Training

At first, my father only taught me a single punch and kick, straight forward lessons on extending my arm and how to turn it into the punch. The full frontal kick was a little tricky, though, requiring me to stand and extend myself from a single leg while raising and hinging the other.

Compared to Gryn's lessons, though, these could be considered easy.

Like me, my brother was only given a few tasks to learn, the first being how to hold and control the weight of a weapon. This did not take more than a few minutes of rolling his wrist and bracing his fist. After that, he was taught three basic block or parrying strokes.

Either because of my past experience with a body or because of my starting stats, it did not take me more than a week to appropriate these two attacks. However, my father insisted that i continue to practice these again and again. Watching my brother is how i spent most of this time.

After a month, my father was finally allowed to teach us our next techniques. As it turned out, our mother was not only the reason why we were only allowed to practice for an hour twice a day but also why we were stuck on lesson one. I felt worse for Gryn more than i felt impatient.

Gryn was being forced to maintain standards made with MY age in mind.

My next lesson was only two different attacks once again, but these incorporated different parts of my body. The first was an elbow strike in which i would turn or lower myself into my target while swinging my elbow in with my body.

This honestly seemed like a pretty vicious attack to teach somebody who was barely even considered a toddler in age.

Likewise, the second strike in this lesson was an attack with my knee. This part was made a little more complicated by my father by teaching me two variations. One was raising and shoving my knee straight out while turning to or facing my target.

The other was raising my leg outward and throwing my knee in from the side similar to a roundhouse kick. The elbowing attack was pretty easier to figure out, so i spent more of my time focusing on these insane knee techniques. The lean and training of my body on either leg while working the other was also harder to get the hang of, so i was happy for the whole month of focusing.

Gryn, on the other hand, was giving two sword stroke and a thrust to practice. The first stroke was a straightforward chop, but he was forced to practice this in switching from one hand to the next and then both one hundred times. He was older and more experienced than me with higher Endurance, so this did not strike me as excessive.

The second stroke was a cross-body slashing attack which emphasized on manipulating the reach of the blade and the angle at which was the was held to accentuate the cutting action of the stroke. This, too, was to be practiced in one hundred fashions.

For the thrust, it was specifically a one-handed attack so it was only practiced one hundred times by either hand. However, it was a lunging spear-like thrust of the sword to full extension with a slight twist near the end. Unlike the sword strokes, our father made Gryn perform this technique as slowly as he could to accentuate the physical training of his one-sided lunging and extending.

By the time i got to the point where i could practice all three of my kicks in slow motion, it was already time to learn the next attacks.

I was finally taught the roundhouse kick as well as its reverse spinning back kick. With the experience form my knee strikes, both of these were pretty quick additions to my repertoire. For my arms, i was taught the spinning back-fist and its elbow variation.

With my overall life experience and currently developing body, all of these movements were swiftly incorporated into my muscle memory to the point where i could practice them one after the next in slow motion. Gryn was also given the swordplay counterparts of my inarmed attacks, but his were in three variations of 'low', 'mid', and 'high' spinning slashes.

All of them required some lunge action while turning the body first at the shoulders and flowing to the hips, but one was literally aimed high just a little above his own head, mid at his own torso's dimensions, and then low about the legs with a partial crouching of his body.

The parts that even i had to admit were complicated about these attacks were the full-body coordination and the general positional awareness. However, when performed correctly, even Gryn the kid looked like a badass with a more than one-hundred-and-eighty degree sweep of his weapon in any direction from either hand.

After this month of practice, i was for some reason only now taught defensive techniques. These lessons were longer that my first, though, because i was taught a more scientific outlook to combat by compartmentalizing the areas of my body from my center outward in a four-part square. From this, i was taught three blocking techniques with my arm and even a low blocking technique for my legs.

Gryn was taught a combination technique meant specifically for fighting multiple opponents in which he slashed up and out with his sword before turning either forward or backward with the sword still extended. Finally, the sword was to be rolled either forward and thrust backward from under the arm or thrust upward and forward similar to the starting stroke.

This technique and its four basic variations looked insanely complicated and took up most of our father's time in teaching them.

However, my blocks were basically non-offensive versions of my initial knee and elbow strikes but with emphasis on the use of my forearms and shins. Because i was never far off from where Gryn was training, i could still listen in and learn about all of the advise shared in those lessons.

One good thing and one bad thing followed this month of training. The good thing was that our mother finally caved and allowed us to practice our martial techniques for two hours twice a day because of the slow but evident growth of our stats. My Agility grew more than anything else from my training while Gryn's Endurance floated steadily up like a helium balloon.

The bad thing was that this was going to be our 'mastery' training in which we were not taught anything new but made to practice all of our skills in alternating orders. Our father would stand between our marked off locations in the lawn and count out the order of techniques and number of times we were to do them.

This was something i had already been kind of doing on my own, but i decided to challenge myself in memory and speed by seeing how quickly i could perform every movement and gesture in the proper order.

However, with the wider arrange of complicated movements he had to ho through, Gryn only did his at a moderate speed. Regardless of this, his Endurance growth only slowed down from once every other or couple of days to twice the first week. My Agility growth remained the same at first with once every other day, but after the first week it slowed down while my Endurance finally started picking up.

Even though we already had weekends for resting or Gryn going out to have fun with friends, the following month became an entire rest period. My practicing times were limited to once every other day for only an hour and a half while Gryn opted out of continuing at all. He instead wanted to go on hikes and hunts with his friends.

I had always been sparing a few hours a day for magic practices, but because of my type of magic it was relatively boring to experiment and pretty much always succeed. the few times i failed were when i did not have enough energy and had to stop or tried something entirely impossible like making paper from a rock.

The magic would not even activate with that intent.

Now, however, i stretched my practices and research to things like alchemy and enchanting. Alchemy was less about the use of magic itself and more about magical substances. My original book had a few examples of common plants and animals or cheap items to be acquired to make a variety of things from a light healing tonic to an acidic poison.

My mom played a large part in this kind of education, helping me with equipment and procurement for these projects. From this, she learned that i already had a firm grasp on the use of numbers and measurements which seemed to surprise her more than the fact i could speak.

Between my parents, it was a shared belief that whatever came out of my mouth was complete gibberish since i mouthed English while they mouthed Common. However, knowing how to measure materials and work out measurement equations was agreeably shocking for someone my age.

Enchanting was somewhat easier because it mostly relied on the use of magical energy, but the complication was the materials used. I could 'imbue' raw mana into nearly any substance and object, but the 'conductivity' of each substance and object determined how much energy was actually assimilated.

Basic wood like oak or simple metal like lead had only a little conductivity, so it could only be enchanted to have a basic function that functions a handful of times before needing to be recharged from the user.

Even more complicated than this- for most people- was the fact that you needed an intimate understanding of the magical affect. If i wanted to make a knife that got hot, the average joe needed to understand with heat the knife could withstand as well as a cheap method of generating thermal energy.

If i was a mind mage, i would use an understanding that all energy creates heat and work from there, but i could literally just will an enchantment at the max potential of the item involved as long as it was realistic.

Could i enchant an iron knife to spray molten gold when it cuts? No. Could i enchant an iron knife to condense and spray shards of ice from the surrounding air? Yes.

However, something like a basic steel cutler knife could only generate three finger-sized icicles and do so three or four times before needing to be fed.

Some items required a combination of both alchemy and enchanting, like the wands my mother intended to make. The alchemy was in the substance used and the alchemist specific skill of transmutation to change the shape of said substance. The enchanting aspect was giving the magically made item a free-range enchantment based on gathering ambient energy coupled with the user's to create less costly and stronger spells cast through the wand.

The substances my mother planned to use was not only the spirit fruit tree limbs but also an expensive ore she refined herself into what translated as 'mithril' and skin from a magical reptile. The highly conductive limbs were condensed into a finger-sized core of leafy wood which was encased in a short baton of wholly magic-made mithril. Then the handles which contained the cores were intricately wrapped and adorned with the scale skins.

A wand purely made of spirit tree wood would have a naturally higher conductivity of roughly fifty-percent in that half the magic used to imbue was the mana that converted. Once transmuted with the magic-enriched mithril the conductivity went up roughly ten percent and then again with the addition of the skins. Not only did they conduct magic as a single object with shared conductivity, the still individual substances could then be given their own enchantment or enchantmentS.

The enchantment used for wands-Conduction- that different wand makers used could be fairly various and work in different grades. The Conduction enchantment my mother used on each of the parts of our wands were the ones used by her family- supposedly a top-shelf brand.

The average Conduction could only lesson the user's cost by about ten percent while gathering as much ambient energy for that much strengthening, the family Conduction had a thirty-percent efficiency rating. Tripled up as it was in our wands, the conductivity of the enchantment was actually able to match the conductivity of the object.

Apparently, exceeding the item's overall conductivity with a Conduction puts the object at risk of breaking and at greater levels can even cause magical whiplash to the caster with an explosion of uncontrolled mana.

By the end of the rest month, the wands that my mother had been making since our training began we finally complete. As well, we were allowed to begin training again. Now, however, Gryn and i were initiated into the 'middle circle' of our martial training. Now i learned that there was actually some organization to everything we were being taught.

What i had been taught in unarmed combat and Grin in swordplay were what his ancestors called the outer ring stage and the final stage after this training would be our inner circle training. For both of us this included a few more techniques similar to the outer ring, but now my strikes became more complicated with their variations and uses.

On top of this, jumping types of attacks and crouching attack were added into the mix for both of us. I could see why they were intermediate level techniques instead of something to learn early on, though, because attempting to learn these attacks with beginner abilities would likely lead to getting hurt.

Even with my overall life experience in fighting, the muti-directional crouching attacks were hard to coordinate and became hellacious workouts.

*