdle I had to overcome if I wanted to be the best.

The competition was this time the same as the last one – three matches with a maximum of 10 points. This time I won all matches in seconds without a problem and got 26 points. While I was fighting, all in the hall were in awe because I dominated all my opponents, even though one of them was quite strong – for the average. The whole time I watched all the matches, especially the one’s of the guy who defeated me. He too won all the matches quite easy.

As the competition ended and we could challenge each other to matches, I went to the one guy who defeated me and challenged him. He just shrugged his shoulder and then nicked, so we went on the stage and both readied ourselves. We both picked our weapons, like last time, and then stood there on the stage. As we both were ready, we respectively nicked at the other one, and so the match began.

He was the first to move and slowly closed the distance. As he was about three steps away, I went for it and threw myself forward. I ran towards his left side; he reacted fast and swung his sword from above at me. I blocked the attack with my right sword, and at that moment, I turned my upper body so that I could look him right in the eyes. While tuning, I used the impulse to throw my short sword in my left hand with full power at my opponent while targeting his shoulder to make him unable to use his weapon. But he saw it coming and evaded the attack, by a hair strain, twisting his shoulder backwards. While he evaded, I used the chance to jump back and get a stable stand.

The attack was a nice try, but now I had only one sword left; the other was lying in the corner, where it would be hard to recover it. And I don’t think my opponent would give it back to me that easily, but I still needed to try. But for more thoughts, there was no time, because I was awoken by a broad sword hitting the ground beside my left while nearly hitting me. I only evaded it because, in the last second, my instinct helped me and made me turn my body to the side. But he didn’t stop there and made an upper cut, which I evaded by jumping back, only to then throw myself forward and slash from above at the guy, who blocked the attack with his sword. Then he pushed me back with his insane strength and attacked me quickly while I was mid-air. But in the last moment, before being defeated by the incoming slash, I turned myself mid-air on the side, only to then, shortly before hitting the ground, roll off. Thanks to that, I had a free lane to my second sword lying on the ground. I didn’t hesitate and ran for it while being followed by my opponent. I could pick it up again while nearly being hit by an incoming attack, but now I again had my advantage back.

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I charged at the guy after shortly gathering my breath, only to be blocked. But this time I didn’t make the same fault, as last time I fought him and toggled my speed, twisted my body sideways, and then stabbed him. But he easily dodged the attack apparently and began with his own attack, which I blocked, causing me to be pushed away from him. Then he went all in with an over-head attack, faster than I could register, and struck me down with one clean hit.

And so ended my fight against him again in a loss; he just went down the stage again after winning saying only “nice fight”. This made me furious, but I suppressed my feelings and decided to definitely win next time.

So I began exactly this day to prepare myself for our next fight in one year, and every day I trained, spared, hunted, and trained more. A year went by faster than I would have loved it to, and through all my training, I was now strong—really strong. In comparison to now, my old self from two years ago was a little child; even the advanced instructor, whom I could barley win against, now had a near zero chance against me. My footwork had made the most improvement over the year; I was always stable, and now it was really hard to make me stumble. But the thing I am most proud of this year is that I made myself a second dagger with another iwàrt teeth I gathered from the dozen wolf corpses.

But even though all I did this year—all the struggle I had while training, all the sweat I sweated, and my huge improvement—the fight ended in a tie. We fought for a quarter of an hour straight before we both collapsed from exhaustion. The fight was perfectly equal; there was no clear winner; we countered or evaded each and every attack; we seldom took hits. But when we took a hit, we did so only to hit our opponent. The fight was epic until the last round, where we both ran forward, only to meet halfway and then hit each other. We both fell down and couldn’t come back up due to exhaustion. Only after a nice hour of sleep we both awoke in the school infirmary, there we both spoke with each other about the fight, we gave us both some pointers and had fun chatting. He was actually a really nice guy, which wondered me, as he is known to be an outsider. He even said: "Nice fight; you are quite strong. I would have never thought there was someone here that was on the same level as me." I answered him and told him he wasn’t half bad either. He thanked me while looking kinda unsure. After our little conversation, I was happy that I got myself a good rival, but also that I was the first person to hear ‘the guy who never speaks’, speaking. After a while we both were allowed to leave and go home, we departed at the school exit. And so the day ended on which I got to know my first real rival.

At home, I was a bit disappointed in myself for losing, but I also realized just what kind of monster the guy is. But now that I knew his strength and technique, I was confident that if I trained further until next year, even more than before, I would definitely win.