Training became horrific after that. Without my need for sleep, rest, or even breaks, Mayer had me doing some sort of training at all parts of the day.

The initial period of strenuous exercise only lasted maybe a week and a half before it seemed like I wouldn’t receive achievements for them so easily. Mayer made me move to training my Agility next, after my Might, and it took around the same period to cap out for that as well.

However, while I sustained a particularly terrible injury in training, I received this.

[A Blinding Pain: You have experienced and overcome a horrific pain. +1 Mind]

And after that, it was on.

Mind training had quickly become one of the highest priorities, especially after coming into direct contact with kinetic shifting. Thus, Mayer started to inflict more painful and horrendous injuries upon me.

This usually resulted in Mayer using his shifting abilities to injure me. Including charring an arm to the bone, and letting it heal. If it had healed from a clean cut at my elbow or shoulder, it would have been fine, probably would’ve barely hurt in comparison. But as it was regenerating from the vestiges of the charred remains, the extreme pain was astounding, as I could feel the nerves firing back up and into the destroyed flesh.

It took less and a fourth of the time than it would’ve if the arm had been cut off, so it became our new priority for me to learn where the limits of my regeneration was.

Mayer did know that complete destruction of the brain was fatal for most Champions, and also if all blood was lost that it was also fatal in disadvantageous circumstances—such as a magical wound that wouldn’t heal with no way to counter it.

However, over the month of extreme training, I had to learn where the lines of effectiveness were. When was it simply more effective to cut the limb off and let it regenerate on its own, rather than sit and wait for it to heal without intervention?

The line became clearer and clearer over time, with a more instinctual edge to it. We kept the system as empirically accurate as we could, but in the end my gut instinct lined up with the results almost perfectly.

Burns, for the most part, seemed relatively easy for my body to repair, but extreme mangling took far longer. Let’s say that my limb was absolutely obliterated under a huge rock. It would take far less time for me to cut it off, because then it isn’t a game of piecing the jigsaw back together, and just following the pre-set pattern in my DNA—or something like that.

During this same time, Mayer began to teach Rethi the sword. A short sword, in Rethi’s case. Just as he had been with hand-to-hand fighting, he was also a bit of a prodigy with a sword. Mayer had told me that a reason for his excellent growth was that he had a real, living opponent that he couldn’t kill but could damage as much as he wished. Practically the best practice dummy that existed.

It made sense to me, and Rethi’s blade taught me a lot of harsh lessons, and the same was true for my body teaching Rethi harsh lessons about his blade. Turns out, when your enemy doesn’t care about being cut, he can trap your blade in between his own bones. Painful, but useful.

With my healing, Rethi’s sword caused a lot of pain, but was all healed quickly. Many of the fatal blows that Rethi was training to execute barely hindered me. I was, however, terrified of blunt weapons.

A sword made a clean enough cut, especially with a master using it. My healing is naturally strong against that sort of damage. If a blunt weapon hit my centre mass with enough force, it would deal enough damage to put me out of the fight for at least a few good minutes.

Of course, that amount of damage, from either weapon, would generally kill those without crazy amounts of power and defence like Mayer.

Rethi also started to grow, and pretty rapidly at that.

The little runty beggar started to gain mass and height. Shooting up to a surprising five foot five, his body soaking up nutrition and physical training like a bone-dry sponge. At this point it had only been three months into the training, and maybe four months since I had first brought him to my employ.

It was a relatively classic, if exaggerated, growth spurt. I wasn’t sure if I had ever met someone who had grown an easy five inches in almost as many months, but after asking Mayer, he told me that the foods that we were eating were of extremely high nutritional value, and that he wasn’t remotely surprised—especially with it coinciding somewhat with puberty.

Apparently, there were villages that were founded extremely close to areas that housed extremely nutritional foods and game, and some of those villages commonly had children in their mid-teens be six foot five or taller.

It seems my height wasn’t unusual in the grand scheme of things, after all.

For all the progress that Rethi made in his physical department, I made in the mental department.

My understanding of the Sharah soared throughout my training. I learned many words, most of them either having little effect on what I already understood or were effectively totally unusable for the time being.

The most useful words that I ended up learning were those that allowed me to shape the way the ‘kinetic blast’ formed. For example, it allowed me to visualise the kinetic blast as water that would hit the target and wrap around and almost spray the kinetic energy off to the sides of the target.

This could theoretically be useful if I used kinetic blast at someone and they had people behind them that I also wanted to effect, creating somewhat of a shotgun of force. I wasn’t to fragment the force of the kinetic blast, and it seems like something that will be outside of my wheelhouse for a while yet.

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Another form of the kinetic blast was effectively a cube of force, which acts very similarly to the original, unshaped form of kinetic blast, but kinetic blast originally starts with more of a ball like shape, so the cube allows for more surface area to be effected by the blast. The ‘water’ kinetic blast technically would effect more surface area, but is far less powerful than both the cube and the spherical blasts.

Mayer and I were desperately working on being able to create a slashing or piercing blast, but all the ways that felt like they could pan out dead ended abruptly, which initially made me think that I needed more kinetic energy to produce them. That ended with me simply putting many holes in the ground.

It was frustrating, because I felt like I had all the words and the emphasis to properly create an edge, but it just wasn’t coming to fruition like I had hopes. That was when I started to feel like I was getting sluggish with every action that I completed in the sentence that I thought would allow me to do a slash blast.

It took me maybe a week or so to figure it out. With Rethi’s help, really. I was explaining the issue to him, showing him step by step what I thought I was doing correctly, when he asked me, ‘who the hell speaks that slow?’ For months I had been taking a slow and methodical approach to it all, but if this were really a language of body movements, then I was totally forgetting ‘cadence’.

With that little glimmer of a thought, I started training at speeding up my movements, whilst also teaching myself proper cadence of how to enact a shift.

It didn’t take long before the way that I moved to enact a kinetic shift changed drastically.

Mayer had commented, day one, that if I had to make the big movements that I was doing to shift a kinetic blast, then I would be useless in combat. I desperately needed to find a way to properly shift without having to make too many crazy movements.

The concept of cadence changed everything. Not only did it bring about the understanding of ‘speaking’ quickly and sharply to enact a ‘bladed’ shift, but also how to speak quietly and subtly. It was when I casted my first raw kinetic blast against Mayer with him barely noticing the movements that I realised just how deeply nuanced the Sharah really was.

When I found more and more of these concepts and added them to the list of things the Sharah was comprised of, I began to feel like I was floating face down on the surface of a sea, staring into the inky blackness, knowing something is there but too mesmerised, and perhaps terrified, to swim down.

With the new understanding of cadence being applied to my use of the Sharah, everything was recontextualised. For example, training with Rethi where I was only allowed to defend.

Beforehand, I was simply using the tempo and speed that I thought was needed and was fit for the situation, but now that I was being aware of the natural cadence that the words wanted to be spoken in, and the context that surrounded them, my mistakes in dodging became far fewer and my blocking became extremely effective.

Before long, it was a game that Rethi simply couldn’t win. In a head on fight, even with a sword, Rethi wasn’t able to down me. It felt good, but I knew deep down that it was a pitiful win. With the abilities that had been granted to me by default for being a Champion, it was surprising that it took this long for me to reach this stage. Mayer had laughed at me in his gentle way when I told my thoughts on the matter.

“Don’t worry about it. It wasn’t like you didn’t work to get to this stage. Also, keep in mind that you are basically self-learning one of the most elusive martial practices in the worlds. Your comprehension of the Sharah continues to blow me away, and I am one of the only foreign ‘certified’ practitioners.”

It made me feel better, but even still, the threat of the Champions who were at least this good on the first day here. Over the few months that I had been training the thought slowly began to eat at me, terrifying me more and more until I started panicking during the night-time hours. Mayer had nodded at me and told me that it was the curse of a man tasked with a job far bigger than himself.

It was still a few more weeks until I managed to shift the kinetic blade, which graced me with an achievement.

[Sharp as a Tack: Through movement and a great deal of mental effort, you have sharpened raw kinetic force into a blade. +5 Mind]

The notification brought a begrudging smile to my face. It was the largest upgrade in Mind I had received in months now. Kinetic blade had taken a lot of work to properly shift, and it would be a long process of taking the crazy mess of words and cadences and minimise it down as much as possible to that I could one day cast it without crazy dance-like movements.

From then on out, the remaining month or so resulted in me learning to better wield my hammer. Mayer helped me with the basics of wielding an oversized and overly heavy weapon, but I was left to my own devices to leave how to use it in conjunction with the Sharah.

At first, I tried desperately to compensate for the massive size of the weapon with massive, slow and incredibly loud movements, and after Mayer knocked me on my ass a few times the way I wielded the hammer began to shift.

Rethi was too weak for me to play around with my hammer near him, so he mainly watched on the sidelines, training in some fashion all the while.

Over the course of a week, I went from completely overkill compensation for the size and weight of the hammer, to calm quick and quiet movements to compliment the hammer.

In that week, it became abundantly clear to me that I would never be the centrepiece of the fight, it would be the hammer. It was simply too much of a behemoth to treat any other way.

So, instead of trying desperately to wield it I simply let it wield me.

The massive thing really only needed a little nudge from me, and clever use of gravity and centrifugal force, and I had a hammer that could bludgeon someone to death in a simple swing, much like the forest wolf that I had killed on the first day.

I learned to quickly summon and unsummon the weapon once a big blow had been dealt, in preparation for when it either got stuck in whatever I had hit with the blow and also so the enemy wasn’t able to exploit the downtime of my trying to reposition the hammer so that it could be swung again.

Once I mastered the ability to summon and unsummon the hammer, my ability to wield the hammer went up exponentially. The time it took to summon and unsummon the weapon became second nature, making the swings in which the hammer was still in the process of forming from the soul metal much easier to reliably land.

It was when I added shifting into the mix that I started to understand just how dangerous I really was.

I could both use the hammer as a source for kinetic force in shifting, which Mayer quickly told me that he would rather wasn’t used on him or any living creature without the intent to maim or kill. However, the problem with this was that to properly utilise the kinetic force took a lot of concentration and wind-up time. It took almost ten seconds to do it reliably and without the kinetic potential dripping through my fingers.

Instead, I could use my own kinetic force to compliment the force of the hammer itself, which was far more achievable.

At this stage, all it really consisted of was using a kinetic blast on the hammer at opportune moments to add to the force of the hammer’s movement. The transfer rate of the kinetic blast into the hammer was poor, but at the moment it was the best option I had.

I mostly used the stamp of my feet because the weight of the hammer itself actually contributed to the strength of the kinetic blast.

When the month began to come to an end, I started to actually come around to feeling comfortable wielding the beast of a thing.

It was only then that Mayer approached me, with a grin that would put the Cheshire cat to shame on his face.

“Congratulations, you finished basic training. How about a good old beatdown?”