One week later.
While it had taken a few days of bleeding knees and shins, Frey could finally walk about the cavern's uneven ground with confidence, only occasionally tripping. His smell was numbed to the stench of dried sweat and straw. The dim light or bright light, he had no preference anymore. He lined up the dummies for another round of practice swings. He struck down with his newest weapon, a wooden training mace. The force of the weapon is what drew him in, the satisfying crack of each and every dummy he descended upon.
'I think I like this one,' he thought as he held out the mace, but the thought faded as soon as pain rose from his now-strained arm and his breathing grew heavy. He frowned, closed his eyes, and concentrated. Life essence swirled around the most painful parts of his arm, just as Alexander had instructed him to do. Over the course of a minute, a small portion of the pain flared down and the shaking stopped. He took a deep breath and raised his mace. Cracks rang out in the cavern.
A wide grin crept onto his face, standing amongst a pile of broken dummies. He stretched out his arm, a painful action but it wasn't as severe as before. 'Alexander was right. This mace is perfect.'
"Good job," Alexander appeared behind him, making him jump.
"Don't do that!" Frey yelped.
"I see that you took a liking to my suggestion," the general said, seemingly ignoring Frey's complaint. Alexander extended his hand so Frey handed him the mace. "The key for this weapon is that you have to be ready with your shield close to you, because you have to be extremely committed with mace swings." He pointed to the dummies. "Again. This time rely on your shield, because you can't change the direction of your strike like with a sword." He tapped the giant's swollen wrist, causing the pain to sear. "Lean into the strike and expect the dummies to hit you back, hard."
Frey got into a stance and swung, using the outwards arc to bring the mace down with a crack into one of the fallen dummies. He tucked in his shield but even he knew that he had done so too late. In a real fight he would have gotten hit. "I'm still too used to reeling back my spear," he sighed. "But it's getting easier to adapt to the different weaponry."
"That's inevitable," Alexander shrugged. "After all, you had years to learn how to use a spear. That experience, now just a bad habit, is not going to go away any time soon."
"Actually sir," Frey set the mace down and rolled out his sore wrists. "That was one of my concerns. While I do think that I can master another weapon within a year, I feel like I just threw away years of training. Thomas and Elero are both going to leave me in the dust." He took out the Kopis. "Maybe I can just train more with this and the shield." He gave a nervous smile.
Alexander chuckled. "Funny, the others said the same." He held out his hand, looking at the Kopis. "Hand it over."
Frey swallowed his saliva. "You want it for training, right?" To his dismay, the general shook his head. "Can't I just keep it on my person but not use it?" He took a step back and slipped the weapon back into its sheath.
Alexander stepped closer. His bad breath warmed Frey, who had broken into a cold sweat. "You may leave at any time." He kept his hand outstretched, not angry nor aggressive, but demanding. Frey averted the man's intense glare, sighed, and handed the Kopis over.
"I understand your concern." Alexander said as he snatched away the Kopis and put it in his spatial ring. "Especially considering what Jackal has turned the Knight's Academy into." He clicked his tongue.
"What's happening over there?" Frey asked. "Now that I think about it, we haven't gone back there in this past week."
"Don't worry about those fools." Alexander huffed. "Those tests won't make you stronger, not anymore. Anyway, remember that it is my job, a voluntary use of my free time, to turn you into something better than you were. Make no mistake. I am merely a guide in this process. I am not going to do the work for you. Now if you excuse me, I need to meet up with an old dwarf." He vanished in a puff of golden life essence.
Frey sighed, took a few moments to ensure that no one was present, and stowed his mace. He walked to a corner of the cave, where the largest patch of mushrooms was growing. "Strength comes in many forms huh?" he thought aloud as a white aura sprouted from his skin.
"In that case, I wonder how I should train to be able to use this power?" He closed his eyes and stilled his mind. Five floating wisps appeared in an endless darkness: the mushrooms. Elero was floating in the lake. It may have been the inches of solid stone or the dozens of feet that separated them, but he couldn't sense her like he had hoped. 'Maybe I have a range?' he thought. 'I wish I could have asked grandfather about this.'
Frey stretched out his hands. The aura condensed into soft, white flames, neither hot nor cold. He reached out. His hand touched the faint wisps. He opened his eyes and cursed. The white aura was still around him yet the mushrooms hadn't changed.
"How are you doing over there?" Elero called from over at the lake. "I don't hear any sparring so you're either dead or taking a break."
Frey jumped and reflexively let his power disperse. After scanning the room as if he were a criminal caught in the act, he let out a sigh of relief and walked over to the cavern's entrance. Elero was still floating at the surface of the lake, seemingly just bored.
"You are supposed to be clearing your mind and meditating. Talking to me is probably not going to help with that." Frey said as he picked his mace back up and began to set up the dummies, but some of them were cracked. 'I might have to ask one of the fellow…the servants to repair this again.'
Elero kept going: "Well it's kind of hard to not think when I just keep flashing back to last week."
Frey cocked his head to the side. "What do you mean specifically?"
Elero let out a long sigh. "The man who keeps warning us with notes; he appeared while I was training last week."
"Really?" Frey looked around, happy to discover that there were no servants in the immediate vicinity. "Who was it? What did he look like? Why didn't you tell me sooner?"
"I didn't see his face, but he told me to make my way down to the demon pit. The key to my true salvation lies somewhere in those ruins. He said to hurry but I figured that we should at least rest and train for a while, which is why I took so long to tell you, but this," she raised a pruned hand out of the water. "This isn't helping me, not very fast anyway. I need answers, and they're down there, waiting for me to get them."
Frey rubbed his chin. "Let's talk about this later, since I don't want us to be overheard. Let's also bring this up with Thomas." He turned back and cursed under his breath. 'Thomas was right. She's about to do something dangerous again, only this time we'll be right there with her.'
New novel chapt𝒆rs are published on free(w)ebnovel(.)com