That days training was particularly intense. Harker seemed intent on beating our mistake into us collectively, although there was no need for that. Although some seemed apathetic, most of the members of our training regiment fell into one of two categories.
The first was the angry ones, the ones that, for some reason or another, were pissed off. Maybe because somebody they knew was dead. Maybe because they hated to be trapped here. Maybe because of something else. There were plenty of things to be angry about, no matter how you looked at it.
The other camp, the more unfortunate ones, were the apathetic ones, the sad ones, they ones who got depressed instead of fired up. They’re performance suffered. They didn’t snap to attention as fast, weren’t as quick to follow orders. Their movements weren’t as intense, nor as focused, as everyone elses. While I’m not normally one to judge how people respond to stress, especially when it’s in a normal way, in this case, it certainly wasn’t helping them. And they were paying a price for it. There was a lot of Harkers boot flying around today, and they were catching the majority of it.
The person most in the dump seemed to be Jerald. Gone was his cheerful disposition. Instead, it was replaced with a strong sense of melancholy. His head was slumped, shoulders rolled forwards, bringing him from a respectably average height to something rather shorter. I don’t know if it was because he felt responsible for Wyll’s death, or if the reality of the situation was just now hitting him, but he was in a fuck that no amount of screaming and kicking could take him out of them.
We spent almost no time on spear drills, simply being made to exercise far more than before. Nobody else figured out how to use their mana to empower their strikes in the short time we did get.
The workout was brutal. It involved a lot of running, almost twice as much as the day before. There was also several new exercises that I had never seen before, that twisted and contorted me into odd and unfamiliar poses, making muscles I didn’t even know I had burn. There was nothing else I could do but keep struggling onwards, however. We all ended up collapsing to the ground at one time or another, some longer than others, but those who stayed on the ground quickly learned that you didn’t want to be there for long.
There was no time for a break, and no time to complain. We were never given long to rest. Once we finished one exercise, we were moved onto another. And then another, and another. After what felt like hours, we were sent away to lunch. It was a tense affair. While some people talked, most were either too tired or two emotional for conversation. The groups sitting together were often missing members today, and the amount of people trying to be on their own was far greater. Several people, not feeling as if there was enough space on the bench, sat on the ground, hunched over their bowls, eating quietly.
I think that our group was the most affected. I sat down near them, but farther away than last time. They were silent. Rogier still looked angry. His face was cast in a deep scowl, and his hands were clenching and unclenching at his sides. He looked like he was aching to reach out and throttle someone.
Jerald had lost all trace of his good cheer. Instead of his normal jolly demeanor, he looked lost. He was staring off into the distance, but when I tracked his vision, there was never anything there. His face was slack, eyes and cheeks relaxed, and he moved slowly, but not in the way that a tired man does. No, he moved like he couldn’t find any reason to be doing anything except for the fact that it was expected of him. His spoon missed his bowl several times, and once he even dumped a scoop on his lap. Seemingly unperturbed, he left it there, where it sat, until he stood up.
Ryan seemed the most unaffected, but it was at least partially an act. His attitude seemed forced today, and he was missing the ever present indignation that normally burned in his eyes. He was the only one who really talked, minus a few grunts of affirmation that occasionally came from the others, and he couldn’t get a foothold to start conversation. He’d go off on a topic, and when the others wouldn’t reply, he would seemingly lose steam, going silent for a minute or two before trying to restart it with something else.
As for me, I didn’t say a word. I wasn’t as much a part of the group as the others were, and I felt partially responsible for Wylls death. I had, after all, been part of the talks for escape, and I was unequivocally in favor of them. I had known that Harker promised us that we would die should we try and abandon our service, but I had thought it was an exaggeration. I had all the chances in the world to try and dissuade Wyll. I could have come up with any number of reasons to stop him, or persuade him otherwise. He might not have listened, but at least at that point I would have done all that I could have. Instead, I let my fear blindly push him to his death.
If we had thought that the break for lunch meant that the hard part was over, we were dead wrong. After lunch, instead of more exercise, we were put to sparring instead. I suspected that the change in activity is only because pushing our tired bodies even more would have been counterproductive, so instead, they had us practice in a different way.
We were grouped up with partners, and offered little explanation. I was simply told to try and defeat my opponent the best that I could with my wooden training spear. People were hesitant to strike at each other at first, afraid of hurting either themselves or their opponents, but after a few people got hit and realized that they weren’t made of glass, the fear and anger that had been building up over the last two days of abuse started to come out. Blows came faster, people hit hard, and the overall intensity was ramped up a notch.
The first person I was partnered with was somebody that I didn’t know. He was big, with a shaved bald head, and looked to be in his early 20’s. I would also come to find out that he was freakishly strong. Every time that I struck at him, he simply batted my spear away. He rarely returned attacks, however, taking a more cautious approach. He held the spear uncomfortably in his hands, as if he would rather be touching anything else, but his speed and strength more than made up for his inability with the weapon. Perhaps if I was better, I could have countered or beat him, or at least held my own, but he thrashed me. Everytime I would get stabbed fatally, we would reset, and his time to beat me got lower and lower. I started to get more and more frustrated, and make mistakes with an increasing frequency. It didn’t help that he started to learn how I fought, and his adaptation was enough to make my very limited spear knowledge essentially useless. I didn’t end up winning a single time.
I was put up against Rogier next. The tall man stood over me, spear held loosely in his grip, tip hanging down in front of him. From the looks of it, its lazy positioning was a front. In all likelihood, it could spring up at a moment's notice, ready to impale anyone foolish enough to get close. It seemed Rogier was a somewhat experienced Spearman. Just my luck.
It didn’t seem like he intended to go easy on me, either. His face was still grim, eyes tightened. Aside from his height, he was a relatively average looking man, and I likely wouldn’t have been able to pick him out in the crown should I be away from his presence for a month. His normally silent demeanor didn’t help his forgettable nature.
There was something different about him now. Something that banished the unmemorable air he normally carried. There was a certain intensity in his eyes, a terrifying focus. His features almost seemed inhuman. It seemed he was still angry. Very angry. That meant my prospects of escaping this unharmed were low.
He stood there, waiting. Eventually, I couldn’t handle the suspense anymore. Mustering all the strength in my body, I lunged forward, trying to end the spar in a single strike. Maybe he wouldn’t see it coming. I found that possibility unlikely, but it was all I could do to cling to that fragile hope. It’s not like I had anything else to rely on right now.
I felt my hand go numb, first. It took the rest of my nervous system another few seconds to recognize that my spear had spiraled out of my hand and was currently resting on the dirt. I hurried to pick it up, ducking under Rogiers glare. Who was he to judge me? It’s not like I had had much time to practice. The drills helped familiarize me to the spear, certainly, but they couldn’t replace experience, of which I had almost none.
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The beating kept up for longer than I was comfortable admitting, before we rotated too around to another person. It seemed that Rogier was most definitely an outlier, as I didn’t do nearly as poorly in the rest of my matches.
I was first paired up against a short man, balding man who fidgeted constantly. A welt was starting to form on the back of his hand. It seems like he hadn’t fared much better against his last partner than I had.
I soon found out why. While I was certainly no savant with a spear, and some might describe me as a flailing infant with it, I had something my partner did not: Some rudimentary degree of athleticism. It certainly wasn’t much, but the man across from me seemed to be in a complete deficit.
I could learn from my mistakes, if slowly. If I threw a certain attack, and it kept getting consistently countered, or I was punished for it in someway, then I would start avoiding doing those actions. Slowly, my style would change, eliminating what wasn’t working. Most people could say that they would do the same. I would like to think that the small amount of martial arts experience I had helped, but in my experience nearly everyone could do this to some degree.
Not the man across from me. No, in fact, getting reprisal for his attacks seemed to egg him on, causing him to launch the same attacks repeatedly. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, right?
It worked out for him one or two times out of ten. Occasionally, he would do something that was so outrageous I would never have seen it coming. Far more often, I would know almost exactly what he would do next, and be waiting to counter it.
His movements were another thing. Far from the focused fury of Rogier, my opponent shakily trailed his spear through the air, often opting to swing it about like a club rather than stab with it.
As I was walking away from my significantly battered partner, I heard a mumble slip out of his mouth. I think it was his name. It sounded like George, but I couldn’t be certain. His swollen lips mangled whatever sound he tried to force past them. I almost pitied him, having to go through that sort of tortuous experience again.
My next opponent didn’t stand out in the way the others did. He was a man of average height, and few words. He wasn’t exceptional with the spear like Rogier, but he wasn’t nearly as bad as George was. In the ten minutes we clashed, I tended to eke out victory 6 or 7 times out of ten, putting me slightly above him. Who would have thought that all my experiences on Earth would actually lend themselves to my time here. It seemed like this was the first thing I had done where I wasn’t the worst person in the room.
After the unremarkable man, I was once again faced with a familiar face. Standing across from me, spear hanging loosely at his side, was Ryan. The merchant flashed a strained smile upon seeing me. I felt bad about having to beat the man, but I was far more worried about getting caught slacking than I was about hurting his feelings. Besides, with the extra fat on his body, I doubted he’d feel what was coming next all that much.
We squared off against each other, spears at the ready. I stood there, tense, waiting to make the first move. Not yet… now. My arms contracted, blurring the point of the spear towards Ryan’s rotund belly. This was my best strike, fast enough that even Rogier had to pause his assaults to deflect them (not that he had a particularly difficult time doing so, but still. I would take what I could get at this point).
Ryan’s reaction speed was greater than I thought. Instead of having to process until I hit him, he quickly spun, shaft of his spear perpendicular to mine, sweeping the point away from his vitals and throwing me off balance. I wasn’t ready for the unexpected counter, and it left me wide open. He took the opportunity to swipe at my legs, and I was barely able to jump back in time to avoid the main force of the attack. Despite my evasive actions, the spear still clipped my leg, leaving a stinging pain in its place.
I growled, refocusing in. I sent a barrage of thrusts and sweeps at Ryan, being far less committal this time around. I didn’t want to repeat the mistake I had made before. This was a surprisingly competent opponent.
The intensity built, as we got more frustrated, each of us learning to counter the others. I was better than Ryan, techniques executed more skillfully, less wasted motion, more focus on total obliteration. But Ryan had me outmatched in a very important category. Namely, he was in far better shape than I was. His beer belly and struggle on the runs had been led me to the conclusion that he was completely sedentary most of his life.
While he may not possess a great degree of cardiovascular fitness. Ryan was no slouch. He was surprisingly strong, and he could move quickly when he wanted too. This wasn’t looking good. His superior stats greatly limited my options. I didn’t know how to overcome them, and to match his strength I had to overcommit, leaving me extremely vulnerable to counter-attacks.
Once he started learning my patterns, I started getting desperate. Our matches went on long, nearly as long as the ones I had with the man previously, except I wasn’t winning more than I was losing. Even worse, I was starting to get more and more exhausted, and the bruises were starting to stack up. Even a glancing blow would be far more painful than normal if it hit one of the purple patch marks that was covering my body with increasing frequency.
I took a quick step forwards, trying to launch a swipe at Ryan’s head. I knew I was getting nasty, but I was too angry to care. It’s not like an enemy would avoid targeting it if this were an actual fight.
I was watching for a high strike when I felt my a blow strike my shins, sending a lancing pain up my legs, before pulling me off my feet and depositing my back onto the ground, roughly. My head didn’t stop when my torso did so it was also treated to the wonderful feeling of bouncing off of the hard dirt. After getting my skull rattled around for a while I decided that it was a good idea to lay there for a while. The sky did look lovely today. It was a bright blue, clearer than it had ever been on earth, and I could faintly see a sheen of stars shining through.
It was when I saw the flash of brightly oiled boots that I sprung back up to my feet. As bad as my head was feeling, I didn’t want to get my ass kicked in a setting where I couldn’t fight back.
Even after getting back onto my feet, my head was still feeling off. I could only hope I wasn’t concussed. I knew there was some rudimentary form of magic in this world, but I didn’t trust it being able to fix brain damage. That sort of medical knowledge took hundreds of years and thousands of people to develop, and even then it was still constantly changing and unreliable. I didn’t have any faith in this worlds' ability to fix it. From what I had seen, their scientific dedication was very low, not to mention their actual abilities.
Ryan still looked mostly normal, so that was probably a positive sign. His arms looked a little wobbly. I inhaled deeply, taking a moment to center myself, before I nodded to him. Understanding my signal, he took a step forwards, letting out a thrust that narrowly slipped past my head. I brought my spear around, aiming to hit his arm, when he withdrew, taking a quick step back out of my range. My movements seemed to flow better than before.
My arms started building up momentum, swinging around increasingly quick arcs. Ryan was starting to be put on the back foot, slowly loosing ground to my overwhelming onslaught. For all of his strength, the speed that my attacks were coming in at was forcing him to stay on the defense, a loosing proposition. He had to defend every strike, because even one slipping past his guard could mean the end of the fight.
The world seemed to shrink until it was just the two of us, the sphere of my focus narrowing, concentrated directly on the man in front of me. My concern about being punished faded, my worries about my future disappeared, the aches and pains in my body faded into the background. These things were all still there, but muted, more of a distant ache than any sort of acute feeling.
Ryan narrowly knocked aside one of my thrusts, before swing a lethal counter straight at my head, the shaft of his spear bending and flexing as it carved an arc through the air, from down by his hip straight up to my neck.
Faster than thought, I whipped my arms around. A crack rang out, as I knocked the spear out of Ryan's hands, sending it tumbling through the air to land a dozen feet away. We both stood there, the blunted point of my weapon resting at his throat.
Suddenly, my legs felt weak. I used my spear as a staff, jamming its butt into the ground, using it to carry the weight my legs suddenly could not. A wave of vertigo swept over me, as if I had stood up too fast, except that instead of fading over the course of a few seconds, it seemingly got worse. I staggered, just barely managing to keep myself from falling over. I could barely make out Ryan’s face through my increasingly blurry vision, but he looked somewhat concerned, as if he had thought about coming towards me, but something was holding him back.
Looking around, I saw a uniformed form standing near us. I think it might have been Harker, but I couldn’t confirm it. That, at the least, would explain Ryan’s current disposition. He probably wanted to help, but was afraid that his presence near me would attract attention. Someone reeling after taking a particularly heavy blow or fighting particularly hard was normal. But when their partner had to help them, that was cause for concern. It meant a problem, and Harker didn’t like problems.
Although my legs were still weak, the spinning in my head was starting to diminish, and my eyes were starting to un-blur. It took my several more minutes of standing there, panting, before I felt recovered enough to straighten back out. Ryan and I tentatively resumed our duel, but even with him going easy on me, he handily beat me every time. Even the most basic exertion, when sustained, would leave me with my hands on my knees, panting for breath.
It seems this was to be our final opponent, however, as Harker soon called time and sent us away. As I was limping off of the training field, I turned to take one final look behind me. Harker was standing, eyes locked right on me.