The morning started with Mayer knocking on my door.
I was awake of course, I didn’t need to sleep and found more solace in doing a sort of faux meditation now. It was basically as close as I could get to sleep without actually sleeping. Instead of the sweet oblivion, I thought all night instead.
I walked out into the main living area and found Mayer making himself breakfast. He offered to make some for me with a look, and I declined with a shake of my head. I honestly didn’t feel hungry at all now. I still enjoyed the smell of breakfast and tea, but I didn’t have to actually eat, which seemed like it would come in handy a lot.
It was only a few minutes and Mayer had finished his meal. Quite remarkable really, seeing as it was a full serving of scrambled eggs. But it sounds like the man was ex-military of some description, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a bit of an acquired trait.
Then we were out the door, walking away from the town centre. Something that I hadn’t done from Mayer’s home yet. We didn’t go into the forest but walked further into the plains that stretched seemingly forever. It was almost entirely barren of trees but had lots of plant life in the form of shrubbery. A large mountain loomed in the distance, but other than that, it was relatively flat all things considered.
I don’t think that Mayer really had any specific place that he was taking me, just that he was taking me far out of the way of the town itself. Less onlookers I would assume. We walked for about forty-five minutes or so, there was a small flat area that had basically no shrubbery at all. It was then that Mayer turned around and addressed me.
“Summon your hammer.” So, I did.
It was still a marvel to me, to be quite frank. The look of it summoning reminded me of CGI demos for liquid, but just really, really good. The way that it formed into the shape of the hammer was crazy, being moulded against the air with the strange metal liquid that was leaking from my hand.
It was strange sensation too. The metal leaking from my hand didn’t feel like anything, really. But the solidifying of the hammer itself felt like it was adding a strange strength to my will. It is called a Soul Weapon, so I assume that is why. It’s basically a metal weapon version of my soul.
After the weapon completed its formation, I looked towards Mayer.
“Just under a second.” I took me a second to realise what he was talking about, but when I realised he was talking about how long the summoning took, I spoke up.
“I think I can do it faster. There is no way that it took that long when I was fighting the wolf.”
“Unsummon it then try again.” So I did. The unsummoning was much faster than summoning, it only took a fifth of a second or something close. This time, as I summoned, I paid little to no attention to the visuals of the summoning itself, pretending that I was preparing to actually hit something with it. This time I felt the liquid fill in the shape of the hammer far quicker than before. But I could feel a small strain on what felt like my heart, but was more likely my soul being put under stress from having to form something on short notice.
“About half a second. Try do it faster. Again.” Unsummoning was even a tiny bit faster this time. However, as I pushed myself to summon faster, I felt an even stronger strain on my ‘soul’. I summoned it a fair bit faster this time, more equal to the time I had used it to brain that forest wolf. Mayer simply nodded, signalling for me to do it again.
I unsummoned the hammer and repeated the summoning process, urging my soul to form faster than before. It was complaining about it but did it faster than before again, but it felt like it was tearing itself out of me. It felt like I was leaking fire from my hands. I grimaced, trying to ignore the pain, but in the end I let out a small whimper. The hammer formed and looked perfect, but it was a very unpleasant experience.
“That was faster. About a third of a second.” I nodded, a little breathless at the pain to be honest.
“Yeah, I don’t think I can go faster than that. It felt like pure fire was leaking from my hand.” Mayer looked at me curiously.
“Do you think it’s trainable?” I thought on that for a moment.
“I’m not sure. It has a lot more to do with my soul, and I don’t know how trainable that is really. Would raising my Mind actually help at all with my soul?” Mayer looked thoughtful, but shook his head.
“No, the soul isn’t controlled that way. Usage of the soul is a dangerous game. Not many dare to mess with shifting with the soul, but there are a few that do. They are totally different from regular shifting. Soul shifting doesn’t even necessarily use ether at all.”
“Well I guess it wouldn’t hurt to try and train it. Thought I’m not going to summon my hammer that fast again for a good while.”
“How about you try unsummoning the hammer and try summon it while swinging at me.”
“Uh.” I looked at Mayer incredulously, but he stared back at me with a raised eyebrow. “You sure?” His gaze continued, and I shrugged. If the guy wanted to risk it, then I wasn’t going to stop him.
I unsummoned the hammer and got into the stance I had been using while hammering in the wooden posts. I held my hands in an approximate position and swung. I summoned my hammer, the liquid pouring from my hand, and filling my hands with cold Soul Metal.
I swung hard, but the hammer did most of the work really, not much of the force I was exerting was adding to the acceleration of the hammer itself but was more being used to keep the hammer on track. The hammer arced downwards until it hit the floor with a hefty thud. I looked up to see Mayer glance down at the hammer head, which was stuck in the ground, back to my face.
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“What?” I asked, confused. He definitely hadn’t moved, and the hammer had arced right through where he was standing. There was basically no way that the hammer hadn’t hit him.
“The hammer head hadn’t formed by the time that it had reached me. You are lucky that hit the wolf, kid.”
I honestly hadn’t even considered that to be an option. I flushed slightly, getting ready to explain that the wolf was closer to the ground, so the hammer had formed by then, but Mayer didn’t give me a chance and waved away my argument.
“Try hitting me with it summoned now.” I raised an eyebrow but complied anyways. I hefted the hammer up to my waist, then slowly lifted it higher. I shifted my stance ever so slightly and swung with all my might. That was the problem with this thing, there was no holding back. If I was going to hit something, it was going to receive the full brunt of the force basically no matter what I did to soften the blow.
The hammer swung towards Mayer with a ridiculous amount of sheer force behind it. I looked at Mayer, wondering what he was going to do. Would he move out of the way at the last moment? Would he try to block or deflect it? But Mayer lifted up his hand and placed it in front of the path of the hammer head. I felt my eyes go wide as the hammer struck his fingers and stopped like a car hitting a solid concrete wall. The unexpected stop to the motion of the hammer made me collide with the handle, knocking the wind out of my lungs. I collapsed to the floor, breathless and gasping for air. My hammer fell beside me with a mighty thud.
“It’s heavy, but beside that, it has nothing to it. Right now, the only strength that your hammer has is its weight. Other than that, its totally useless. If you have someone that can deflect or stop your hammer in any way, you’re dead.” I looked up to see Mayer look down at me with a small grin on his face.
“Holy. Shit. You are strong” I said between gasps. Mayer snorted.
“Not especially. There are many much stronger than I. It’s true that I am much stronger than you are, but if you had even half of my strength, your hammer would be far heavier than what I could block like that.” I grumbled as I stood up, dusting off my pants.
“So how am I going to even be able to use that thing,” I pointed at the hammer, “In actual combat?” I was a little peeved, not going to lie. Couldn’t I have got a damn sword or something?
“No idea. But everything has to start somewhere.” Mayer said, before taking a stance. I looked at him oddly for a moment, then got the idea and mimicked his stance as best I could. He waited a moment until he was sure I was ready, then started to move.
The difference between us was immediately obvious. His movements flowed as if he were water itself, whilst I jolted about like a fool, stumbling over my own feet at every chance I could get. It was embarrassing, but Mayer made no mention of it. The movements were based solely on the feet, legs and waist. The movements didn’t touch the arms at all. I was curious as to why, but it was too demanding to both concentrate on the movements and think at the same time, so I gave into the motions.
After ten minutes, I realised that the movement patterns weren’t repeating. Each pattern was unique, but consisted of the same, or very similar movements. The patterns, however, didn’t feel similar at all. There had to be hundreds of unique movements, all working different muscles in my legs, all predicated to serve a very specific function. But the patterns were different, so different that it was difficult to predict what it was that we were going to do next.
It took me thirty minutes to get a semblance of a feel for where the movements would go next, but even then I found myself halting and desperately rushing to catch back up to where Mayer had gone with the pattern.
After an hour, my muscles were burning like all hell. I had no idea that there were so many muscles to burn in a foot. Though I pushed through the pain to follow with Mayer. I was still shit in every sense of the word, but it was a fun sort of game, to try and keep up with the man.
The most interesting thing about these movements to me was that, in all reality, you barely needed any musculature to pull them off. I’m sure that being well built and fit was going to be a good help in performing them easily, but even a child could pull them off. All that was really holding you back was your skill.
Each movement was calculated and was made to be able to flow into tens of other movements. I had thought earlier that there might be hundreds of different movements, but now I started to realise that you could probably break it down into half a hundred moves, and then break the variants down within that main move. But either way, that still added up fast. There were probably more like thousands of specific moves that could be performed.
The movements were a lot like katas in karate or any similar martial art, but a lot more complicated and more free flowing. We had been going for a few hours at this point, but Mayer simply continued on without even a hiccup, continually pulling off new combinations that I hadn’t even thought possible to make look graceful. His eyes were closed, his face looked serene, as if he were listening to a symphony that only he could hear.
I started to wish that I could hear that symphony too. But at the moment, I was only able to struggle along, and imitate the older man as he moved unbelievably smoothly.
After three hours, I started to stumble a lot less, finding a good neutral point where I could re-attempt basically any move from was a big help. It also made me look a whole lot less stupid.
After six hours, I was following most of his movements, albeit poorly. There was a massive discrepancy with how both the movement’s looked. My movements were mostly jerky, but every now and then my brain would have an epiphany moment, and most times out of ten, it would lead me in the right direction.
After eight hours, I could mostly keep on tempo with Mayer. He didn’t go particularly fast or anything, but it was exceptionally difficult to keep a consistent pace. Keeping a consistent tempo kind of implied that you were able to follow along properly, but I fudged it and made lots of safe bets and wide movements, so that I could pick up specific movements easier when I had the chance to examine further.
Unfortunately, the ninth hour was the last. Mayer’s movements for about thirty minutes had been slowly drawing to a close. I wasn’t sure why if felt that way yet, but I was sure that I would find that out at some point.
When Mayer finally stopped, he did a quick stretch, then looked to me.
“You did good for your first time. A solid basis is being built for what everything will be built around.” He looked at me, giving a small smile, then started walking off back towards his home. I was somewhat dumbfounded by the sudden change. I was still stuck in the final position hat Mayer had performed.
“Wait!” I called after him. He stopped and looked over his shoulder questioningly. “What’s it called?” Mayer looked out into the distance, seemingly questioning if he should tell me or not.
“It’s called the Sharah.” He said, rolling the ‘r’ ever so slightly, giving the word a distinctly foreign note. Mayer didn’t bother to see my reaction, not that I had any special reaction to the name. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it didn’t have a name at all. I stood there for a moment, thinking about what I should do next. There wasn’t anything that I needed to do today, and there wasn’t anywhere I could go except Mayer’s place, and maybe to the town bar. So I decided to stay here and fumble through half remembered movements, hoping that I would understand a little bit more of the strange movements that Mayer had performed for me not minutes before.
It was a whole lot harder without Mayer there to guide me, but I carried on, despite the difficulty.
It was a long day of struggle.