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Chapter 132- A Strange Dance?
🕑 Added 2024-01-30 23:59:00 +0000 UTCArthur closed his eyes, trying to ignore the twitching in his limbs as he thrust his spear for what felt like the thousandth time. It probably was. The pain in his muscles felt like an electric current was constantly running through them and half his focus was spent making sure an involuntary spasm didn’t ruin his form.
A quick dose of healing would get rid of all his troubles but Issania, the demoness, had expressly forbidden him from doing so. Apparently, she didn’t trust his healing to not undo all the progress he was making. As she’d explained to him, unless he had years of experience with magical healing, or he was an unparalleled genius in the field, then standard healing would only hinder him. Healing returned a body to its peak natural state, it didn’t account for any changes someone had tried to introduce into their body via physical training and so would simply undo them.
Unless he was confident enough to heal his body whilst accounting for the new muscle growth they were trying to stimulate, there was no point.
Arthur secretly thought she just liked watching him suffer. He’d never be caught saying it out loud though, not over his dead body. The silver lining to this situation though, was that with his prodigious regeneration rate, which was currently unhalved thanks to the interference of a tier 3 locus and its infusion of ether into the area, his training was progressing about nineteen times faster than Issania had expected.
She had, in fact, completely changed her training plans for him when she saw how fast he recovered, something she attributed to his unique physique and he chose not to correct. Her new training plan was far, far more thorough than the one she initially thought she’d barely have the time to get through.
Arthur had cursed his health regeneration about twenty times this past hour, at least he thought it had been that long. He'd lost track of time for quite a while now. Arthur heard a shrill whistle and nearly cried in relief. It was the signal to stop, and it took all his willpower and then some not to drop the spear and crash down onto the ground. He’d paid for it the first time with an instant cancellation of his two-minute break and he didn’t think his heart could take another right now. Issania, the monster, had somehow repurposed the former endurance challenge’s restrictions into her bastardised version of a hyperbolic training chamber.
Instead of making skills more expensive the longer he used them, that effect now applied to any bodily movements he made. Suffice it to say Arthur didn’t think he’d trained this hard in his life. He also hadn’t improved as fast… ever. It was quite literally magic and Issania was so good at teaching he wouldn’t be surprised if she had a legendary class for it. She knew exactly how far she could push him and was quick to correct his mistakes, though she did allow him to make them first. Heck, she actively encouraged it. ‘Failure was the true master of success,’ another quote she’d stolen from her dad. She’d actually admitted to stealing it from him when he asked, though she’d said it with such a proud grin on her face he couldn’t find it in him to tease her.
The thousandth thrust he’d made, exhausted as he was, was like night and day when compared to the first one he’d made in peak form. “Good,” Issania said walking in front of him. “You’re still over extending a little and you roll your shoulders sometimes still but these are all things that’ll be ironed out of you when we move on to practical application. Nonetheless, you’ve gotten two times better than I predicted you would and we still have two hours to go. Well done. I’m proud of you.” She clasped her hands together and inclined her head at him in a partial bow. “You’re going to earn me some amazing rewards, you know that,” she joked.
Arthur didn’t have the energy to laugh so he merely smiled at her. “Remember what I said at the beginning. A good piercing thrust is half of spear-wielding. You’ve got to an adequate level, enough that I don’t mind you telling anyone that Issania the spear maiden trained you anymore.”
“I thought your weapon of choice was the sword, teacher.”
“Semantics, Mr Ward. no need to get caught up in the details. You can drop the spear for now, by the way. Relax your arms a little for what's coming next.”
Arthur let go of the weapon like it weighed a million tons and groaned in relief and he shook at the tension from his forearms. Issania chuckled, “Now if only you could follow the rest of my instructions so fast, we’d have made a spear-prodigy out of you already.”
Picking up his weapon, she got into the stance she'd taught him and started cycling through the eleven forms she’d taught him. First, she demonstrated the way he made the motions, pointing out all the flaws and slight deviances he’d made and then she’d show him what the perfected motion looked like. Logically, Arthur knew Issania’s spear forms were not flawless she’d said as much, that any master of the weapon would laugh at her strikes as the thrusts of an amateur- but to him, someone who’d only just picked up the weapon a few hours ago it looked like the peak he’d forever seek to reach.
Shaking his head to clear his thoughts, Arthur focused on what Issania was saying. She was especially expressing the mistakes he’d made on the seventh form. It was the spear-strike equivalent of an uppercut, designed to strike under the chin to pierce the brain. Issania had admitted that the spear form would rarely ever see use in battle, it was too specific to use against most opponents, but apparently it set the foundation for hundreds of more advanced strikes, a transitionary position as she called it.
“I think your hand-to-hand combat training is to blame for this, but you're subconsciously curling your wrist inwards a few degrees on the upthrust. You might not think it's a problem right now, but the moment you meet a strong enough defence, or someone knocks aside a blow, you run the risk of snapping your wrist. Your joints are practically identical to mine, and they’re not designed to handle force applied at certain angles.”
She stepped backwards and held his spear in a resting motion against the ground. Looking him up and down, she noted that his prodigious regeneration had already healed his sore muscles. “Sure, your unique physique might allow you to use improper form without facing the same consequences as the rest of us, but that advantage only lasts until you meet someone strong enough. Fixing the issue now will save you a lot of pain somewhere down the line. You’ve got a talent for spear-fighting, enough that a number of martial schools in my homeworld would have you in, but it’s the little things like this that will differentiate you from other geniuses. You might pick up another weapon in the future and leave the spear behind, but I’d hate to see you squander your potential. The lessons you learn here will translate very well to a number of other polearms, even a few axe styles I’ve seen used.”
“Apart from that,” she paused to see if he’d taken everything she’d said in. “Your thrusts are explosively fast which many tend to struggle to achieve. I certainly did. You're still not using your lead leg very well. It’s gotten a little better over the past hour, but you quickly fall back into old habits when you're tired. Keeping most of your weight off your leading foot is probably great for whatever martial art you trained, but your attacks are about 30% weaker because of it with the spear. Remember what I said, force is-”
“Always generated from the ground,” Arthur finished off for her.
“Exactly,” Issania beamed. “And you need both feet planted properly on the ground to generate that force.”
Arthur groaned as the high-elf chuckled. This was the twenty-seventh time she’d said those words.
“Alright. That’s it. Breaks over. Get back to it,” she commanded.
He spent the next half hour polishing up on the eleven fundamental forms, but this time, Issania introduced transitionary movements to his training. This meant that instead of returning to a neutral position after every strike, he now had to ‘flow’ one of them into the next. It took away the half-second break he used to get after every attack and he was now in constant motion where every interruption to the flow was punished with a three-second reduction to his break times, which felt like they were being placed further and further apart. He’d started the training with one every five minutes and now, he didn’t think he was getting one in twice that time.
It was almost a dance of sorts, the movements of his torso and arms that whilst certainly more harsh than traditional dance, certainly had a kind of elegance to it. The thought turned out to be a premonition of sorts, or was it a self-fulfilling prophecy? Arthur wasn’t sure and was too exhausted to figure it out. He twisted his hips and pushed off his foreleg, his spear an extension of his body as he pushed it through an imagined enemy, exhaling heavily as he began to transition into the next form, never stopping for even a second.
“Pause!”
Arthur froze halfway through the motion, his muscles screaming. This was the longest he’d gone without a break and the floor's restrictions were making every repeated movement cost about 30 times more effort than it initially had.
“You can let go of the weapon, lie on the ground, whatever you want to do to relax for the next five minutes .”
Arthur didn’t think he’d ever heard sweeter words, and he dropped bonelessly to the ground. “Don’t fall asleep though,” Issania reprimanded. “I need you to pay attention to what I’m saying, okay.” She prodded him in the side with her feet to see if he was still awake, and cleared her throat. “Well, where was I? Ah yes. I’m not sure if you’ve realised by now, but the movements you’ve learned so far when performed together, create a dance of sorts. It’s a spear art called the star-spear revelations, as pretentious a name as I’ve ever heard. Apparently, its creator managed to piece the core of a sentient spirit star with it, a tall tale so absurd it's almost sacrilegious. Normally, now would be the time I’d tell you about the style's long and rich history but I’m sure neither of us could care less. So far, you’ve learned half of the foundational arts, the attacking forms. Now you need to master the footwork.” She paused for dramatic effect.
“I hope you’re good at dancing.”
Issania’s teaching methodology for footwork was, in his professional opinion, questionable. ”If you wanted a dance, you could’ve just asked me, teach,” Arthur teased. “You didn’t have to try and trick me into anything.”
Issania blushed a deep shade of scarlet, and he could literally feel the heat radiating off her. They were, after all, face to face, with barely a foot distance between themselves. “Okay, Mr Ward,” she huffed, stepping away and disengaging from him. “I need you to take this seriously. You just had to go and make it awkward.” She pulled out the helmet she’d stored away and put it back on, hiding her face from his vision. “Let’s try this again. If you say something annoying, I’m going to step on your toes.”
A few minutes into his new training regimen, Arthur was cursing his past self for his poorly thought joke. He couldn’t prove anything, but he was sure Issania was being a lot more exacting than she needed to be. Things had started off normal enough, if a little more intimate than one would expect a spear training to be. They’d started off standing opposite each other, with his spear between them. He’d placed his hands where he normally would, and she’d put her own beside them on the inside.
Then they’d started ‘dancing,’ where Issania led and Arthur followed every movement of her feet with his own, constantly trying to maintain a perfect twenty centimetres gap between them. At the beginning it was easy enough, if a little awkward, she’d gone so slowly a pre-system human would’ve easily been able to keep up. As things progressed through, she started to move faster, adding more and more complex moves until Arthur struggled to simply keep up, heaving for breath as they moved across the ground, so fast, a breeze of wind constantly surrounded them and yet so softly that their feet didn't leave any indentations on the floor.
At least Issania's feet didn't. Try as he might, he still left a trail of prints in his wake, though even a blind man would be able to tell the vast improvements he'd made in the past hour. He'd transformed from a heavy-footed barbarian into a warrior who looked like he danced as part of a competitive hobby. Arthur didn't know if he was happy or sad when Issania disengaged from him. On the one hand, he was so exhausted a stiff breeze could probably knock him over, but on the other, he recognised that the past four and a half hours of training were worth their weight in gold.
Sadly, their allotted time had come to an end. It was time to put his class to the test. His layer challenge rewarded him according to how well he performed in his spar with Issania.
It didn't expect him to win.
Arthur didn't think he could lose.
