We walked after the man with some level of cautiousness. The initial attack had been a surprise, and I wouldn’t let that be true for another.
I kept on my guard, and Rethi at my side did the same. We walked the familiar road to the clearing outside of town, leaving behind the small town for the time being.
When we reached the middle of the clearing, Mayer simply turned, which startled both me and Rethi into a ready stance. I noticed that Rethi’s ready stance was good, and Mayer saw the appreciation of it in my eyes.
“The boy hasn’t been slacking. He has been my most willing student besides yourself, and he always ends up sleeping out by where you are practicing.” Rethi froze, as did I.
“I didn’t know that?” I said questioningly in Rethi’s direction. The boy went bright red and stammered a bit, but Mayer’s gave a wide grin.
“I’m surprised you didn’t notice it, especially after Rethi being so close by when you were attacked by the Jothian boy.” And Mayer was right too. Rethi had no reason to be there unless he had been there for far too long in the night. I turned to Rethi again and, without meeting my eyes he mumbled.
“I like watching it. It’s soothing and it’s like it makes a nice sound.” A thought sparked in my brain, but I pushed it down for the moment. This wasn’t the time for questions and answers.
Mayer then waved his hand in the air dismissively.
“Alright, since you are both trained to the point where it is reasonable that you learn actual combat, both in your physicality and in technique, it’s about time we did that. Along with that Max, you will be learning to control your newfound telekinetic abilities, and hopefully not blow any arms off today.” Mayer laughed light heartedly but I didn’t. Not exactly a humorous mental picture for me.
“We will start with a simple hand to hand bout between your and Rethi. Max, you will have to pull your punches.” He stated and waved his hand in our general directions. We turned to each other and hesitantly raised our hands in a guard. Mayer just made a short, harsh sound that we took to mean ‘go’.
We hesitantly circled each other. I was far bigger and stronger than Rethi, this wasn’t really a fair fight, and I don’t think it was meant to be. I was probably the strongest person physically for miles, by virtue of the stat system that seemed to be all important to the Champions.
I didn’t want to hit Rethi, or really participate in combat all that much in the first place. Call me weak, or a wuss, but I was born as far away from violence as I possibly could be and raised in one of the fairest societies in the world. Violence was the furthest option in my mind when it came to how to solve an issue.
But here? As seen by the actions of that Jothian boy, violence wasn’t so far from the surface, always a possible action to take. Now, I had to adopt that mindset, or be crushed by those who did.
I put my hesitancy aside and moved in swiftly on the boy. I tested his reaction to a simple punch. His reactions had very clearly been modelled after the Sharah, and he was surprisingly good too, his movements spoke of little discordancy to my ears. He obviously didn't have the breadth of time that I had put into training, but he made up for it with his obvious swiftness, recovering from slight missteps without delay.
I was still faster, though. I punched again, and saw through his actions and moved in swiftly, using my far superior strength to then restrain him thoroughly.
Rethi put up a struggle, but it was futile. I was far superior; it was like wrestling with your older brother before you hit puberty.
Mayer called it, and I moved away. Rethi looked a little chastened but took it in stride.
“Now, Rethi, you see where you stand. You are strong maybe for your age, maybe you could even beat some older boys, but as soon as you get into a fight with an adult, you will be crushed. Plain and simple.” Then Mayer turned to me.
“Time for you to learn where you stand.” A feral grin bloomed on his face as he started to move forward. An instinctual and primal fear came along with that grin. I quickly began to backpedal, but Mayer moved deceptively fast. He gave me no time to prepare, and quickly began punching at me with ferocity I hadn’t experienced before.
I dodged as best as I could with the little warning I had been given, taking a glancing blow to the shoulder, and feeling like someone had thrown a rock at me. My steps became uneven, and I quickly moved to correct it, but Mayer was there, ready to capitalize.
I desperately moved away as I felt the fist sail through the air and tried to take advantage of the man’s overly forwardness and kicked out at his legs, ultimately hitting him.
A little bit of satisfaction ran through me when I realised that I had hit him but was then let down when I felt like I had just kicked a boulder.
Mayer laughed what might have seemed like a pleasant laugh but was overshadowed by his fist hitting into my chest with all the force of a truck. The wind was pressed out of my lungs with an almost audible woosh and I was left lying in the dirt, panting, and trying to get my breath back.
A hand appeared in my vision and I grabbed it. Mayer lifted me off the ground like a carboard box and pulled me onto my feet.
“And now you know your place. This is the start to becoming strong. Knowing that you are incredibly, pitifully weak against any who want to do you harm.” Mayer pulled the sword that he had attacked me with before out of the ground, where he must have stuck it somewhere in my ‘fight’ with Rethi.
“I won’t be using this for today and will only be teaching the sword later to Rethi, as he is the only one able to actually use it, sorry about that. Soul Weapons are jealous ones.” I grimaced, remembering when I'd first tried to use another weapon and the horrible pain that'd come shortly after I'd picked the blade up. Mayer looked towards me, feral grin still present, “and you, Maximilian, will come to learn just how brutal a fist fight can be.”
Brutal it was. I didn’t not believe the man when he said that I would learn, but I think I simply underestimated how badly I would want out of this whole thing.
Rethi was far quicker to adapt to the brutal tactics needed for a fist fight, and started to do some serious damage, even when I overpowered him almost absolutely. And because I apparently regenerated from wounds incredibly fast, Rethi had been commanded by Mayer to go all out, no holds barred.
This did indeed mean that he did everything from biting, doing his best to mangle my scrotum. It is just as unpleasant as it sounds.
The sheer brutality of the boy actually began to shock me when he managed to get a finger inside my eye socket, and temporarily sent that eye blind. It recovered mere minutes later, thankfully.
There was a newfound respect for the small boy and his brutal tactics. He didn't even seem remotely fazed by his actions, and I was the total opposite. If I hit Rethi just a little too hard, I immediately felt bad.
At least at the beginning.
It didn't take long for Rethi to Iron that out of me. I knew that tomorrow I’d see the boy covered in bruises and feel absolutely terrible, but when the boy is trying to gnaw your nut-sack off, you aren’t exactly giving much credence to that thought.
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It only took a few hours, and Rethi was entirely worn out and probably sore on every inch of his body. I thanked the boy, and apologised for it all, but the boy just grinned haphazardly and trudged off home.
I now realized that it was just me and Mayer now, and that meant that things were about to get 10 times worse.
After an hour of sparring with Mayer I was fairly sure I had broken most of my major bones in my body. Mayer was clearly just as brutal as Rethi, and many times more skilled at doing damage.
One time he had grabbed and flung me by the jaw, ultimately breaking the jaw and ripping open my cheeks from the force of the throw, that felt odd when my cheeks began knitting themselves back together.
The moral of this lesson became clear throughout the many hours of abject torture. It showed me all the places I excelled, and where I faltered, and gave me an opportunity to change it on the fly to avoid the next horrible injury.
The upside to this was that I learnt that Champions were effectively impossible to kill unless you did it all in one go with a mortal blow. If you give them a minute to run away, then you have to fight a Champion who is back at peak physical condition.
Totally unfair, but I can’t say I’m complaining. It’s a major asset to me and makes it far less likely that I could die, but I’m not invincible. No matter how you look at it, it the injury is grievous enough, or in a bad spot, I will still probably die from it, despite my ludicrous healing ability.
It did mean, though, that I could effectively train in battle like you would in a game. Balls to the wall.
I trained for many more hours, until the sky began to darken when Mayer spoke, breaking out almost silent string of bouts, aside from grunts and occasional screaming, of course.
“That’s enough of tearing you apart,” I sighed in relief, “It’s time to work on this telekinetic shifting of yours.”
I nodded, then stood there, unsure. Mayer rolled his eyes.
“Just try to hit me with it again, hold back if you can.” I shrugged and made the same move that I had two times now.
It worked perfectly, all the different pieces coming together to perform a single movement that made my body crackle with energy. This time, I restricted the feeling of pulling from within me, limiting the amount that had been pulled from what I assumed was my reserves.
There was a soundless explosion on Mayer’s chest. But he didnt move and acted as if a pillow had hit him.
“That’s good. You did an excellent job at restraining the amount of ether that went into that particular blast. We will call it a kinetic blast for now, seeing as that is all it does. I have a suspicion that it is less a blast, and more a transference point for kinetic power that you are pushing kinetic energy through, resulting in the blast.”
Honestly, that was a more advanced analysis than I was expecting. Not that I thought Mayer was dumb, or an idiot. More that I was surprised at the almost scientific way the magic was described. I nodded my head.
“I feel like it is one word in a sentence, and that it is simply the start of it. Like saying ‘I’ or ‘You’ to start a sentence.” I shrugged, a bit ashamed of the incredibly unscientific and imprecise and somewhat clunky explanation. Mayer however, seemed to appreciate the idea and thought on it for a moment.
“That is an interesting way of looking at it. It certainly makes a degree of sense. For example, there are many ways to enact a shift. Some use incantations, some use rituals, and some use simple hand signs to enact it, some even simply use their mind, but there is always a way that they enact a shift. It seems that in the case of kinetic, or telekinetic shifting, you must use your entire body to enact a reliable shift.”
I was immediately glad that Mayer could use the sparing information on how it felt to further his understanding, as well as making me not look like a fool.
“So, I guess I will have to discover more words to the language?” Mayer nodded and smiled appreciatively.
“Exactly. I cannot say that I am an expert of all things shifting and the various ways that they can enact a shift, so I don't have many reference points but my own way that I shift, which so happens to be the polar opposite of how you do so.” He outstretched his hand and a little ball of flame floated above it.
He had made no obvious incantations nor movements to suggest that it had anything to do with the physical, so it only really left one option.
“You shift with your mind entirely?” Mayer nodded and put away the little ball of flame.
“So, my advice on exactly how to shift would do far more harm than good when it comes to this quite unique way of shifting. It will more than likely come to you as you practice more and more, but you probably won't be able to do anything all that interesting for a while, if my experience has anything to say for it.” I agreed with that. It was a bit crazy to ask for more than this only a day after I had gained the ability to shift. Mayer had told me that it usually takes weeks at least to shift for the first time, so I had a sneaking suspicion either the Champion abilities or the Sharah is helping me out here.
A thought hit me. Mayer instantly saw the thought hit my brain, but said nothing and watched on, eager to see if anything were to come from it. Mayer and Rethi had mentioned Laws before. It seemed to just be a different name for physics principles and such, which means I had a tiny little bit of an understanding.
The current, at least as current as when I was still on earth, physics theories all tend to agree that energy never really gets destroyed or created out of nothing, it just changes form. So, you might ask where the kinetic blast is coming from.
I summoned my hammer, the silver soul metal leaking from my hand into a solid shape far quicker than I could have done so many days ago and hefted the oversized thing onto my shoulder. I thought about what I was going to do for a moment and then turned to look up at Mayer.
“Mind if I hit you in the chest again?” Mayer’s eyebrow arched in amusement and interest and he nodded. Only a moment afterwards I made my move.
Before, I was using the stamp of my foot as the point where I ‘released’ the ether from within me to enact what I had ‘told’ it by letting it go from me. But releasing that ether is only one part of the whole.
The action itself was like the words, and the releasing of the ether was like a full stop. But when you are saying a sentence, there is more than simply just words and a full stop.
There is emphasis.
I made the same movement as before, but as I completed the move, I held the ether in for just long enough to slam the hammer downwards into the ground, releasing the ether upon impact.
Mayer’s eyes went wide as he was hit by an incredible force. He was blasted back, forced to utilise air shifting to stop him from flying upwards and away from the ground. He skidded to a stop, his feet never truly leaving the ground, but leaving little trenches in the ground where the man had travelled to a stop.
I was immediately worried and unsummoned my hammer and ran over to him. I asked if he was okay, but I only found him laughing uproariously, clutching his stomach in a bout of unguarded mirth.
He managed to wrangle his laughter in to where he was only giggling every few moments and spoke.
“You can tell me about how you did that later, but for now, I think that I am going to go eat dinner and go to bed. Definitely don’t use that on anyone but me just yet.” He laughed, and walked off towards his house, leaving me to ponder.
---
Mayer sat over his desk, writing into a small journal, humming thoughtfully to himself.
He wrote:
Day: Whatever, forgot to count.
Started the boys doing real combat training today. Rethi seemed to surprise Max with his ferocity, which is good. Rethi will probably never grow to be as big as Max, but I can teach him to be more ferocious and cunning. He is even progressing quite quickly in the Sharah, just about as immersing himself in the practice as Max himself. The boy goes out and watches Max perform for hours, even sleeps out there.
Max doesn’t seem to realise, but Rethi just about deifies him. Respects him more than me by far. Rethi will be a good addition to Max’s repertoire of people to know in the future. And maybe even my successor, in all the ways that implies.
Max isn’t a natural born fighter like Rethi. Doesn’t quite have the brutality in him. But for what he doesn’t have in natural talent he tends to make up for in wit. He is never going to be as good as Rethi will eventually be at skilled fighting, but with some of the things that Max has going on in his brain, his seemingly unending dedication to training and his burgeoning power, I can only see that he will thrive in a fight.
At the end of the lesson I decided to go over some of the shifting to try and analyse his ability. He made some interesting remarks, and then he got this strange glint in his eye. Maybe it was realisation, or maybe it was something else, but not a moment after he summoned his weapon and enacted the same shift as before, but now using the hammer as a focal point (?).
I didn’t get an explanation off of him. I couldn’t let him see the damage he had done to me, or I think he would have been scared of what he could do. He is too soft to experience real consequences for his power just yet. Soon, but not yet.
Mayer sighed, then put away the pen that he had bought many years ago for a ludicrous price, and even all these years later it still worked like it was new. He let the page dry for a moment, shifting some air over the pages and then closing the book.
He got out of his chair and winced, he moved towards his bed and sat down, then slowly prying himself from his shirt. Underneath was a chest covered in purple and black. Every movement hurt the older man, not having experienced so many broken ribs in many years. He grabbed a small vial from his dresser and downed it without even looking at the contents. He growled at the foul-tasting concoction but laid down on his bed and started to feel the mending of flesh and clicking of bone as it knitted itself back together. As well as the horrific pain that came along with any good healing potion.
It was going to be a long night.