WW Chapter 67: To be a Trainee (Patreon)

Drawing on the tempestuous nature of his inner world, Ezra ducked under the gout of fire shooting from his partner's spear. With his greater experience, the pale, handsome man juked to the left, and then did the same to the right after two more steps. Telemachus fell for the second feint, and sent flames through the haft of his spear towards where he thought Ezra would be. With a grin, Ezra went back to the left and, after settling his stance, sent a wave of wind bursting from the head of his axe in a downward blow.

Wind smashed into Telemachus from above, knocking him to one knee as Ezra jumped forward, leading with his shield. The wood smashed into Telemachus's face, and knocked him back, stunned and out of the fight.

“Victor, Ezra!” Chloe's voice rang out, and even though there was no danger of Ezra pressing the attack against his friend, the Pseudo-Knight blitzed forward to stand between the two combatants.

“You all right?” Ezra asked as he put away his axe and knelt down beside Telemachus.

“I am... fine,” the stunned man said through spinning eyes and slurring words.

Fortunately, Ezra didn't have to argue with him about his current state, as a healer rushed forward and, without listening to the feeble complaint from the downed man, healed him with a touch. Ezra saw as Telemachus's crooked nose realigned itself, and his eyes focused. Then, blinking rapidly, Telemachus sighed and reached a hand out to Ezra's.

“I thought I had you with that one,” the darker-skinned man said as he struggled to his feet. “Still too eager to use my aura to take you out, I guess.”

“You just need to use aura for other things more in your day to day life,” Ezra said, quoting both Jormun and Chloe. “Me being able to use it as flexibly as well as I can is because I spent weeks using it not just for attacks, but for movement, hiking, and marching.”

The two continued talking as they retreated back to the presence of their other three friends, looking at Chloe to see why she had organized this series of duels among all of the prospective Knight trainees. As they did so, Ezra thought back over the past two weeks.

In what shouldn't have come as a surprise, Ezra found himself rather quickly getting into the rhythm of training that the garrison demanded of him. The schedule from one day to the next varied, but as a whole, what the were expected to do didn't change much. Some mornings it was patrols, others it was training. Some afternoons it was training, others it was patrols. In general, they had two parts to the day: the training and the real-life experience.

He was more than happy to get out of the garrison, as Ezra knew that the people with the most potential would need to get out and experience the world. Because he was so new, he wasn't allowed to go on any of the patrols that went outside the bounds of the city, and, in fact, none of the trainees were allowed to. Some people called those the best patrols, and as he was experiencing the opposite, Ezra couldn't help but feel like he agreed.

The patrols in the city were mind-numbing and made Ezra feel like a guard. The “good patrols” within the city were monopolized by the noble-born trainees, where they could walk in the centermost parts of the city. There, the wealthiest merchants and nobles had their villas, their mansions, and their businesses. Those trainees that had connections there basically served as additional guards for their friends and family, while the commoners, and whichever of the wealthier number had drawn the short straw that day, were sent everywhere else.

Ezra didn't care to fight for an opportunity to go on patrol with people who hated him, so he walked in the seediest parts of town, where everybody scattered like rats before the approach of dawn at their appearance. Ezra was used to poverty and the gross parts of necessity that it brought, but poverty in such an enclosed, limited space was far more disgusting than he was used to.

In Villy, people had plenty of space to toss out their chamber pots, and while the designated parts of the city where they tossed all of the disgusting things that life created smelled horrendous, here in the city, everything was too closed in to give a good dumping location. As a result, the foul stench of drying urine and rotting feces was omnipresent. According to some, there was a sewage system that allowed for the disposal of such things throughout the whole of Brayton, but here in the slums, that system was overtaxed and underdeveloped.

Whatever the case was, Ezra didn't like patrolling within the city, and training within the Garrison, though better, still had the days blending together into a boring amalgam. The days spent training with various different weapons gave him plenty of familiarity with each, and though he'd thought he would be like Basil, leaning towards using a bow since their affinities were similar, Ezra quickly found he hated the stupid thing.

Whenever he used a bow, no matter how somebody told him to hold it or how they tried to help him, he ended up letting the string snap against his elbow. Over the course of two weeks, he had five training sessions with the bow, and he had started to get used to life while having a constant bruise on his left arm.

The weapon that he was surprised to find himself really enjoying was the battleaxe. It was heavy, and just like the sword, carried the issue of him having to learn to maintain edge alignment. Unlike with the sword, even if he slipped his grip a little, it was still nearly a kilo of metal smashing into his enemy. That, paired with the fact that he could still use his shield with the axe, meant that he rather quickly settled into having that be his preferred weapon.

Even so, Jormun didn't let him forget the existence of a Weaponmaster, and maybe even a Weapon Saint. With that in mind, Ezra forced himself to continue experimenting with other weapons. The sword still sucked, and hearing Jormun constantly talk about it being his first weapon, the one he loved more than the rest, grated on him. Fortunately, the old ghost had plenty of advice to give Ezra that helped him to progress more quickly than before.

For the first time since he had first started seeing the phantom of the long-deceased Master, Ezra was feeling the real benefit of having Jormun there. When practicing in the yard, Jormun gave pointed, specific advice on what small things were needed to improve as he took small breaks to drink and catch his breath. At night, in the privacy of his room, he was allowed to bring a weapon, where he drilled forms. 

When nobody else could see, Jormun could nitpick the smallest parts of Ezra's stance, a frustrating experience, especially since Ezra was effectively forced to participate in it without even being able to complain. After all, if he was talking too much to himself at night, he might sound crazy to the people whose rooms were next to his.

Over the course of those two weeks since his arrival, Ezra also got to know his fellow commoner trainees. Miriam was quiet by nature, and her weapons of choice were a pair of half-meter-long blades, something between a dagger and a sword. In practice, she was always willing to help him with working on the way he held his weapons, though she had a different fighting style than he did. Or rather, a more established one.

Dirk was fun to practice with, because if there was anybody that Ezra had met whose inner world was made to be earth-attributed, it was him. When fighting, the short man settled into a wide stance and was basically immovable from there. He carried a large shield in his left hand and a mace in his right, and his style was to protect himself and launch knee-shattering counterattacks into any openings that presented themselves. Fortunately, in practice, he used a blunted, lightweight club instead of his weapon of choice, and Ezra only had to be sent to the healers after a practice bout with him once, when the hit had twisted his knee wrong and dislocated it.

Rose wielded a bow whenever she could choose, but was a fair hand with a short spear when forced to fight in melee. She had tried to help Ezra with the bow for a few days, and eventually ceded all of the frustrations of teaching a useless pupil to Basil. The Pseudo-Knight gave Ezra all the instruction he could hope for, and still, Ezra just knew that the bow did not and would not come easily to him.

Finally, Telemachus was Ezra's go-to sparring partner. Just four days after Ezra's arrival, the other man made his breakthrough into Adept, his inner world one overrun by flames. Though neither engaged in all-out aural fights, when paired together, they could draw on similar levels of strength from their inner worlds to provide a good rivalry to the other. The other Adepts in the squad, Willem, Louis, Patrice, Tula, and Quinn, were forced into practicing with the other two new commoner Adepts from time to time as well.

Willem and Louis, the representatives from the Noble faction, held true to the general expectations of the jackasses they associated themselves with. They pushed too hard in duels and were constantly trying to injure Telemachus and Ezra, giving them much more difficult duels than they got elsewhere. In truth, Ezra welcomed it, since the fights with those two were the closest thing to live combat experience he regularly got.

Willem used his water affinity to negate most attacks coming his way. It would appear that what Artemis had done against the orcs was a relatively common application of her affinity. Though Ezra wondered what Willem's attribute meant with how he saw the world, he mostly saw him as an annoying foe who, like most of the nobles, had been training with the sword since they were young and could dance around him. Fortunately, Ezra was scrappy and learning fast, so although he still lost any fair fight against the Nobles, his greater skill with aura allowed him to continue to bridge that gap. As a result, Ezra had defeated Willem in the semifinals of this little tournament.

Then there was Louis, who Ezra hated fighting. His affinity was either darkness or shadow, something like that. It was something that Ezra couldn't really deal with, and anytime that the two had a fight where they were allowed to use aura, if Ezra didn't win in the first ten seconds, it quickly devolved into him blindly striking out and hoping to keep the beating he was about to receive short. Louis, like Miriam, favored wielding only weapons instead of a shield, but the two-handed sledge that was his weapon of choice fortunately wasn't allowed in a “friendly” duel. Instead, he was forced to stick to a much smaller, lighter quarterstaff. That smashing into the ribs was still plenty agonizing.

Telemachus had been fortunate enough to be matched up against Louis instead of Ezra earlier in the tournament. His flames counteracted the noble's shadow, and like that, the primary advantage of the more experienced Adept's aura was taken away. Telemachus had been able to use flames to his advantage and stab Louis solidly in the throat with his “spear” without a head.

The other three Adepts dueled with Ezra without much complaint. Patrice and Tula, both women friends from their youth and each from families that had, for generations, been soldiers and guards here in Brayton, had more ordinary aural affinities, stone and light respectively. Quinn had the most esoteric of the seven affinities within the trainees.

Whenever he fought, if allowed to use his aura, his body would swell from the stature of a thin but healthy man to that of a barrel-chested boxer or worker. His arms grew as thick as Ezra's thighs, and he wielded cudgels that whipped through the air with painful grace. Despite that, he was generally gentle, and in the tournament had refused to use his aura in a fight against Rose. She'd taken every advantage of that, and after he was jabbed painfully in the sternum, then throat, and then the sternum again, he'd given up.

As the victor of the tournament, Ezra had won five fights in a row, and though he'd used his aura only sparingly, his inner world was largely exhausted, and his head was pounding as Chloe stood up in front of the thirty-two trainees. Ezra could feel the burning hatred from most of the nine anti-Duke trainees, but only focused on the Pseudo-Knight that stood in front of them.

“Congratulations to Ezra for being the victor in this tournament.” Her voice was warm as she said it, and she was obviously inviting applause with her words. The four commoners clapped heartily while the rest gave various levels of polite or forced appreciation. “For your victory, you'll be granted two pieces of equipment from the armory that are of Pseudo-Knight quality. We will discuss this in more detail once you have time to speak with Smith. Now, onto the purpose of this tournament.

“It's been two and a half months since the last mass expedition outside the walls,” Chloe said without any further ado. “This tournament was to see who here is capable of being brought along on an extermination of a small group of largely unidentified goblinoids that have been sighted about two days' travel northwest of here. Everybody who reached the semifinals, you are universally granted this permission. For the rest of you, depending on your performance here, as well as in an additional test to be presented to you, you may also qualify.

“Those of you who will be coming along, we will be leaving in the morning two days from now.”

Ezra blinked several times, then, with a smile, looked at Telemachus. The other Adept looked similarly excited at the prospect of getting to do something more than just train. Now, he just needed to get himself equipped, and he'd just been told that he was going to get more, higher-quality equipment before that.

He could hardly wait.