TWENTY-THREE
“I think we went to a lot of effort to arrange this for it to be rather pointless. Could have just asked you over,” Mathis muttered as everyone gathered around the wrestling mats. They had had to travel for three hours to cross across the different districts of Oasis to arrive at the arranged spot, but Kon hadn’t minded. Leaving the high end classy districts and moving through the working class crowds had been a relief. Finally he could feel more at home here with people who had thick calluses on their hands and the worn down look of people who worked every single day.
The Order of the Dragon Knight’s quarters were nicer than everywhere else, but compared to the decadent wealth openly flaunted in the merchant and noble districts, it was easy enough to let pass. There were mostly Squires running about with only a bare handful of cadets. It was the only time that Kon had seen cadets outnumbered by Knights.
“Nobody knew that both sides wanted a meeting,” Kon said, shrugging away the problem as if the theatrics of this fight wasn’t an annoyance. They could have already been working with Jurgen on how to achieve their goals rather than all the travel, but it was what it was. Warrior’s pride was on the line and neither of them were willing to back down.
“Let’s Jurgen get some exercise,” Mathis said with a grin and a shrug. Kon just shook his head. Mathis should know better having been part of Titan’s Resolve, but that was before Alice had spent the better part of a year training with Daniur. In the long run a single year wasn’t much time, but the refinement in her fighting style had been night and day.
“You have the contracts ready?” Alice called out across the room, interrupting the boy's discussion. Jurgen looked up from where he was stretching to give Alice a crude hand gesture before straightening up.
“You talk a lot of shit. Let’s see if you can back it up,” Jurgen called out as he stepped onto the blue mats. Alice threw her head back and roared with laughter as she stepped into the ring.
“I’ve been spending too much time with cultivators. It’s all they do,” Alice said. There wasn’t even the faintest hint of an apology in her statement.
They both leaned over, bending at the waits while staying in a good athletic position, arms out wide as they circled each other slowly. Jurgen made the first move, dropping down low and shooting for Alice’s legs. Alice let him slam into her legs and when he went to pull her to the ground, he grunted as he found himself stuck. Alice grinned viciously as she reached over and plucked the dragon knight off the ground, arms circled around his waist.
Kon had to bite back the laugh at seeing Jurgen’s confused look as Alice slammed him back to the ground hard enough that the room shook slightly. Jurgen was fine, his body more than tough enough to deal with that type of beating. He flexed, twisted, and weasled away in a slick move, appearing on the opposite side of the mat, no worse for wear than bruised pride.
Alice approached like an inevitable tide, slow and steady, arms wide out and never once did her wide smile falter. Jurgen was no push over, he didn’t wait for the tide to wash over him, but lowered his head and met it with determination.
A second later Jurgen went flying through the air to slam hard against the wall.
“I don’t think this match is going the way he thought it would,” Kon whispered to the shell-shocked Mathis. The older boy’s jaw was literally hanging as he watched his mentor get tossed around like a ragdoll.
“How is she that strong?” Mathis whispered.
“I have a theory about that. When she started training me she said it was normal to build the first layer as body reinforcement runes with only a single filter rune. Then she stuffed me full of monster cores and freshly harvested meat and trained me into the dirt and healed me and repeated the process.”
“WHAT?!” Mathis’s shout drew eyes from Jurgen’s other Squires, soon to be Kon’s comrades, but neither of the combatants flinched.
“See, that’s what I’ve started to realize. It wasn’t standard operating procedure at all to do that. But if she did it to me, she might have done it to herself. Which means she’s very, very, physically strong.”
“Normally the first few layers are meant to boost your senses, filter energy, and some self-defense runes. Not to reinforce your body into a tank. That’s what the armor is for,” Mathis exclaimed, looking over toward Alice with wide eyes.
“Again, it’s just a hypothesis, not definitive,” Kon reminded him.
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“So you’re built like her? Just an absolute physical specimen? I remember your workouts and they were crazy, but nothing like this,” Mathis looked back to where Jurgen was falling from the ceiling after having been tossed upwards like a toy.
“No, I’m nearly already as physically strong as she is. But that can be for another time.” Kon kept that thought to himself as he remembered the last time Alice had decided to test him and had proceeded to bury him through solid stone walls and floor while fighting Diur at the same time. He might be close to her physical strength, but he still wasn’t even close to being her level as a combatant.
“This is embarrassing,” Mathis said as Jurgen pushed himself to his feet, a look of resignation slowly worming its way through his prideful defense. This wasn’t a man who would bend easily.
“Just give up, buy me a drink, and we can try out a different type of wrestling,” Alice growled at him. The row of Squires all burst into a wave of ooohhhh in unison. Jurgen froze for a moment and that was all the opening that Alice needed. She shot low and grabbed his legs, slamming him into the ground and got the full mount and pin in seconds.
“This hardly got my blood up. Kon, get over here,” Alice said as she booted Jurgen off the mat. Kon sighed as he looked down at the new clothes he’d foolishly worn. It had been supposed to have been a match between Jurgen and Alice, not involving him at all.
“This is for you new kids who are about to join us. This is the level you’ll need to be reaching,” Alice said as Kon stepped up into the ring. Since their last fight he hadn’t had any leaps in cultivation, just his steel body slowly settling down. There was more weight to him every day now, a sense of solidity that went beyond his weight and mass. He was hoping once he finally finished his rune and implanted it he could be a decent sparring partner for Alice and not just a punching bag.
“Hit me,” Alice ordered, the familiarity of the command had Kon moving before he could think. For a few moments they went back and forth, exchanging blistering displays of hand to hand combat before Kon slipped up. He was slightly too slow on a counter and Alice got within his guard.
Next thing he knew he was bouncing off of a mat and landing in a roll, never stopping as he launched the next series of attacks at Alice. He’d realized that ever since she started fighting back instead of just dodging that she was more at home on the offense. If he could keep her on the backfoot it would keep him from being reduced to a bloody pulp for just a bit longer.
Over the space of the next two minutes Alice broke his guard three times, sending him sailing each time. Kon didn’t have any give in him and nothing was too broken, mostly cracked and sprained, so he got to his feet each time to meet his crazed mentor.
“Think we’re making an impression yet?” Alice asked him in a breathy whisper while having him locked into a clinch. Her knees were busy hammering his quads, turning them into a long black bruise as he struggled futilely to escape.
“You’re making an impression of your kneecap in my thigh,” Kon managed to grunt out as he wailed on her ribs with his left hand. He didn’t know what was breaking, his fingers or her ribs. Regardless, she wasn’t releasing him yet.
“If you have the breath to complain, then you have breath to fight better,” Alice growled. Her next blow was in his gut and it bent him half as the breath exploded out of him. Knee met nose and Kon felt his nose flatten to his face as his head snapped back.
“ENOUGH!” Jurgen’s yell shook the room and Kon rolled to his feet to see the Knight looking apocalyptic with rage.
“This isn’t training! This is butchery!” Jurgen roared, his voice cracking with anger as he looked them over. Alice frowned and her Regrowth rune popped into being and Kon felt his wounds heal nearly instantly.
“He is pissed. And her healing is getting better.” The two thoughts ran right over the top of each other as Kon looked over to wear Jurgen was shaking.
“This is not how we train Knight,” Jurgen went as if to keep speaking but his own anger overwhelmed him, his mouth snapping back and forth repeatedly as he looked over Kon and Alice.
“It’s how I train. My Squires are brutalized, broken, beaten into the dirt every day. They learn to fight through the pain, through the despair, through the end of the fucking world if it comes down to it. Kon’s my first and I’d take him over an entire squad of your Squires and it’s not because he’s special or stronger. It’s because he doesn’t know how to quit. Even when he’s a broken, crying, dying mess, he still gets up to fight every single time. And that will ensure our Knights come home,” Alice snarled, leaning down to look down on Jurgen as their noses nearly touched.
“Don’t think we’re supposed to see them fighting like this,” Mathis commented as Kon came over to him.
“Is that your normal sparring session?” Marie asked with concern on her face as the rest of the Squires came over to them.
“She started me out with just trying to hit her. She wouldn’t hit me, just make me chase after her till I collapsed from exhaustion. It was only once I got strong enough to be hit and hit her somewhat reliably did she start to actually punch back. Our last spar she put me through a stone wall and I crawled out of it to keep the fight going,” Kon informed them. They all looked at him with a mix of horror and regret. Marie summed it up best for them all, her words nearly lost in the echo of Alice’s and Jurgen’s screaming match.
“What did we get ourselves into?”