Chapter 17: A Day Of Training

"Here we go." I thought aloud as I got my ass up and out of bed.

As soon as I had both planted on the gray floor of my room, I walked to the entrance of my home and waited till Amata was in front of it. Moments later she arrived where I needed her to pull off my harmless prank, so I pressed the button opening the sliding door before she could get up to any mischief.

*Ksshk*

"Well good morning, Amata. You're here surprisingly early, aren't you, even earlier than the day before?" I said with a broad smile, implying that I knew exactly why she keeps showing up earlier and earlier with each passing day. 

It took her a second or two for her to recover from the surprise I gave her and once she did, she quickly stammered out a greeting along with an excuse with a bright red face. "G-good morning Harold, I-I came earlier than yesterday because we have a lot of training to do, so I wanted us to get a head start on it today."

"Uh huh, yeah that's the reason, definitely not here to pretend to wake me up just to somehow end up climbing into my bed in the end, definitely not that right." I replied, not buying her excuse at all since it had already taken place once before.

As the shade of red on her face was further deepening over the next few seconds, I got the conversation moving along and asked. "Moving on from that since you're already here, you might as well join me for breakfast unless you already ate?"

"N-no, I haven't had breakfast yet." She stammered out with a still bright red face.

"Alright then, come on in."

With that settled and Amata out of her stupor, I moved out of the doorway to let her come in. And right as she entered inside, I closed the front door and headed to the kitchen with Amata in tow to whip up some breakfast for the both of us.

After rummaging through the fridge for a bit, I asked her. "Hey Amata, are you fine with bacon, eggs, and some buttered toast on the side for breakfast?"

"Yeah, that sounds great." She replied happily with a not-so-bright red face anymore.

"Okay cool, that will make things easy, then. Go take a seat, since it won't take me all that long to get everything prepared." I told her.

"Oh alright, but if you need any help, let me know."

"Alright, will do."

While Amata was taking a seat at the dining table, I started pulling out all the ingredients from the fridge I was going to need. I followed that up by retrieving a couple of pans from the cabinets that I was going to use to cook the bacon and eggs. No more than a minute later, I had everything out, so I started heating up the pans on the stovetop.

"Amata, how many eggs do you want?"

"I'll have two." She replied happily from the nearby table.

Now knowing how many eggs she wanted, I cracked open eight eggs, two for her and six for myself since a growing boy needs his protein if he's to make any gains. From there, I checked to see if the pan was hot enough and it was, so I moved on to the next step, which was to butter the pan up for the eggs.

Once I had a nice spread of melted butter across the pan's surface, I poured the eight eggs onto the pan's hot metal surface, producing an audible sizzling sound. With the eggs now cooking, I got the bacon going on the other hot pan along with the toast and had everything ready in about 10 minutes flat. 

"Okay, everything's done Amata. I'm bringing the food to the table now." I said whilst I was loading the plates up and bringing them over.

"Here you go. Do you want any ketchup or jam?" I asked her after placing the plates on the table. 

"Umm, can I have some raspberry jam, please?"

"You sure can, let me get it." I replied before heading back into the kitchen to locate the raspberry jam.

After searching through the kitchen for a bit, I located the jam and brought it back over with me to the table. When I finally sat down, we began eating breakfast I just cooked up for the two of us. And as we ate, we chatted intermittently between bites about the different things we'll be doing in training today as well as what we'll be working on tomorrow.

15 minutes in, we finished the meal and when we did, Amata thanked me with a bright smile on her face. "Thanks for the meal Harold, it was really, really good."

"Yeah, no problem, let's just try to keep the climbing into my bed part out until you're older. Can you do that for me?" I responded, making her cheeks flush again, although not as severe as previously. 

After a short few moments, she nodded her head. "Good, and since you're willing to compromise with me a bit, you're more than welcome to come over for breakfast every day, if you want."

Once I said that, she had a surprised look that morphed into an ecstatic expression a few seconds later when she realized what I had just said.

The next second she hopped up from her chair and raced over to my side, wrapping her little arms around me, giving me a hug while looking up at me with slightly wet puppy dog eyes and questioned. "Really, I can eat with you every day from now on?"

"Uh, yeah, I don't see why not, as long as you keep your word and discontinue your bed-climbing activities." I replied, putting a small smile on her face while she continued to hug me.

"Okay, that's enough hugging for now, Amata. We have our training to get to." I said, while ruffling her hair with a smile of my own.

After a few more moments, she let go, so I walked back to my room and gathered a few things that we'll need for today's training, those being an extra set of clothes and some other miscellaneous things.

"I got what I needed. Let's head out." I told her.

Not wasting any time, we made our way out of my home's entrance and into the gray vault hallways and began walking towards the track to do a bit of cardio.

Several minutes later, we arrived at the track, thus I turned to Amata and said. "Let's start out with some stretching first and when we're nice and limber, we'll move onto running. And once we've done that for a certain amount of time, we'll do some sprinting lastly. Are you good with that?"

"Yeah, I'm fine with that as long as I get to take a break to catch my breath in between."

"Okay, let's do an hour of cardio before we take a short break and after we're finished with our short rest, we'll hit the weights. Sound good?"

"Sounds good to me."

"Alright, let's get to it."

The next 30 minutes were spent with her and I running and as I was in the midst of doing so I looked over towards and noticed she was having a hard time keeping up. So we took a breather on the benches nearby for five minutes before Amata seemed to have settled her breathing enough to continue.

"So Amata, do you feel like you can continue onto some sporadic sprinting with short breaks in between?"

"Yeah, I think I'm fine to continue, but I will definitely need those breaks in between so I can catch my breath and calm my heart a bit." She answered, to which I nodded my head.

A few moments later we got up from the benches and continued the rest of our cardio for the next half an hour and right as we hit the 1-hour mark, Amata was basically ready to collapse. Hence, we headed for the benches once again. However, mid way there we, Amata stumbled on her feet so I grabbed her before she could tumble and hit the floor.

"You alright?" I asked, concerned.

*Haa-haa* "I'm fine, my legs are just a bit numb from all the running we just finished." She answered, her legs shaking slightly.

"Well, before you possibly take another tumble and injure yourself, I'll just carry you the rest of the way."

"N-no, that's alright. I-I think I can make it." She responded, somewhat embarrassed with her head now facing down.

*Ahh*

Not taking no for an answer, I picked her up with my left hand under her knees and my right hand on her back and carried her the rest of the way to the benches while her face became a bit more flushed.

...

Half an hour later on the benches, I had Amata laying down with her head on my lap almost passed out when I had the bright idea to give her some positive reinforcement so she doesn't lose her drive to improve.

"Great job, Amata. You've been doing phenomenally well lately and I've noticed your speed and endurance have improved quite a bit since we've started training together, so keep it up."

"You really think so?" She replied, springing back to life somewhat.

"Yeah, you have, so keep up the good work."

With her smiling brightly, I let her continue resting on my lap for an additional 15 minutes before I decided to get us moving toward the weights. "Alright, let's go hit the weights at the gym for a bit."

"Can't I lay here for a few more minutes, please?" She asked with her puppy dog eyes gleaming.

I struggled for a bit internally and eventually caved to her request. "Haa, you can lay down for five more minutes, but then we're going, okay!" I answered, hearing a giggle in reply and seeing her smiling like she just accomplished something huge.

After five more minutes passed, Amata got up from my lap and we made our way through the gray hallways of the vault to the gym. The minute we got there, I set Amata up to do some free weights exercises with weights she could handle while I also did the same alongside her with the maximum weight I could handle. We then ran through a good portion of the gym equipment and ended up spending about two hours there when we decided collectively to call it quits and head to the pool to get a swim in.

Upon reaching the next venue, I went over how many laps we should try to do. As soon as we were done discussing that, we began swimming back and forth until we hit our numbers. Though my laps took significantly longer than Amata's since I had a ton more laps than her that I needed to complete. So she ended up off to the side of the pool watching me till I was done with an admiring look on her face.

From there, we relaxed and played around in the pool for the rest of the hour until I was starting to get hungry, thus I asked. "Amata, are you hungry yet?"

"Yeah, I've been starving for a while." *Growl* She answered before her stomach agreed with her, making her face flush again for the umpteenth time today.

"I guess you are ha ha. Let's head to my home and I will make us some lunch." I replied, which she nodded her head to.

Done with physical exercise for the day, Amata and I both gathered our things and began the journey back to my home, where I then made a pretty sizable lunch. For the simple reason that we were both practically starving after exerting ourselves so much in today's training. When we eventually finished eating, I applied a few stimpaks to myself and Amata to help with recovery and muscle fatigue.

"Okay, time to head out to our next destination."

"So we're going to work o-"

As we discussed what we would be doing there, I headed out the door with Amata following right next to me to my lab to work on a few of the things that needed to be prepared for my future wasteland adventure.

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If you want something else to read, that's similar to this, check out my other webnovel Wasteland Conqueror. It has a lot more chapters released.