Post by Lone Dancer on Nov 7, 2022 5:28:34 GMT
Chapter 5
Training Regime
Carlos was panting hard as he ran his twentieth circle around the room. Sweat was dripping down his shirt and he was regretted wearing his dress shoes as his feet were beginning to really hurt. Of course, Jade barely looked winded, being what she was.
That was until Melissa slapped some heavy weights on her, and she swiftly joined Carlos in commiserative misery. The brass giant did not speak much, but Spirits above was she a taskmaster.
Carlos felt like dying. Truly a great way to spend one’s birthday. Anytime he slowed to a point Melissa deemed unacceptable, she was there behind him to smack his legs with a stick she found from somewhere. And man, did it hurt.
It didn’t help that Hawthorne seemed clearly amused by their suffering, making encouraging quips such as;
“Come on, lad; you can do it! She’s only smacked you 27 times. I’m sure there won’t be a 28th!”
Or,
“Just only a bit further; you’re just 79 laps away!”
Carlos had to bite back a curse. He, however, did feel a dark joy when Jade, too, finally became victim to Melissa’s whacking stick. Her suffering, along with him made the pain slightly more bearable.
Thankfully, Hawthorne finally intervened.
“As much fun as this is, Carlos here looks like he is going to drop dead, and Jade doesn’t fare much better. I’ll give them some Elixir, and we’ll continue.”
At his words, Carlos felt intense relief as he could finally stop. He almost faceplanted as his legs gave out, but he caught himself just in time. The typically athletic Jade also joined him in giving the floor a friendly hello.
They both kneeled over, gasping for air. Carlos could at least muster the thought of appreciation that the dust was gone. It didn’t stop the fact he felt like he inhaled his own body weight of it though, earlier.
“Alright now, bottoms up. You have more laps to do!”
Hawthorne handed him a simple metal flask, and Carlos drank greedily from it like it was a font of life itself, the sweet elixir within nourishing his body. The effects were immediate. His legs no longer felt like the wet noodles they were reduced to, and he was buzzing to bounce back up.
Hawthorne took the flask away, now giving it to Jade. She looked at it, looked at Carlos, gave a shrug with the remnants of her strength, and took a swig. Her eyes widened, and she took several more before Hawthorne removed it from her grasp.
“Yahhhh, I should limit your intake before you both become addicts.” He commented, looking between you both.
“Whelp, get up and run, lest Melissa gives you her brand of encouragement.”
That was all the words Carlos needed to hear, and he sprung back to his feet and resumed his sprint. Thankfully the potion made his feet stop hurting though he was certain he was wearing the shoes down.
Jade was flying by him, regardless of the weights she was wearing. For every lap he made, she made three. It was slightly disheartening, but he reminded himself that she was a Cultivator. Keeping his pace, he was glad for the fact that the elixir also removed most of the pain from his legs from Melissa’s painfully accurate stick.
He was counting the laps in his head. Twenty-five, thirty, fifty, seventy-five. His legs reached near dying stage again around lap sixty-eight, but he dared not stop and was running off of sheer will and remnants of the potion. Jade finished a while back, and was cheering him on as he ran, lungs heaving.
However, Melissa was merciless, and he spent the final twenty laps getting tapped with the stick. Instead of going for his legs, this time she went for his arms. He reached lap one hundred with absolutely no idea how he got there as everything was becoming an exhausted haze.
He was offered a bench to sit on by Jade, an offer he took, practically flopping over in half. As he sat there, gasping for breath and unable to feel his legs, Hawthorne offered him a brown pill, explaining;
“Take this. It’ll help, but it won’t be pleasant. Part of the way it remains non-addicting.”
Carlos simply heard the word help, and didn’t care for the rest. He took the pill from Hawthorne’s gloved hand, and popped it into his mouth. The taste was bland, but grew bitter quickly. What made it worse was how the it then transitioned to an unpleasantly spicy flavor, making his nose feel runny and his face flush.
Despite the awful taste, his legs were mending themselves together once more. He wasn’t sure if this constant wearing him down to exhaustion and then using potions and pills to bring him back was healthy. Jade pat his back as he warily stood up once more.
Well, he was at least ready for whatever Melissa had planned next.
“It is now time for you to spar the other.”
Damn it.
###
“You know, Instructor, I don’t feel like this is a fair matchup.”
Melissa snorted, while Jade rolled her verdant eyes.
“Life isn’t fair. Now fight.”
He tried flashing Jade a kind smile.
“Uh, go easy on me, please?”
She gave him a wide, shit-eating grin.
“As your dear friend, I would never want to hold back on your potential.”
He gulped, which furthur amused her. Hawthorne cut it.
“Less talky talky and more beating each other up. Come on; we got bets placed on you.”
Jade did an ‘oh well, what can you do’ shrug, and flashed forward. Carlos barely had time to pull his arms upwards into a blocking pose like Melissa taught before Jade’s fist landed.
Ow.
He was sent tumbling backward, unable to catch his footing. The wind was knocked out of him, and he sat there, wheezing. Jade looked upon him with some concern, but Hawthorne waved it off.
“You’re a Mage; why are you trying to fist-fight a Cultivator?”
“Because you told me too!”
“Eh, only said fight. You inferred incorrect information from misreading data.”
Carlos bit back some oaths, gulping down the words. After a few more seconds of catching his breath, he pushed himself back up with a grunt.
With a grunt, he got back into the fighting pose—arms out, ready in defense. With an idea, he tried forming an Arcane shield between them, but Jade struck him before even a wobbly shape could take hold. He was sent sliding backward as Jade merely pushed him rather than punching him again.
“Come on, Carlos, do better.” Hawthorne called out.
“How?”
“Act fast, conjure faster. It’s simple!”
“What?”
“Go.”
Jade shot off into action while Carlos was scrambling to do anything. Like before, he was sent sliding backward while trying to conjure the shield.
As he re-oriented himself, he was looking around the room for anything. He had an idea, and snapped his eyes back to Jade. She was already preparing to strike again. Her green eyes were cold steel.
Well, if he couldn’t make something new, then he would use something old.
Back in the corner of the teaching room, an Arcane tube rattled. Jade’s eyes flicked to the source of the sound as Carlos expended his will to send it flying toward her. She easily caught it with one hand, giving him an unimpressed look.
“Really?”
But he wasn’t done yet. His Ego suggested a little theatrics, so he obliged it. With a grin and a snap of his fingers, he willed the tube, and the contents within, to explode.
He had a sudden headache from the combination of sending the tube flying and then detonating it, but he watched in satisfaction as it shattered with a bang! Dust billowing out.
He could hear racking coughs from within the cloud, and Jade stepped out, absolutely coated in dust. Her eyes were shut tight, and she was leaning over, still coughing. Hawthorne was clapping like a madman, laughing.
“Yes, that’s how a Mage does it!”
However, Carlos was growing concerned as Jade was still coughing, and he was starting to feel regret his actions.
The dust-covered girl, her green clothes now wholly drenched in brown, looked up at him. Her eyes were squinting, but at least there were open.
“Yah, I feel like I deserve that.” She said between coughs, little plumes of it exiting her mouth. Not wanting to just leave her in this state, Carlos began conjuring another tube and suction hose, regardless of the headache he had. It certainly didn’t help, but he could deal with the migraine while helping his friend.
He began running the hose up and down her. She would hold her shirt tight so it wouldn’t keep trying to get pulled into the hose as well. Bit by bit, she regained her signature green. After a few run downs, she was in a much better spot.
She coughed out some more dust.
“I am so going to take like five showers, and even then, I don’t think I will feel clean.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. I did something dumb and lost for it. You won. Congrats!” She gave him a small smile, before coughing out even more dust. She frowned at the bitter taste.
“Is it possible for you to hose my lungs or something?”
However, Hawthorne cut in, now standing behind them both.
“Aw, bonding. Anyhow, I’m sure a quick visit to the healers will fix the dust in your lungs issue for the both of you. Now, onto important matters. Let’s discuss what we do here at the Defiant Guild during this little breather.”
Carlos turned his attention to Hawthorne, very interested in what he had to say. He kept in mind the breather part, so they were likely to fight again after this or something. Fun.
“Well, as Carlos here first guessed, we combat Companies. Or more specifically, we strike where they are vulnerable. In sheer numbers, they heavily outweigh us. So we sneak in, searching and extracting important intel or objects.”
Hawthorne checked they were listening, before continuing on.
“We wear them down bit by bit, hindering their operations. They label us terrorists, fanatics, but we know the truth of the matter. Our little heists, so to speak, are nothing compared to what they do the general populous. They say we deal in blood, but we didn’t make the Bloodspring like they did.”
Carlos’s thoughts grew numb at the mention of the Bloodspring. That was a horror he didn’t want to think about at the moment.
“To speak frankly, we use Companies consuming nature against them. If they detect one of their own is being weakened, they will pounce. They have no empathy for their kindred and will gobble them up in forced corporate mergers. We count on that cannibalistic nature of theirs to hamstring them.”
He knew what Hawthorne was talking about. He had limited memory back of his time in Avalon, but he heard new cycles common in the fact that some small Companies got absorbed by a greater one.
“The final benefit of these heists, is we get to keep, use, and distribute what we collect. You could consider us a Robin Hood of a Guild.
“I won’t sugarcoat it. What we do is bluntly, morally grey at times. People get hurt in the process. Innocent people trying to live in a world that consumes them, getting the short end of the stick. But for every innocent person caught in the crossfire of our missions, hundreds, thousands more are helped. We can’t wage full-on war against the Companies. We just don’t have the people or resources. But we can sure scrape them down to size.”
Jade and Carlos stood there, ruminating over Hawthorne’s words. Being told that the Defiant Guild was mostly a bunch of magical heist folk trying to cripple Companies by causing infighting and that they weren’t perfect was sobering.
Yet it wasn’t like there were other alternatives Carlos or Jade could lean towards. Maybe Jade, considering it, but for Carlos? No. But at the end of the day, this was his choice. And his choice was one made long ago, sealed in ash.
He faced Hawthorne, who was searching him over with his grey stormy eyes. Even Melissa seemed pensive. But Hawthorne seemed to have found what he was looking for, and relaxed. Jade interjected however.
“How do people get hurt?”
Wearily, Hawthorne faced her. He seemed tired, a weight on his shoulders as his eyes flashed back to something neither of them could see.
“We fight against the Companies, what they stand for, and what they do to stand there. But Companies are made of employees. More often than not, people who have no choice but to work there, to feed the machine. It’s that or debt piles up endlessly, and they come collecting.”
Hawthorne paused, considering his words.
“Companies don’t pay their employees with Marks. No, they use credit to keep them locked in. We have no grudge against the employees. They are contractually bound to do as ordered. But when we strike against Companies, it is often that employees get hurt in the process. We do not enjoy it; it’s not our goal. The only people we condemn are those in charge.”
“I see.” Jade was quiet, taking in Hawthorne’s response. She sighed.
“It all seems messy.”
“It is, lass, it truly is.”
Carlos understood Jade’s hesitation. At the end of the day, she cared for people. The idea of innocents being hurt in the crossfire didn’t ring right with her. He got it. He was slightly iffy on it himself. The moralistic philosophy of the needs of the many over the needs of the few was always a troublesome one to think about.
But it was also pragmatic. Carlos didn’t enjoy thinking that way concerning people, but it was.
“Well, you know how we operate now. You still in? Still want to learn?”
He reached out a hand. Carlos shook it, and eventually, so did Jade. Hawthorne sighed. He muttered something to himself, something about the recruits always looking so hopeful.
But the melancholic moment was over. Hawthorne clapped his hands together, the loud smack reverberating against the walls. Melissa stood up straighter.
“Shall we continue, then?”