Daedalus Khimaira knew that someone, somewhere, in a golden palace watching him, must be laughing at his exhausted form. Last month, training in the Legions was not what he expected himself to be a part of. With the trials approaching however, the clan as a whole moved to prepare. This meant that some members of the Golden Devil Clan were told to join the Legion by their peers. Not Daedalus though, his reason to be ground down for the past week in physical training was a lot simpler. He wanted to open his own pie shop! The money he could stably gain from being a member of the Legions would go quite a ways into that dream, after a short nap though.
Daedalus embraced the quiet bed. Rubble can be very soft, surprisingly.
"Someone must have pulled some strings to get you a place in the X Black Shadows." a thousand bells interrupted Daedalus's quiet bed. Groaning, Daedalus looked up from the training ground to see trainer Rhines with a hand outstretched to Daedalus. Thinking of the money to earn, Daedalus held the desire to fight the person who interrupted his nap. Rhines's outstretched arm proceeded to pull up Daedalus.
"I just want to sleep" moaned Daedalus.
"I can see that. If I wasn't a trainer of the X Black Shadows you might be left alone to sleep out here for the night. As the trainer of the X Black Shadows it is my job to know the weaknesses and strengths of our members. You are unusually weaker than most people right now usually are. When breaking recruits down it doesn't normally take from dawn to dusk for a recruit to tire. Much less a full week before the recruit cannot handle the physical training anymore."
Trainer Rhines was being unusually talkative today. If Daedalus wasn't so tired, he'd walk away. Instead, he tried to stay standing in front of trainer Rhines, who would not stop talking.
"Someone really is looking out for you though. The Black Shadow cohorts of the Legions is, in some ways, the safest armies of the Legions. We train demonic tunists to aid in battle formations with the other cohorts of the Legions. This means that our members need to have an extensive knowledge of battle formations, tunes, and instruments. Physical training isn't nearly as necessary for a demonic tunist as it is for our other troops. Still need to train our recruits not to slow the Legions down in a retreat, and to put up a fight if surrounded." Rhines finished the lecture with a cold smile.
"I'm going to tell you a little secret, the Black Shadows are required by clan law not to have a single recruit drop out of our four year training course. All recruits must either join our group, or be transferred elsewhere if they have something concerning."
Rhines reached behind himself to pull out a drum, before continuing to talk.
"We are aids to the Legions, not the commanders. There are exceptions, such as border patrol, but that's rare. Effective use of our techniques in such a large area would require more of us to play constantly at all times. Highly effective, but an intruder can always go around, straight through if they're strong enough, or have a road outlined by heaven for them. The clan has tried outright blocking the Trials with demonic tunists before."
Daedalus didn't know that. He had assumed the clan was too proud to rely on anything except battle formations, the Legions, and arrays. Otherwise he should have heard something about poison masters among cohorts of the legions, or a whole army of animals fighting for the clan.
"That was in better times when the bloodline of the clan was purer, and we had about fifty nascent soul masters."
Rhines banged his drum taking Daedalus's mind elsewhere.
People stood in a room overlooking a map array of a mountain range. Dressed in purple robes, with the only other remarkable thing about them being their green hair, and expressions. Faces that looked as if they had walked into a fight with death while naked without a weapon. The people nodded together.
"The plan as recorded was simple, make the invaders attack each other. It should have worked, and it mostly had."
A lone person, dressed in the clothes of a sword cultivator. Wandered a mountain valley in search of something. Something the lone swordsman appeared unable to find. Daedalus followed the journey of the lone swordsman across the mountains into a valley with bronze statues. The sword cultivator became excited, his mouth made no sound, but an expression of intense longing that made Daedalus uncomfortable appeared on his face. Daedalus became even more uncomfortable when the sword cultivator took his sword out, but the qi aura on the sword turned the sword into a pickaxe.
The lone swordsman attacked the bronze statues. A bronze statue with incredibly black eyes, from the back of the bronze statue valley, rushed over to the lone swordsman. With one punch, the lone swordsman died. That one bronze statue with black eyes became attacked by another bronze statue. Soon, the whole valley transformed into an arena of bronze flying around until none remained standing. Just when Daedalus thought the fight was over, like a desert mirage seen from a different vantage point, the bronze statues became corpses of oddly dressed cultivators in horrible pieces. Some were charred, some had been frozen solid. None were breathing anymore
"The record written was that while the clan did eliminate many invaders, losing only a few members of the clan. The few hundred surviving raiders became heaven's chosen. Come the next trial, and those chosen became completely immune to all forms of demonic tunes."
Where they walked, light followed. Moving furnaces of unstoppable human figures moved mountains with a mere arm movement. The figures killed nobody where they walked only damaging the lands they went through at ridiculous speeds. A purple robed, green haired person, from the first vision, threw a punch at one of the figures. The punch went through the figure of light as if they were a ghost. The figure of light continued to alter the land as if the purple robed person were a creature so far beneath the attention of the light furnace, no words were needed to explain the actions of the stars.
"Worse, they were somehow enslaved by heaven. What had been a trial, turned into annihilation as the raiders wrecked our resources instead of the clan. Fields became infertile. Arrays were heavenly changed to poison the air, walls visibly aged into dust. If not for the nature of the clan we would have devolved into infighting over limited resources, as it was we lost our potential from the rage of the heaven's. After that, a strict rule was put in place, no large cohorts of demonic tunists for the trials."
Standing at attention with his eyes shut, Daedalus had no response for Rhines.
"Hey, you awake?" Rhines clapped his hands near Daedalus's ear. Getting no response from clapping in front of Daedalus's ear. Rhines crouched low to place his palm on the ground of the training field. Lines of a array lit up from a qi infusion, changing the field from a flat plain under the night sky into a warm mattress of pillows. Standing up with a smile on his face, Rhines hummed with every step taken from Daedalus's now fallen form from it's upright position.
Daedalus woke with the sun on his back, and a foreboding feeling. The feeling only grew worse at the sight of familiar pillows, with familiar names upon them, specifically Daedalus's name in the characters native to the Golden Devils.
"Dungfowl? Not again."
One of the unique creatures of the desert are the dungfowl, a bird notorious for it's annoying habit of collecting dung while having a unhealthy obsession with fire. The feathers of the dungfowl were incredibly warm, which would make them useful for mortals if not for the stench that had been declared impossible to remove.
Daedalus hoped he would reach the baths to remove some of the stench before training began. With every slow step to the baths accompanied by pain, Daedalus anticipated a long morning ahead.
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Map arrays are useful things. After the ridiculous number of mathematical equations performed on the terrain. Finding the power source for the array. Refining the array so it would not immediately drain the power source in seconds. Map arrays are useful things, but a pain to implement.
With the commander of the Black Shadows, and the battle formation master for the Black Shadows, trainer Rhines observed Daedalus's path to the nearest bathhouse in the training grounds, counting the time until Daedalus entered.
"He heals under sunlight, becomes weaker without it." Darius, the Black Shadow commander confirmed.
"Rhines has been running the lad hard for the last six days. The journey to the baths took less time than it did yesterday. Normal bodies cannot take that level of abuse." commented the battle formation master for the Black Shadows.
"A bloodline seems likely, but I asked you here for a question. Should we work on improving his physical abilities or transfer him out to a different cohort? His strength seems to lie in the body instead of a profession. With the Trials approaching our demonic tunes will be more helpful to allow the Legions to train while we take their chores on." asked Rhines.
"Raise all the recruits physical abilities up, have them train in battle formations, extend the training time to twelve years. With the last four years of those twelve devoted to demonic tunes.. Just because we are on the backline during the trials is no reason we cannot aid our people as a last line of defense during them." commanded Darius.
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Note: I'm not very good at writing. I imagine that Daedalus's sun bloodline would be extremely obvious to figure out, but it is possible that if you don't fight, the bloodline could go unnoticed for years. I hope you don't mind my taking some liberties with demonic tunists. They really would be helpful for the clan, but some reason to not mention they exist in large groups for the clan is the direction I'm going with this. Demonic Tunes would easily go against that rule of only those of the same cultivation level fight each other, as a tune can be heard by many. A demonic tune that caused untold havoc to the invaders during a Trial, to the point that the heaven's had to intercede personally on the punishment should be enough of a reason for the clan to choose not to use them for the trials, which would in turn reduce the favorability of demonic tunes among the clan. I can see individual demonic tunists being fine, but a whole group of demonic tunists working together to mess with the Trial should have had incredibly good results at least once. Just no more than that once.
Omake Bonus: Cultivation Boost
