SEVENTEEN
Kon wiped at the sweat on his forehead as he walked toward the gym that his holopad had led him to. The entire morning had been spent in deep meditation as he worked on finishing shaping the rune, his willpower finally snapping after five hours. There had been tangible progress and Kon was certain he was close to finishing the rune, maybe one more session left and then the implanting of it.
“I’m sure it’ll be painful, but can it be worse than the body cultivation?” Kon stopped and banged his head off a bulkhead.
“Definitley jinxed it. Why would you tempt fate like that,” he hissed at himself as he ignored the pointed stares of a pair of merchants who were walking by. They were easy to tell apart from the other inhabitants of Oasis. Richly clothed with rare metals as bracelets or necklaces, various gems dangling from ears and fingers, and the constant upturned noses as they walked around the quarter made it easy to pick out.
The nobles stood out just as much but for different reasons. Kon had pieced it apart easy enough as the scions of the original warlords of humanity still tried to cling to their past barbarism. Well cut suits that imitated officer’s uniforms and they all carried steel of one form or another. Most carried a knife but a few had full sabers that would be unwieldy inside of the tight confines of a ship. The only similarity to them was that both groups kept sneering at anyone and everyone who wasn’t part of their clique.
Mages were supposed to be the final group in the large section of housing, but the mages were so few in number that they were hardly present. Kon looked around the hardly inhabited area, where plenty of people could have been living, and instead it was just available space where large, sprawling shops sold exclusive wares or cafes and restaurants appealed only to the highest echelon of society.
Kon turned away before he reopened that bleeding abscess in his stomach, that pit of fury that had been banked ever since Alice had been returned to them. It was people like this who had consigned them to death. He hit the access key a bit harder than he meant too and plastic cracked sharply as the door opened, a sharp piece of it slicing along the edge of his palm.
Kon looked down at the jagged point of metal and plastic that had been the access control and his own, unvarnished palm. A thin red welt had appeared, but even now it faded from view.
“Neat. Hope they don’t expect me to pay for that.” Kon walked through the doorway into the private gym and stopped as he stared at the three mages that they had recruited were all lying in limp heaps of flesh. Sweat pooled around them on the blue mats as they moaned weakly, trying to move but their trembling limbs failed them at every turn.
“It’s not fun when they’re this weak,” Alice complained, her voice drawing Kon’s eye to the older Knight. She was sitting on a piece of equipment looking down at their new recruits with a mix of disgust and horrified curiosity.
“What did you do them?” Kon asked, already assuming she’d done her favorite training exercise.
“Don’t look at me like that. I’m not that much of a sadist. This was just warmups,” Alice said with a sneer, waving her hand down at the limp group. Alexandra and Beto had begun to slowly ooze away from each other, the slick nature of the mats allowing them to slide.
Loras looked dead.
Kon nudged the boy with his foot and a groan came from the mage and Kon retreated.
“Like wet noodles. It’s going to take me forever to train them to be even the least bit useful. At least you had basic physical fitness,” Alice complained as she stood up and looked over her newest victims.
“I sent that boy into a rift with a rock. A ROCK! Untrained, ignorant, illiterate, and armed like our most ancient forebears!” Alice started to get into her speech as she belittled the three mages.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“I knew how to read and my ignorance was only toward stuff you know. Bet you don’t know how to repair hydroponic units,” Kon grumbled. He knew that Alice could hear him, but the three mages were just human with their senses.
He walked past them and toward the heavy machines used for weightlifting and began adding weight to the bench press machine. The last time he’d been under one of these machines he’d been able to bench press two hundred and seventy kilos eight times. Every time he hit the weight increase button there was a loud clank of metal being added to the high weight bar. It echoed over the gym and slowly silence fell as the bar bent in its holding brackets and became a smiley face. Kon slid under it and grabbed the bench press, enjoying the cool metal under his fingers and palm as he pressed lightly up.
It was meant to see if the bar would even jostle, move in his hand when he tried to pick it up. Instead it went up a few centimeters and Kon’s eyes bulged as he picked the weight up and brought it down to his chest, pushing upward with ease. A strangled laugh bulled its way free as he started to rep the bar and its load.
Six hundred kilograms. Over a half ton.
It went up and down with ease, only starting to burn when he hit the fifteenth rep. He settled the weight back down with a thunderous crash, the entire frame shook as Kon swung his legs free of the bench. Three pairs of eyes stared at him with wide eyed awe while Alice looked mildly impressed.
“That’s what you’re going to be working towards,” she told them. The three mages still looked too exhausted to do much other than nod along, but Kon felt a bit of pride in his chest as they looked over at him.
Alice must have noticed because her look went from impressed to predatory in a heartbeat.
“Come on pup. Show me what Benny’s taught you,” she said as she brushed the three limp mages off to the side.
Kon groaned as he thought of the beating she’d inflicted on him and Diur before they had departed. That she’d healed them didn’t matter so much when she was throwing them into stone walls. He still walked forward and took up a place in the middle of the mats.
“Now, no breaking the ship,” Alice said with a sly smile that had him thinking she might have noticed his earlier mishap with the control panel.
“When we were first stranded on Crucible, the best way to train him was like this,” Alice told the three watching mages who had yet to utter a single word. It was a far cry from the rather chatty group we had met yesterday, but having your lungs collapse due to the strain Alice called training had a way of doing that.
“Hit me,” Alice snarled and Kon moved. He sent a wheelkick toward her chin, moving in a blur of speed that surprised even him. Alice didn’t try to block it, just ducked under his foot and went to swipe his plant foot.
In a feat of strength, flexibility, and coordination that he had never before dreamed about, Kon jumped with his plant foot. He cleared four feet with ease, twisted his body violently and landed on the far sides of the mat. Alice stood in place, waiting patiently.
“The name of the exercise is Hit Me, not do pretty flips and run away,” she said after a moment when Kon didn’t come charging at her. One of the mages snorted quietly, but it was loud enough to draw both of their gazes and the knot of them wilted under the combined glare.
“Enough from the peanut gallery. Let’s go, Kon!” Alice barked and Kon lowered his chin, raised his shoulders, and settled into a modified boxers stance as he moved toward her. Alice rolled her eyes at him and in that moment of distraction, he struck.
It felt good to move, his body eager to show its strength, and his fist nearly clipped her chin as she darted back. For a moment there, she had used her true speed and strength, and it was to escape him. Kon smiled at the thought and then Alice walloped him with an open palm to the side of his head.
“Keep your game face on,” she snarled and Kon nodded even as his head smarted. She’d moved fast enough he couldn’t have dodged if he wanted to, but she had pulled the blow before it could land with all its power.
They circled each other, trading jabs and dodges as Alice began to actively spar him rather than just dodging and making him chase her around. Over long moments they sped up, Kon not quite hitting his full speed, he could feel another gear lurking, but fast enough that none of the mages could keep up with their movements.
Alice ended the spar with a decisive arm lock that Kon would have needed to rip his own arm off his body to escape.
“Trying to take my arm off?” Kon complained as he rubbed the life back into the limb.
“It’s not that big of a deal. They grow back,” Alice said and she offered him a nearly imperceptible nod in thanks for his set up. Looking back at the three mages all of them were bloodless, their faces pale as they stared at them with horror.
“What?” Alice asked, trying her hardest to sound innocent.