Unwieldy (Fantasy & Hammers)

[Sarius]

Chapter 21: Elation

The Sharah, as I quickly found, was exceptionally difficult to learn by yourself. I assumed it was the nature of the movements being free-flowing, and without a specific structure like the more rigid katas that I had performed in karate classes when I was a kid.

I did get the impression from the movements themselves that they were more about the basis of movement than movement in combat specifically. I wouldn't even be surprised if Mayer know other movements that were more specific to combat.

I stumbled around in the dirt for a few hours in the dirt, trying to remember Mayer's precise movements, but when you do something for nine hours it all starts to blend together. One thing that it did achieve, was a clear feeling of wrongness in my movements.

It just felt like I was faking, that I was just blundering along and that I wasn't truly grasping the essence of it at all. It was like anything I guess, but having seen Mayer, whose skill in performing the Sharah was so clear—it was a night and day difference.

The only thing that I had to go off was the sense of wrongness that I had in my head. If I did something that felt even slightly less wrong, then I would continue to do that until I could substitute it with something slightly less wrong.

During the time that I was bumbling along with Mayer, I had felt so much more capable and questioned things less. But now that I was alone, left to my own devices, I felt almost totally incapable of doing anything that could improve my performance of the Sharah. But I continued to do it anyway. I didn't really have anything else to do, just this or some other training style stuff.

I could run, or do push-ups or something of a similar effect, but if I were to be perfectly honest, strength and endurance training was horrifically boring with my body. I knew that much from the time on the Jothian's farm. I could run at my theoretical max speed for days and days and never truly have to stop. I'm sure that I would receive and massive boost in my agility, and maybe I would slowly get better at running itself, but other than that?

Nothing.

However, this… the Sharah. It was skill, a complex and intricate performance that used every part of your legs, forcing you to train your body to move in the correct patterns and positions. If I thought about it, it was like relearning how to move, how to walk. It wasn't exactly the most physically strenuous task in the world. But it was about learning to make every other task more achievable and more efficient.

At least that was what I thought. I couldn't possible fully understand at this point in time, maybe in the future.

But as the sun slowly dipped below the horizon, I realised that I could be working on multiple things at once here. My hammer was still laying in the dirt a few meters away from the well won patch of dirt that I had been drawing circles in for the past fifteen or so hours. At the start of the training session, I had tried summoning that thing as fast as I could, but it ended up feeling like fire was leaking out of my hand. So, I was somewhat nervous about trying to train the summon and unsummon process.

First of all—out of pure curiosity—I tried to unsummon the hammer from a distance, and that didn't do anything at all. I thought as much. Being able to unsummon your Soul Weapon from afar would be incredibly useful. It would also mean that you could never lose your Soul Weapon, and it could never be taken hostage. Which was sad, all things considered. It meant that I was vulnerable, and also that a physical manifestation of my soul could potentially fall into the wrong hands.

I walked over to the hammer and unsummoned it. I walked back over to my little circle and started to do my best mimicry of the Sharah again. As I did so, I summoned the hammer, facing its head towards the ground beside me where it wouldn't impede on my next few movements. After I had done those movements, I then turned around and grabbed the hilt and started to unsummon it.

I immediately stumbled over myself and had to restart.

Thinking as well as trying to perform the Sharah was extremely difficult for me. Mayer could literally do the Sharah with his eyes closed, but I wasn't nearly so practiced.

I tried the same movement over and over again.

I had decided that there was effectively no way for me to imitate Mayer's performance of the Sharah in all its ever shifting and infinitely complex glory—so over the past few hours, I collected all the main movements that I could clearly remember and slotted them haphazardly into a kata of sorts. It looked and felt stupid, and even more unprofessional from the start, but it was the best I could do with my little experience.

What I was trying to do was fit the summoning and unsummoning into a 'cycle' of my Sharah kata. So, I decided that I would unsummon the hammer at the start of the cycle and summon it again at the end of the cycle, but I had to make it fit somehow.

It was really difficult, and sometimes even thinking, 'Okay so in three more steps I grab the handle…" would make me mess up badly enough that I felt better restarting.

It took me maybe thirty tries to unsummon correctly and have performed the Sharah well enough to move on to the next part of the cycle. It would only be in the middle of the third quarter of the kata that I was able to place it where I had unsummoned the hammer from.

The whole idea was to make it so I was able to repeat it—and on top of that, the more naturally and the faster I could unsummon and resummon the hammer, the smoother the Sharah would flow.

Killing two birds with one stone I would say, if I could actually pull it off in the first place.

As good as it is to have someone as obviously amazing as Mayer as reference, it sure makes you say 'Well, Mayer can do…' or 'Well, Mayer does…', only further making you feel inadequate. Maybe its also the other Champions. They are purportedly super intelligent and stuff. How long would it take for them to pick up this stuff? If they were anything like some of the main characters in stories I've read, they would pick it up so fast that even the seconds were meaningful lengths of times—shocking every man and their dog in the entire city, or something equally as ridiculous.

But I was only a regular dude, trying my best to do this weird dance thing while summoning and unsummoning a massive hammer made from my soul.

I've let that sort of thinking stop me from doing lots of things in my life. 'Well I could never be as good as this person.' It was an excuse in a way. Sure, sometimes I said that because I genuinely wasn't interested, but sometimes it was because I looked at those people and realised just how much work it would be to get that good at it.

But here? Here I had no choice. I couldn't give up like that anymore. If I did, then I forfeited the right to survive in this little competition that God had set up. I would never go home—I would never be anything other than a regular dude in the midst of all the geniuses.

So, I continued to try.

I didn't manage to summon the hammer again well enough, and I had to restart from the beginning again. It was another ten tries until I managed to unsummon the hammer well enough to continue, and I failed again.

Over the course of the next two hours, I managed to get my success rate with an unsummoning to one in three, but I still wasn't able to get it to summon quick enough and seamlessly enough to be able to continue to the next stage and then to the next cycle.

It was extremely slow going. I had repeated the same few steps leading up to the unsummoning possibly thousands of times now, and the steps leading up to the summoning at least a few hundred times.

Another hour went pass without being able to summon the hammer again. I had been close a handful of times, but it was so incredibly difficult.

The reason it was so difficult was because of the extra weight that I suddenly had to manage somehow, whilst still performing the steps of the kata. The weight didn't stay the same either, it grew until the head was completely formed, and only then were you able to place it down on the ground, because otherwise the hammer head hadn't formed fully, and the surface was uneven and would fall over onto the ground, making it impossible for you to circle back around and easily unsummon it.

So began the arduous process of trying it again and again until it worked.

I was confident in my ability to pull it off, but the weight of the hammer was so massive, that holding it up in the air while doing complex footwork for just over a second, which seemed to be about as fast at unsummoning as I could achieve while doing the Sharah.

It was painful, my legs burned, my feet burned, my arms burned almost every muscle burned. It was horrible, but It only made me more stubborn.

Stubborn was something that I had never really been. I don't know what it was exactly, but I had always viewed stubbornness as overtly bull-headed. I always saw examples of the 'I'll be right' mentality, and I grew to hate it. I paired it with irrationality. But this? This was exactly the situation for stubbornness. It was then and there that I performed my first true act of stubbornness.

I tried over again. I could do a few hundred tries in an hour now, and I was able to pull off the unsummoning seven out of eight tries, an extremely large improvement over when I was initially trying to first get the kata going.

I had quickly come to the realisation, however, that I would have to be able to perform the lead up to the summoning perfectly every time until I had a reasonable chance of successfully pulling off the summoning.

It was because, even though I was able to perform the movements leading up to the summoning most times out of ten, even if one thing were to put me even slightly off kilter, then I would basically be unable to bear the weight of the summoning. The weight was so huge that it required an extremely solid dispersion of weight between the feet, if it wasn't basically perfect, then I would immediately almost fall over, or drop the hammer because I can't hold it well enough.

So, hours and hours pass of me failing over and over. But I come to care less and less about actually achieving the goal and start to really try to make my movements flow like Mayer's did. It was a mixed bag at first, some movements were easier to pull off with the same floaty, almost ethereal flow that Mayer's every movement exuded, but the overwhelming majority were awkward.

Now that I was performing the movements in a set kata, I could repeat the movements as many times as I so pleased, so adding a new element, like the flow and the hammer, was much easier, because now you could think about your next step instead of haphazardly following along with someone else's movements.

My kata was clearly butchered in comparison to Mayer's performance. There weren't anywhere near as many moves, and not as many combinations, but I had to make it manageable for myself.

Implementing the flow set me back a few hours worth of work, making me fail the unsummoning one time out of four. It was a big blow to my confidence, but I pushed ahead, determined to get back to where I was before I added in the flow of the kata.

Over the next few hours, I felt the kata slowly evolve to more than what it was before. It was still obviously amateurishly made, but as I added in the flow, and changed some of the moves ever so slightly, the movements began to fell far more solid, more natural than they had been before. Whereas before, my movements were shaky, I was trying to keep up with a tempo that I had set myself, and I would rush some steps to make that possible.

This flow suddenly stressed the consistency of movement. While tempo is important, you can keep tempo and still move badly. But to both keep tempo, and to keep a consistent flow, you had to move properly and solidly, otherwise everything would crumble and you would be forced to start again.

It was the introduction of flow that made me fail more in regular sections of the kata. Beforehand I would stumble through them, but the flow was an unforgiving and cruel mistress.

Over and over and over I tried. I was deep into the night, maybe even in the early morning. I could almost assure you that everyone was asleep. It was freezing cold, but I didn't even notice it. My body was warm and buzzing with a strange energy that was totally detached from anything to do with my physical form. It cut through any tiredness that I had and made me forget that pain ever existed in the first place.

I was close.

I swear that I could feel it. My movements now felt seamless in comparison to what I was doing before, my movements all staccato and off kilter. Now I felt solid, and my movements felt meaningful.

More hours passed, and you could start to even see the licks of sunlight peek over the edge of Orisis. But I was absorbed. Time flew by me like a light breeze, almost undetectable. My mind turned off entirely, simply repeating the movements over and over. I wasn't trying anymore. I hadn't given up, but I wanted these movements to be so ingrained in me that I couldn't possibly fail or mess them up.

Time flowed as smoothly as my movements, surprising me in a way. There was a great deal of wrongness in comparison to Mayer, but as I felt myself move it felt so seamless and melodic. As if my joints themselves were singing to me, my body creating a resonating sound within itself, each muscle talking to another all singing a song of combined movement.

And it was there that it happened.

My steps against the ground were firmer than they had been before, it was as if the earth was hugging my feet, holding them and releasing them upon my every movement. Each movement flowed into another with a slow precision that I had been practicing for hours now. The unsummoning went easily, I barely even noticed as my hand moved out to grab the hilt, making the large hammer liquefy and return back into my body. Each step felt light and easily performed, and each planted foot felt as solid as stone.

Then came the summoning. My hand reached out, and the hammer started to slowly form from the liquid spilling from my hand. The weight grew greater and greater until a point into the kata where it was possible for me to angle my upper body so that I could use both arms to hold up the ever-increasing weight.

However, this is where the difficult part began. The section that had made me fail every single time. Doing the Sharah while the hammer head formed was like walking around with a water tank filled with liquid metal. But this time, my stance held, and despite the strange shifting of weight of the forming of the hammer head my movements remained unimpeded.

Then I performed the final steps, placing the hammer on the ground and then seamlessly doing the last minute or so of movements, that despite not having done them many times in comparison to the beginning section, I nailed. Then I returned to the beginning position of the kata.

Then I let the built-up elation soar across my body.

 

[TrashyBoi]

I think you accidentally double posted the chapter, my guy.

 

[Sarius]

I think you accidentally double posted the chapter, my guy.

Click to shrink...

Yeah for sure bungled that one. Fixed with the right text now, so enjoy the character not being stuck in a time loop

Thanks for the heads up, you're a legend.

 

[TrashyBoi]

Yeah for sure bungled that one. Fixed with the right text now, so enjoy the character not being stuck in a time loop

Thanks for the heads up, you're a legend.

Click to shrink...

No problem. By the way, really enjoying the story man keep it up.

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 22: Blasphemer

It was soon into my unadulterated happiness that I heard enthusiastic clapping from behind me. I quickly spun around to see Rethi wide eyed and clapping like a man possessed.

I was surprised, to say the least. I looked up at the sky and realised that it was almost midday. Meaning that I had spent a few hours more than a full day on just practicing the Sharah, including creating the abomination that is my kata.

I looked to Rethi seeing his face clearly, he looked a little rough around the edges—some bruises and cuts still obvious on his form—but he looked a whole lot better than only a day or so ago. I sighed with relief, forgetting my triumph in a moment.

"That was so cool Master Maximillian!" Rethi said, racing up to me with all the energy of a young boy.

"Well yes, but I've only managed to pull it off once so far." I wasn't ready to receive compliments on anything I had done quite yet. Rethi, however, had moved his interest to something else. My hammer. I looked at him oddly as he was intently staring at it—scouring the light silver with his eyes in awe. To be perfectly honest, I was a little amused. He didn't seem to be aware of me staring right at him, so I lightly coughed to pull his attention. His head whipped up to look at me, and embarrassment crept up onto his face—as clear as day.

"Oh! I'm sorry, I… well I couldn't help but look." The boy said, shuffling awkwardly in the dirt. I laughed and looked quizzically at the massive hammer that was head down in the dirt.

"What do you think of it?" I asked. I hadn't really discussed the hammer with anyone but Mayer, I didn't know what just a common person thought of the thing. Rethi looked at the hammer, and then back at me.

"Well… it's beautiful. It might be all one colour, but the detail to it is strange. I haven't seen anything even remotely like it before. I've seen a few of the weapons that mercenaries or warriors wear when they walk through town. The one or two times I've seen it happen, anyway." Rethi shook his head emphatically, "But they look nothing like this. The craftsmanship that went into something of this size, and with this much detail? It's incredible. I would more expect it to be a showpiece on some rich man's mantle than be used as an actual weapon."

And there it was. If I were to be perfectly honest, I didn't really think about the hammer all that hard since I had been handed the thing. I just used it and got on with life, a tool of necessity. But Rethi saw it entirely different. I knew what it truly was, but to Rethi it was a mystical weapon that could be summoned and unsummoned. I nodded to myself slightly before turning to the boy and patting him on the back.

"It's a decent hammer if I do say so myself. It does the job, and I am forced to try and handle it properly." I laughed and walked over and unsummoned the thing by lightly grabbing it by the hilt. Rethi watched in wonder as the hammer rapidly melted into liquid and was absorbed into my hand. It wasn't really any faster than it was before at unsummoning, but it felt slightly smoother somehow, if that made any sense at all.

"Are we going back?" I asked Rethi, who was still gawking ever so slightly. I don't know how well he had caught me summoning and unsummoning the hammer beforehand, but he seemed engrossed this time around. Seeing it unsummoning up close must be different than from afar—the metal leaking into my hand where I touched it. Rethi nodded sharply, waking himself from his stupor and then started to walk quickly in the direction of Mayer's house.

I walked in the same direction, but a great deal slower. I wasn't about to run all the way to Mayer's home, too high energy for me right now—even if I technically always had the energy. Rethi quickly picked up on it and slowed his pace to match mine perfectly.

It took a while to reach Mayer's little house, but the walk was worth it. I needed to let myself rest, even if it was totally superfluous. It helped me readjust from being in a mode where I was crazily repeating the same actions over and over again, with no concept of time at all—into suddenly being a normal human again and having to deal with social encounters. Massive difference.

I barged on in through Mayer's artfully crafted wooden door and took a turn into the living room.

"Morning." I said, not really referring to time all too strictly, and plonked myself down in the seat that has been claimed by me. Mayer took a sip, eyebrows raised amusedly with eyes that peaked over the cup and wrinkled ever so slightly at the sides. Rethi quickly sat down in another spare chair that had been set out what must have been only recently.

"Good afternoon boys." He said half into his cup. "You've been out for a while Rethi. Did you run some errands before you went and fetched Max here?" I looked pointedly towards Rethi.

"N-no sir. I found him out there doing a strange dance. I didn't think I should have interrupted him at the time, so I just waited." The young boy shifted uncomfortably in his seat under the pressure of the combined gazes of me and Mayer.

"How long did you wait, Rethi?" I asked lightly.

"Three hours." Mayer answered for him. I looked at Rethi and sighed, the boy himself looked down at his hands, fiddling with his fingers nervously.

"You were right that I was in the middle of something, but next time just call out to me." The young boy nodded sharply—his much cleaner sandy blonde hair bobbing with the motion. Rethi turned his gaze away from me and I moved my attention away in kind. It wouldn't help to put any weight on the boy, it wasn't like he did anything wrong. Personally, however, I would appreciate it if someone would alert me when Mayer called on me—he was someone that I would stop even the most important of things to go meet, just on the odd chance of something serious arising.

"It's fine, I will tell the boy when something is urgent or not. In this case, there is no real urgency. Otherwise, I would have gone and fetched you myself, after a short while." Mayer chuckled as he saw a small flash of relief in Rethi's face but continued. "It seems that your little plan went pretty well." Mayer said, looking at me. I tiled my head to the side slightly, an unspoken 'How so?'

"My mother was sent a letter of written apology by the Jothians." Rethi said, happily but with a tinge of sadness in the fringes of his words. I raised my eyebrow, waiting for the 'but'. Rethi took a deep breath and sighed it out.

"But my mother found out about it. About me being a beggar." His eyes dropped to his hands again. I could hear the tears simply from that emotional, strangled sound in his voice. I had feared that this would happen. It was almost inevitable that Rethi would be found out at some point, whether it was now or in the future was almost irrelevant.

"What happened?" I asked. It wasn't really a question; I know what happened. Rethi didn't speak for a while, before managing to squeeze out a few words.

"I don't think I am welcome home for the time being. Or maybe ever." He said solemnly. I nodded, looking back to Mayer and gesturing towards the room that I had slept in for a few nights, offering it to the boy instead. He nodded back affirmatively, though I could tell it was already a given in his mind. I didn't need the room at all, really. I could just as easily sit where I was all night and do nothing here, it wouldn't change anything.

I got up and beckoned for Rethi to follow and showed him to the room. After that I showed him around the place; a quick tour of all the amenities, the bathroom right across the hall, and a quick warning to not touch anything hanging on the walls in the hallway—and then I left him alone in the room for a bit. The kid probably needed some time himself, at the very least to process the rapid change in his life.

I walked out into the living room and sat opposite Mayer again and sighed.

"Knew that one was coming?" He asked, and I nodded lazily.

"His mum is pretty hardcore. She was unhappy about me giving them money for perfectly legitimate reasons, I can't imagine the fit that she had when she found out her son was a beggar himself." I could just about hear the hurtful words of a deeply wounded woman being screamed from here. Mayer nodded.

"She is apparently quite the bull-headed young lady." I could just about feel my ears prick up at that.

"You know her?" He nodded, but didn't elaborate, so I didn't pry—even if I was curious. He took a long sip of his cup, slowly drinking the tea with his eyes closed. He waited a moment before opening his eyes again.

"She has never allowed herself to take any of the support I tried to give her over the years. I've tried many different things from small to large, but nothing ever worked. I haven't tried in a few years now." He said, tapping the side of his cup, making the ceramic ring ever so slightly. "I'm somewhat surprised that you managed to convince her to take that money in the first place. I hadn't so much as been able to make her take firewood for a particularly nasty cold season."

"I think it was all about timing, it was more about her son that it was about her. And I was also pretty forceful about it, with all the grace and subtlety of my hammer" Mayer exhaled softly and nodded but waved his hand as if clearing the air of a dirty smell.

"Anyway, enough of this depressing conversation. What about your training. Rethi seemed impressed." He said, eyebrow raised amusedly. I laughed awkwardly.

"Well, after you left I couldn't really do the whole dance the way that you did, so I decided to break it into a smaller set of steps that I could repeat easier." Mayer's eyes widened behind his teacup and he quickly swallowed, holding down a choked surprise. His eyes went from shock, then horror, then overwhelming amusement.

"You abridged the Sharah? How blasphemous of you! I guess that's my fault for not telling you that you shouldn't." He said, delight emblazoned across his face. Between the somewhat ominous wording and the delighted way he said them, I was left with a confused smile. Mayer got up and started making himself another cup of tea while practically giggling to himself as he did so. He offered to make me one, and I agreed—still thoroughly confused.

He delicately handed the teacup to me and laughed delightedly as he sat back in his seat and took a sip.

"Why are you so happy about this?" I asked carefully. I honestly wasn't really sure that I wanted to know. Mayer looked at me and grinned.

"The Sharah is a very sacred thing to the Sharah'hin." He paused a moment and thought about something then just said "Sharah'hin just means People of the Sharah. Anyways, they really hate it when you do abridge or change the Sharah in any way. Big sore spot to them." Mayer giggled to himself, a joke I probably couldn't possibly understand.

"Well, now you are both a Champion and a Blasphemer. The Sharah'hin would really hate you now." Then Mayer gave a great big belly laugh, so hard that he almost spilt his tea.

Almost.

A/N: Another day, some more content. How are your day's going? Working hard or hardly working?

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 23: Search

The Sharah'hin? I hadn't heard anything of them yet. Mayer seemed to smell the question on me as he pre-emptively answered.

"The Sharah'hin are an old race that are quite secretive and closed off from outsiders. It is rare to encounter a Sharah'hin away from home when you are not directly engaging in a war with them." Mayer chuckled and took a sip of tea.

"So, the Sharah is their big thing?" Mayer laughed at that.

"Definitely. They teach it to all of the Sharah'hin, but very, very few outsiders. I just so happen to be one of those outsiders." Mayer shrugged.

"So why am I so blasphemous then?" Changing around some of the moves can't be that bad right?

"The Sharah is effectively their religion, though they hate it being referred to as that. They like to say it is a way of life, or the only correct way of living and such, so I just count it as a religion. If you change around the moves to the Sharah, you are obstructing the correct pattern that it is to be performed in, and thus obstructing the proper course of life." Mayer shifted in his seat and took a sip of tea, "Always thought they were full of it, but just complied with them."

"You don't believe in all that?"

"No not really, I went along with it because they wouldn't teach me otherwise. But I don't know if they care all too much if you actually believe, and more if you practice the Sharah in a way that they approve of." He looked thoughtful for a moment, sipping his tea, "It's not like they are spewing bullshit, they have their own wisdom that they usually try to communicate through the Sharah, but I don't really subscribe to it being the optimal way to life or anything."

"So then why do they hate Champions?" I asked. Mayer just looked at me, eyebrows raised.

"Everyone hates Champions." He scoffed slightly, then quickly amended, "Anyone old enough to remember hates them." I nodded slowly.

I was about to ask further, but there was a sound from the hallway, and a few plodding steps. I turned to see Rethi standing there, his eyes a bit red but doing better than I would have thought. I was expecting to not see the kid for a few hours at least.

"What's up?" I asked. Rethi looked awkward for a moment but seemed to find something within himself and stood up straight addressed me head on.

"I need to go get someone to take care of my mother. I can't be gone for a long period of time again." I nodded, suddenly aware that I had kept him from his mother for three odd days when he had been helping me work on the Jothian's farm.

"Are you going to go hire someone?" I asked. Rethi nodded, but with a little unsurety.

"I'm not quite sure where I should even go, really. What do I even look for?"

"I guess being a nurse wouldn't exactly be a common profession around here would it?" I said, looking towards Mayer, and he raised an eyebrow with an amused look on his face, electing not to answer.

"Well, how about we go see Master Gram and see if he can help you out?" I said placatingly, and Rethi thought on that for a moment. I couldn't really guess what he was thinking. In the end he nodded, and I laughed slightly, relieved that the boy would let me help him with this at least. I was slightly afraid that he might try and clam up on me, but it seems my worry was unfounded.

"Alright then! Let's get this show on the road!" I said, raising myself from my seat, but Mayer stopped me. He brought out his pouch of coins and started digging around in it, a slight clinking of coins rubbing against each other as his fingers pushed them around within the small, corded bag.

"I owe you boys two smah each for the work on the Jothian's farm." I saw Rethi wanting to argue, but Mayer give him a glare that stopped him dead. He shut his mouth with a slight click, and the coins were given to us without any argument. He sent us on our way shortly after, returning to his comfortable chair and tea.

That was something that I had grown to respect about Mayer. He might seem like it, but he wasn't always no nonsense. We have had our share of emotional or semantical conversations over the past days, in quiet moments between anything important happening. But when he decided that he didn't care for an argument, then he was quick to let you know.

So, we were walking through town head held high. Everyone that we passed gave us a wide berth, not out of fear, but maybe because they were uncomfortable—unsure about our exact spot in the little town's social hierarchy. I wasn't too concerned about it, but Rethi might feel different.

We made quick work of the distance between Mayer's home and Master Gram's shop. I was getting pretty good at walking long distances now, which was handy because before this would have left me puffing, but now I still felt fine.

We approached the windowed storefront of Master Gram's medicine and surgery shop, and I brazenly walked up the steps and swung open the door.

A little bell jingled and Rethi quickly walked in behind me as I strode through the open doorway.

"Good day! I'll be with you in just a moment!" I heard Gram's distinctive nasally voice from behind the door into his surgery room. There was a minute or so of mad shuffling until he bustled through the door, being extra careful to not reveal the contents of the room to us.

"Oh! I haven't seen you boys in what, a week?" Gram laughed jovially, and quickly came out from behind the counter, grabbing a hold of my shoulders, "You seem to have gotten a bit of a name for yourself around here all of a sudden! Mayer's nephew is a big title to receive around town." Gram took note of Rethi as well, "And you too, young man. You've really gotten up there with the big players haven't you!" He walked over to the young boy and patted him roughly on the shoulders. Rethi was adorned with a massive grin, a confirmation of Gram's earlier statement. I guess I felt pretty lucky to have met Mayer as well, let alone be associated with him.

"So! What can I do for you two today? Got some issues you want fixing?" He said, putting on a bit of a salesman voice, almost in jest. I laughed, playing along.

"In a way, Master Gram." Gram's eyebrows flickered up slightly, "Rethi is currently busy working for me, and because of that he is unable to properly take care of his Mother."

"I see." Gram said thoughtfully, "So you wish to find a person who can take care of her?" Rethi nodded enthusiastically, it seems that Rethi was about to launch into a spiel of some sort, but Gram held up a hand.

"I'm sorry lad, but I don't really have the time to be running around. I can't really be away from the store that long, too many flesh wounds to mend or infections to take care of." Rethi looked a little defeated, but I quickly cut in. I wasn't about to just give up that easily.

"Do you think there would be anyone in town that was capable of taking care of Rethi's mother? We are in dire need of a carer at the moment. They don't necessarily need to be learned in the medical sphere, just capable of taking care of a sick woman." The doctor looked just about ready to say no when he paused—just for a moment. I jumped on the chance.

"You know someone?" I asked, not letting him weasel out of telling us. Gram was still for a moment, then scrunched up his face in an expression of distaste before sighing.

"Alright, alright. I know a person that could probably help you take care of your mother," he said looking towards Rethi, "But she's not all that active nowadays. I wouldn't want to disturb her more than she already has been. Plus, I can't say that I like actively driving business away from my own store." Master Gram sighed heavily. But that tune quickly changed when I started digging around in my pocket. I pulled out one of the iron smah that Mayer had given me not ten minutes ago.

"You can have this iron smah if you tell me the name and place." I said plainly.

"Well then, how gracious of you. The name is Arren Smithe. She lives not too far from here. I'd imagine that Rethi would know her house, actually." I looked to Rethi and saw his face fall slightly.

"Thank you very much, Master Gram. We better get going." I took the man's hand and placed the iron smah into his palm and walked out the door with Rethi in tow.

Rethi started automatically walking, presumably in the direction of this Arren Smithe, but he looked markedly more dejected now.

"Rethi?" I prompted, but I was met with silence for a long while. I could see the boy mulling the thoughts over in his brain, and I was desperate to know what it was that he was thinking. But I left it.

It took two whole minutes for the boy to speak again.

"Mrs Smithe's husband died from the same thing that my mother is sick with. Rhy disease." Rethi looked down at the dirt under her feet. "They say that she is so heartbroken that her soul died along with him, leaving her body as a soulless husk." I raised an eyebrow but didn't comment. Rethi didn't continue to speak, just walking in the direction of this person's home.

It wasn't long before we were there.

It was obvious which one it was. It was a total mess of a home. One of those houses that you would walk by on the streets, its large size and structure made from what were once nice materials indicating that it was a good house. Now though, it was shabby, dirty, and just downright falling apart. It was similar to a few houses next to it, though those houses were well taken care of, giving just a hit as to how the house ahead of us used to look.

"This is it?" I asked, knowing the answer.

"Well. It's our best bet." I said. Rethi nodded dejectedly, but I ignored him. I walked towards the door, head held high and standing straight. I rapped on the door and waited.

The sound of my knock seemed to echo throughout the house, signifying the complete emptiness inside. For some reason it sounded like it would be cold inside the house, despite it being relatively warm outside.

It was a few minutes before anything showed a sign of coming to answer the door, but I held steadfast. My knock was easily hearable, and even a person sleeping lightly would be able to hear it. I didn't look back at Rethi, imagining him to be either waiting nervously or totally unenthusiastically.

But after those minutes had passed I heard a slight shuffle against the wood flooring and before I knew it, the door swung open almost violently, revealing a young woman who looked like she hadn't slept in a year. She was tall, probably around six foot, but looked malnourished and extremely, extremely depressed. You could just about feel it radiating off of her in waves. That could possibly be her smell as well. It seemed that bathing wasn't necessarily in the list of her priorities.

Her hair was long and on the verge of being matted, unruly and unwashed, bright blue eyes striking against her darker brown hair. Her hair framed her long face, which only seemed to be made longer by the sunken cheeks and sallow features.

She looked up at me, eyes squinted and then lazily moved her gaze to Rethi.

She stood still for a moment, her eyes looking Rethi and I up and down, over and over again.

"Hello, I-" I began, but she turned around, and abruptly banged the door behind her, leaving me and Rethi standing outside like fools.


A/N: Hey there! Some exciting news, as of today I 'technically' finished stocking my backlog chapters for my other stories and the new ones of Unwieldy. That means that it's really only going to be a little while before I get to start showing off the other stories I've been working on and such, which is pretty exciting for me!

I hope you are all having a good day!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 24: Talks

I looked to Rethi, eyebrow raised but he could only shrug—disappointment practically etched upon his features. It seems like he knew what was going to happen, or at the least had a good idea that it wound. I waited a moment, thinking the course of action I should take.

She made it obvious that she wasn't too pleased with having visitors, no matter what their purpose was. But we also needed this carer, really badly. There was no time for me to spend on playing games like this, not only would I be jeopardising the mental health of someone I was directly responsible for, but also putting his mother in physical danger. So, I sucked in a deep breath and knocked on the door loudly once again.

This time it took Arren Smithe about half the time to get to the door. The ruddy wooden panel swung open violently, revealing a scathing gaze directly pointed at me. I was given a death glare, rivalled only by Shae herself. We locked gazes for a moment, her eyes boring into my soul—trying desperately to wound me with her eyes alone. But, despite the raw anger in her eyes, I felt nothing.

This was one of those times that I definitely knew that something was different about me. Now that I had been transported here, anyway. This was beyond the simple, 'I can stay awake for an indefinite time period'. That was far more tangible. But this… I was staring an infuriated person right in the face—usually you would feel the heat climb up your neck, your body automatically preparing itself for aggression or incoming physical harm.

But here I was, cool as a cucumber, as tacky as it sounded. It was strange, I was acutely aware of this, yet those emotions and the physical response I expected never came.

"Good afternoon, Mrs Smithe." I said calmly. Her death glare increased in intensity, somehow. She looked about ready to spit on me but she seemed to think better of it. She then tried to slam the door.

But as the door closed, I stuck out my foot, catching the door. The door wasn't heavy, and my shoe and relative bodily resilience stopped it from hurting. But as my foot abruptly stopped the door, Arren's body was harshly flung in my direction.

I would have easily been able to catch her in a hug, but that sounded like a poor idea. I can't imagine she would take too kindly to that. So instead of a hug, I stuck out one hand that quickly collided with her shoulder. I firmly grabbed a hold of the woman's extremely bony frame and easily stopped her from falling any farther towards me, or towards the ground.

She was very unsteady, the only anchoring point that she had keeping her upright was my onw grip on her shoulder. Turns out that I was really damn strong, and I could basically hold most of her bodyweight with one hand at an awkward angle. One of the most surprising and also most stark displays of my newfound physical prowess.

Problem; she didn't like being held. Not that I blamed her, but the moment that I let go I could tell that she was going to fall over. So, I did the only thing I could think of and I held her there awkwardly like you would hold a cat by the scruff of their neck—hoping desperately that they'd get the clue and calm down and not go mad and scratch up my hands.

The moment that she had found adequate footing, I let go immediately. She looked up at me, scowl on her face. She didn't need to say anything, the look told me everything I needed to know. I powered on anyways.

"Mrs Smithe. We have a situation that is quite important, and it seems that you are the only person that is qualified to help us." I said, playing it general. She retreated back into her doorway but didn't immediately slam her door on us. That was a good sign, I think.

"Find someone else." She said, scorn dripping from her voice like poison on a razor-sharp blade.

"There isn't anyone else that can help us. The only other person that could possibly help has the rest of the town to attend to." She looked at me quizzically, scorn still present but curiosity winning out in the end.

"We have a lady that needs to be cared for quite heavily. At the moment, the person who normally takes care of her is unable to do so due to his work requiring his presence. This means that she is going largely unattended at the moment, which also means that she's dangerously alone and without support." I looked at her deep in the eyes, trying to examine what she was feeling. I could sense more inquiry within her but let her manifest it before I pushed further.

"Taking care of someone? I'm hardly qualified. Go talk with Master Gram." She said shortly. She seemed about ready to close the door on us again, so I quickly interjected.

"He told us to come to you." I said, stopping her in her tracks. I could almost see her ears prick up as she turned towards us, eyes sceptical. "I have been led to believe that your late husband had the same disease that this lady has. That is the only qualification that we need."

The woman stopped cold—I had hit a nerve obviously. It was basically impossible to not hit one, so I wasn't surprised when I did. There was silence for a moment while her face whirred with minute expressions. Not a word was spoken between all of us, but I didn't dare look away from the woman in fear that she might just decide to disappear into her house. I managed to glimpse Rethi out of the corner of my eye, looking extremely worried—his body language fraught with anxiety. He was wringing his hands nervously and silently shifting from foot to foot. He didn't seem nearly as dejected anymore, but now I had his hopes up.

"Why would I help you?" The silence was broken. Her voice was raspy now, devoid of emotion. It was cold and callous. I imagine that this was because I mentioned her husband. But I only shook my head.

"It isn't me that you are helping. It's him." I waved my arm in the direction of Rethi, who was suddenly put on the spot. His eyes went wide as the woman's attention was suddenly turned to him. He didn't know what to do with himself. He looked to me, as if he were begging me to save him from her attention, but I simple smiled. It took him a moment to realise that I was asking him to tell her about his mother. He looked down to his hands, not confident enough to meet her eyes.

"My mother… Shae Orsen. She got Rhy disease a few years ago. It wasn't so bad at the start, but it got worse and worse, now… she can't even eat properly anymore. Even if she does, it's like it does nothing" He paused heavily, implying that there was a whole lot more than just eating that she had difficulty doing. He soon picked up again, his voice rough with emotion, but almost a little hopeful, "I finally managed to get a job that will allow me to support her, maybe even be able to buy treatment if there is any that Master Gram can get. But I can't take care of her and work at the same time, I need someone to help me." He slowly began to look up from his hands, a slowly began to meet the gaze of Arren Smithe.

There it was. The real kicker. Crying beggar boy asking desperately for help. I don't mean to make it seem like I was forcing Rethi into this uncomfortable encounter to scam some lady into helping his mother, but damned if it wasn't a good marketing tactic.

"Please?" He asked with all the sincerity that the world had to offer.

"I-I…" The woman was extremely flustered. It seemed that her emotions had come back full force, forcing her to battle with both the situation at hand and the emotional tornado inside. Crying beggar boys tended to have that sort of effect I assumed.

But what I wasn't expecting was for her to say, "I'm sorry!" And to then close the door on us, right in our faces.

The reaction was almost immediate. Rethi's mood instantly spiralled into deep sadness. I was a little dumbfounded, but I was still basically emotionally untouched, if a little perplexed. I wrapped an arm around the boy and started to direct him away from the door.

I felt terrible, but there wasn't much that I could really do. The only way to find someone was to do this and the unfortunate consequence of being rejected was this. Tears and sorrow. But the real problem was that there were no more options. There was no other person to turn to. I couldn't cheer him up by saying that the next one could be it, because there was no next one.

"Master Max…" He said, practically sobbing. I pulled the kid closer to me as we reached the road in front of the house. With his head resting against my chest, he sobbed. The pain in each of those terrible, wracking sobs was almost immeasurable. I could feel the helplessness exuding from him. He had no choice. He couldn't stand by and watch his mother die from neglect, but he couldn't take care of her and also work at the same time. Not to mention that it was likely that Rethi's mother wouldn't take kindly to Rethi showing back up and trying to help again.

"I– I think that I might have to quit, Master Max." He said, his voice muffled by my shirt. I waited for a moment but ended up merely nodding. There was nothing that I could say, and nothing that I could do. This is what they meant by being stuck between a rock and a hard place, I guess.

We stood like that for a while. Rethi's sobs slowly became nothing more than mere whimpers. It was heartbreaking. But I had big things that I needed to do, and I won't be able to help Rethi more than I already am. Something that I deeply regretted.

I peeled the kid away from me and grabbed a hold of his shoulders. Looking him deep into the eyes, I could only smile. He was a smart kid, smarter than most. He didn't have many ways to show it, but you could see it in his eyes. Just that little glint of intelligence that you can't find in everyone. I wanted more than anything to see that glint turn into a raging inferno, just like I know it would.

"Alright, kid. Let's get moving. No use hanging around here." I said, pushing gently against his back. We moved down the road towards Mayer's home once again. This time there was a distinct air of melancholy. I guess even Champions had to have bad luck every now and then otherwise-

"Wait!" I heard a loud bang of a door slamming open and then the distinct sound of someone running on the gravel road behind me. I turned my head, momentarily surprised. But when I did, I couldn't help it. I felt it rise up from my stomach and into my throat. It burst out of me with more force than I've ever experience before.

I laughed. I laughed a delighted, gleeful laugh.


A/N: Posting in the middle of the day because I'm tired and wanna sleep at a good time tonight. Just taking a good old chill day to rest. Hope this chapter finds you all well!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 25: A Boy's Musings

Rethi had let all those words, all the feelings, flow out of him in that moment. They felt far away now, despite being only a few hours ago at best.

But there he lay, in a comfortable bed that he was still unsure if it was truly his to sleep in, looking towards the wooden ceiling. He didn't have anything left in him anymore. He had said all of his words, and it all came cleanly to an end. Mrs. Smithe had agreed to take care of his Mother for two iron smah a week. It was expensive really, but it was a hard job, so he happily agreed. It seems that she knew where Rethi's home was, which was almost surprising seeing as no-one had been there in at least a few years now, especially since monsters had raided that part of town. She had asked a few questions before nodding and leaving towards his home. He didn't know how that was going, if his mother was accepting help or not, but he could only hope.

Rethi felt hollow now. Not unpleasantly though. But in the sort of way that your mind doesn't really care if you stare at the ceiling for a few hours. His mind barely created coherent through after the day he'd had, except for one thing. One person.

Master Maximilian.

He was a strange man; Rethi knew that from the moment that he'd met him. At the time he was standing almost too straight and looking like he didn't have a single clue about where to go. Rethi thought that he might be just a wanderer, but I had heard the news from the town folk whispering that Mayer had brought in a boy a night or two before.

Rethi remembers looking at the man and thinking 'He looks very un-boy-like.' He stood tall, much taller than most he'd have ever met, only a few truly freakish people were taller than him around here. Rethi had wondered if he were a mixblood of some sort at first. He looked too different from Rethi, in his own opinion. Too clean, too pale. Master Max ended up offering money to Rethi. Only to guide him around the town.

He offered far too much for simply being shown around town. Rethi had been suspicious at first but fell to temptation anyway. That money could buy him a decent amount of food for himself and his mother for at least a week.

And then he was thrown into the deep end. Suddenly he was working for Master Mayer and Master Max, he was assaulted by the Jothian boys, Mayer sent out a letter, his mother learned of my begging and he got kicked out. Now he was here.

It was strange. You'd swear that life couldn't change that fast, but it just continues to prove him wrong every step of the way.

But one thing stayed constant for all of it. Master Max's unwavering support.

Honestly, Rethi couldn't see what Master Max saw in him. He couldn't understand what he really wanted from him either. Rethi used to think he might be a mixed-blood of some sort, but his stamina is endless, and he can summon and unsummon a hammer from thin air. He'd never heard of a race that can do that before. He surely couldn't be human.

What would someone capable of all that need from Rethi, the beggar boy?

Master Max is strange. He carries an air of mystery with him, but he doesn't even seem to notice it. If he does then he ignores it so completely that you'd swear he was unaware. He carries himself in a weird way. He felt stiff when Rethi first met him. But over the course of only a few hours at a time, he seemed to evolve into an entirely different person.

He went from being stiff like a mannequin at the start of that day, to being able to convince Rethi's mother of allowing him to be his employee. Signing bonus included. All in one, single day.

Maybe Master Maximilian truly is Master Mayer's nephew, and is a noble of some description. It would explain why he was giving away money like candy, and why he is such a good speaker. But Rethi was starting to find it doubtful. He has suspicions, but everything is so wishy washy that he wouldn't be able to tell either way.

Ever so slowly, Rethi had come to realise that he respected him. Not false respect. Not respect for your seniors or superiors. Real respect, admiration even.

It was easy to say why. He was charming in a way that Rethi had never encountered before. Sometimes you could swear that he looked past your façade and right into your true emotions, into your soul. Sometimes all it takes is a little look from him, and suddenly your feel as if your thoughts are open to him. It feels like he can read you like a book sometimes. But it was never scary. It was never unpleasant. It wasn't violating.

It was… liberating, in a way. It was as if the words that I really wanted to say were heard by him whether or not you said them. Rethi didn't think that Master Max knows that this is how it feels to talk to him. It's like baring your soul, making yourself vulnerable.

That's why Mrs. Smithe came running after us. I could see it in her eyes, it was like they had become windows into her soul. He had blown the way so wide open that she was forced to take his words in, regardless of if she wanted to hear them or not. His words were strong, direct and coated with silver.

But before she had come running, Rethi had believed it was all over. He believed that he had missed the one chance that he had been given to make something of himself. He felt it all crashing down around him, and Master Max just held him.

It was then that Rethi felt like a little boy. He felt like he knew nothing and would amount to nothing. How could he even begin to compare to someone like Master Max. Even Master Gram was so much smarter than He. Rethi am only a babe, fresh off his mother's teat in comparison.

And then Master Maximilian looked at Rethi in the eyes.

Maybe it was then that Rethi realised why it was that Master Maximilian's words were so effective. Maybe it was then, when Rethi stared into his eyes and he saw myself, potential fully realised.

In that moment Rethi was a Doctor, healing the sick of the world, one patient at a time. He was a Mage of unparalleled intelligence, protecting the world from threats unseen. He was a Warrior, fighting for the people who'd lost hope.

Rethi was everything and anything he could ever want to be.

It was then that he realised that the reason that Master Maximilian could speak to someone's soul, was because he was speaking from his, baring it to anyone who would listen.

So there Rethi lay, looking at the wooden ceiling in a comfortable bed, remembering a smile of a man whose eyes shone with his belief in him.





A/N: This is more of a short interlude chapter, created to serve the purpose of revealing more about Rethi and how he feels. It's hard to convey this sort of stuff without hearing them think themselves or whatever else, so I thought I'd but something here. It's short, but at the time I wrote this, I was relatively proud of it.

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 26: Growth for a Young Mind

After managing to sort out Mrs. Smithe—the woman who was capable of being a nurse for Rethi's mother—the next few days were rather demure, all things told. I mostly spent my time training in my bastardisation of the Sharah. Every day, Mayer would invite me to train with him in his genuine practice of the Sharah, and I would do my best to follow along and correct my self-teaching. My own katas were progressively becoming more fluid and increasingly difficult to perform as I added more and corrected past mistakes in my form and foot placement. As well as adding extra points to my kata where I summon of unsummon my Hammer. Something that I both hated and loved for different reasons, both calming and secretly infuriating. Though I have to say, it was becoming easier for me to incorporate movements and ideas, even if it was more technically difficult than ever.

It was quite a process and, before I knew it, it had been well over a week.

That was an issue, I found. Now that I was capable of staying awake indefinitely, I had become great at burning time practicing, and otherwise studying the Sharah. It was a point of interest to me all of a sudden. Of course, the allure of learning how to efficiently move was compelling, but not compelling enough to spend well over forty-eight hours straight at one point simply repeating the same motions over and over.

No, what was truly capturing my intrigue was that I had yet to receive an achievement for it. I could feel myself improving so definitely, so you would think I would have received an achievement at least for Agility, maybe even Might, with all the stress and weight I was putting on the muscles in my legs and arms from constantly summoning and unsummoning my hammer and doing complex movements in general.

So why was there no achievement?

I had consulted Mayer on this, and he had told me—helpfully—that he wasn't sure. He could see that I was improving steeply, and that I was well on my way to being able to be considered at the level of a novice practitioner of the Sharah. But not having received an achievement for it was odd. I distinctly remember asking what Ryan had done with the Sharah, and Mayer told me that at the time, he didn't even know the Sharah or the Sharah'hin existed.

This could mean any number of things really. It could mean that the Sharah was outside of the purview of the 'system' that the Champions can take advantage of, or maybe the conditionals are locked behind being a Sharah'hin or being accepted by them. It wasn't something that was useful to ponder right now, but it did manage to convince me that I needed to work on more than simply the Sharah. I wasn't getting any increases in raw ability from it, so I moved to other forms of exercise at first, trying to find where the best results came from. Even if I so deeply wished that I could do the Sharah and naturally increase my physicality buy just doing that, but woe is me with my sort-of broken system.

I had some help from Mayer and Rethi—who was surprisingly astute at finding ways to make training more effective—three heads seemed to be better than one, of course. It seemed that the best course of action was to make simple and repeatable exercises more difficult. So, running became running covered in weights through a field with odd terrain and trying to accurately, and safely, navigate through it without falling over or injuring myself.

It seemed to work really well, even if it sucked and was about as anti-fun as you could get.

Strength was also pretty simple to train, simply doing hardcore farm work did wonders. Farm work had a lot of the things that is effectively weightlifting just with objects that are hard to grip and are almost always on weird angles and in weird situation. Putting up fences, commandeering livestock, working primitive farm machinery like ploughing instead of using a horse or a bull, grinding large amount of grain and other similar processes. I even tried my hand at butchering livestock when it came time to do so, and I managed a half decent job—even if the butcher was incredibly nice and attentive to make it work. I found the experience was good from a skills perspective, but I didn't really use my body all too much—even if it was pretty physical work—but it was definitely using my brain more than usual.

Though the simple farm work was losing its effectiveness and quickly, the simple achievements being completed. The screen really didn't like repetitive actions, valuing new and strange processes over traditional training. It forced you to ignore actually building skills and instead just try a wide array of things to potentially gain an achievement out of it. Which made no sense in my opinion, just putting a hard cap in how useful it'd be to become a true master of any one skill other than actually having the skill itself.

That made me realise that I wasn't really working on my Mind stat. It was an easy thing to forget after being confronted with the dire need for physical prowess, but after a long night of training in the Sharah without any additions to my stats, I realised that I needed to go with a holistic approach for now.

To put things simply, I had a tonne of problems without answers. One of the most pressing was that my hammer was the least useful part of my arsenal at the moment, despite being the only thing that allows me to be competitive with my Champion peers. It was something that I could barely lift, and even if I got really good at managing its weight in comparison to my strength, which according to Mayer would remain roughly the same, it was still effectively useless. It might be good at smashing something into the ground in one hit, but that's if I can hit it at all—and that was seemingly becoming more and more unlikely with just using my raw physical strength. Maybe if I were taller, it would allow me to take more advantage of leverage and some other trickery, but even if I were taller the hammer would likely be taller, staying at its current height proportional to me.

I didn't have an answer for this right now. I didn't have any reasonable solution in sight. So, as the morning sun shone over the nice field that I had spent the night performing the Sharah, I decided that I needed to find an effective way of increasing my Mind stat.

After a few more hours of the Sharah, I went to Mayer's home. I walked into the lounge room to see both Mayer and Rethi sitting in their chairs, both drinking tea and relaxing. It seemed that Mayer had really warmed to the kid, and he seemed to teach the kid a lot about the practical world that surrounded him. Rethi had stopped coming outside during the nights to take care of me, after quite an argument. The boy didn't seem to care too much for regular working hours and simply wanted to wait on me day and night. It was almost infuriating really. He was too polite, and too willing to do more than I asked. I had gotten used to it by now, allowing him to try his best to imitate servants and butlers that he had no doubt heard stories of—those that waited on some of the most powerful men and women in the city, country or even world. Mayer actually encouraged him, teaching the boy proper manners and speech, how to set a table and proper decorum. Surprising, coming from Mayer himself.

The boy worked tirelessly to make sure that he properly served me, and that he learned all that he could from Mayer. Many times, I have considered asking the boy to stop it, and just act normally. To stop calling me Master Maximilian, and just treat me like an equal, but even as I entertained those frustrated thoughts I knew that it was simply a farce.

What would happen if I asked the boy to act normally? To let me make my own cup of tea—like the boy was quickly getting up to do right now—to stop dressing the best that he possibly could at all times, even with the poor clothing options that he did have, he made sure that he was immaculately washed and hair was cut and styled correctly. The answer to that question was simple.

The boy would feel useless, that he wasn't valued and that he couldn't provide adequate services for the coin that he was being paid. And he would be right too, he was already being paid far more than what he was worth, and he was trying to desperately make up for it in any way that he could think of.

I sat down in my seat, sitting right across from Mayer himself. He watched Rethi as he made tea and told him off for ten things he did that apparently weren't good enough. It was surprising, Mayer never really seemed like the man who would know all of this, especially not at this level of detail. He was lecturing Rethi on the incorrectness of his hand movements when he caught my look of mild amusement and blew me off with a half sneer.

I chuckled lightly, but only a minute or so later, after Rethi was done being chewed out, I managed to get a nice cup of tea and I thanked Rethi with a smile, which seemed to please him.

I sipped the tea delicately before Mayer spoke to me.

"So, what brings in our ever-training Champion? We haven't had you for morning tea for what seems like weeks now." Almost two weeks actually. I nodded at this and took a moment to swallow the tea and think on my response.

"Well, I have been working towards training my Agility and Might quite effectively recently, I have a total of thirty-eight Might and twenty-seven Agility. A considerable increase in my raw ability." Mayer nodded, "But, my Mind has only increased minutely since I arrived here, and I'm beginning to think that it is possible that answers could lay there for me." Mayer shrugged, he was rather non-committal when it came to finding a way to make use of my Hammer, he just gave me options and it was my choice whether I took them or not.

"I was thinking," I started, "that you could teach me some shifting and that-" I was cut off by Mayer shaking his head.

"No, that won't work." He said. I was confused for a second.

"What won't work, you teaching me to shift?" I said, somewhat worried. Shifting being totally off the table would be really disappointing in all honesty.

"No, you are perfectly capable of learning how to shift ether, but it won't help you with your Mind stat, not as well as you would think anyway." Well, that was a relief.

"Why not, isn't shifting all about using your mind to control ether, or whatever, to become what you want?" Mayer closed his eyes, scratching the side of his aged face. Before sighing and opening his eyes again.

"Another of Ryan's pet peeves with the screen and stats. Frankly, as you have started to discover, your physical statistics are stagnating. Even with you practicing the Sharah almost endlessly, you aren't seeing the increases of strength that you'd be seeing if it gradually effected your strength. In short, even though you have gotten far more powerful over the past weeks, if you were able to progress through physical exercise you wouldn't see this stagnation."

"Why would it be made like that? It seems counter intuitive and having to go around trying different things to only potentially get an achievement is infuriating." I grumbled, thought Mayer chuckled.

"Either way. Ryan found that, much like with the Sharah you practice, shifting gives little to no rewards, aside from something he called 'breakpoint' rewards." I quirked an eyebrow questioningly.

"A breakpoint reward is something that, 'the screen gives you to try make you not hate it as much'," he said in monotone, "at least that's how Ryan would put it anyway. He had this issue with shifting, and he'd receive big rewards when he hit a breakpoint, but they'd never scale well—always giving you a big hit early on but really lacking when you hit the next one"

"Wait, what was his Mind stat anyway?" I asked.

"Ryan's Mind stat began at thirty-six, it was difficult to understand the differences between his absurd natural state and the increase in proficiency due to his Mind stat."

"Thirty-six? Really? God damn." I hung my head in mock shame. There was a little bit of disappointment at that number, to be perfectly honest. I had worked pretty hard for a few weeks now just to be able to reach similar stats in my Might, but he had that brain back on Earth. It was almost monstrous, having that level of intellect on Earth.

"Don't think about it too much, boy. They are freaks of nature. But I'll tell you what," Mayer grinned a toothy grin with a conspiratorial glint in his eye, "Ryan never really stopped sleeping, he would sleep at least 6 hours every other day. So, you have him beat there. You have your own upsides." I grinned as well, feeling just a bit better about knowing that the other Champions were likely to be nearly four times more intelligent than me at base.

"Even so, I need to raise my Mind stat, I can't neglect it and stay as dumb as I am if I really want to be able to compete with the other Champions in any way, shape or form." Mayer nodded, but then also shrugged.

"But I also don't really have all that good a way to teach you to raise your Mind stat. It was the one stat that Ryan had under control completely. He gained Mind stat from reading really complex stuff and storing it in that crazy brain of his. But you and me both know that you can't do that." Mayer said, chuckling into his tea as he surely remembered something that would probably always stay private to him.

"Master Maximilian, if I may?" Rethi said. He had been standing by my side for the duration of the conversation, standing straight and holding a dishcloth, ready to clean any mishaps made. I looked to him, eyebrow raised with interest.

"If you are interested in learning, I would go ask Master Gram. He is likely the most intelligent person in the village, and I would suggest asking him for tutelage perhaps?" He spoke with forced elegance. It was definitely better than what it was the first few days that he tried, but now it was starting to actually fit the boy. It was actually a bit shocking, but I knew that it wouldn't be long, especially under Mayer's direct tutelage, before he was going to be qualified to be a proper servant of high-class nobility. It had only been two weeks since abject poverty and now you would easily mistake him for a middle-class child.

I considered his proposal and found merit in it. Master Gram had been one of the first men I had met in the village, and he ran an Apothecary. It also seemed that he was capable of surgery, and from what I remembered, his surgery room behind the main business area seemed relatively modern to my world, in the grand scheme of things anyways it was basically a surgery room from 200 years ago on earth. But the man was clearly learned in medicine, and if there was anything that got you thinking, it was medicine.

I nodded to him. "I think that's a pretty good idea, I also need to learn magi- err shifting sooner or later. It could be something that I find great use in. For now, though, I will have enough on my plate learning the Sharah to a decent extent and also possibly working under Master Gram to some degree." Mayer nodded in agreement himself.

"Learning to properly shift is an involved process. Much like how the Sharah is for you currently." I took a large gulp from the tea and swallowed in quick succession and managed to down the tea very quickly.

"Rethi, what is the time?"

"About seven hours into the morning, Master Maximillian." He responded almost instantly.

"What time does Master Gram open for business, or would he be comfortable having visitors at this time?" Rethi nodded at me.

"Both, Master Maximilian." I got up, and was about to pace out the door, but paused for a moment.

"You don't have to call me Master Maximilian every time, Rethi. You can just address me as sir or something similar." But Rethi shook his head.

"No, Master Maximilian. Sir is used for people whose status you are unaware of or are simply older men of around your father's age. Master is used for those who are high born, of a similar status or are accomplished." I sighed and flapped my hand in Rethi's direction.

"Alright, alright. I get your point. Thanks, Mayer. I'll see you later to learn more of the Sharah." Mayer nodded, an amused glint in his eyes.

I walked out the door with Rethi following behind, quickly and quietly shadowing me at the polite distance that a servant holds between him and his Master. Infuriating, but in a way, I was almost proud.

---​

I opened the door with a jingle, walking into a smallish room with lots of glass cases holding many different herbs and medicines. I had no real way to tell if any of them were legitimate or not. Maybe this world had magical herbs and stuff. If all went to plan, then I would probably find that out.

Rethi walked in behind me, making the bells half jingle before the door shut properly. He then assumed his position, his pose carefully manufactured to be respectful and ready to deal with any possible problems that could arise.

I walked up to the counter and stood there for a while. Waiting for Master Gram to get ready if he needed to. But after a half minute or so, it became obvious he hadn't heard me.

I called out once, and then for the second time after a similar amount of time, but there continued to be no response.

"I'm going to have a quick check to see if he's in that back room there, if not we can just go." Rethi nodded and started to move forward to open the counter's flap for me, but I just gave him a look that stopped him in his tracks.

"I can open this myself, as you well know." I moved behind the counter, lifting the hefty piece of wood that was the openable extension to the counter with effectively no effort.

I moved just up the small hallway and saw the door. It was closed tight this time, no small crack to see through, so I knocked.

"Master Gram? It's Maximilian. I'm wondering if you'd entertain a short talk?" There was a moment of dead silence. But it was the sort of silence that you could feel something odd in. It was just ever so slightly too silent. Then I heard a crash behind the door.

Before I knew it, my hand was on the knob of the door, swiftly opening it, and I heard Rethi make his way to my flank in a moment.

What I saw was… interesting. There was Master Gram, dressed in what I could only assume was a facsimile of scrubs, a fallen wooden table with an assortment of metal tools scattered on the floor, hands covered in grime, and with eyes that looked like a deer caught in the headlights. The reason for this look of pure terror written on his face?

The dead body lying on the table next to him.

Now, I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but one thing that I do know is that people in this sort of era of medical understanding aren't a massive fan of the whole 'cut open a dead body' thing. And if the look on Master Gram's face, the grime on the body and Master Gram's hands said anything to me, then I have a little bit of a hunch that the body wasn't exactly given willingly.

I felt Rethi at my side strain to get a look into the room. He hadn't seen anything yet. I pushed the boy away gently, not allowing him to see into the room and begun to talk.

"Ah! Master Gram, I hope that I didn't interrupt while you were doing anything important, would it be too much of a hassle if you and I could speak for just a moment?" I said, putting a great deal of gravity on the word 'important'. Master Gram couldn't speak, so he quickly began to nod, and I pasted a friendly smile onto my face. I turned to Rethi.

"Rethi, would you please man the store for Master Gram. If you are unable to help with any requests of the customer just advise them that Master Gram will be occupied with important business and has been asked to not be disturbed for a while. I will come fetch you when we are done."

Rethi's face flashed a worried expression before quickly regaining himself and did a neat half bow and wordlessly moved out of the hallway and into the storefront.

I turned to Master Gram who was still exactly as shocked as he was beforehand, and I walked into the room, gracefully closing the door and grabbing a stool that was right near the door. I pulled the stool out and sat on it, quickly crossing my legs and making myself look as much of a proper noble as I knew how.

"Now, Master Gram. Would you be so inclined to explain yourself?" A smile growing on my lips.

This was going to be fun.

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 27: Causa Mortis

My eyes locked with the bespectacled doctor. He looked as if he were a guilty child, about to be whipped bloody.

"What is it that you are doing here, Master Gram?" I said with a voice that a stereotypical noble would use. The sort of voice that conveyed friendliness but spoke of cloaks and daggers.

"I-" Master Gram stammered, but I cut him off before he could continue.

"And don't try to fool me, Master Gram. I may not be from around here, but I'm not an idiot." This line wasn't really all that necessary, but it did do a good job of making the man's face drain of blood and become a sickly looking grey. In this sort of conversation, dominance was everything.

"Well, I…" He began before sighing, his body slackening, "I am a man of medicine, Master Maximilian. It is a difficult profession, especially around these areas. There are so many injuries to fix, diseases to cure, most of them that I've never even seen before nor my father. I have five generations of comprehensive medical knowledge and notes, and none of it even references some of the illnesses that people are coming to me with!" His voice began to raise in frustration, his smock waving emphatically with arms. I watched on in amusement when the man finally got to the end of his sentence and he realised he had been yelling. His eyes went wide, and he seemed about to apologise but I waved it off.

"Go on." I said, face still a mask of friendliness. He hesitated for a moment but nodded and continued.

"There are many different ways that you can learn about an illness, and study it, but one of the more useful ways that I can learn about something is a… direct examination." The final words came tentatively.

"The direct examination of someone's corpse. A post-mortem." I said plainly. His eyes widened in shock, and a little excitement.

"You know of it?"

"Not quite, but I am aware of a few pertinent procedures." I answered truthfully.

"Then you must understand the necessity of a post-mortem! You must see why I am doing this!" I dropped the friendly façade.

"Understanding is very different than agreement when it comes to an argument of ethics, Doctor," I could see the chill run through the man as I gazed deep into his eyes, "I am an outsider. The way I view the world is vastly different than the townsfolk that live here, and even yourself. However, nothing that I know can properly excuse your actions, not ethically."

The man visibly began to panic. I could see the words rushing through his brain, trying desperately to find the golden words that would make this mess go away. He wouldn't find those words, of course. Things like this aren't easily brushed under the rug for too longy. Someone always fucked up, and someone's head always ends up on a pike. I paused to let the man panic for a while before I spoke, letting the man sweat for a bit.

"Are you a moral man, Master Gram?" I steepled my fingers on the legs that I had crossed, back straight. To a man like Master Gram, I must be the one of the most intimidating men he's has probably ever had to face, at least in this moment. Which is sad in a way, because I am a small fry when it comes to intimidating people. Mayer could have probably made the man wet himself by now.

"I– I believe so, Master Maximilian."

"Then you are wrong, Master Gram." I said stonily. The middle-aged man's face contorted in fear for a split second before I continued.

"You are a grave robber and a corpse thief. A moral man will never even think of doing such a depraved thing. Exhuming a corpse that has been laid to rest in the comfort of the soils?" Words sprouted from my mouth while I stared into the man's eyes. They were words that spoke directly to the man's guilty conscience. It was so obvious, in fact, that I swear that I could feel his guilt myself. "So, I ask again, Master Gram. Are you a moral man?"

I let the words hang in the air as I stared into the man's eyes. I saw more panic, which quickly became what I almost suspected was anger. I don't know whether it was at himself, me or maybe even the corpse that laid on that table. But it soon quelled into resignation and sadness.

"No, I am not Master Maximilian." He spoke the words in almost a whisper.

"Good. Then at least you understand that much. However, Master Gram, do you believe yourself just?" The man's eyes flickered up to mine, and without a second's thought, he spoke.

"Yes, yes I do." I smiled.

"I am of a similar mind to you, in that fashion. I am aware of the heights that medical understanding and technologies, and possibly even shifting, can take us. Within a mere lifetime I've seen wonderous developments begin in the most unlikely of places, or possibly even with the darkest of depravities." I stared into his eyes, trying to convey the gravity of what I meant by the 'darkest of depravities'.

What I meant of course, was the human experimentation done by Nazi doctors during the Second World War. While the information gained from the torture—that Nazis wrote down in books and called science—may be questionable, the data there was pertinent enough to at least have a moral argument about using it after the fact. Historically and scientifically disputed as it may be, it found its way home in Master Gram's heart. As Master Gram looked me in the eyes, I knew that he had something come to mind as I talked about atrocities.

Good to know that there are downright terrible people everywhere. Very homely.

"Now, let's speak of what we shall do about this." I stood up, lightly brushing myself off for effect, and moving over to the body that lay on the table, quickly examining it. It was the corpse of a young man, probably not even thirty—although death seems to have an aging effect. The body was somewhat damaged, probably from being buried for a few days, but was in otherwise reasonable condition. The doctor hadn't actually started a procedure yet but was likely in the process of cleaning the body as best as he could.

"Why have you taken this specific body, Master Gram?" The man paced up to the other side of the table and stood across from me.

"Derno was his name. He became ill quite suddenly and before long, he died. I cannot tell what it was that he had contracted or developed, but he started getting many sores that wouldn't heal on his back." Master Gram rolled the body onto its side displaying gaping wounds that had been filled with dirt and other grime. For some reason, I didn't feel any revulsion at all. I know that I would have when I was back on earth, but right now I was starting right into those dirt filled holes without a hint of a gag or thought of looking away.

"Quite nasty," Not letting emotion into my voice, "Did you try to convince the family to give you the body for your testing?" The ensuing silence was answer enough.

"Have you ever tried to convince someone of this idea before?" The man nodded, but with a grim look on his face.

"It was a bad idea. I think if they hadn't told me to leave and never come back that day, I could have been thrown out of the town for it. It's an extremely touchy subject, Master Maximilian." I nodded, understanding but with an eyebrow raised.

"This wouldn't have happened to be right after the person had died, would it, Doctor?" His face went through a few emotions before he nodded ashamedly.

"Not the best at bedside manners, it seems. They may be extremely resistant to the idea in the first place Doctor, don't get me wrong. But they are also capable of changing their ideas and opinions like anyone else. However, right after a loved one has died is not when they are going to do so. You and I think of this process in a very different light than they think of this. They think of this as a sort of sacrilege, where you brutally chop up their loved one's body and defile their remains. You have to convince them that this is not the case, and that there is merit to what you are doing. Something that this," I gestured to the body lying on the table, "does nothing but hurt. The moment that this is found out, they will have your head." I walked back over to the stool that I had pulled out and sat on it again, assuming my earlier pose.

"I think it is possible that I could help you in this regard, Doctor." Master Gram's eye opened wide with shock, but then narrowed with trepidation.

"Why would you possibly choose to do that? Your reputation could be irreversibly harmed through doing something like this, and you are currently the town's bona fide Lord. Or at least the nephew of the Lord." I laughed but kept it short.

"Maybe so, but I came here today for something and while it might not be what I wanted, I think I got an alternative that was possibly better." I grinned a wide, devilish grin. The man across from me gave a nervous one in return, I laughed deeply and got up and patted the man on the shoulder in a friendly way before I gripped onto his shoulder firmly and let my joviality drop away to seriousness.

"I advise you, Michael, to get rid of that body as soon as you are done with it. It would serve you well to never do this again. Clear?" If the usage of his first name bothered him, he definitely didn't let it show. He nodded tersely and I nodded back without further fuss.

"I'll leave you to your devices, Gram. I will be back later today to speak with you more about acquiring bodies for proper post-mortems." I didn't state explicitly that I was setting somewhat of a deadline, but I think it was made pretty obvious anyways.

"Good day, Gram."

"Good day, Master Maximilian."

I turned, opened the door and walked out without a hitch in my stride. I was, however, careful to move through the doorway in such a way to block the view of the insides and closed the door immediately after exiting, which turned out to be an idea that I was extremely grateful for.

"Hello." A small voice said from the hallway beside me. I casually turned, not frightened by the voice like I swear that I should have been. There was a small girl, standing there. Black hair that was likely the same colour as her father's, before his had well and truly become various shades of grey. Her frame was extremely slight, so much so that you'd think that she was maybe only ten or so years old, but with one look into her eyes, you could tell that she was older. Maybe Rethi's age, maybe even a bit older than that.

"Good morning. My name is Maximilian." I said, regarding her professionally. I sensed that it was the best way to address her.

"I know who you are, your name is the talk of the town Maximilian. My name is Alena." She smiled gently, but also didn't use the title. An issue with authority it is then. That is when a thought hit my mind.

"Do you happen to know Rethi all that well? I believe he mentioned you at one point." Her face lit up with recognition.

"I do, he is here quite often looking for treatments for his mother. How do you know him?" And I laughed, politely of course.

"Seems that you aren't entirely informed then. He is currently employed under me." Her eyes shot up in surprise, it looked a little comical on her small face, but I saw the apprehension set in on her features.

"He is just in the other room, if you'd like to come talk with him?" I asked, pretending to not see the mix of emotions of the young girl's face. Maybe hearing that a friend was someone's servant wasn't exactly a pleasant thought.

I strode out to the storefront area to see Rethi standing diligently behind the counter, awaiting any customer that might come in.

"Rethi!" Alena said loudly. Not quite a shout, but also not a normal tone of voice. She rushed past me, quickly pulling on Rethi, who looked shocked, but seemed compliant enough to her will. I chuckled to myself quietly. Seems like this little girl might be a bit of a storm in a bottle.

I strode past the two who had huddled themselves in the corner, quietly whispering to each other, Alena with a look of worry and anger on her face and Rethi with a look of utter bewilderment.

I opened the flap at the side of the counter and made my way to the door, and as I opened the door the bells jingled. I saw Rethi's gaze move to me and I smiled impishly and mouthed, "Good luck." He scowled and I laughed a little too loudly, causing Alena's gaze being turned to focus on me. I grinned at her, probably infuriating her all the more and left the storefront and into the street, walking slowly down the path to Mayer's home.

It took probably 10 minutes for the boy to finally catch up to me, with a slightly depressed and bewildered look on his face, but I left him alone. I had a sneaking suspicion that at least one of the two had romantic inclinations towards the other. This wasn't really something I wanted to chime in on all that much, especially without the express request from Rethi himself.

Ah, young love.

 

[finbikkifin]

What I meant of course, was the human experimentation done by Nazi doctors during the Second World War. Horrific stuff, but what we learned was almost invaluable to the progression of modern medicine.

Click to shrink...

This really isn't remotely true. Turns out when you decide that ethics don't matter, you get a bunch of assholes torturing people to death for laughs rather than doing science. Even their hypothermia notes - the usual last recourse of "well, they must have helped with something" - are IIRC mostly "so if you put malnourished and abused slaves into freezing water, they don't really like it."

 

[Sarius]

This really isn't remotely true. Turns out when you decide that ethics don't matter, you get a bunch of assholes torturing people to death for laughs rather than doing science. Even their hypothermia notes - the usual last recourse of "well, they must have helped with something" - are IIRC mostly "so if you put malnourished and abused slaves into freezing water, they don't really like it."

Click to shrink...

That's fair enough. I'll reword this into something less 'flattering', if you could call it that. Though after some research myself I found articles/papers that are for and against the practicality of that information and its ethics which, honestly, fits the entire point of what Gram is doing here, so it'll stay in.

Calling the data invaluable is certainly hyperbole, but there were so many tests run, ranging from almost legitimate medical research to just straight up sadistic torture (though we both know which was the more popular option). However, just like basically anything, it was just another jigsaw piece that aided in the advancement of medicine and science in general, regardless of the ethics that surround it. Whether or not something of true value was actually discovered by Nazis. Though that really couldn't be said for aviation and such, as far as I can understand. Germany was pretty good with that sort of thing back in the day.

Anyways, I'll get that patched to be a little more genuine, though I think it still fits in the context of the scene. Thanks for the comment!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 28: Hooray for not Being Crippled

It didn't really take all that long for me to return to the doctor and discuss methods of actually procuring a body for use in post-mortem testing. I, thankfully, found out that it wasn't a point of religious interest. It was very possible that some believed that defiling the body in death transferred to damage to the spirit of some sort, and I was infinitely glad that it didn't seem to be the case here. Maybe the belief of Arun, the Death God, was the chief reason for this. Though I don't know much, if anything, about him.

I quickly brought up the fact that it might possibly be easier to convince someone of this if they were offered compensation of some description. The knee-jerk reaction was to offer payment in actual coin, but I shot that one down pretty quickly. Judging by the reactions I've received from simple payments and other monetary reimbursement, paying for a corpse seems like it would ruffle some feathers big-time.

So, there came the idea of offering mortuary services as reimbursement. Gram wasn't entirely understanding of what I meant when I placed the idea on the table, but before long he was on board with the idea.

The dead here are treated with a level of disgust, simply because the people of this world, and possibly the other world as well, don't have a widespread method of preserving the body—at least not reliably or well. So, the body is generally buried soon after being found dead, with very little time for the family to come to grips with the death of the person. Gram explained to me that this was likely because of a fear of disease or a miasma like effect on the surrounding people.

So, simply, as a small reimbursement for the use of the body in post-mortem tests, Gram will clean and prepare the body for being viewed by the family. There would probably be extenuating circumstances where the body was irreparably damaged, either during a post-mortem, or from injury or disease that killed the person in the first place. Other things could likely be done in the place of mortuary services, possibly transferring into health check-ups for the family that Gram would usually charge for.

This conversation only took maybe an hour to work it all out, and now we had a clear idea of what we could give in return. I was oddly excited to convince people of post-mortem procedures; I was beginning to feel confident in my ability to do so, strangely.

After another few days of simply repeating the Sharah and learning with Mayer in the mornings, the time finally came for me to go do what I had signed up for. A man named Renit was going to die of a disease or infection that Gram wasn't able to identify. I walked to the man's house, finding him surrounded by family, but all at a distance except for an elderly lady who was tending directly to the man laying bed, half comatose. It made me smile a little. Looks like Grandma didn't care one second for her kin not being treated well, especially not because of a little infection.

A few seconds into the conversation, it became clear that both him and the family understood that he was going to die. It seems that they were still in the process of accepting that in its totality, but the man himself was actually resolved about it. He exuded a sense of calm dread at what was happening to him, but he didn't seem like the sort of man that would bow his head in front of death.

He was perfect.

Words flowed from my mouth like nothing else I had every really experienced, the other few times only being close. I soaked up how they felt about every word I said and, depending on the reaction to that, I would use the next to tinker with the atmosphere—releasing calming words when bad emotions came to the forefront of their minds, and saying empowering things when defeat was written on their faces.

The man himself was easily drawn into my world. I spoke to him of duties that only he could carry out. That his contribution to the world would be far, far greater than anything than he could possibly know.

As his attention began to focus on what I was proposing, there was a slight hesitation, before he quashed it mightily with all his will. I explained to him the possibilities that could arise from such testing and told him that there was no way that the information gathered would ever be truly useless. It might not always come to fruition immediately, but in the next generation it could save lives in numbers that we couldn't truly comprehend.

And so, the man was sold. Tied to a sense of duty that was greater than his instinct of preserving, his body, and the piece of mind that it would offer him to keep them intact. As I walked through the dirt streets only a few minutes after the conversation, a pleasant feeling tickled my mind, and something popped into my mind.

[Read a Room: Flexing your uncanny ability to read a room, you handled an extremely difficult topic with absolute grace. +2 Mind]

I couldn't help but grin. This is what I had hoped would happen. Learning anatomy with Gram was my first choice initially, but mostly because I didn't see any other way I could realistically raise my Mind stat. Now it was different—I could do this for Gram whenever it was needed, make myself available for mediation between people and patients, and my Mind stat would steadily increase.

It had been so long since I had received a stat increase that I had almost forgotten that they should be more of a priority. Not as if there wasn't reasoning for the other things that I was doing, though.

Firstly, the Sharah practice was endlessly helpful in control of my body, but didn't inherently increase my Might or my Agility. Maybe the Sharah and other fighting skills fell outside the purview of the screen, or millions of other possible answers for why I wasn't receiving stat rewards from something as physically demanding as the Sharah.

In recent days, I came to the realisation that my mindset from the very beginning of my transportation had completely shifted, and rapidly too. Originally, I was thinking in an extremely game oriented way, but when I saw people and spoke with them—Mayer, Rethi and his Mother, Master Gram and his daughter Alena so on and so forth—it became strikingly clear that they were real, and genuine. There was nothing NPC-like about them. Mayer, as typical as you could get from 'old man is powerful and teaches wayward child', was still different than I would have expected. His hand never forced me into situations I wasn't comfortable with—he was open and willing to converse, rather that telling me to sit down and be told how the world is. In fact, I feel like we've both informed each-other about how the world works, rather than just one of us pulling back the veil over the other's eyes.

The more days I pondered on likening this world to a game, the more I realised that it wasn't going to be so convenient for me. In a game, you would be swept into a series of events that you weren't able to stray from—not really anyways. But here I was, maybe only two weeks and some change into my stay here in this world, and I was already effectively master of my own time, with enough reputation to sink a battleship in this tiny little town, and the ear of a very powerful man.

So, what else was there? What was I doing here?

What were my true goals, and what would I need to achieve them?

My feet met the wood of Mayer's doorstep, and I walked in, sitting on 'my' chair across from the man who seemed like he was eternally sipping tea and reading. Retirement, I guess. One look at me and I could tell he knew that I wanted to have a heavy conversation. Something that happened far more than I'd like to admit. He sighed and closed his book, placing it on the table beside him and crossed his legs.

"I don't know how to say it without sounding like I'm full of myself, so I'll just say it." I paused for a second, "I am way, way too good at people. It's only started becoming really obvious recently, but now it's getting to the point where I can't ignore it even if I try."

Mayer's face didn't change but I could feel that things were clicking for the man.

"I can feel it. I know something is clicking for you." The man's eyebrows shot up. It wasn't really surprise, but the feeling of an entire picture coming into view. The man was stock still for only a moment, before he gently placed his cup of tea down, and looked at me in the eyes. A seriousness in his countenance that only really appeared ever once and a while.

"Well," he started hesitantly, "wou are a natural empath. An extraordinarily rare trait. In fact, I believe that the only other human natural empaths that have existed are Soul-Seekers, though they are considered Long Dead now." It was my turn to raise an eyebrow.

"Uh, being 'Long Dead' doesn't seem like something I really want to be." Mayer nodded.

"Some you really don't want to be. A Long Dead is simply a title for a human variant that has been either eradicated in its entirety, or just stopped appearing altogether. Though I doubt that you could actually be considered a Soul-Seeker at all. Being from another world entirely and all."

Well, that was easy to understand then.

"You are a natural empath. Effectively, you are just naturally able to use your soul to do what an empathic shifter does with shifting. Usually at the cost of being able to shift ether altogether." I thought on that for a moment. A natural empath. So not mind reading level, per se, but just able to sense feelings then. That seemed to line up, at least a little bit.

It was maybe a few weeks ago when I noticed it, unexplained flashes of 'I swear I can feel what they're feeling', but nothing on the level of what I was feeling now. Now, I was getting clearer signals, like scrubbing through the radio waves on a long car trip, in the middle of a nowhere-road, and then finally managing to hook into a radio station. It started fuzzy and indistinct, and maybe that was where I am now. Maybe it'd even get stronger with time?

"Will I not be able to shift then?" Mayer waved his hand dismissively.

"You are a Champion, that in and of itself overrides that limitation. Though whether or not that restriction applied to you in the first is up for debate. It was likely that your natural empathic trait began to awaken only recently, since coming here where the ether or other, more nebulous energies, reside to power it." I nodded.

"Is being a Soul-Seeker, or just a natural empath, all that strong? I understand that I can…" I hesitated find the right word, "convince really well. But I don't understand how I would be able to beat someone that has a similar alignment towards anything combat or otherwise." Mayer gave me an incredulous look.

"I thought you were smart. The answer is that you don't match up against them, you get someone else to do that for you." Mayer laughed and continued regardless of my eyes rolling, "Empathic shifting is extremely powerful. Many of the most powerful leaders to have ever existed were extremely potent empathic shifters. The most legendary were Soul-Seekers or from races with natural empathic abilities. Instead of being good at hitting things real hard, or the shifter equivalent, you are able to walk into a room with some of the most powerful people alive and convince them that your cause is worth fighting for." Mayer shrugged and I nodded stiffly, seeing his point and trying to discard my preconceived notions.

Though there were extremes on all ends. There was probably another man who could walk into a room with exactly the same people and wipe the floor with all of them. I guess that just meant that I'd have to convince that person too. And those that can beat them or gather enough allies to beat those that could never be convinced. The social power games were already hurting my head and I wasn't even involved yet.

"When you put it that way, it seems like something extremely powerful. Maybe even overly so." Mayer shrugged again, picking up his tea and sipping.

"Yes and no. In this world there are just about an infinite amount of ways you can tackle a problem. People develop new ways of tackling those problems all the time. Shifting and ether are just blanket terms—people utilise ether extremely differently across civilisations and continents. To put a long story short, yes you have a very powerful asset, but it isn't like there aren't others that have assets just as good or greater than yours. Just because most people that are Kings and Emperors have access to empathic shifting of some description, doesn't mean that all that have access to empathic shifting are Kings and Emperors, or even nobles and merchants."

"Well, at least I have that going for me. At least I can claim that I wasn't total cannon fodder for this Champion War." Mayer gave a short laugh and I smiled along with his grin.

"You are also probably the strongest naturally empathic human to live, seeing as none of them would have been able to naturally train to the state you're in physically, even now. So that is also an upside." I laughed along with him this time, relaxing a little now that I knew that I wasn't going insane from delusions of grandeur. Though I guess that still didn't make me a genius, like the rest of the Champions. My natural empathy could only be used as well as my smarts would let me, and if I didn't use it well enough, it'd be exactly like I'd never had it in the first place. It was just another tool in the toolbox, right alongside the Soul Hammer.

I sighed deeply, only to return my gaze to Mayer, wry grin growing on my face without restraint.

"Hooray for not being crippled, I guess."

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 29: A Whole New World

The next few days were somewhat aimless, if I were to be honest.

Don't get me wrong, I was productive. I trained in the Sharah with intense fervour, and I flexed my Soul-Seeker-esque capabilities literally whenever I could, to maximise the gains in my Mind stat. I managed to gain four more Mind stat, usually from convincing people of things. Turns out that there are a lot of people dying around town, and Gram wants all of the bodies he can get.

I succeed around eighty percent of the time, and usually the reason for failure is more the family's wishes rather than the person who is actually dying.

On the other side of things, I still wasn't seeing any rewards for the Sharah. I was relatively proficient now, Mayer had even gone so far as to tell me so, but I still didn't gain anything. I knew that I gained a lot of control over my body, and a solid foundation for building strength, but the total lack of reward had me somewhat worried.

I was gaining too much from practicing the Sharah to stop, even allowing me mediocre control of the hammer in certain situations. I pushed the thoughts from my mind and continued my routine of practice.

It went from morning to afternoon to evening, then suddenly it was midnight. Resigned as I was to my total lack of need for sleep, I continued my training in the dead of night. The Sharah pseudo kata that I was performing was many times more elaborate than the first iteration that I had once created, and because of my seemingly endless stamina, I was able to increase the length and the physical strain required of my body to perform it.

But still, no rewards.

In a way, I knew I was being ridiculous. All this time—easily hundreds of hours worth of training—could have been spent on increasing my Strength or Agility, or even Mind stat through simpler training. But the Sharah sucked me in like nothing else did. I couldn't help but truly think that there was more to the movements than simply moving your body proficiently and efficiently. If that were it, then this probably would have been a total waste of opportunity and time.

So, like the idiot I am, I doubled down. Training so hard that I could feel the burn in my muscles and my joints and bones creaking from the massive amount of strain—quite a feat in a very hardy body. All the while doing this, I was continuously training my ability to summon and unsummon my hammer, as well as doing basic tasks, such as picking it up, putting it down, switching it to the other hand.

I was so wholly absorbed that when a blade came slicing down upon me, it was almost instinct. My mind didn't even have time to panic or think of anything else, except for moving. It was like my brain hit overdrive, and I was suddenly acutely aware of my surroundings, and the person that stood in front of me.

The blade that had attacked me was of extremely poor quality, not that I profess to be an expert in anything bladelike, but it looked like it had been dunked in water and left there for a few years. Pock-marked and rusted, the blade was even fairly crooked, but there was enough shine in the metal for the remnants of light bending around Orisis to glint and reflect onto the wielder—illuminating him.

I hadn't ever seen this man. Or maybe boy would be a more accurate description. He was older than Rethi, maybe by three or so years, making him maybe seventeen.I was about to open my mouth when the boy yelled some jumble of words all mushed into one sound, and he charged at me again, poorly stabbing at me with the sword. However, a sword in the hands of someone truly untrained could be dangerous, and I wasn't willing to risk doing a ballsy move like trying to catch the blade or even disarm him.

I might be stronger than him and have a little bit of training in the Sharah, but I was far from a combat genius. I could theoretically run away from the encounter, but that seemed like a stupid idea. This was obviously someone from the town, and I needed to understand why they were attacking me.

The boy was now wildly slashing at me while yelling obscenities, as I simply just backpedalled away, out of his reach. His face grew increasingly red with rage as he raced after me. But you can't really beat someone with effectively infinite stamina this way.

Weirdly, though, I was still scared of the boy. Maybe I was more scared of the weapon that was being swung around. Even so, I couldn't quite find a way to stop the boy without either hurting me, or braining him with my hammer—neither of those things were what I particularly wanted.

So I played the long game and continued to run from the confrontation, hoping the boy would lose his steam and calm down to a degree. That turned out to be the wrong decision, when something caught the boy's eye and an even deeper rage burned across his face.

"I'll fuckin' kill you, you damn beggar!" The boy raced passed me before I could look and see what it was that the boy went after. When I saw who it was, it became painfully obvious who the boy with the sword was.

One of the Jothian boys. I had never actually seen them myself, but when the boy went after Rethi, screaming about beggars in a fit of fury, it was made obvious for mey.

Unfortunately, this just makes this situation even more complicated. The Jothian boy raced after Rethi, and Rethi ran from the boy, wide-eyed in terror. My immediate instinct was to go bash the kid's head in while he was going after Rethi, but I wouldn't be able to catch up with the boy before he grabbed a hold of Rethi and possibly did some serious damage. I was fast, but I couldn't cover enough ground before the boy's blade reached Rethi's flesh.

I felt helpless. No matter if I ran as fast as I could, the boy would reach Rethi before I reached him.

My eyes soaked in the situation as I futilely ran with all my might, the boy wasn't that far ahead of me, but he was much closer to Rethi now, and it was all flat ground—there was no escape route for Rethi to find.

The bigger boy's feet pushed against the ground, launching himself into a lousy dive, with his rusted sword outstretched, slicing towards Rethi's skin.

Then it was as if time had stopped.

I could see the minute detail of Rethi's terror filled face as the blade threatened his life, and the rage of the boy who wielded it. The sword was held poorly, almost as likely to fall out of his hands than it was to actually cut Rethi.

It would only take the tiniest bit of force to snatch that sword right from the hands of the Jothian boy.

A strange instinct took over me as I planted my feet and moved ever so slightly, following a pattern of the Sharah. It pulled on something within me, and my legs and arms strained unnaturally hard for the simplicity of the movement.

As the movement continued, the pull increased, as well as the strain on my body. As soon as my foot hit the ground once again, there was a snapping sensation inside, and a force ripped out of me. The boy's sword flew out of his hand, landing a few meters away, allowing me to continue running and quickly grab the sword before anyone else moved.

Then I simply stood, staring at the two boys. Rethi quickly scrambled to his feet and ran to my side, his pants and hands dirty from being pushed down into a muddy patch of grass. He didn't quite stand behind me, but it was close. The other boy, however, didn't move at all. In fact, he stood, staring at me with comically wide eyes. They were filled with terror.

He knew.

I had 'shifted'. I don't know how, and I don't even know what it was that made the connection in my brain not seconds before. But now the floodgate was open, and I could tell there was a bit of ether connected with my every movement.

I looked down at the boy with a poker face, not letting him see the mix of surprise and exhilaration, along with a sprinkle of apprehension that coloured my thoughts.

"Do I need to bother to ask why you attacked my employee, or is it as stupid a reason as I think?" I said, my voice flat, imitating Mayer to a degree.

The boy's face faltered, shame and terror washed over it, before a weak but smouldering look of rage smeared itself across his mug.

"No one will trade with Pa, we're gonna starve and it's all that damn beggar's fuckin' fault." He drawled out, words thick with an accent similar to Rethi's own light one, but far more unrefined.

"And so, your bright idea was to try to kill me, then to try kill Rethi?" I looked at him, disgust was written on my face, and I knew it.

The words the boy was formulating died on his lips, and the shame returned. The boy looked down at the muddy grass he was lying in, averting his eyes. It was then that I found it prudent to look into the boy's emotions. Something I was beginning to get a true grasp of.

It was turmoil supreme. There was fear, but far more than I had elicited with my meagre showing of shifting, no there was fear far larger than that. I couldn't tell exactly where it originated from, or from what idea, but I had some theories.

It was fear from possibly becoming something he had scorned, like a beggar. Or it was a fear of his father or mother, maybe even one of his brothers.

Either way, it would be stupid make a big scene of this. It sounds like the Jothians are pretty screwed anyways, and exposing this would probably get this kid killed and the rest of his family cast into exile or something just as drastic.

So I decided to play around that consequence.

"You know what you did, and you know the cost it would incur, yes?"

Fear washed over the boy even further, flaring like a beacon in my mind. I waited a moment, letting the fear stew to give the most impact.

"Killing people or having them killed is not something I especially aspire to. So I will give you a deal. You go back to your home, and you get ready to go find work somewhere. I don't care what that work is, whether it be serving drinks at the pub, or cleaning out stables, but you will find it. If you aren't doing something in a week, then I will release another note detailing what happened today." Confusion washed over the face of the boy who had probably expected to be killed or be dragged into town and be chucked in a pit somewhere, as they do with criminals out here—but instead he was given an odd request.

There wasn't much reasoning behind doing this. Just that I knew that he would go out and do something other than terrorise and injure with a sword. Plus, it would probably do well for him to be away from his home. Something tells me that home isn't a particularly kind or warm place.

The boy nodded vigorously, and after a moment he got to his feet, and scrambled away—only giving a backwards glance to the sword I was now holding. I watched him quickly move out of sight, in the direction of the town, taking the long way around so as to not pass by Mayer's home.

I turned to the boy next to me, who was staring intently at me, his blue eyes piercing.

"What? You're being very quiet." I asked, jokingly mocking. Rethi's face remained serious.

"You shifted." He stated plainly. I nodded after a moment, a demure confirmation.

"I think so, yeah." I paused for a moment before adding, "What's wrong?" The boy's face contorted, becoming a look of disbelief.

"Are you serious? Nothing is wrong! You just shifted for the first time, this is huge!" The boy grew excited, completely forgetting he had just been mortally threatened by a blade. I raised an eyebrow questioningly, the boy had a talent for flitting through emotions like a hummingbird between flowers.

"Mayer shifts all the time, is this that big a deal?" Rethi's eyes grew confused, then became clear again, and he began laughing.

"Sometimes I forget you're from another world. Mayer being able to shift is a big deal, but he's Mayer, y'know?" I laughed at the description and nodded before speaking again.

"So how common is shifting really? Mayer makes it seem really common."

"I don't know where Mayer is from, but I think I have only ever seen one other shifter in my life. They were in a caravan of a hundred or so people passing through, or the ones that survived the trip from the south. I don't think they were strong though, or they would be part of an army. I was told that they were the only shifter anyone living in this town had ever seen."

Well, it made sense that Mayer would know a lot of shifters, seeing for strong he was, at least physically. Before I could speak again, Rethi butted in excitedly.

"What did it feel like?" I thought on the question for a moment before spitting out an answer.

"Odd. It felt as if I were moving through mud, then there was this strong pulling sensation in my body and then a snap, like a rope breaking and it was done." I said, I was devoid of constructive ways that I could explain the sensation.

Rethi's eyebrows furrowed in thought. Before his eyes lit up again. I checked his emotions and felt an overwhelming sense of wonder and excitement.

Looks like I'll be answering questions for a while.

I laughed while the boy peppered me with questions when an overwhelming amount of information hit my brain.

[A New Sensation: Somewhere inside you lurked a power you didn't know existed. To tap into it caused a whole new world to open itself up to you. Where will you go, now that you've found it? +5 Mind]

[The Blasphemer of Prophecy: Unlocking a secret long kept by the Sharah'hin, you have stumbled your way into a prophecy that has been forgotten by naught but a few of the Sharah'hin themselves. +5 Mind]

[Wielder of the Sharah: The truth of the Sharah has presented itself to you, and you are now at the start of the journey along its path. Once you learn more of its secrets, and travel further along its path, you may perhaps become a True Wielder. +10 Might, +10 Mind, +10 Agility]

I was dumbstruck.

I turned to Rethi with a flabbergasted look on my face.

"I need to talk to Mayer."

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 30: Prophecy

I walked as fast as I could without making myself seem like a madman, meaning Rethi had to just about run to keep up.

"Master Max! What happened?" he just about yelled after me. I turned and gave him a scolding look. Here, in the middle of the street, was definitely not the place to expose information that could lead to me being identified as a Champion.

Rethi withered beneath the look but continued walking alongside me while keeping a watchful eye.

The walk was brief as we made our way up the stairs to Mayer's home and burst through the door, almost running into Mayer, who was standing in the hallway sipping tea with eyebrow raised. He spoke a moment later.

"Such a rush to meet me in the morning?" I laughed somewhat tersely.

"Yes actually. I can shift now." Mayer's eyes lit up slightly, a little bit of excitement flaring through them. I realised that I always felt and saw people's emotions far more visceral when I had the attention of their eyes.

"That's good news. It generally takes a lot for me to train someone to shift, and even an expert needs a few weeks at least." I furrowed my brow, did he not know?

"Mayer, did you know that the Sharah is a method of shifting?" Mayer's brows now furrowed as well.

"Theologically, yes. It was said that those with the highest commitment to the Sharah were capable of creating storms with their steps. I have met a few that were capable of something similar." I simply deadpanned and looked directly into his eyes.

"Looks like it's just the Sharah'hin that have managed to do so." Mayer continued to look me in the eyes, his surprise evident before he muttered something about Champions and ran a hand over his face with a sigh.

He waved me into the lounge room and we sat, Rethi taking the extra seat near me and listening, his eyes wide with wonder or something similar, I wasn't paying enough attention. Mayer looked at me for a moment, then asked what had happened. I recounted the attack from the Jothian boy, and then explained, in as much detail as realistically possible, the feeling of using the Sharah for shifting.

"Then right after all that, when I was sitting down with Rethi, 3 notification appeared at once. I don't even think I have had 2 at once before." Mayer nodded patiently, but I could see the growing worry in his eyes. I decided to not look at it further lest I see the real magnitude of his worry.

"How well do you remember what they said?"

"Pretty well. The first one was just an achievement for shifting the first time I think," Mayer nodded, "The second was about a Prophecy. Something about a blasphemer being in a prophecy that even the Sharah'hin had forgotten," Mayer closed his eyes and started rubbing the bridge of his nose, "And then the last one was about becoming an Apprentice Sharah Hammer Wielder. Stuff about walking the path of the Sharah." Mayer didn't even try to disguise his groan. I didn't dare check his emotions, that would probably only make me even more worried than I already was.

It took Mayer another 5 minutes before he spoke again, but Rethi and I simply sat and waited for him to speak like lost puppies.

"Okay," Mayer started, "first of all, nothing to worry about with the shifting, that seems normal enough, despite it's pretty odd usage. We will test it later, but I have a good idea of what it may be, based on your description. The prophecy..." Mayer thought for a moment before speaking again, "I don't know of any prophecy including in the Sharah or Sharah'hin. Prophecies, however, I do know a little about, and they are terrifying and horrific, and always, always have an element of disaster, no matter how positive it may seem." He held my eyes, asserting his point before he sighed and continued.

"Prophecies are just one big question. They wait around and linger until someone eventually solves it. If you become part of a prophecy, then you will become part of the outcome as well. Prophecies never state certain outcomes, and only speak in riddles and uncertainties, even ones directly relayed by the requisite Gods themselves. If I were to be perfectly honest, I wouldn't even bother go looking for what the prophecy says, because all it will do is muddy the waters when the prophecy eventually happens to you."

I was part of a prophecy? Me? The most unequipped possible person for the job. Basically anyone of the other champions could probably deal with a prophecy better than I could hope to, but I was the one that had to stumble into it?

I felt an unreasonable little flame of anger burn in my chest for Mayer. Don't kill the messenger seemed so reasonable when I wasn't being told that I was a part of a prophecy, especially one that we didn't even know what it entailed. Was it the end of the world? Or was it about a kingdom or a war? There were too many options, and it only made the flame in my chest burn a little hotter.

I don't think I had been this angry in years about anything, let alone since coming to this wild place.

"What's a Sharah Wielder?" I asked recounting the achievement I'd got, curiosity overtaking my misplaced anger.

"Ah, old and powerful Sharah'hin. Like blade priests of sorts. Opponents that, if I were to ever fight them, I'd be wary about."

"What were they like in battle?"

"Frankly, they were terrifying," Mayer laughed a genuine laugh before thinking further, "When a Sharah Wielder showed up, it always became a legendary battle. I never saw one fight personally, but I've heard the tales and seen the aftermath. As far as I could tell, they fought like a storm of blades, and nothing ever truly came out in one piece when they were involved."

"A storm of blades?" I couldn't honestly reconcile what I had done with my measly usage of shifting and a storm of blades. Mayer nodded.

"I suspect that it is because the shifting they used was telekinetic in nature." There was a slight gasp from Rethi. I looked towards the boy, and gave him a quizzical gaze. Telekinesis isn't that crazy a concept, possibly on of the more boring ways that you could use magic, or shifting in this world.

"Really!? Kinetic shifting is actually possible? I thought it was a myth! Everyone says that it breaks too many Laws!" Rethi blurted excitedly.

"Breaks too many Laws?" I asked directly after, looking between the two. Mayer smiled at Rethi.

"I'm surprised you know of any shifting theory. It's not generally something that a person in a small village would go out of their way to learn." Rethi blushed a little and mumbled about a book he'd read a few times.

"The Laws are the rules that are set by what I guess would be our Gods, or maybe the universe itself. They are not inviolable, by using shifting, we can utilise Ether to ignore some finer details on the weaker end of the spectrum, and entirely break multiple laws on the stronger end." He stopped to take a sip of his tea that he was probably keeping warm with shifting as we spoke, "Telekinesis is one of the types of shifting that was at least thought of as impossible without either incredible power for little usage or a specialised method. It falls under the same category as space, time and gravity shifting. Though, some methods have been used to allow for shifting of them, but they tend to be very… destructive."

"So you are saying that the Sharah'hin have basically been sitting on the method to reliably and efficiently utilise telekinetic shifting?" Mayer laughed and nodded.

"Quite the scandal, really. The Sharah'hin that know of the telekinetic shifting will be extremely unhappy that a Blasphemer found the secret, and you will be hunted by them without doubt." He must have seen the worry that I felt, and the worry that I could feel radiating off of Rethi in that moment.

"It is bad, I won't lie to you, but there are solutions." At his words, my gaze grew quizzical, and then he grinned almost wolfishly. I could feel Rethi shiver beside me.

"Rest well, we will meet tomorrow morning for some true training."

---​

It had been hours since that talk. There had been one person that I was told to go convince of a post-mortem today, earning me one more Mind stat. Which was stupidly low in comparison to the massive increase of twenty in the morning, plus the four from earlier that week. So, a twenty-five Mind stat increase. I was a little bummed that the increase from convincing people of post-mortems was so small in comparison to the twenty increase from learning how to shift. I had been warned by Mayer, or the ancestral teachings of Ryan, that this massive increase wasn't going to last. After a ridiculous amount of work I finally managed to shift, and received a good reward for it, I think. However, Ryan did say that the rewards didn't scale sell. Would that mean that I would achieve another big milestone to only receive ten measly might, even if I work for months?

I shook aside my dark ponderings. For now, however, I felt amazing. The last time that I had felt anywhere near this good was when I received the achievement after the almost three-day stint of hammering in fences. But now it was multiplied by at least three. My body felt more fluid, courtesy of the increase in agility and the increase in strength made every action feel just a little more achievable, except for using the hammer, which only seemed to retain the same difficulty no matter how strong I got.

The really amazing one, however, was the increase to Mind. The effects of the increases didn't truly come into effect until after the talk with Mayer, but now the world seemed far clearer, like I was looking through foggy glasses before. I could feel every sensation in far more detail and the little subtle nuances to the Sharah that I had to fight so hard to find and incorporate into my katas were far easier to find, it was almost natural even.

I could sense the shifting of ether in my movements. The whispers of imperfections in my movements called out for me to fix them. It was almost trippy to perform the Sharah now, and it felt far less like a simple kata now, more like it was a language of movement.

I realised that my katas were the equivalent of babbling like a child, there were some words hidden behind many sounds and expressions that weren't comprehensible at all. The hours passed and the moon bloomed overhead in a spectacular showing of just how bring the night could be.

My katas began to rapidly progress into something that was somewhat legible. Once I started to feel what felt like little sparks of energy coursing through my limbs it was as if I was intoxicated with the rhythm of it, no longer was the Sharah something that I had to think about and maintain every little motion, now it was like movements flowed by themselves, like all I had to do was tell my body to do one thing and it would do five follow ups to that one thing in response.

That training session was both the most constructive session of the Sharah that I had ever performed, and also felt like the absolute shortest.

I felt like I was only just getting somewhere when a sword came slicing towards me from the gloom of the early morning.

On instinct, I moved away from the sword and without looking or thinking I made a similar motion as I had done so yesterday. This time, instead of the strain of walking through mud, it now felt more like water, and the pull on what I now assumed to be the ether inside of me was far more willing to acquiesce to my whim. My body began to virtually hum with power just before the movement was entirely completed, and when it did the snap of power within me releasing was immense.

The next slash from the sword was soundlessly swung wide, sending the arm of the assailant careening off to the right, before it was quickly and expertly reeled in, and remained at the assailant's thigh.

It was eerily quiet, given the amount of power that I had thought that was contained in that blast of kinetic energy. I gave the assailant another look, expecting to maybe see one of the older Jothian boys or their father, but was instead greeted by the face of a jovial Mayer. With Rethi off in the back watching on with wide eyes and gaping mouth.

"That packs quite the punch, Max." I was about to open my mouth to apologise, but Mayer waved his hand dismissively. And turned to walk away, assumedly with us to follow but before he turned he leaned in closer to me.

"Don't use that on anyone but me until you have that under control. That would have ripped Rethi's arm off." He winked at me, a little grin the met with the mischievousness of his eyes.

Then he walked off, Rethi and I scrabbling to follow.

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 31: Combat

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. Today will just be bout after bout," He 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.

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 seeks 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.


A/N: Four chapters remain...

 

[finbikkifin]

Go for the balls, Rethi! Eye or sack, rip and tear!

 

[Sarius]

Go for the balls, Rethi! Eye or sack, rip and tear!

Click to shrink...

Rethi has the reccuring theme of being rather brutal... maybe we'll get to see it more in action one day! Thanks for reading!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 32: Double Time

The world whirled around me as Rethi hammered his fists into my skull. The sickening, jarring blows knocked my onto my ass and into the muddy earth. I groaned in pain and disorientation.

Mayer had strictly forbidden me from hitting back against Rethi for the time being, I was simply becoming too strong physically to reasonably control my strength in fights as vicious at they were getting. It had been maybe a week since we began the training, and already Rethi was destroying me in sheer ability. Of course, if I were to actually hit back I would wipe the floor with him, but he would tear me up with scratches and bites even if I did want to.

I sighed, laying in the mud for a moment while the vicious scratches and lacerations healed on me. I mentally checked my stats while I naturally healed the damage.

[Might: 53]

[Mind: 36]

[Agility: 42]

Honestly, I had learned to keep tally of my stats in my head as the achievements hit. I hated bringing up the stupid stat screen, in all of it's simplified ridiculousness, but I needed to make sure I wasn't too far off with my own tally sometimes. Big numbers though.

I lifted myself off the ground with a grunt and got back into a fighting stance. The stupid stat screen always managed to get me angry enough to keep going.

Rethi came towards me like lightning bolt. I dodged easily and cleanly. This repeated until Rethi caught me out on one dodge, and then I would resort to blocking his attacks, then he was get a hold of me and start tearing me up till I go down.

This was how it went, over and over again for hours. Rethi was a very dedicated boy, especially when it came to fighting with me.

It would, however, be remiss of me to not mention that I wasn't playing by the same ruleset that he was.

He was playing the game of 'whatever it takes to win.' I was playing by the rules of the Sharah, and only the Sharah.

For example, once Rethi manages to hit me once while I am using exclusively Sharah movements to dodge, I then immediately switch to using exclusively Sharah moves to block his attacks.

This way it doesn't take an hour for Rethi to bring me down, and I get to understand the Sharah more in more situations. Another benefit to doing so?

Learning the language of the Sharah.

The movements I use are curated 'words' that I believe are most effectively and making 'sentences' that denote dodging or blocking. This is mainly done with footwork, but Mayer has been displaying more upper body movement upon my insistence. I think that he only really wanted me to learn the Sharah for its foot movements technique, until I stumbled upon the 'language' of it.

The arm movements have added more words, and better ways to express myself through the language, but I still felt like a toddler who was mashing words together in desperate hopes to find a sentence that described what I wanted.

The only thing that I had going for me in this regard was that my body would tell me when I screwed up a 'word' or got a 'sentence' horribly wrong. The Sharah toed the line in what the body was truly physically capable of. Not in a muscular sense, or else I'd simply overpower it and out-stamina it with my seemingly endless supply, but more in the sense that it toed the line of physical impossibility. If you made a step wrong, it wasn't too uncommon to have to use another 'word' to offset the mistake in the previous 'word', thus creating a 'sentence' that didn't make sense and would fail.

Don't worry, it's as confusing to practice as it is to try to understand. Mayer seems to understand the idea of the whole thing and agrees with my methods in trying to train it, but he cannot hear it the way that I do. Rethi, however, is able to.

Rethi has a spectacularly sharp mind when it came to fighting and movement, and so the Sharah seemed somewhat within his wheelhouse. He didn't have the same comprehension of it that I did but was quickly able to tell when I did something that 'sounded' bad.

Unfortunately, he didn't seem to have much interest in uncovering the Sharah like I do. He is interested in the shifting of it, but I think he sees the Sharah in the same way that Mayer does, a means to an end, rather than a path to follow.

My ability to shift, admittedly, hadn't increased by all that much since I first was able to use my kinetic blast.

I had found the first word to the 'sentence' and found that I could give it emphasis with my hammer, but other than that, I was awaiting the second word that I could use.

Rethi began stabbing at my eyes and ears with his fingers, and his finger did manage to get into one of my ears, followed by the familiar pain of having my eardrum destroyed.

I raised my hand in surrender, and Rethi stopped. I didn't surrender often because there was always valuable information to be picked up from every part of training as vicious and hardcore as this, but I wanted to rest my mind for a while.

Rethi tailed me silently, his eyes on the trickle of blood leaking from my ear. I could feel his hesitation, his mind whirring before coming to a halt and his mouth spitting out a question.

"Does it still hurt, Master Max?" I slumped down in the shade of a slightly taller bush that we had been using to store water and clothes. I raised my eyebrow as I pressed my fingers to my ear, feeling no pain, and began to scrub at the side of my face and neck when the blood trickled to.

"No, the eardrum has healed already. Why?" Rethi laughed and scratched his head, his unkempt hair rustling has he did so.

"I mean, when I hurt you and stuff." I gave him a flat look and he stammered on, "I poke your eye out and rip it out of your head, and not ten minutes later you have a new eyeball in your head. Sometimes you don't even make noise when you get hurt, and most times you make noises that could be the sort of grunt you do when you get out of a chair or sit up on a bed." I laughed and nodded.

"You're right, but no. I do still feel pain. In fact, I believe my sensitivity to the pain has only really increased. I know all the shapes, colours and tastes of it now, thanks to you and Mayer," Rethi gave a wry grin, "What has actually changed, is more how I deal with it."

I looked up to the sky and found it was starting to get later in the day. After a moment of thought, I laid back my shirtless body being graced by the cool embrace of the vibrant green grass.

"Rethi, I'm not sure that I've been the best employer to you in these past few weeks." Rethi immediately opened his mouth to protest, but I waved the words away.

"I've found myself in a tough spot, Rethi. That means that my focus it going to be all over the place, most likely for a very long time, maybe forever. However, right now I have time and I feel like I'm not using it as wisely as I really should be." I said, staring off at the sun that was slowly being occluded by our orbiting planet in our shared sky. I turned to him after a moment, finding his face with a slight furrowed brow.

"I don't think that's fair, Master Max. You are a Champion. I don't mean that because you are one, that you're not tied by the same rules as everyone else, but more that you are suddenly in a worlds wide game for survival of the fittest." I nodded gently.

"Maybe." I ran a hand over my face, feeling a sort of exhaustion that could only be found in stress. The small boy grinned at me.

"Master Max, a war is coming, and you are preparing yourself for it. I am just a kid of fourteen years, when it all comes down to it. I wouldn't be able to face what is coming, not yet, but you can." The boy looked up at the sun, the sun hanging in the sky by but a thread.

"As far as I see it, Master Max. You have my interests at heart. You have this world's interest at heart. I don't know what your plans are, but I'm sure that it will be something that I can wholeheartedly follow." Rethi turned his face to me, his face steel, absolute.

"And I will follow." The boy stood and brushed his pants off, slowly walking away.

I was a little shocked to hear those words. In that moment, I saw the absolute will that Rethi had behind those words, and it was both endearing and absolutely mortifying. Endearing in that I know I have someone who believes in me and what I can accomplish, but absolutely mortifying in reality of the belief he has in me. I am just a guy. I'm not special. I can kind-of-sort-of read minds, but other than that I am totally useless in the face of a collision of my world's best and brightest.

I could never compete with Einstein in physics, not even remotely close. There was almost surely some seven-year-old with a better grasp of physics than I do. It was just that, but with everyone that was a Champion.

It came to me as a freezing cold stab to the gut.

Mayer once spoke of the power of empathic shifting; that I would be able to use it to convince a room of some of the most powerful people in the world to achieve my own goals.

It was becoming more and more obvious to me, as I my mind began to whir, that I was going to have to do just that. As my mind hit maximum speed, I felt a familiar concoction of calm and pondering that was Mayer's eternal emotional state.

"Mayer, let's talk as we fight." I yelled, while standing from my position. Mayer's ever precise form was striking against the glaring sun, its red anger on the horizon for being forced away in favour for its sibling.

Mayer whipped forward, and I punched into his attack, knowing that it wasn't possible to dodge or block his attack effectively enough.

"What do you wish to talk about?" The man's deep but gentle voice rumbled as My fist hit his shoulder like a pebble hitting a boulder, and he broke my shoulder bone. I cracked out with my leg, meeting his lifted leg's shin and likely fracturing my own shinbone.

"I'm going to need to convince Champions to join in with my idea of protecting the world from those that wish to go home." Mayer grunted and threw and punch into my stomach that made me reflexively keel over, and he then slammed an elbow into my back, while I took weak shots at his legs and stomach.

"Indeed. You're unlikely to ever to be strong enough to do this alone, and not vicious enough to do so either." He shot a knee into my face, breaking many facial bones.

It took over a minute of pummelling before I was able to talk again.

"I need to know what happened last time to do that. I need an idea of what will happen in the future."

Mayer nodded while I punched and kicked at him and he simply brushed them away with his blocks.

"It took over 2 years to get the war into the public eye, but by then the Champions had all created their own camps, all defined by their almost complete lack of regard for the people their actions affected. They introduced technologies that destroyed kingdoms and economies and waged campaigns that sucked the life from the earth and destroyed the population of nations. You need to find a way to avoid that."

I coughed at a foot was rocketed into my chest, breaking basically everything there and probably puncturing a lung.

"I think I need to find those that don't care to go home." My fist flew at Mayer's face.

"Good choice, those that wish to go home are the hardest people to convince of your goals." He caught my hand and crushed all the bones in my fingers and pulled harshly, ripping my arm out of its socket.

"I think I may have to amass an army created of those that don't care to go home and use their skills to create an opposing force to the 'go-home' groups that will inevitably form. Only one can go home, after all." Mayer nodded.

"You need to somehow keep those Champions that ally with you in check. You will need a powerful inner circle who are able to police those that misbehave in your camp. To find such people will be nigh impossible." I grunted in pain as he slammed a foot into my pelvis, shattering it.

"Maybe so, but I think a true neutral party would be a good place to start. I have a feeling that a science-y type would be best. I can't imagine many of them have much interest in going home, but they are probably most likely to play both sides of the war. I need to get one of them on my side, at least. They will be absolutely invaluable, even in comparison to an extremely strong warrior type."

"Good thinking. You are already making headway on your ideas. But be warned, that you do not truly have long till the war comes into fruition. It will only be cloak and dagger wars for so long, and with you amassing a team, it will only be a catalyst for a faster moving war."

I laughed a pained laugh, prompting an eyebrow raise from Mayer.

"Seems like I need to speed up my training then." I grinned; my teeth covered with blood.

Mayer laughed and came at me, double time.


A/N: Three chapters remain...

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 33: A Beast to Wield

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.

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?"


A/N: Two chapters remain...

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 34: Brutality

The first blows from Mayer came fast and hurt just as much as they always did, making the bones inside of me rattle and creak like wonky floorboards.

I quickly moved to the side, dodging another set of blows and summoned my hammer, swinging it down over head. Mayer dodged with ease, but I used the missed blow's kinetic force to create a cube shaped kinetic blast, launching Mayer back off his feet for a few meters. He was much more prepared for the blow in comparison to the first time he'd taken it head on.

I quickly unsummoned the hammer, letting the metal melt back inside of me. Mayer didn't give me the chance to ready another blow, and he closed in as soon as he saw the hammer begin to unsummon. He flanked me with all the ferocity that Rethi usually showed in his bouts with me, landing a painful kick to my side and cracking a few ribs that immediately began to heal.

I slammed my foot into the ground, enough to push Mayer away from me slightly and put him off kilter. I moved into a flow of words, a sentence of the approach of a predator. The words took me uncomfortably close to Mayer, and I rose my knee into a powerful strike between the legs. Mayer grunted, but grabbed hold of my arms and threw my body towards the ground.

However, I expected that he would try to throw me, so I prepared a sentence, and used the force of the throw to then launch Mayer into the air, allowing me to use his grip on me against him, ultimately slamming him into the ground instead.

I used the words of retreat as Mayer got up from the ground, dusting himself off.

"Good going, Max. You're a much better fighter than you were only a few months ago. Your insight into the Sharah shocks me more and more every time I see you use it." I could only give a dry chuckle.

"Don't be all conciliatory, Mayer. We both know that you are playing with all your limbs tied behind your back," I looked the old man over, seeing nothing but a few minor abrasions, "I don't see any real injuries on you, anyways. It'd take me hours to take you down like this." Mayer took a step, and then he was right in front of me.

"I guess you're right." He said, as his hand flew towards me. I dodged the first, forming the hammer in my hands and in the way of the second punch. His fist recoiled off of the hammer, and he grimaced.

"Bet that didn't feel any good." I grinned, using the shaft of the unformed hammer to fend off a few attacks. Mayer grunted, but didn't bother replying. I swung the formed hammer head at him, making him step back. I followed him, using a centrifugal motion to retain the force of the swing. Mayer held back even further, but I proceeded to use all my might to force the hammer to swing over my head, the massive silver coloured hammer streaking through the air like a comet.

Mayer dodged slightly to the left and kicked the hammer head off to the side, nullifying any kinetic force that I could have pulled from a missed swing.

I began to unsummon and move back, but Mayer was on me. His first fist landed directly on my throat, crushing my windpipe with ease, and then he started pummelling me in my face and upper chest.

I was still very vulnerable to being knocked out, so I dodged and weaved as much as I could, but the limited access to oxygen, and the desperate wait for my windpipe to regenerate, made it incredibly difficult to keep up, landing me a few solid hits to the head and both collar bones being broken.

When I felt my windpipe regenerate with a familiar sickening pop, I took a long, slow breath to stop me from coughing too much, and used my willpower in the moment to focus on coughing the blood from my lungs quickly.

I hated coughing up blood, but I had gotten good at it over the months I had trained. I was constantly breaking bones and having flesh ripped up in my face and throat, so I had to get good at managing it in battle, because it was likely going to happen more than once.

Mayer raced forwards at me, trying to capitalise on my current task, so I spat a mixture of blood and mucus into his face, making him recoil somewhat. I took a deep breath and roared as I started to execute my most dangerous sentence.

The movements were smooth, and extremely snappy, the air around my limbs almost vibrated with the excitement of my silent words. My body danced with a deadly promise. Mayer's eyes widened and he began to quickly move in to try and stop my incitement of the shift.

He was too late. As my foot slammed against the ground, the fragile earth giving way beneath my monstrous strength, an invisible blade screamed through the air, seeking to bisect the older man in two.

Mayer dropped to a knee and reinforced his position, putting every physical defence that he could between him and the blade of raw kinetic energy. The invisible blade hit the arms that he had erected in front of his face first, tearing and biting into the muscle of his forearms. He quickly began to rise against the blade, defying the force and trying to guide the force to a less vital area of his body.

It took him a few seconds until the force behind the blade was depleted, barely able to make it to the bone of Mayer's forearms. He rose to his feet, opening his mouth, ready to congratulate Max on his newest addition to his arsenal…

Then he saw the hammer slam into the ground in front of him, the earth shaking ever so slightly as I angled the handle of the hammer towards the man's centre mass and grinned like Rethi did. A vicious little expression, almost demonic in nature.

I let the immense energy from the hammer blow hit the end of the hammer, blasting it up from the ground, rocketing the shaft of the hammer forward towards Mayer's chest like a spear blasted from a cannon, with only the meagre guidance of my hands as a guard rail of sorts.

Mayer desperately tried to twist away from the blow, but the immense speed of the shaft was overwhelming. It caught the old man on the shoulder, an issue more with my aim than Mayer's reflexive movement.

As saw as the shaft touch the man, I realised that this was different. This wasn't like every other time I had hit the man, where he would shrug it off with so little damage that it was almost infuriating to me.

This time the shaft began to chew through Mayer's flesh. I heard the crack as the bones of his upper arm, collar bone and shoulder were pulverised by the sheer force of the blow. My stomach dropped as I saw the shaft of the hammer dig into Mayer's flesh like a hungry shark, devouring his meat and feasting on his pain.

The man then yelled– no, he roared.

There was a blast of almost incomprehensible energy, in that moment I saw the natural elements surround Mayer and aid in the ways that they could, the earth rose around the man's legs, the air at his back pushed with its mighty gale, the flame flickered into life, fed by the wind and burning like gets at his back, and the water drained moved with the earth, aiding it in forming and solidifying like stone around his legs. And what brought it all together, was the golden glow of a powerful light radiating off of the man, of a power far more than anything I'd encountered before.

Mayer's roar lingered in my ears, the force of the elements assisting him with all their might, spurred onwards by the warm, golden light that wreathed him.

Before long, the force behind the hammer had been depleted, and Mayer's power disappeared along with it. Mayer's body slumped to his knees, his hand hovering over the damage to his shoulder.

I raced forwards, suddenly terrified of what I had done to him.

"Mayer!" I almost yelled. Mayer grimaced as he looked up at me.

"Yes boy, you fucked me up pretty hard." He said, a harsh pain in his voice, but none of the venom that I had almost expected. I ran a hand through my mane of brown hair nervously, mind whirring with what words I could possibly say to rectify this.

"Oh man, I didn't mean to…" I stammered, but the man slowly interrupted me with a grunt.

"Of course you meant to, you idiot. I was pushing you to do it." He looked up at me and gave me a pained grin. "Look at how damn strong you are, boy. You're so strong you could probably kill me if you did it right!"

Mayer's voice was pained and laboured with strain from the injury.

"Shut it Mayer, I don't want to kill you. What the fuck should I do to help right now?" I said, my words coming out a little too fast, and almost tripping over each other.

"I have them!" A voice called out from ten or so metres away. I turned quickly, seeing Rethi stand their with an awestruck expression, holding a small wooden box in his hands.

"Get over here then!" Mayer growled, and Rethi ran over with nimble feet and quickly opened the box, pulling out a sizeable opaque vial and then handing it off to Mayer quickly, before nervously awaiting more orders with bated breath.

Mayer practically threw the thing down his throat and grimaced at what was probably the taste of it. He reached out to Rethi's shoulder and patted it gently.

"Did you get to see something good, kid?" Rethi nodded with fervour.

"It was amazing! You were both so fast, and Master Max's shifting was so fluid, it's like he knew what was coming! And…" But I interrupted the boy's rambling excitement.

"What the hell are you talking about! I almost killed you!" I said, a little bit of anger leaking into my voice. I was met with a quizzical gaze from Rethi, and an amused one from Mayer.

"Of course, Max. That was the whole point." He laughed gently and gave me an almost admonishing look, "You didn't actually think I was so strong that I'd be able to stop you forever, did you? I was overwhelmingly powerful in comparison to you months ago, but back then you were basically just a normal human with a big ass hammer. You are five times stronger than that just in raw statistics alone, along with your usage of the Sharah and kinetic shifting. You are probably somewhere in the realm of twenty to fifty times stronger in a fight than you once were." He laughed painfully.

"You are growing to become a real monster, and you don't even realise it yet."

I didn't know how to respond. I knew that I'd grown stronger, but twenty to fifty times stronger? That was insanity to my ears. I could barely conceive of myself being anything in the face of the old soldier, his overwhelming might now vanishing abruptly to show me the reality to my unprepared mind.

"I didn't want to do that to you." I said, unable to stop looking at the gory mess that I'd turned the older man's shoulder into.

"This is the first step for you, Max. You don't know what brutality is. Not truly." I almost opened my mouth, ready to decree that brutality was all I experienced for months in training, but Mayer cut me off.

"No, you don't really know. You have experienced brutality knowing that it couldn't truly kill you. This is your first true example of that. The first step in becoming a true warrior. A true Champion." Mayer looked me dead in the eyes, and I knew that he was right.

It was all still too much like a game to me. All too easy to brush off and forget once the wounds heal. But now I've brutally injured Mayer, and I know that there is no way that I'll ever truly forget that wound. The pulverised flesh and bone leaking blood.

"Why now?" I said, my voice quiet against the whirlwind of emotions in my mind.

"Because now is the best time. Now you need to go out and truly fight. This time, against the environment." He grinned.

"You're gonna go monster hunting."


A/N: One chapter remains...

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 35: A Little Trip

I sighed for what felt like the fiftieth time this morning.

Preparing for the trip was… interesting.

It came along with about a weeks' worth of preparation. The length of the trip itself was probably a handful of days to the location and the same back, but entirely depended on the pace that me and Rethi set.

If it were just me, I would sprint full tilt for a day or so and be there, but Mayer said that was too easy—another way to exploit my statistical advantage over gaining any real, worthwhile experiences from the trip.

I didn't really agree, but Mayer knew his shit, and if he thought that it was pertinent enough to discuss, then it was probably worth adhering to. As much as I was dreading the send-off in a few hours, anxious beyond all logical reasoning, I saw it for what it was. A bird flies the coop situation.

Even back on earth, I had never really managed to get out of my parent's house. I had reasons that could be used as a compelling and rather convincing case, but the real truth was that I barely had an independent bone in my body.

Not that I was totally reliant on everyone for everything, but I can't say that I worked particularly hard for anything specific, and even then, I simply cruised on by in life. The height of privilege, I know. I was waiting till after university to really figure out my independent living situation and all that, but now that was the furthest possible worry I could have.

Instead, I was effectively preparing myself to trek across unfamiliar lands, using only intuition and information that I can gather from people to find ultra-powerful people who may or may not obliterate me on sight.

Luckily, neither Mayer nor I were complete buffoons, and sending me out on that sort of trip with essentially a wave goodbye is considered to be sending me to my sure death. Though what I'd gain on this trip that would help outside of this sleepy little road town? I couldn't possibly know.

Rethi was off saying goodbye to his newly acquired girlfriend. Gram's daughter, Alena. I say 'newly acquired' in the sense that they only realised that they were dating a few months ago, but they were basically dating beforehand too.

She clearly despised me, for whatever reason she had cooked up. According to Rethi, she was a vindictive one, and that seemed to be the main reason she had no friends, other than Rethi of course. Other than there not being that many children running around, of course.

Rethi, after a while of being around Mayer and myself, had become a very relaxed kid—an unlikely voice of calm, given the way that he fights. He was probably the only person I knew that could put up with the girl, judging from my few interactions with her over the past months—none of which went well.

It was then that Rethi made his appearance. He looked a little more haggard than he should be this early on in the day, and his bags were hastily packed, meaning that he'd probably have to properly repack them—before Mayer saw them and made him unpack and repack everything 'army style'. Which was code for painfully meticulous, of course. Not to say that it didn't work.

"Got a good chewing out?" I chuckled. Rethi grunted, unamused by my prodding.

"She still thinks that you've enslaved me or something. I have no idea why." He grumbled moodily, a distinct departure from the usual chill atmosphere he assumed. I could think of a few possible reasons why she might think so but saying them out loud would be counter-productive, to say the least. So, I merely shrugged and put the young girl out of my mind. She was going to be the least of our worries out on the road to have a nice blood fuelled tea party with a monster of some sort.

A few hours passed of preparation and double, triple, and quadruple checking that we had everything.

Mayer showed up a few times and pointed out minor things, and so on.

Then the big send-off came and went, in which Mayer briefed us on why we were going out there, and what we were probably going to face.

"We haven't had traders come by from the smaller road towns to the south for a good few weeks now, and everyone is struggling to get by with the resources we have from the north. The people who do manage to come by were almost all attacked by a group of monsters out along the path a few days out. You are going to go there, investigate and eradicate if necessary."

With that, he had sent us off.

Mayer had taught us how to interpret this kind of information and how we should handle it. He wouldn't give us any more than what he already had because, simply, you wouldn't get any more information in a real monster subjugation request.

And so, the journey began, with Rethi on horseback and myself on my own lovely mare. We took it easy. There was no point in rushing our way there only to be too fucked to do anything but get killed, so we kept the speed reasonable.

The first few hours of travel consisted of us talking about the theoretical points of the subjugation, like what monster it was likely to be, how far along the path they would be, etcetera. But really, it was basically shooting the shit. There was no way that anything that we were saying would hold up to the reality of the situation. The conversation started to morph and contort into whatever appeared into our heads at any given moment. Which eventually lead us to the topic of Rethi's choice in women.

"I have no idea how you can put up with that, to be perfectly honest." Rethi looked at me funny for a moment, and then shrugged.

"She really isn't that bad." I gave him my best blank look.

"Remember the time she saw you covered in my blood and she decided that she'd run around the town telling basically anyone who would listen that I was torturing you?" Rethi looked sheepish.

"No-one got hurt in the end, it really wasn't that bad." My blank stare continued.

"She tried to stab me. With a broken broomstick handle."

Rethi opened his mouth to reply but closed it and sighed.

"I know. I know. She's crazy overprotective. Always has been." He looked down at the horse that was shifting beneath him as it sauntered down the path and scratched at the back of the horse's mane.

"I don't think she has quite gotten her head around me not needing protection anymore, and my attitude changing to reflect that. It's making her worse. Paranoid even." I nodded. The boy certainly didn't need protection anymore. It was doubtful that anyone in the small town would be able to lay a finger on him before he had ripped their throat out.

"Maybe she is unsure about the power dynamic of your relationship shifting?" Rethi chewed on his lip for a bit and grunted in affirmation.

"Maybe. We are on rocky ground at the moment, with me coming out here with you. She thinks I've gone insane." I laughed.

"Maybe we have. We are going out, hunting for a group of monsters. Most people would think that we were crazy." Rethi joined in with my laughter and we moved on to lighter topics, like shifting and the Sharah.

The sun eclipsed by the other planet in the sky, turning the sky a brilliant golden colour, the planet warping the light slightly making it almost look like a golden orb. It was quite the marvel, something I'm not sure that I'll ever truly get over seeing.

Our conversations slowly died down into a comfortable silence, like a fire that once blazed, but now hummed with delightful warmth.

The path became less maintained the further we went out, becoming more and more uneven, which would have made it much harder to travel on foot. It wouldn't have bothered me at all, but I could see why the addition of the horses was a wise move by Mayer. So still, despite the rapidly eclipsing sun, we forged ahead, agreeing to set up camp two or so hours before the sun truly disappeared.

It was in those few hours of walking that I started to feel a strange sensation on me. Tracing me. I looked around not truly perturbed, but a little wary.

The sensation went away but came back a few times over the course of the next few hours. I couldn't pin the feeling on anything in particular, so I had to leave it alone for the time being.

Rethi and I struggled to set up camp, despite doing it with and without Mayer's help on several occasions. The change from open plains to the outskirts of a towering forest apparently made for a much more difficult time setting up tents.

It took us a good hour to properly set up the camp and the fire, and then another thirty to make and eat a simple dinner, which I ate more out of habit than any nutritional value I could get from the simple soup.

The one benefit that came with being sleepless was that I was always capable of taking night watch.

I didn't tire, so a drop in perception due to fatigue wasn't something we needed to worry about. A fact that Mayer had made abundantly clear that we factor into our decision making on the road. It was also another one of my 'cheats', in his words.

Honestly, unless Mayer hadn't shoved the importance of having a watch rotation down our throats on many an occasion, we wouldn't have even bothered having me out on watch in the first place.

This time however, I started to see Mayer's reasoning.

The feeling from this afternoon was back, and much stronger this time. It became abundantly clear that either someone or something was following me, and it was close.

I didn't move, making sure that whatever it was wouldn't be alerted to the fact that I know they are there. I readied a sequence of movements, primed to obliterate anything that so much as moved.

It was then that I heard it. A small, almost imperceptible shuffle in the woods near our camp.

I sprang into action, swiftly moving from a sitting position into the proper stance, then flowing into a collection of movements that sung of destruction. I snapped towards the source of the sound and slammed my foot into the ground with a sharp pounding motion. I felt the power of the slam rush through me and begin to run its predetermined path through my body as I finally understood what it was that my eyes were telling me.

My mind went into overdrive. I desperately forced body to move a little more, to change directions of the blast just a touch. I growled with the effort it took to change a sentence already set in motion, but my complaining legs and arms complied.

The diverted force shot outwards, raw energy roaring towards, and then into the base of a tree, exploding a haphazard circular hole in the sturdy wood, sending splinters flying everywhere, some even stabbing into my flesh only to be pushed out less than a second later.

I stood there dumbfounded for a second, my eyes and mind disbelieving. However, after a moment of this, my mind kicked back into action and, almost involuntarily, I roared.

"What the actual fuck."


A/N: Stay tuned in the next few days for a new chapter and an announcement!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 36: A Stowaway Found

I had, quite honestly, been a little angrier than I should have.

Though it may have presented as being angry at someone, I was really angry at me.

I should have known. It was so clearly obvious that it was almost painful to observe in hindsight. I guess that's what I deserve for going lethal straight away, rather than being normal and sleuthing it out before trying to explode them into tiny little bits with a kinetic blast—something that Mayer had specifically said to not use on anyone but him.

I sighed and ran my hand through my dusty brown hair, brightened from the light of the campfire that had been resurrected from coals in the middle of the night. Rethi sat in front of me, half dressed and eyes wandering between the two of us, unsure who to be angry with in the first place. I looked to my side, seeing a short, dark-haired girl sitting next to me, somehow both shellshocked and also wearing a combative expression, one that I had become well acquainted with over the past weeks and months.

"What exactly happened, Master Max?" Rethi asked, kindly but worried. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Alena Gram, Rethi's girlfriend, make a scandalized face. I quickly interjected before she could start yelling.

"Had been feeling eyes on me all night and was trying to figure out what it was," I paused before I continued, "I acted rashly and decided to get the jump on whatever was watching us."

The moment after I finished speaking, Alena's top boiled over and she began to yell.

"Damn right you acted rashly! You almost killed me, you murderous-" Rethi turned to look at her, his eyes flashing a brilliant green in the light of the campfire.

"Alena. What are you doing out here?" He slowly intoned, each word a carefully laid brick, a platform for Rethi to stand on. Rethi was surprisingly good at this stuff, he had obviously handled a few situations just like this. The master was at work.

"I, uh…" She trailed off, looking for words while sneaking scathing glances at me. After a moment of Rethi patiently waiting for a response, he nodded at her, as if he had heard an enlightening string of words. I raised an eyebrow, honestly more amused than any shade of angry now.

"So, Alena," Rethi continued with his slow intonation, "you followed us out here, on foot, to a place you knew would be dangerous. You then tried spying on someone you knew to be one of the more powerful individuals in our area, for possibly hundreds of kilometres, and you didn't expect that you might be killed?"

His tone the entire time was not chiding, nor was it accusatory. He was reframing the subject of the conversation itself. From Rethi's standpoint, I was beginning to see how he was less angry with me, past the fact that I'd come close to accidentally killing his girlfriend. But also, because we are out on a main travel road on Virsdis, a historically hostile planet. If you were going to do something so colossally stupid anywhere, it better not be on Virsdis.

Alena had nothing to say to that, brightening to a shade of red that only contrasted her pale features from her dark hair further. It was a mix of anger and embarrassment that I felt swirling around inside of her. She was a mess of emotions, this girl—always was. It's why I was so sceptical of why Rethi would even think about getting together with her, for really any reason.

But, in her, I think I saw a small inkling of that reason. It's definitely not because she was hiding a golden heart, but because that anger and indignation extends from a desire to protect. Just an overwhelmingly unhealthy manifestation of it.

Rethi sighed heavily, placing his head in the palms of his hands. The boy had been wired with worry after being awoken by my shouting. He had thought it was bandits, he had been prepared to kill. Instead, he had to deal with the near death of his girlfriend.

"You know why I told you that you couldn't come. You knew why." Rethi said, exasperation leaking into his voice. It wasn't venomous, but a mixture of sadness, betrayal, and disappointment. Rethi stood up, his muscled body extending upwards to his full height that loomed over his girlfriend, even if she'd been standing. He looked her in the eye for a moment, a small battle of wills, before Alena gave up and looked away towards the trees not so far from the small camp. Rethi turned to me, seeking guidance.

"What do we do?" Alena swung her head around, indignation flaring.

"You are letting that… man choose what happens to me?" Such vitriol from such a small woman, it was almost surprising. I didn't bother to give her a response.

"Well, she's already out here, and was committed enough to run the whole day as well," I looked at her, honestly slightly impressed, "so I don't think we should even bother bringing her all the way back to town just to have to ride all the way back out here. If she wants to risk it with us, then she can." I shrug my shoulders, and Rethi looked concernedly towards Alena, who's expression betrayed the small wave of relief I saw in her.

"But what if-" Rethi started, but I waved away his question.

"That's all you. If she is going to put herself in danger, then she may as well have someone around who can help her if she royally screws it up." It was a risky call, if Alena were injured for whatever reason, it would come back to this decision being the origin of the problem. But I couldn't honestly see Alena just giving up following us. I barely knew the girl and even I could tell that she was fanatically devoted to Rethi, for whatever reason.

Rethi looked at me, confused. He hadn't ever really had a position of authority or responsibility, aside from caring for his mother, so to essentially be given the wherewithal to dictate how to manage his girlfriend on this trip was a new experience.

"Anyways, I'm going to bed. You can sit out here keeping watch with your girlfriend. At least we'll have more people to keep watch." I gave a nod, and I was off to 'bed'.

Of course, I didn't sleep, I hadn't slept in months at this point. Oddly enough it had become hard for me to understand why I ever enjoyed sleep, other than the simple refreshing of the mind. Now I found the idea of sleep, or willingly giving myself to unconsciousness, a deeply unsettling concept.

So, instead of sleeping, I spent my time listening and experiencing and thinking. A sort of meditative technique for those with infinite mental and physical stamina. I had initially developed it as a mental rest while performing the Sharah, but it became something that I simply did in downtime that couldn't be used effectively for anything else.

At first, pushing myself to feel and experience the emotions and thoughts around me was hard, if not downright uncomfortable. Me being a natural empath and also capable of shifting were supposed to be mutually exclusive. But for reasons unknown to me or Mayer, other than the canned response of 'you're a Champion', it wasn't. I haven't been able to scrounge out much information of the Long Dead or Soul-Seekers, other than what Mayer knows. Everyone else just know of them as legends, beings that once existed and now definitely do not.

How my ability to interact with ether independently from being a natural empath wasn't immediately obvious, though I guess it was intuitive enough. I was able to 'transfer' a small amount of my emotion sensing empathy through my ether, something that I was sure would strengthen through becoming more adept with shifting and utilising ether.

Which, at the moment, I was definitely not adept at. Sure, I was capable of using shifting, enacted by the Sharah, but when I just tried to move ether on its own; it was a whole different ball game, and I wasn't even knowledgeable enough to be able to understand why.

I could hear the quiet but relatively tense conversation outside of the tent. It came down to the fact that Rethi was disappointed that Alena wouldn't let him trust in his own judgement, and Alena was mad that Rethi would allow himself to be subservient to me. Fair enough, I'm not sure I'd take too warmly to a partner of mine being subservient to someone else. But I'm not sure she cared to believe that Rethi was not a slave, and never would be.

It was a long night after that. I was still a little shaken by the fact that I nearly blew a hole in the chest of a young girl. Cold blooded killer, I am not.

The sun began to peek from behind Virsdis, the warm glow slowly adding colour to the rough canvas of the tents. The early mornings were enchanting on Virsdis. Virsdis had a side that was always facing the sun, the light side, and a face that was permanently dark, where the Nightfell have taken up residence—in the legends, anyway. Night on Virsdis came when Orisis blotted out the sun with its mass for ten hours as it passed in its orbit around Virsdis. In the morning, after ten hours of night, Orisis moved just enough to let the sunlight refract off of its atmosphere, creating a bright and almost heavenly display of the 'sunrise'.

I wonder if people awaken early to see it, or if the other Champions look upon this and think as I do. Maybe they are too busy doing anything else other than look at it, in fear of potentially coming to find that this is more than a proving ground. Or maybe that this world was anything more than a game that the God who had put us here had created just for us to mess around in.

I got up out of my reclining position, readying myself to tackle the day, when I felt a pair of eyes flit over me, just for a second. I was instantly snapped out of my reverie, as I quickly spread my ether out, trying to connect to anything I could with it, trying to use my natural empathy as a sort of radar.

I found Rethi and Alena sitting on the ground near where the fire was, and something else. I moved quickly towards the tent's opening and threw the flap open, only to see Rethi and Alena sitting by the last whispers of a campfire.

Rethi's alert eyes wandered over to where I was standing and gave me an odd look as I stared intently at the campfire.

"Everything alright, Master Max?" I hesitated, giving the boy a nod only after a few seconds of staring at the campfire. I could have sworn I felt something. In fact, I'm entirely sure I felt something. What it was, I couldn't know, but it was a far odder experience than the silly girl tailing us, who was slumped onto her boyfriend's shoulder, sleeping away her watch duty.

I gave Rethi a light scolding eye for that, and he scratched at his face sheepishly.

"Alena, up." I said, calmly. She awoke slowly, her eyelids fluttering and then finally opening, starting with a squint. It was a rough wake up, made harder by the fact that she was forced to run after us for the whole day, so she didn't fall behind. She groaned out something in a very teenagerly way. I chose to ignore what it may or may not have been, based on Rethi's shocked expression.

"We are going to pack up camp and get moving for the day. You are expected to help pack up, and then you will ride on one of the horses while we travel. There will be no complaining, or I will take you back directly to Master Gram. Are we clear?" I state harshly. Not too harshly, of course. She was still a kid. But the differences between a kid here and a kid back home are immense. If she couldn't pull her weight, then that was her fault and many would not grace her the option of being escorted home, no matter her gender or age.

Alena wiped sleep from her eyes and nodded, getting up with Rethi and I to pack away the canvas tents and roughly washing the cooking tools that Rethi had used last night. It took thirty odd minutes before we were back on the road, the grumbling girl up on my horse, trying her best not to fall off, with adequate help from Rethi, though I suspect that he was trickling out information because he found her jostling around on the horse's back secretly hilarious.

Throughout my jog alongside the horseback riders, I continued to search for the origin of that odd presence that I had felt only hours before. It was something almost wholly alien feeling to me, and yet I couldn't catch even a whiff of it.

I was concerned that there was more than just a little girl following us.


A/N: Hello, hello! Welcome to the first chapter of the new backlog of chapters that I've written for Unwieldy.

From now on, there will be somewhere between 3 and 4 chapters posted a week of this story, but not to fret! You can get more of my content in reading my other stories, Fixture in Fate and Ribbon! Also, if you're interested in having a place to chill out and receive updates on my stories, check out my Discord as well!

Of course, this is all find-able in my signature!

Hope you all have an excellent day!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 37: A Slip of the Tongue

The trip was slated to take around three to five days, depending on our pace. With Alena around things stayed approximately the same. Though she was clearly just as inexperienced with travelling as any of us, at least on horseback.

I really didn't care all that much about her presence, I was fairly confident that I could take this whole shebang on by myself, and the addition of Rethi was really just so that I had a companion that had skill and experience. Something I was beginning to realise was just as invaluable as having experience and skills yourself.

It made me reflect on the stories I had read in my fairly recent youth. Stories of ultimate soldiers and academics, capable of doing every task themselves, an island of their own. In fact, they may as well be walking countries, all the expertise and skill that you'd need was available until it was convenient for the plot to strip it away to make the character rely on someone.

I had realised that I wasn't going to be one of these characters. It just wasn't a realistic possibility. Sure, maybe I had literally double the time than a regular person, on account of not needing to sleep. But that would still mean that It'd take twenty years of fixated devotion to do what a 'regular' person was capable of in forty.

So why not trust in those that had been walking that path for far longer than I? Would I not trust in Mayer because I have surpassed him in my insights, if not execution, of the Sharah? No, of course not. His opinion is still valid and extremely valuable to me, especially where my common knowledge of shifting and the general limits of extra human strength. He had been moving his body with the kind of strength I have only just begun wielding for decades.

So Rethi was immensely valuable to me, in an odd way. A 'manservant', loyal and willing to do dirty work to execute on the goal of his lord. Though I wasn't happy with the title and was thinking that 'right hand' was going to be a better descriptor in the near future.

The road was increasingly becoming less maintained as we ventured forwards, fields to our right and forest to our left. The maintenance of the roads barely ever reached out this far, probably because there wasn't much reason for loggers to come out this far, unless they want to deal with more wild forests and more dangerous beasties, which I guess is exactly what we are doing.

My light jog beside the horses faltered as their speed slowly declined into an amble rather than a trot. It marked the first break for the day, the sun well and truly in the sky by now.

Both Rethi and Alena hopped off their horses, Alena grumbling and rubbing her ass, giving my horse the stink eye. I just chuckled as I whipped out a fresh apple, offering it to the beast who gratefully took it from my hand.

These horses had been impressively determined through the yesterday and today, making great pace. Mayer had procured them from a horse nut in the town over the other way from which we were travelling. Interestingly enough I could have easily ended up in that town instead of this one if I had walked upstream instead of downstream on that first day. Might've ended up as a stable hand to survive if I had.

Alena walked over to Rethi who was currently letting his horse drink generously from the stream that followed the road we were following. It'd veer off at some point, according to Mayer, but never far enough to worry about getting water.

I let my horse free into the field after taking off a training short sword from a clasp on the saddle. It wasn't quite as sharp as the one that Mayer had loaned Rethi for actual fights, that one could easily cut through bone if wielded right, Mayer had demonstrated as much on me.

"Rethi!" I yelled out to the boy, who turned before the sword hit him in the back of the head and deftly caught it. Mayer had done that during training to the both of us, so we did it to each other to keep each other up to snuff. He looked down at the training sword and grimaced as he turned to look at Alena, who instantly wrote her own story as to what was going on.

"Give it your best today, we don't have much time before we are fighting for real, and we want to make sure we both don't die a stupid, horrible death." Though it was incredibly unlikely that either would happen to either of us, I really wanted to make sure that the boy wouldn't end up with an injury that would hamper his future for whatever reason. Small nicks were fine but, call me overconfident, we should be able to take out this whole group of forest wolves without being touched once. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Rethi could do it singlehandedly—his training with Mayer really showing just how much work Mayer had been putting into raising Rethi as his 'heir'. If we couldn't take out these wolves together, then I'd be more than a little disappointed in myself.

Rethi steeled his expression and moved forwards, throwing the scabbard off of his training sword, which was standard issue army if I remember correctly, and threw off his travel cloak, waiting for me to do the same. I just shook my head.

"If I get hit then ruining my clothes is my punishment." Alena's eyes widened; she'd seen what that sort of sword could do to someone. She was baffled why I would care more about by clothes than my bodily integrity. Strange how priorities change when you pain and injury are fleeting to you.

Rethi nodded and raced forwards, starting with a mix of the approaching steps in the Sharah and a flurry of sword strikes that Mayer had been belting into his head for months. I deftly dodged each flurry, knocking the last strike away with my forearm on the flat of the blade, then moving closer to push the boy back.

Really, this was a game of tug of war in opposite, just with more swords and grievous injuries.

The blade whizzed through the air as he used the force of my push to spin around and slice at my other arm, which I ducked and swept at his feet. He jumped, stabbing towards my lowered form. I moved in closer, reaching under his armpit and taking his sword wielding arm and throwing him further back.

Rethi, not one to be caught on his ass, flipped mid-air and caught himself on his knees. I approached, unrelenting, punching out with heavy blows, enough to make the shorter boy's body creak with the effort of parrying them with the flat of his blade. The reason he wouldn't try to sneakily slice my hand with the edge of the blade is because I have caught his blade in the bones of my hands one too many times for him to try that with.

I laughed as I approached, making the boy grin with exertion and a battle drunk glee. The exchange only lasted a few more seconds before Rethi took a last, desperate lunge at the precipice of the water stream. The world slowed as the blade approached my face, but I thought of something far more interesting.

I used the split second to bring my hand up, and jam it onto the sword's tip, impaling it to midway through the blade. As painful as it was, it really didn't feel like all that much anymore. Pain was a hollow feeling, more a signal to my brain that my body had been violated than an actual sensation anymore.

The blade slowed to a stop, and I grinned at Rethi, who could only look on in exasperation and frustration as I pushed my hand all the way down to the hilt and commandeered the pommel straight into the boy's chest, winding him and pushing him the last step before the inevitable plunge into the water.

It took Rethi a moment to resurface, before he took a gasp of air and proclaimed:

"That's cheating!" I only laughed, quickly followed by Rethi's laughter from within the stream.

This was when I turned to Alena, who simply watched on in a mixture of horror and fascination.

"How does it feel to know your boyfriend is a badass?" Alena gaped as I laughed. I started to idly yank out the sword through between my middle and ring finger, quicker and surprising less painful than pulling it out the long way. I threw the blade aside and started to walk back towards my horse.

"Wait! That wound needs to be treated!" Alena called as she ran over to me. Amused I turned to her as she roughly gabbed my wrist and lifter it to her face so she could examine it, only to see the wound quickly begin stitching itself back up, the ligaments and muscles reattaching to the relatively unaffected bone within the hand, before the skin slowly begun to repair itself. The skin was always the slowest to regenerate for whatever reason, but the skin didn't really add all that much functionality if you didn't mind a little pain, so it was fine by me.

"How…" Alena trailed off as she watched the miraculous healing that comes with being a champion.

"A gift of sorts, you could say." Her eyes turned to mine, questioningly. Her dark hair complimenting the striking blue of her eyes.

"Life shifter? Are you one as well?" She asked, a pure intensity dawning on her face. Rethi, who was taking off his damp clothing and wringing it out, stood very, very still. The reaction was immediate. Alena's face lost all of its glee and her jaw clamped shut.

"A life shifter?" I said thoughtfully. Alena paled with a stricken look, her emotions darkening severely. Rethi discarded the clothes he was drying in a pile in the grass.

"A life shifter?" Rethi said, his voice a bit more shocked, and… worried?

Alena didn't deign to answer us, as she quickly walked away to where my horse was standing, her mind whirling with a frankly astounding number of emotions—a prominent one being fear.

"I assume being a life shifter isn't exactly a prestigious title?" Rethi nodded and I sighed.

"Is it because of something stupid? Or is it well founded?" Rethi looked pained for moment before he answered.

"They are also called Abomination Makers, Master Max." Well founded, then. There was a moment of pause before the boy walked over towards his girlfriend and placed a hand on her shoulder. It seems that Gram was hiding more than he was letting on. A life shifter, huh? So, a healer, figuring from how Alena reacted to my regeneration. Could I have seen this coming? Maybe.

I knew that Alena was weird, which was a good enough reason around these parts to suspect that they had something going on. Gram and Mayer were good examples, me included, I guess. And looking back on it now, I remember Gram's face being very similar to his daughter's when I had asked about medical horrors of the past. Abomination Makers. Interesting.

To me, there was hardly a taboo. As long as you were able to shift it, then there was something to it, in my opinion. It could be as simple as shifting dust into existence, and I wouldn't knock it until I knew whether or not something astounding could be done with it. Life shifting sounded like a good candidate for being able to do some crazy shit.

I did some menial chores, brushing the horses, heeding them, drying off Rethi's clothes before I decided that the two lovebirds had been given easily enough time to talk.

"Alrighty then, are we done exposing deep, dark secrets to each other?" I got two glares out of that. I offered a chuckle.

"Good! Time to get a move on. On the way we can talk about how this life shifter stuff works." Alena paled, and Rethi looked about ready to go in and defend her.

"No, Rethi. I am not going to have someone travel with us whose powers we aren't sure of. If she is unwilling to talk about it, we will ride all the way back to town just to drop her off. Mayer will be made aware of the reason." Rethi paled and Alena paled even further. Rethi looked at Alena questioningly before she nodded hesitantly.

I threw Rethi's now only slightly damp clothes at him, who redressed quickly and jumped on the back of his horse and gently begun to warm the horse up again.

"Get ready for another awkward conversation." I laughed as Alena struggled up onto the horse. And rode after Rethi, ignoring me.

"Ah, sometimes Rethi makes me think that I'm the supporting character." I chuckle as I began to jog after the two teenagers.


A/N: Hello! Another chapter of Unwieldy down, and yet another strange thing within this little town. I'd bet my bottom dollar that Mayer was the reason for all the strange things happening. Maybe its a cosmic balance sort of thing. Either way, hope you all have a great day!

 

[Sarius]

Chapter 38: Hope

The ride was punctuated with an uncomfortable silence. I calmly jogged alongside Alena, keeping my words to myself while the girl mustered the willpower to speak. It took a long time, hours in fact. For me, it may as well have been a blink of the eye, especially for someone who had trained in the Sharah for days at a time.

"A life shifter is able to take hold of the physiology of a being, and transferring ether into it, allowing the shifter to manipulate the body of the subject with extreme precision. Often used to both heal and harm." She recounted woodenly, as if reciting from a textbook. I wave my hand with mock impatience.

"The real story." I simply stated, for I knew there was one. No-one reacted to having an ability the way Rethi did without something being up. She grumbled discontentedly but sighed like a child trying to avoid her chores—only to do them in the end anyway.

"Life shifters have a bad name. There is a fair amount of them, but if you don't know what you are doing with the abilities then you can just as easily kill as you can save by total accident." She shuffled uncomfortably of her horse.

"So, there are many life shifters running around with no training trying to heal people and killing them instead?" I questioned, knowing full well just from the girl's storm of emotion within her eyes that it wasn't even remotely close to the full truth.

"Yes, and the cults." Rethi supplied quietly. Alena glared at Rethi immediately, but Rethi showed no sign of remorse.

"Cults?"

"Yes, cults," Alena sighed, "they are large conglomerations of mainly life shifters who are obsessed with… human augmentation." I hummed. Ending up with the nickname Abomination Makers wasn't exactly singing the praises of the success of their experimentation.

"I imagine that they aren't great people."

"No. They routinely kidnap and experiment on children for years." She spat vehemently.

"And you? What are you?" She looked shocked and a little hurt before she swallowed her discontent and replied.

"I–I want to be like my mother…" she paused for a while, and Rethi's attention laser focused on her, I assume this is the first he's heard of this, "she was a shaman in the tribes of Orisis. Father travelled out to meet her, hearing legends of one of the most powerful life shifters alive. Once they met, they became an unstoppable team of medical knowledge, Mother having an instinctual and experience-based knowledge and Father having a scientific and evidence-based knowledge." She ran her had through her dark hair, brushing it from her face, only for the unfortunate breeze to defy her attempt.

"So, you want to someday combine your father's medical sciences and your mother's innate abilities?" She quickly nodded, staring at me as if I were going to argue with her. I just shrugged.

"Sounds like a good idea to me." I say and continue to jog. There was an air of stunned silence and listening in on her emotions only told me how surprised she was that someone wasn't openly combative against her ideals. I raised my eyebrow and her, giving her a small smile.

"You know, where I am from people could only dream of people capable of life shifting as it is here. Damn the medical research, we had tonnes of that, just the ability to edit someone's body so completely would change how we approach medicine for years to come. For this world to have people capable of what you can do? You are extremely lucky." Now even Rethi was looking at me oddly. I had gotten good at telling what Rethi was thinking, just by virtue of being around the kid most of his waking moments and seeing almost all of the expressions he had to offer—I didn't even need natural empathy for it. So, I continued.

"I know you don't think much of it now. What could a person capable of only saving one life change? Especially when tens of thousands die from simple physical injuries." I turned to them, wondering if they were following along. Alena looked suitably confused, but interested, and Rethi's attention was focused—as it was whenever I talked about small snippets of Earth, something I didn't do very often, the wound a little too fresh. I hummed with thought, trying to find the words I wanted.

"But what about when that is no longer a concern? When the same protection afforded by the most powerful kingdoms on Orisis spans the entire planet and this one, when monsters slowly become less and less of a threat as humanity and other races advance to such a level that they can be easily dealt with by a group of common soldiers. What do you think is the next biggest cause of death?" Rethi began to think, but before he could even think of an answer Alena spoke confidently.

"Disease." I snapped my fingers and shot finger guns at her cheesily.

"Precisely. Once monsters and wars stop killing everyone, the next big issue will be illness, probably. I'm sure that the larger kingdoms have come up with ways of mitigating the spread of disease, they can't have their populace be wiped out by a random virus. But when it becomes the largest cause of death, there will be a massive push behind improving working and living conditions, putting in standards for the food you eat, what materials are used to construct things, the creation of sanitation as a societal concept. Eventually, the world will reach a point where it becomes almost impossible to make anything any cleaner or more sanitary without massive changes in life as you know it. So, after the world has begun to clean itself, and the spread of disease has been mitigated to a point where many diseases will simply disappear, and many will be mitigated in other ways—like inoculation and later on, vaccination. So, what is the next frontier?" The two kids looked at me, enraptured by what I was saying, but unable to look that far into the future on a dime.

How could they be expected to either? When the world was so concerned with actually surviving against monsters, what does disease matter in the grand scheme of things? I chuckled at their obviously feeble attempts to pick a 'new frontier'.

"What about diseases that have nothing to do with cleanliness? What about diseases that stem from lifestyle choices, or simply from existing in certain parts of the world and the insects that happen to be there too? What about birth defects that an unlucky child in thousands is afflicted with, or the various mental disorders that are inherited, at least partly, through genetics?" I shook my head at the two children in front of me who couldn't possibly know just how terrifying and destructive these diseases are.

"But with this power of yours? Life shifting could change all of that. Imagine that you were able to identify a chance that a child was potentially to be born with a rare genetic disorder that would make it impossible for them to live even a few years. Right then and there, you could eliminate that possibility right from the parent's genetics and the unborn foetus. You could stop the cycle altogether." I smiled at Alena. It was a moment of thinking before she seemed to slowly come to terms with just how far her ability could potentially stretch. I shrugged.

"You have a long way before you reach even remotely close to that level yet, especially without accidentally making someone start leaking blood through their eyes." I laughed lightly and Alena looked slightly disheartened by that, fuelling the darker parts of her emotions more severely than I had expected.

"But just because the goal seems unachievable, doesn't mean that it isn't worth pursuing. And who knows, you might accidentally achieve it." The who teenagers adopted thoughtful looks, and even Alena's storm of emotions seemed to calm down for a moment while she pondered. It'd be interesting to see what came out of this. Best case I get someone on my side that is able to heal people, and in worst case, I sow the seeds of my idealism.

We walked in mostly silence for the rest of the day. Maybe the two teenagers had things to think about after my spiel, but that was fine by me. Silence was a good tool, giving way to some of the best thoughts in the end.

The day slowly trended towards night, and after one more stop earlier in the day, we decided to take it in for the night, quickly setting up the tents and a campfire. We ate a quick dinner together, Alena and Rethi spending most of their time chatting quietly amongst themselves, which was fine by me, mostly because of the fact that I could feel the eyes on me again. I was sure now, the unknowable, alien feeling was coming from the campfire of all things.

Honestly, I was less creeped out by it at this point, and simply confused. By all visible metrics, it was an entirely normal campfire, nothing even remotely interesting about it. But irrespective of my perception, there were alien emotions simply existing within the fire itself.

When the two kids decided to go to sleep in the same tent—how scandalous—I stared into the fire, directly where I felt the emotions coming from. I think I spent a little over an hour staring into the fire before the emotions disappeared entirely. That just made me even more confused, was it contingent on–

"I'm sorry I didn't introduce myself sooner, your companions were… having a hard time getting to sleep, as it were." I jumped up from my spot on the ground, immediately summoning my hammer into existence the fastest I ever have. I took a swing at where I heard the voice coming from, and there was a loud thump as the hammer buried itself into the ground beside a portly man dressed in fine clothes, but not fine enough to be nobility. His face was the epitome of welcoming and hospitable, his head was balding too, only seeming to match his welcoming figure. I was entirely sure that the hammer was going to hit the man but soundlessly, and seemingly effortlessly, he had managed to dodge the blow entirely.

"Ah yes, the hammer I've heard so much about. If I remember correctly you weren't able to wield the beast of a thing for a while there. It's good to see that you have made progress." The man smiled encouragingly, in a way that I felt to my very core. It was inexplicable, but I had felt the same once, what felt like years ago now.

"A God."

The God before me raised an eyebrow.

"Indeed. Lord God of the Hearth Court, at your service. Fast on the uptake." The man moved to sit again, gesturing for me to do the same.

"I try." I said with not much humour in my voice.

"Yes, I know. It's not exactly a normal occurrence a God descending to meet a Champion. In fact, if I recall correctly, the last Court of Gods that authorised contact with a Champion ended up being culled." The man chuckled to himself. Though, the joke was a bit morbid for my tastes.

"So then, why would a 'Lord God' deign to come meet one such as myself, if the price for so doing is that high?" I looked into the God's eyes and felt that same alien set of emotions, but amusement bubbled to the surface most prominently.

"An interesting conundrum, isn't it? There is a reason of course, and that reason is you." The God looked into my eyes with a thoughtful expression on his face.

"Me? What's so interesting about me in all of this?" I asked, genuinely intrigued by the turn of events. Surely I'm not the most important Champion on probably even Virsdis at the moment, so that's certainly not the reason.

"Intention! Intention, my dear boy." The God yelled out. He saw my eyes glance worriedly towards the tent that both Rethi and Alena were sleeping in and he chuckled mirthfully.

"Do not worry, I am a Lord God, I know how to set up a few rudimentary sound cancellation wards and such." My eyes narrowed, seemingly lost in thought for a moment, but I prompted him.

"Intention?" I resupplied.

"Ah, yes. Intention. Do you know what those that fought in the last Champion War lacked so severely? The ones who were fighting against those who wished to return home, back to Earth?" The God pretended to ponder. His words were almost like an actor gently guiding his audience to the conclusion he wanted them to reach. I just raised an eyebrow at the God, and he chuckled merrily, delighting in being called out in his act.

"Intention. Champions that wished to go home were filled to the brim with it. Their burning need overwriting the care for any life, army, kingdom, or Champions that would dare get in their way. And what did we have to combat them?" He asked, a slight variation on the pondering expression. This time it was more like an academic, conversing with another about complicated topics only they could speak on at their respective levels.

"Nothing." I said, but the God's face fell, becoming a stone guise of distaste.

"Fear. All we had was fear." And I felt it through his eyes. That burning fear existed still within the God's chest. A wildfire of worry and anxiety over whether there would be anything left to be the God of.

"So," the God regained his jolly expression, his emotions equalizing once again, "this time, before the storm truly hits, we need something else to power us." He smiled, the simple expression filling me with an emotion that I wasn't so familiar with, a complex thing born of dire circumstance. That emotion was…

"Hope."


A/N: Hey there! Hope you all had an amazing Christmas! I didn't post yesterday to spend some time with my family and enjoy the day as best as I could, but I'm back onto it now! Full steam ahead for little old me!

Hope you all enjoy a Christmas gift, just for you!