A moon shines.

A moon, just a single and beautiful bright moon.

A moon that shines with an incandescent blue glow, a glow so strong it makes the stars around it fade away.

A moon, a moon that with its brightness eats the stars around it. A blue glow, blue? No, not just any blue one. The blue of Mana. The blue of magic, the blue that swallow the starts. The blue that will shallow me.

“Aaahhh”

‘It was just a dream' My body shakes all over. 'It was ju.. jus...t, just a dream, a very scarry dream about a moon eating me alive'

I take a deep breath and look at the sun coming through my bedroom windows. `It was just a dream, a very bad and strange dream’ . I get out of bed and put on my training clothes.

Going outside I start running, just like every single day. This time of the day, most people are still waking up, even the guards are still walking to the middle wall, some of them nod to me and I nod back, some I know, others are just another man under my father's command.

I take my normal pace and run just like every day, focusing on my body, I take one foot behind the other, just one foot behind the other until my run is over.

Back at my house, I don't go insade, insted I go direct to the back courtyard. My father already waiting for me in the center of our little arena. I go to the water tap, just one of the many magic devices in our house, one that provides clean water for cleanning and drinking. After cleanning my face and drinking a little I enter the arena.

“Already an hour ?” My father asks, as I take a step inside the arena.

“I am early,” I sayd taking my place against him. He only answers with a very little nod, looking in my eyes to see if he can find anything wrong with me. “Just a nightmare”, he shows a shadow of relif in hist eyes, nods again and then raises his sword.

His sword is a real Blutbad Bastard Sword. One that killed a large amount of monster and man equally, and after so many times being bathed in blood and mana it actually started drinking it. A Sword that drinks mana and blood to become even stronger.

“Slaaash” Just a little move and the air already is screaming, the sound is not new to me, not even since my training started. It's the sound of the true beggining of my day, as the sword without any warning is comming for my neck.

My training started six years ago, in the day after my six birthday, I was so scared after our first day that I hid behind my mon on the second day to not go to the training. But my father would have none of that, he picked me up and made me run, to shape my body to the real training he was going to give me.

For a intire year, I ran everysingle time my body coud do it. I would sleep, eat, run, reapeat. That year, my body and mind took the shape and strength to hold a sword, the one that I carry in my back during every day since my six birthday.

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In our little arena, I try my best at not dying under the never ending flow of attacks of my father, as his cold brown eyes follow my every move. His mana coathes my body, making the shield spell, the first technique that every knight learns, also known as ‘second chance’ as the spell technique litery can take one single blow, no matter it’s strength. The one that my father is using is a little more advanced, making it in my body and not on his.

Today marks the day I complete an entire year without taking a single blow from my father's sword. I make no mistake, as I sidestep, block, parry, and never attack. ‘It’s not your time to attack’, he teached me in the last year, so I never did it again.

After around half an hour, much more than a normal person stamina can take at such intense fight, but we are not normal persons, so we can still keep going, but he takes a step back. The action took me aback, never, ever, in my intire training with the sword he made such a move. I look deep in his eyes tryingto make head and shoulders of the situation.

‘What is happening?’, he seems to have read my mind as he answers like aways, no more words than the needed.

“Attack!”

I don’t give him time to change his mind, immediately my eyes show the steel needed to do the act. I don’t need to make a move, an attack is coming and I am showing it in my eyes the resolve to do the act.

‘How ?’ I don’t even know how to begin, there isn’t even an inch of his body that he can’t protect. ‘That’s it!’

He never told me to pass his defence. He told me to attack, so an attack I must make, attack to learn how to attack, just how I just learned to stay alive as he once told me 4 years back to. We fight for another half an hour as I do my best to attack with the moves he makes me learn and repeat infinitely after the running training.

During the half an hour that left of our training I never ever touched even a strand of his long hair.

As the training ends he says: “It’s time boy.” He picks his water bottle at the border of the arena and empties it with one big gulp. “Tonight we will feed the homeless at the borders of the last wall” I nod as I remember my father's origins, a Knight that comes from the lower of the lower of this city, and one of the fell that actually remember from where he came from.

I look at him and nod, then I take another mouthful of water as he goes away. Making my way to the training dummy in the corner of the arena I remember the last time we did go feed the homeless. A place where persons are worth nothing at the eyes of the nobles, nothing at all, not even the price of killing them. But …

To me and my Father, they matter, even the demi-humans, because everything that breath is precious, like me and my family, they are worth just by being people. Life itself is valuable and not to be taken without a very good reason like protecting your own life or the life of innocente soul.

We always go there, at the place where the security of the walls is minimum, where the fight against the monsters can break out at any time. We go there to give food to the ones that can’t get it , to the kids that steal or starve, to the old that can’t work anymore, to the cripples and even to the addicts. The world there is cruel and life worth less than a leaf of bread.

My Father did tell me one time, that one day he was about to die, after starving for about five days. One kid, one of the really bad kids, tried to kill him so he could have something to eat. The biggest of the crimes. But my father killed him stead, even at his weakest moment, he could still count on his greatest talent, a talent he came to discover within a few days after.

Once the boy was dead, soon the army took him to the prison, self defense is hard to prove when you are a homeless starving kid that just killed another. After feeding him, the knight in command of the prison noticed the steel in his eyes and against the rules took him to die as a slave of the arena, a good show is always worth money. Claiming that he was already 16 at the age of 12, the knight made him fight against a Gladiator Executioner, specialist in killing dangerous criminals.

In the world of few words that my father lives, I will never know the full history, I only know what my father sayd, and he only sayd: "I cut that man down".

The arena by it's rules couldn't keep him after winning the challenge, so back he was, to the last wall, but now with a sword in his hand he was finally able to fight life back to hell.