B2 Ch. 13 Padawan

Tilly finished out that evening by meditating and grabbing dinner before bed.

Well, he tried to meditate. However, meditation on the edge of the parade ground wasn’t nearly as productive as it had been on the side of the mountain. He spent most of the time trying to focus on breathing and moving between thoughts about the nascent nation's chances in the wide world and his own challenges against Corruption. No matter how hard he had tried to move past these thoughts, they just kept coming.

Ichiro had eventually called it a night once he noticed Tilly’s face devolving from focused to disgruntled. He helped up the frustrated human and informed him that in the long run, meditating in such environments would assist him in gaining the Battle Trance skill, even if the provided short term challenges to focus,

“I highly doubt you will ever be a man who finds much comfort in silence… So instead we will lean into that as a strength.  Do not fight against your environment, walling it out.  Instead, let it wash through you, and in its passing only quiet will remain.”

After that, they had grabbed dinner, and Tilly found his small shack newly sandwiched between two large timber walls, supporting structures that where significantly bigger than what had been there previously.

With a rueful shake of his head, Tilly had entered his small shelter and collapsed in bed, barely remembering to shut the door behind him.  Pushing himself to the edge of comprehension mentally, emotionally, and physically had finally caught up with him and consciousness fled him with abandon.

He stubbornly lingered in that place between waking and dreaming for a few rebellious moments. Some part of him touching on the place in his own mind where time spirals and space returns to its starting point.  Where belief and identity supersede flesh and blood.  There, music once again moved around and through him, calling him to grow,

to become more.

He followed the song to its source and saw a riot of color continuously bursting forth into wild patterns, reaching out to and through all things.   Yet this song was not unfettered, it was surrounded on all sides by a crashing, hungry silence.

The screeching of a broken record, twisting at the edges of the song and attempting to unravel it from the outside in.

…

8 hours later.

Tilly awoke to the industrious sounds of sawing and hammering just outside his thin walls.  He rolled over, swallowing through the dryness in his mouth, and grinned as he found water and a simple meal of rice and eggs on a tray next to his bed.

He chowed down and guzzled the water, before slipping out into the early morning to find that he was once again far from the first one up in the city.

Everywhere he looked he saw people hurrying, but not in the same way he had seen in the capital’s final hours.  The people he saw moving through the slowly filling streets, all moved with purpose-filled steps.  Their slack looks of hopelessness replaced by determination and in some cases, eagerness.

Carpenters were shouting at masons to hurry and lay stone for foundations, while behind them fishermen, hauled in early morning catches in heavy laden baskets.   It was clear that the entirety of the Three-Fold Alliance knew about the Boons and was intent on getting as much from them as possible.

He hopped into the stream of people and headed through the burgeoning city to the parade grounds. His pace increased to a jog almost subconsciously as the energy of the surrounding populous lightened his steps.

He arrived at the agreed corner of the parade grounds to find Ichiro already kneeling in meditation.  Tilly’s face unknowingly turned down in a frown as he hurried over to take a position opposite the lapin in the dawning light of the day.

Ichiro’s breathing remained unchanged, but a small smile tweaked the corners of his mouth as Tilly studiously got into the breathing pattern and began to focus intently on his visualized flame.

Soldiers trickled onto the field around them, clanking along in unfamiliar gear.  They cursed their own clumsiness and teased each other in turn, preparing for another intense day of training. Tilly breathed in their presence and breathed it out again.  Taking Ichiro’s words to heart, he tried letting all the sensory input he was receiving move through him instead of trying to wall it out.

Commanders began bellowing out orders and harassing any stragglers who were slow to obey.  Formations were established, and drills began.  Nearby someone tripped and the sound of dusty thunk reached Tilly. His right leg began to cramp and the annoying muscular pinch demanded his attention for a long few minutes.

All these things and more flooded Tilly’s senses, and he did his best to take them in and let them go again, trying to find that deeper place he had touched in front of the temple.

But his flickering flame had only grown a small amount when Ichiro broke their meditation time,

“That is enough for now Jonathan Tillman, I can tell you are improving tremendously.”

“Tch.”  Tilly snarked as he got to his feet and shook out his sleeping lower extremities.

“What was found, can be found again.  Do not be disappointed that all of your progress is not blindingly fast.”  The lapin admonished, his stern expression looking out of place on his relatively young face.  Or maybe he just looked young when Tilly compared him to his father, who seemed to be made out of granite as well as skin and bones.

The stern look however remained until Tilly relented,

“Oh, Alright!  I just hate the thought that I’m doing less than I could.”  Tilly sighed, rolling his shoulders, and loosening his back.

The lapin nodded in solemn understanding before stepping back a few feet and clearing his throat,

“Now as your skill advances, your footing, hand placement, and form will all improve incrementally. Our best understanding of skill leveling is that as you take steps toward improving your own ability in an area, the System supplements that improvement. So, for every level you advance a skill, you must take a significant step forward on your own, and the system adds to that improvement with a portion of its own vast store of experiential knowledge.  Knowledge gathered and stored over the course of all creation.”  Ichiro lectured, clearly reciting much of this by rote, and if Tilly didn’t miss his guess, he knew exactly who Ichiro’s tutor had been.

Tilly broke into the lecture with what he hoped was a clarifying question,

“Except for combat skills, the System will not ‘supplement’ improvements there without you facing serious risk…Why is that?”

“It is actually for our benefit!” Ichiro answered excitedly, choosing not to pick up on the slight whine that may or may not have entered Tilly's voice at the tail end of the question.

“Can you imagine what the truly powerful would be able to do if they could advance such skills in the safety of their strongholds? Power would be perpetuated endlessly without challenge or change.“ He continued passionately,

“No, even the inheritors and great powers of this world must put themselves at risk to advance.  In fact, the kind of training we are doing here would not typically be enough to significantly grow your skills, due to your knowledge of the non-lethality of our encounters.  But with the boon in place, this loss is balanced out.  This gives us the luxury of advancing our abilities as combatants without risking our lives.” At this point, Ichiro’s expression was so enthusiastic that Tilly almost felt bad about the dread that was once again building internally at the thought of being cut and stabbed for hours.

“The only thing that will not improve along with your weapon skills is your sense of what will be effective against different enemies.  In this, you already have a good instinct,  but we will sharpen you as much as possible over the next weeks until you are operating at the full potential of your build.” He concluded, his gaze growing more serious as his hand moved to rest ominously on his sword.

“Now, I want you to try the same opening strike you used against me initially yesterday.  I will respond by countering exactly how I did last time… anticipate my movements and see if you can’t produce a different result.”

…

The rest of the morning was a slog of painful repetition, as Tilly grew familiar with just how fast and capable Ichiro was with his sword… drawn or sheathed.  They moved through the same close combat opener and his method for closing the gap on any enemy who had a counter for his ranged throws.

Ichiro struck Tilly with numerous painful but superficial cuts, stabbed him a few times, and even broke Tilly’s hip.  Every injury was a shock to Tilly’s system and kept him on a razor edge every time he reset to face the calm swordsman.  Every couple of exchanges, Ichiro would send Tilly to rest for ten to twenty minutes or until he was capable of full range of motion.

Even with Ichiro's occasional slips into distracted, far-off staring it was still a brutal beat down. The lapin’s inborn battle reflexes were more than enough to match Tilly in those moments.  In one of these exchanges, when Ichiro’s face suddenly went slack, Tilly swore the sword jerked the lapin's arm into a fanning block that intercepted both of his strikes.

In fact, Tilly was not able to repeat his feat of surprise from yesterday at all, not over the course of several hours of training.

It was grueling, both mentally and physically.

It reminded Tilly of some of the hardest gear workouts he had ever done; 75lbs of wet protective equipment doing its best to drag him into the ground as he carried dummies, climbed stares, and advanced a charged hose.  That level of physicality, but with the abrasive mental element of facing constant injury from violence. Tilly’s fight-or-flight instinct was taking a beating along with his body suffering from decades of peacetime living.

Even his close familiarity with the pressures of a life-and-death profession fell far short of what he needed to develop in order to survive in this world of subsonic sword strikes, and fists that could break through stone walls.

By the end of the session, Tilly was unconsciously flinching away any time Ichiro brought his sword around to bear, his battered subconscious frayed to tatters.

With the sun sitting high in the sky, Ichiro considered his student's state carefully, measuring opportunities for further progress against risk,,

“That is enough for today. I believe continuing will do more harm than good.”  He finally said, sheathing his sword, and bowing to Tilly,

“You have shown incredible resilience for one new to this world, I am honored by your courage.” He declared coming up from his bow with something more solemn replacing his typical serene expression.

“Thanks… That means a lot, actually.”  Tilly replied attempting to slide his hatchets into their loop several times before actually getting them in.

“Make sure to drink some water before you start meditating.  I want you to take time to feel your way around the mental and emotional obstacles you are facing.  Especially the reality that they will only get worse.”  he said, his eyes softening, even as his tone remained heavy.

Tilly nodded along absently, moving slowly towards the water troughs as a limp in his right leg slowly resolved itself, the pain fading but its memory still affecting his movements mentally.

He absently cupped the water in his hands and splashed it over his face and sweat-soaked hair.   As his mental fog began to clear he opened his blinking notification log to a sea of detailed injury logs.  He winced, mentally invoking the damage notification filter once again and leaving only the numeric evidence of his progress.

Beginner Hatchett Level 12 > Level 14

Dual-Wielding (Hatchets) Level 8 > Level 11

Ax Throwing Level 15 > Level 16

A thrum of satisfaction reverberated through the numbness that accompanied continuous trauma. The whispers telling him to give up, to ask for a break, or even to run away were ruthlessly smothered by the proof of some sort of improvement.  If he could show similar gains over the next weeks of training, he would more than double his current combat capability.

On top of the skill levels going up, he felt himself gaining a better understanding of the flow of combat itself.  Sure, he hadn’t been able to come up with meaningful counters to the lapin’s speed or skill, but over the course of the morning, he had slowly developed a certain feel for where to attack. Instead of mindlessly following his skills guidance, he found himself actively looking for the most effective places to push and mentally noting where it would be pointless to attempt a strike.

As those three notifications glowed in front of him, he squeezed every bit of hope and encouragement he could from them.  He would do this again tomorrow... and the day after…

However many days it took, he would do what he had to, to protect these poeple.

He would do whatever it took.