Chapter 2: Growth

The training began soon, the two started with light runs, a few push ups and pull ups and bringing the water from the well to their homes.

It was pretty normal, what wasn't normal, however, was the rate at which they improved, it took them two days to get used to the routine and a single week to feel almost no fatigue from doing it.

This incredible rate of improvement shocked the boy's father greatly, it took them only a year to reach the strength of an average ten year old male and they showed no sign of stopping, each time they got used to a specific training they invented a new one or found ways to upgrade the difficulty.

But the little girl was still dissatisfied by such progress "Kle, wake up, I have an idea!" she shouted, waking him up from the land of sleep.

"Lie..." he muttered to the girl who had jumped on top of him, violently waking him up.

"What?" she asked with a purposefully oblivious face.

"I hate you" he had been taking a nap in a tree's shade like he usually did, when the crazy bundle of excitement who enjoyed causing others pain and discomfort in general decided that jumping on him, nearly causing him a heart attack, to wake him up was a good idea.

"I love you too, no come on, we have no time to lose!" she started dragging the boy from behind towards her home.

The boy grumbled a bit while still covering his eyes with his hands to protect them from the sudden influx of light he wasn't yet used to, but eventually he relented and started following the girl.

When they reached the house the boy smiled as he greeted the girl's mother "Hello miss Stark"

"Oh hello Klemens, did my daughter drag you around again? Please excuse her, when you're not around she is lonely" said the mother kindly.

He always wondered how the crazy girl was born from such a kind and gentle person, miss Stark was a person who couldn't even harm a fly, but her daughter found pleasure in torturing him.

"As if, he's the one who is lonely without him, it's my job as his best friend to drag him around" stated the psycho with a smug smile on her face while looking at him, seemingly asking 'Isn't that right?'

To which he took a deep, long breath and answered "I would rather be eaten than you being my best friend"

To those words she pouted a bit, before turning into her signature smug grin "I'm not only your best friend, I'm also your only one, isn't that so my dear K-L-E?"

His expression crouched up, she was right, but it wasn't his fault, they were the only children in the village!

The other's were already adults or too small to entertain a conversation with.

Seeing him not answering, she beamed at her mother with the word 'See?' written on her face, she then dragged him to her family's studio, the place were the entire family would sometime come to read a book or relax in general.

She then turned toward him and put her hands behind her back with a smug expression, reading to showing him the newest realization by her genius brain.

"I came to the conclusion that at our current pace we are not gong to be able to become strong enough to destroy the walls" she paused to look at him.

"Obviously" he answered, that was something he knew since the start.

"Therefore, we need to find a new way, which I might have found" she then took a book from the shelf and opened it at a very specific page, on it a diagram was written and she handed the book to him.

He looked it over for a bit before a spark appeared in his eyes "Bomb? This is interesting"

"Eheh, I know how much you love inventing new things and I thought that we could combine our geniuses to create something even better!" she shook his shoulders with excitement.

"Stop that! It could be cool to experiment a bit, but finding this gunpowder will be difficult, we can't simply go to our parents and asked them to help us create something that could explode if he handle it wrongly" he analyzed.

"That's were you're wrong, my dear Kle" she looked at him with a gaze filled with pity, which prompted him to chop at her head causing her to release a small "Ow!"

But she continued taking out two other books from the shelf "Look at this, it's called tridimensional movement gear, they use it to move in two directions rather than one, it uses a gas powered mechanism to shoot the wearer forward at high speeds" she told him, despite her dumb character she was extremely intelligent and analytical in things that her dumb brain took an interest in.

"And now look at this!" she opened another book showing a complex device "This is called a gun! it uses explosions to shot forward a lead bullet at speeds high enough that it's capable of killing a person with a single hit if it's to the right place"

He could understand how the three things she showed him were connected, the gun and the bomb worked through the same principle, using gunpowder to create an explosion while the tridimensional movement gear and the gun both shot something through the air.

But he couldn't understand what the crazy girl had in mind, did she perhaps want to build a bomb big enough to blow the walls up? But in that case she wouldn't have showed him the other two.

"You don't get it do you? We can't find the gunpowder so we will use the gas to create a weapon to destroy all the titans!" she explained excitedly.

"Seems doable, but one big problem remains, where would we find the gas?" he asked the girl, hoping she had thought of a solution.

"Doesn't your father have a couple of cylinders of the thing? We could use that!" she showed an incredible amount of confidence in the fact that her plan was doable, but that was not a solution.

"Yeah, he has two, not nearly enough to create the thing you're planning to do" he replied sarcastically.

"Mmmh... That might indeed be a problem" but her confidence wasn't shaken in the least, even if not now then in the future she would surely make her vision a reality, but now there was something else they could do.

"Whatever, let's start making a plan, with my intuition and your luck it will surely be easy!"

He wasn't convinced, but drawing was something he enjoyed so he didn't really mind wasting a bit of time before his evening training session.

But that day he didn't even begin drawing anything, but exclusively analyzed the gun's drawing and studied how it worked, he would later pass to studying the other two things and only then will he start actually trying to draft a new device.

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Three more years passed, and the two children were now both nine year old.

They currently stood in the forest near their village, it was were the few hunters went to hunt for wild animals to eat and distribute to everyone in the city.

Together with the tho children there was was a middle aged asiatic man, he had short black hair and looked at the two children as if he was seeing two freaks of nature.

The two were as strong as a normal adult and probably even more, the boy was extremely fast and could jump from one tree to the other with minimal effort, he seemed almost like a flying squirrel.

Meanwhile the girl, while not as fast was an extremely creative thinker, during the hand to hand combat training they went through in the past two years she managed to create many techniques to disarm and incapacitate an opponent with relatively no problems.

The girl seemed completely intentioned in becoming a soldier to leave the walls and to become strong enough to destroy them, while he thought that she would be able to convince the boy in coming with her like she often did.

She never managed to make him do something he absolutely didn't want to do, like skimping on his sleeping schedule, but there were plenty of things he didn't mind doing and just needed to be asked persuasively enough.

So, rather to give them an edge over any potential competitor, the father decided that the two would go through two new types of training, the first was sword training, using his old pair of swords and the second was training to get them used to being suspended in midair through the cables for tridimensional movement.

He new how new recruits were trained, he had once been one of them after all, so he asked for help from the the best builder in the village to help him building something that could help them in their training.

The machine was relatively simple, you just had to pull a lever and the cable would bring the person in the air, it wasn't as good as the recruits training camp's one but it was enough for now.

For the next couple of years he would teach them how to cut things precisely with the swords and to comfortably stay in the air.

But at least part of his plan was ruined when the two had absolutely no difficulty in remaining perfectly balanced while in midair.

'I keep underestimating these two geniuses' he sighed as he watched his son mock his friend for looking ugly from below.

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Two children that were now a couple of months after their tenth birthday and they met like most other days in the forest where they would train and try out new things, which was exactly what they were doing right now

"Hey Lie, look at this" said Klemens with a happy expression on his face as he showed his newest invention to his friend.

"What is this exactly?" she had an inkling of an idea about what it really was, but she had to ask to be sure.

"It's a chain!" he said smiling teasingly "Don't you even know that?" he had a smug smile that mimicked her normal one.

"Umu! It seems you're learning the art from this Queen, but it's not enough to embarrass this great one!" she replied, to this point he had never managed to make her flustered her even once, she had no concept of shame in her body and in her mind she could do no wrong.

She was an incredible narcissist he thought, but eventually let it go and kept going with his explanation "See this part here? I wrap this part around my wrist, while this part on the other end I can connect it to this part of the sword right here" he showed the process as he was explaining it, showing the modified part on the swords hilt to make it so the chain could be tied properly.

"And now I can do things like this!" he started swinging the sword left and right, before picking up speed and started rotating it till it seemed a blur.

He then made a throwing motion with his hand, and the sword shot forward like a projectile easily smashing apart the tree in front of him.

"And look, I can even recover it almost instantly!" he flicked his wrist and the sword shot back to his hand.

While all of this happened the girl seemed unimpressed "What's the use of this thing if you're just going to exhaust yourself too fast? The sword it too heavy an long to use this thing effectively" she had already analyzed the strength and weaknesses of her best friends new invention.

"I know" he shrugged off the girl's assessment, those issues were glaringly obvious if used with the swords his father had given them, but things changed when he made another change too.

He passer her a paper with a drawing on it, it was the design for a sword, maybe dagger was more appropriate for the length, but he liked simply calling them blades more.

Once her eyes looked all over the design her expression lit up "Yes, this could work! The short curved blade could make it more aerodynamic while the width of the blade would make it more durable and heavy for a bit of extra impact"

"And most of all I created with the natural rotatory movement or the tridimensional movement gear in mind, with this I can use the rotation to make them go even faster, which will in turn give me even more power to strike at the enemies ripping them apart"

But soon they both cooled down as they thought about the most glaring issue "But yeah, they would break immediately if they his something particularly hard and leave me defenseless"

"That, plus the fact that if they break they would cost a lot to make new" she deflated, this kind of weapon wasn't her cup of tea, but seeing her friend excited made her happy too.

But all of a sudden her expression suddenly contorted, her intuition told her something really bad was about to happen.