Chapter 13 (Patreon)

“How much formal training do you have?” a clone of Kate Cha asked, hands planted on her waist while another set of her practiced weights, acrobatics, and strikes on heavy bags.

She doesn’t waste a single second, does she?

“Do you count YouTube and heavy-bag work in my garage?” I asked.

“No,” she said firmly, her dark eyes filled with condescension.

“None, then,” I said. “That bad video going around is about the best I can do.”

She gestured for me to approach. “Why don’t you show it to me, then? I’ll be gentler than that thug on the news.”

Taking the invitation, I pushed forward quickly, snapping a fist at her face.

She dodged. A flicker of something—amusement, maybe—crossed her face before her foot hooked mine.

My leg vanished from underneath me. I hit the floor hard, bounced back up, and rushed in again before I could think too much about it. I feinted a straight and snapped a low kick toward her leg, trying to compromise her footing.

She stepped back. I lunged into the opening, knowing full well I was about to get bitch-slapped.

The palm to my solar plexus drove every ounce of air from my lungs. My body wanted to fold in on itself, crumble to the floor, but my mind and Pain Tolerance skill refused to let it.

My fingers snapped out, trying to grab the offending arm.

It was already gone. So was she.

There was a shift in the air. I ducked low, expecting another strike to my head, but it didn’t come. My left knee buckled instead.

I tipped forward, catching myself on nearly all fours. A hasty roll spared me from a knee to the head, but the kick that followed caught me square in the jaw and sent me flipping.

My head was spinning, literally, and I heard a gasp and another groan.

Then I realized both had come from me.

“What the hell was that, Kate?” Eve shouted.

“I’m fine,” I said as I rose back to my feet.

The pain was already fading.

I adjusted my stance and closed my guard, not that it would help much. My breathing was quicker, but steady, and I was ready to go again.

Pain Tolerance has reached lv 8

In fact, I would go all day if I had to.

My only real problem was my health.

160/240 HP.

Pain Tolerance could keep me from caring about the pain, but it couldn’t make the damage disappear.

A few hits like that, and I was dead.

I swallowed. Idly, I wondered if I could actually stop the clone standing in front of me with everything in my arsenal.

I knew the answer immediately. Still, I hadn’t expected the gulf to be this large. I thought I’d been making decent progress with all of the skill levels.

It was clear, now more than ever, that it was no real substitute for experience.

“Not even a bloody nose,” a Kate clone said to Eve. “I knew he’d be fine the second I hit him in the solar plexus. That strike has dropped seasoned fighters, yet he shrugged it off.”

“You can certainly take a beating,” the clone sparring with me said. “And you have good instincts. But everything else is—”

“Shit?” Rex suggested, a small smile playing at his lips.

“Like you did any better during your first session,” I snorted at him.

“As a matter of fact, I did,” he shouted back.

The Kate clone ignored him.

“You’re stringing together a bunch of basic techniques with no thought as to why they go together,” she said. “And your form is atrocious. We’ll have to start from the ground up.”

Ouch. That hurt my feelings a tad, but it was what I signed up for.

I looked back over the last few exchanges in my head. Every move I’d made had felt deliberate while I was doing it. Now that she pointed it out, I could see the problem.

I wasn’t really fighting her.

I was throwing techniques at her and hoping something stuck.

“I’m not afraid of hard work, Sensei,” I said.

That earned me the first hint of genuine emotion from her otherwise inexpressive face.

And it was irritation.

“Don’t call me that.” She took a beat to gather herself. “I have a name. Use it.”

“Noted.”

We went several more rounds, each one slow, ponderous, and very painful.

She didn’t just beat me. She dissected me.

Every time I repeated a mistake, she pointed it out. Every time I tried to compensate with speed or strength, she punished me for it. Whenever I managed to do something halfway decent, she immediately showed me how I could have done it better.

It was humbling.

And, strangely, exhilarating.

Over the next thirty minutes or so, she cataloged everything I knew about fighting and came back with a lesson plan.

It started with movement.

She wanted me to drill the boxing fundamentals I already knew obsessively and use them as a foundation to understand what fighting was really about, in her opinion—control.

And the foundation of that was good movement.

She wanted me practicing my stances, balance, stepping, pivoting, lateral movement, keeping my hands up, and recovery before she would properly teach me how to box.

After boxing, she wanted me to learn how to wrestle, then move on to Muay Thai since I liked kicks so much, and add in a few other styles when I had more experience.

When I asked about weapons, she gave me a flat look that I was growing increasingly familiar with.

I was getting ahead of myself again.

“It’ll be months before you’ll be able to reliably win fights against amateur MMA fighters, much less villains,” Kate explained as the two-hour session wound down.

With the system’s help and my blessings, I doubted it. I didn’t have months, and neither did the world. But I didn’t contradict Kate.

The training room was empty now. The Guardians must’ve dipped out at some point.

“We’ll start the first of your lessons at the same time tomorrow. I’ll show you the movement exercises then.”

I checked the time.

It was nearly six o’clock.

Boxing has reached lv 10

Pain Tolerance has reached lv 10

Taekwondo has reached lv 8

Meditation has reached lv 8

+2 END

+2 DEX

+1 STR

“What about right now?” I asked.

“Right now?” Kate asked, a bit surprised. “Aren’t you tired?”

SP: 103/240

“I recover quickly. Part of my power.”

That wasn’t entirely a lie.

Meditation, regeneration, food, and the System meant I could recover from training much faster than a normal person.

Kate stared at me for a long moment.

“Don’t train all night long,” she warned, and my brows hiked up a fraction. “I recognize that look in your eyes. I saw it in the mirror every night when I first started training.”

I glanced at her clones. They were still training, still pushing.

“Shouldn’t you take your own advice?” I asked.

“Probably.”

We settled into a comfortable silence while she showed me the moves.

I mirrored them after a few tries, thanks to my Martial Talent Passive, and ducked out for the night.