12 Miles Below

Cathida was unhappy.

Which, as I’d learned over the last two days, was not a rare occurrence. In fact, I’d say that being grumpy was her default. It’s only by accident that this grumbling had a reason behind it today. She was brooding that I had blown off her training requests in order to do my sister’s bidding, again.

I, in my vast intellectual capacity, have been wisely used by Kidra as exclusively muscle. Sent left and right to deliver goods, give small speeches, and threaten the right people - all in armor of course. I hadn't even gotten a chance to report my breakthroughs to her personally yet, since each order was handed to me at a distance. Kidra was plotting in ways only the old Winterscars would be able to compete against.

And once she'd gotten a report with a photo of the new look I'd taken up, I'd been thrown into the deep end of her plots.

The dark grey, black and gold gave a nod to the crusader heritage, while also making it clear I wasn’t a crusader myself. The red sigil and theme gave a clear nod that I was of House Winterscar. Journey even modulated my voice in helmet to sound slightly darker and more ominous to fit the theme. The combination made for an impressive, dangerous and regal look. Like something even the machines didn’t want to mess with.

And it damn well better do that. Cathida and I had spent an entire two hours carefully tailoring the look.

With the administrator account permissions, Journey had no issues generating quite a lot of additional parts for the armor. Some things however, like the cape and a half kilt, had to be done the old fashioned way. If it wasn’t in the design docs, the armor would be stubborn about it. Cathida had verbally shrugged at that, saying it was hardcoded limits. She couldn’t convince Journey any more than I could.

Let me restate that: Cathida couldn't convince Journey. This threw me in for a loop, considering Cathida was a figment of Journey’s imagination - in a manner of speaking. This was like a sock puppet talking back to the owning hand. Like the same person role playing an argument with themselves. Journey was on a completely different level when it came to method acting.

By this point I had stopped thinking of Journey and Cathida as one and the same, even if they technically were.

“If you keep acting like a weasel, you’ll sprout a tail and teeth to match.” Cathida grumbled in my helmet as I slunk down into the depths of House Winterscar’s abandoned property, checking behind me periodically to make sure I wasn’t being followed.

“Well if you have any suggestions on how best to keep the literal artifacts of a god safe, please let me know. I’m all ears.”

“Peh!” She huffed. “I’m an armor, not a magical idea factory. Aren’t you supposed to be the clever one? Weasel.”

The second thing I’d learned about Cathida is that she likes to complain. A lot. In fact, I'd hazard to say she hasn't stopped complaining from the moment she'd been 'created'

“You’re only being cranky right now that this is more important than training.” I huffed out, knowing it was basically futile to try and reason with this old lady.

“Of course I’d be upset! It's been two whole days and you haven't even gone on the courtyard to train even once!" She shot back. "The faster you learn how to properly fight, the faster you won't end up twelve miles under with me laughing at you the whole way down. This hocus pokus isn’t anywhere as important as a real sword. Peh!”

“Counterpoint - those real swords are made of hocus pokus. I’m thinking learning how they do that might be worthwhile, you have to agree with that at least?”

She didn’t answer back to that, grumbling instead, which was Cathida-speech for ‘you win this round.’ as I've recently learned to translate. I would strongly theorize that Cathida was physically unable to string the words 'You're right' in that order.

I jumped up the last set of stairs leading to the second floor, avoiding the carefully laid traps and making sure my tracks had been covered. The door opened up slowly and I walked into what I’d started calling my sanctum. If I was a wizard, I’d damn well have my own tower. Of sorts.

The small heater remained at the center of the room, unpowered and waiting. I had fit a power cell into it a while ago and there was still plenty of juice left in it.

Last time I’d been here, I’d spent most of my time chatting with the old bat in my armor and figuring out just what I’d done. The other half of the time was spent looking at a mirror while Cathida and I slowly changed the look up. By the time I was done, I had responsibilities to handle back within the estate grounds and those basically never stopped coming until I specifically requested the time.

Today I had a few tests in mind for the Occult that I'd been plotting. And there was plenty of it that I could do without having to take my helmet off.

“All right. Experimental log number one. I’ll be testing the effects of stacking multiple fractals of the same kind near each other.”

I coughed out, raising my hand and poking at it with my finger in a few spots. “Journey, etch the fractal of heat here, here and here.”

My first experiment was to see if fractals could stack their effects together. In this case, the fractal of heat was my testing rat.

Journey’s spirit wrapped around my arm, wherever it trailed, small etchings of the fractal were left behind. Once done, I gave the order to pass a current of electricity through all of them. The result was small tongues of flames all over the arm, each hovering above their respective fractal. Impressive, but ultimately useless.

I ran through a small gauntlet of additional tests anywhere from layering the fractals one over the other, to reshaping the size and overlapping multiple fractals into each other. Results were inconclusive. Size affected some fractals but not others, so that was on a fractal to fractal basis. Overlapping would instantly cause the fractals to stop functioning, so interfering patterns were bad - with exception to interfering patterns that weren't part of the Occult up to a point. I could scratch one single line through the fractal but so long as the pattern was still technically whole, it would work.

Too many lines and the fractal lost coherence. It looked like fractals could withstand a bit of additions so long as they didn't muddle the whole thing too significantly. However, the opposite was absolutely not true. Remove even a tiny dot from the pattern and it would stop functioning. Ultimately, I ended up with a lot of data that didn't all fit perfectly together which made me question if there was a consistent rule to the whole thing.

The last experiment I wanted to run was something I took from Winterscar. Its soul fractal had been many different fractals, all connected to the center soul fractal. So it stood to theory that maybe fractals could be joined together. What would happen if I perfectly connected the fractal of heat multiple times together?

The implications that fractals could be joined together gave me a theory that the Occult was more like a language. If there was an infinite amount of fractals that reality recognized, then among that infinite valid set, there could be a chance concepts for control existed.

Like ‘Shoot fire in a straight line’ or ‘Make an explosion’ - in which case I could create spells of a kind ahead of time, leaving them coded up on the armor and activate them at leisure. Or do what Talen did and carry a book of metal sheets with those spells pre-written there.

Unfortunately, I had no way of testing that theory out. Twelve hells, I didn’t even know how to discover new fractals or what steps were taken for that. And the bad news didn’t stop here. The armor didn’t have any tools to model or graph mathematics. Which meant that I had no way of figuring out how to seamlessly combine fractals together. So until I had the right software that let me mathematically stitch fractals together, that second experiment wasn’t going anywhere.

Journey could create fractals with perfect accuracy, but only when I had the equations solved ahead of time. Figures the hard part would be discovery rather then execution.

I changed tracks and began a more in-depth study the Soul Fractal. First, for ease of access, I had a small copy embedded on the inside of my chestplate right by my skin. Second, I had a permanent current run through it, triggering the fractal and leaving it powered. The soul sense now became ever present.

“Journey, any difference in my vital signs?”

“Still hale as a peach on a tree, young man. Journey doesn’t see anything wrong with you. Why? You do something I should know about?” Cathida said.

Here’s another issue I’ve discovered since ‘unleashing’ Cathida back into the world: Journey’s default voice was completely gone. The armor itself no longer spoke to me directly, instead it seemed to speak through Cathida, making for a strange game of telephone.

“I’m testing first the effects of having an active soul fractal so close to me for longer periods of time. For all I know, there might be some poison or health issues.” That wasn’t a high chance on my radar, Journey had a soul fractal active at all times that the suit was powered on. And knights didn’t get strange sicknesses from that.

But I digress, at least trying to see if there was anything off was something baseline I should do.

Survey says, it’s either a very slow cooking poison, or it was generally safe to carry an active fractal around for so long. Journey hadn't given me more answers about the fractals, the armor itself seemed just as new to the whole field as I was. I had to re-discover things all on my own, including the safety of it all. The only oddity with Journey is that it refused to acknowledge Talen's book existed, even if I had it on hand. The pages remained blank when viewed through the helmet, and as far as Cathida was concerned, I was coming up with these ideas and plans out of nowhere. The blindness didn't carry out anywhere other than the book, so the rest of the Occult was on the table at least. Why was that a thing? I hadn't the faintest idea and chalked it up to a quirk of the armor.

But I digress. One mystery at a time. Right now, I was going into that soul fractal, searching for the medical limits there first. My discoveries were racking up minute by minute once I really set my eyes on testing this whole Occult one step at a time.

First thing I discovered: If I sank too deeply into the fractal my body would go into a kind of coma, like a meditation trance. The deeper into the soul fractal I got, the less control I had over my own sense and body until the entire world blurred into the soul-sight and my body slumped down.

I tested the different amounts of connection I could have and found an interesting middle ground.

Only reaching slightly into the fractal, I gained that soul sight while mostly remaining alert within my body. It gave me an additional sense for little cost. To make it even better, I found I had a feeling of concepts behind me. The only issue was how novel the sense felt, thus making it difficult to really process through. It was like a blind man seeing for the first time - the world of color didn't make sense, there wasn't any pattern recognition imprinted yet, rather everything felt like a surreal blend of colors with no rhyme or reason. It would take me some time to really hone that soul-sight into something I could rely on the same way that I could with my eyes.

Being able to keep the soul-sight active while still fully lucid and in control of my own senses was too big of an advantage to give up on only because it was too hazy for the moment. Nothing could sneak up on me ever again for example, once trained. And I had a somewhat vague ability to peer through walls and objects. Nothing could hide from my sight either. The advantages were there, I just had to hone the skill so that the feelings weren’t so muddled together.

That said, there was an additional item to note: About halfway into the soul fractal, at the border where I lost connection to my body, active fractals in the world began to glow before my sight - or at least that’s how I interpreted it. Like a whiff of a strong scent and direction.

Talen had mentioned that the second mastery of the Occult was to directly command the fractal concepts using intent, which was something the old tribe shamans had managed to accomplish by backdoor using the soul fractal.

The question was how to do that. I'd spent the past hour testing out the soul fractal by itself, now I felt confident enough to start mixing up the lessons.

See, after I spent some time floating around in the soul fractal thinking about how to impose my will upon the natural elements, that’s the logical conclusion I came up with: Go and grab it.

Extremely scientific, I know. The soul fractal let me move around like a blob, so that made me think this was what the shamans had likely done first on discovering this fractal. They moved their blob like soul-roots and reached out to the glowing fractals themselves.

In the real world, the common sense was not to touch an open flame since burning was a thing humans aren’t fond of. And now I was considering touching the fractal of heat with my bare soul. What was life without a bit of risk though? It'd be boring to keep playing everything safe and fortune favors the bold.

I brought my hand close to my chest and had Journey light up the fractal of heat on my palm. In the soul-sight, it glowed bright blue. This close, it was easy to reach a tendril of soul out and touch the fractal itself without exposing myself too deep to cold reality outside the warm comfort of my soul's housing.

The root-like appendage narrowed into a tip, and I lightly brushed the very edge of that fractal.

Oh boy. That was something. On touching it, I felt something. More accurately, a lot of things.

The first is that this fractal was drawing energy from somewhere else. Somewhere beyond. I didn’t get much more sense from that.

The second, was that the fractal was eroding away. Part of that energy was slowly severing the connection and warping the metal it was etched on, giving this fractal a limited half-life. Journey’s armor was made of tough stuff, for the metal was almost completely unyielding. But not perfectly unyielding. It would take eons before the fractal had melted itself out of existence, and yet that time would inevitably come.

I wasn’t sure all fractals wore off like this, or if it was just a quirk of heat itself. That would require more testing with other fractals. I hadn't heard about Occult blades breaking down before at least.

The third item I felt was concepts. Many of them, all tied together. Majority of which was gibberish to my mind. Like static noise. Some of these concepts I could understand somewhat. There was a vague notion of agitation for example. Some kind of movement. The rest felt more like garbled static.

The last item I found was that this static was malleable. Simply observing it already changed it. Reaching out a metaphorical hand to the static gave odd results. Like swiping a hand over a smooth plane only to feel an occasional bump or crack where my soul could connect to something.

It was those cracks that gave me a place to latch onto.

I brought my hand back, retreating into my soul fractal and brooded there. Here was my working theory: This wasn’t the pure concept of heat. In fact, it was tainted in a way by a hundred other smaller concepts that were introduced within the equation itself.

Dozens of these concepts were dormant or otherwise garbage data. I had no idea what part of the equation connected to those. And maybe one of those concepts was something that let me bridge into the fractal, where I could impart my intent into the fractal.

I snuck a soul-appendage-hand-thought back onto the fractal and pictured the flame narrowing.

The flames remained stubbornly unchanging.

You know, it would be seriously nice one of these days if I could just get something right the very first time I tried it. Is that so hard to ask for?

No, this wasn’t the right way to go about this, clearly. I had to think like an Occultist. Everything revolved around concepts and connections. Talen mentioned that this method of imparting intent wasn’t something that existed naturally - the shamans of old had used it like a patch job.

All right, let’s keep it simple: The soul fractal lets my soul into the fractal magic like a backdoor into the system. My soul could create the intentions. And this fractal of heat had cracks in it that my soul senses could feel and latch onto.

My mental picture was just that - a picture. In a system where everything revolved around concepts.

I focused and tried to think of the concept of a flame narrowing. Instead of looking at the flame in hand and willing it to constrict, I pushed my mental understanding into the fractal itself, completely ignoring the flame that appeared outside.

The moment I did, the small flame began to stutter and move.

Ah. I love it when I win.

By the time I had returned to the Winterscar training ground, it was already far past the time to sleep.

There was a knock at my door. “Master Keith, are you awake?” A woman’s voice said.

I groaned and rolled over in my bed, hugging my pillow for comfort. I'd come back home really late and had barely gotten a few hours of sleep. The knocking resumed without mercy or feeling to that fact.

“Master Keith, forgive me, but I’ve been sent to wake you up.”

I rolled over again. “Fine.” I grumbled. “I’m awake! I’m awake.”

Taking a few seconds to put on some quick clothing on, I was in a presentable state when the servant knocked again for entry.

She slid the door open, then came in with a wild look in her eyes, as if she’d seen a ghost.

“What’s going on? Something happened while I was asleep?” I asked.

She was among the new hires that Kidra had brought on. Her name wasn't known to me yet which felt odd to me. Spend enough years with a small staff and that was just inevitable that everyone's names would be memorized. I trusted my sister’s judgement with the new staff here however. She certainly had a plan for everything given the amount of work I'd been given.

The servant nodded, bowing down low. “This one was dispatched to polish and clean the armors in their storage. I did so, first with Winterscar and then with Journey.”

I had a feeling I knew where this was going…

“Your armor, master, it… it talked to me.” She said, a note of panic. “It demanded that I bring you to it. It yelled at me and was most irate when I didn’t know the voice was coming from the helmet. I’m afraid your armor might be possessed by an evil spirit of some kind.”

“Ah.” My hand reached out to scratch the back of my neck on reflex. “Well, you’re half right. My armor’s a little unique right now and it’s still a little temperamental.”

The servant nodded. “Then it's not possessed?"

"Not by an evil spirit, no. It's an armor's spirit, that isn't in question." Now, whether it's an evil spirit or not was up to interpretation.

The servant seemed to pale at that response. "I’m terribly afraid that I’ve offended the spirit of the armor.”

I shrugged, putting on a light morning yukata. “I think my armor is offended by everyone, she’s a little cranky. Don’t worry, I’ll straighten this all out.”

She nodded, looking a little less frightened and more relieved. “I’d... I'd always heard armors spoke to their user, but they were said to be programs that gave reports. This… this wasn’t that.”

Looks like I’d need to visit a certain retired crusader before she scared away all the new help. “Did she say anything else?”

“No, master Keith.” The servant said. “She was only insistent that you be brought before her. Very insistent.”

I nodded. “Suppose I’ll need to sit down with that armor and have a nice long talk with it about proper decorum. What is your name?”

She bowed lower, “Melandy, my lord. The lady Winterscar hired me yesterday along with four others.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong, Melandy.” I took a few steps past her and out of my quarters. The hallways stretched out to the sides, a small chill lay in the air of the early morning, the general heaters were usually turned down over night as less people used these streets. “Let’s go see what my cranky armor wants this time.”

Cathida wanted what Cathida wants: Which is to say she wanted me to suit up and train since it’s the morning. And if she had to shake down servants left and right for it to happen, by the goddess, she will do so with a grin. Honestly, I'm more surprised it took her three days before she started haunting the house.

“Finally decided to drag yourself over, did you?” The armor sat in the display vault, perfectly assembled on top of the shrine. It looked almost smug in a way. The helmet staring back at me accusingly.

“I would appreciate it if you didn’t scare my staff.” I diplomatically asked Cathida, pointing a thumb at the serving girl hiding behind me.

“Oh, I'm so sorry." She said in a voice that promised everything but sincerity. "You know what I'd appreciate? If you didn’t blow me off on this, you little git! You said we would train yesterday! Swore it up and down, I can have Journey dredge up a recording of you!”

Okay. Rebellious armor. Didn’t see that one coming. Great. Everything is great. “Okay, I admit I said that - but we came back at three in the morning! Of course I wanted to sleep!”

“Then you shoulda’ thought of that before you gave me your word! Youth these days! PEH! No excuse or spine, none! You’re going to put the armor on, go out into that courtyard and train until the sun melts the snow, or else! Don't start a war with me, I've fought in plenty before, I'll trounce you in sheer experience.”

I turned to look at Melandy, and she returned the stare. “Are they… supposed to be like that?” She asked timidly. “When I cleaned Winterscar, that armor didn’t say anything. I’m afraid I might have turned something on by accident!”

Sighing, I shook my head. “No, my armor’s more of an exception to the norm. I don’t think anyone in the clan has seen something like this. You didn’t do anything wrong, don’t worry.”

The armor remained staring at me, in quiet contempt. Which was incredible considering it didn't have any facial features to display contempt with. Presence of will in a way. I had a feeling Cathida would gladly become the glorified poltergeist of house Winterscar, wailing away through the walls, if it got her what she wanted. Or if she found it fun. That was altogether another strong motivation.

“Fine.” I made my mind up. I'd brought this demon back to life, now I'd have to shake hands with it. “I’ll go train this morning. But in exchange, I don’t want you to be scaring more people like this. Are we clear?”

The armor scoffed. “You don’t get to talk terms with me you little weasel. I’ll do whatever I damn well please! Goddess above shine down on me, I’ll yell at the rats and roaches skittering by if I have to. Try me.”

“Melandy?”

“Yes, master Keith?”

“Would you do me a kindness and have some coffee made for me? The strong kind. It’s going to be one of those days.”

“No, no no no! Keep the blade leveled up, edge at a tilt. You take a step forward and lift the blade up, then cut down. The strike is meant to close the distance while offering a defense from top strikes mid-lunge. If the edge of the sword isn’t pointed right, you won’t be able to cut away the expected attack! Do it again. And tilt your body more inwards, you’re expecting something to be cut off from above, and it won't be a broken tea kettle. Whatever it is needs to be pushed out of the way immediately before it falls down on you.”

“Like this?” I twisted the blade edge so that it pointed further up, then repeated the swing.

“Better. Now, again!” Cathida said.

To be fair, Cathida was a better teacher than Father. That I was already able to replicate the first basic attack of the crusader longsword style within five minutes was evidence enough.

However, she also had the entire faculties of a relic armor to work with. Ghostly outlines of where my feet should be placed appeared on the ground, something my HUD would show. That included an outline in three dimensions of where my hand and body should be positioned. I would match the outline a few times and then try to repeat the movement without assistance. The rest was to drill it in.

I repeated the hit, following the guidelines. We weren’t going for speed here, just accuracy. My movements were slow, training the muscles to perform this again and again. It was as if I was fighting underwater. There was an issue with all this - not in the training but the imperial style itself. To be blunt: This style was comically overexaggerated.

“I still don’t get it.” I said. “Even going at full speed this move would be too predictable. Why such a wide arc? Anyone would see this coming miles away.”

“Machines are usually twice or three times as large as we are. The wide arcs are required to make sure you catch a hit. You aren’t trying to stab a machine, you want to cut off the limbs and eliminate the venues of attack it has.”

Lights went on in my head. Now I understood - Imperials didn’t fight other knights. Of course their style of combat would be more specialized for the enemy they fought. “Look, we'll need to talk about application use a bit. Surface dwellers don’t fight machines often, the main two enemies up here are the weather and people. And one of those I can’t fight with a sword.”

“BAH!” She spat. “Your savage surface style clearly doesn't take into account the true uses of an armor. Now trust me and do what I say.”

“These ‘Savage’ combat arts that we surface dwellers use are built specifically to fight other people." I argued. "The enemy I’m going to fight up here will usually be other knights.”

“You think this cudgeled up style of yours can stand against the imperial style? Don’t make me laugh, young man. You lot are too big for your knickers.”

I sat down in a lotus position, longsword placed ahead of me. The other guards and warriors in the courtyard paid me no attention, continuing with their training.

Kidra had followed through on her promises and increased the guards. And that pace wasn’t slowing down yet. Previously we only had two. Now the whole courtyard was filled with people whose names I didn’t know, all wearing the Winterscar black and red uniforms.

"What are you doing?" Cathida asked, irate. "Don’t tell me you’re already tired? We aren't even half an hour into training!"

“I need a style of combat that can both handle machines and humans.” I said. “That part I can’t negotiate on. This imperial style seems to be built specifically for handling larger opponents, but that’s not who I’ll be fighting. So we need to come to a compromise of some kind.”

Again, Cathida only scoffed. “Have no fear. A squire would be able to defeat any of your knights and so will you once I’ve trained you correctly.”

“You fought surface knights before?”

“Admittedly, no. The old bat only came up once in her life to the surface, not long enough to challenge some poor knight into losing their lunch money. But if she had, she would have absolutely taken a few names. Any crusader worth their golden glitter would have. You surface dwellers only accidentally use the full breadth of armors. We imperials have used armor for centuries! We train in them as children, you only inherit these armors once you’ve already learned all the wrong things already.”

I still couldn’t quite understand why Cathida was so confident this over-leveraged style would defeat the surface one. The movesets Father had shown me were extremely tight and optimized to give very little hints at where the attacks would come from. It was hard to see why the imperial style would succeed against this.

She’d said something about learning all the wrong things before inheriting the armor. “So what’s the trick?” I asked. "Because it's sounding like there's a trick here that surface dwellers don't know about."

“The Ferrum-Corpus! The iron-body transformation. The ultimate goal all knights strive to achieve. It’s all in the mind, young man, the mind! Instead of trying to perform the movesets as quickly as possible with your physical body, relax the body and move the armor directly. The armor can go far faster than you can, believe me. You have to stop limiting it.”

I looked down at my hand, deciding to try this odd scheme of hers out.

Once.

Twice.

But matter how hard I tried to visualize my hand curling into a fist, it remained as is.

“You’re doing it wrong.” Cathida unhelpfully added, cackling all the while as if she'd played the world's greatest practical joke.

“You don’t say. What’s the correct way to do it, oh wise hermit of the armor? What am I doing wrong?”

“Cathida would have told you about the iron-body mantra teachings. A whole philosophical ramble that’s filled with impressive sounding words. In truth that’s all bunk. The science is that Journey listens to muscle impulses and won’t overextend past your body’s current physical motion. So the trick is to both relax your muscles while directing them to move. You get the armor to misconstrue movement orders, yet not have your own body limit the armor. Do it right and it’ll feel like your body is being puppeteered by you instead of full movement. That’s why it’s called the iron-body technique. The armor becomes your body. It’s simple, get it?"

All right, fair enough. "So what's the first step to all this?"

"Oh what a surprise, now you want to listen eh? How about you give it a try on your own first. You're hot-headed and think you know everything, so go on! Show little old me what you can come up with on your own. And when you come crawling back to ask for instructions I expect no more back-talking.”

She was testing me here. I didn't have high hopes of being able to figure this out, but damned if I wasn't going to try. Father’s movements were faster than a human could have moved. I knew that from experience. I think he was unconsciously activating this technique. At that point he likely wasn’t thinking about the individual movements anymore, only considering the fight as a whole and planning out the next steps to take while trusting his body would move.

The flow state of combat I remember he mentioned. Could I replicate that? He would have built that muscle memory up over years of practice. If I was intentionally aiming for that end goal, was it possible to shortcut those years?

Ten minutes of odd attempts later, I was still nowhere close to success. Given Cathida's goading, I'm almost sure it wasn't something I could achieve quickly. It was a truly odd ability to be able to simultaneously choose to move your body without actually moving your body.

"This is hopeless." I grumbled. “Quick question, how long exactly does it take to learn on average?”

Cathida snorted. “About time you asked me that. Four to five years of deliberate practice.”

Urk. No wonder she was laughing. “Four years?! You made it sound like it was just a state of mind or - I - nevermind." I sighed. Of course she had deliberately been vague about it, the little troll.

"What, did you think you’d get all these skills without the hard work?” She said. “Now have you learned your lesson about trusting your elders, or do I have to beat it into you some more?”

I grabbed the longsword and got back up. “Fine, you win. I’ll follow your instructions to the letter, respected elder-sama.”

She certainly nailed the smug in her voice, I’ll give Journey credit on that one. “The first step to learning the proper technique is to perfectly master one strike. Once you have committed every motion of that strike to memory, we’ll begin to relax the muscles during the strike until only the ghost of the muscle memory remains without the actual follow-through. We’ll do this for each move within the Imperial longsword forms.”

The longblade sang through the air again as I repeated the same motion again and again. The whole time I felt like I was overlooking something to all this, but I couldn’t quite pin down what.

"Would Cathida have won against, say... Father with this technique?"

"Eh, that one's a toss up. Cathida would be consistently faster..." She paused for a moment. "Though I suppose the over-telegraphed moves would have reduced the advantage somewhat. Your Father was a veteran already, using the technique unconsciously in bursts."

"Hang on, you're saying that others reach the iron-body technique without applying the imperial training style to it?”

“Give a fool enough time in the armor and eventually they’ll stumble on it. Imperials discovered a more focused method of honing the skill, which is what you’re doing right now. For reference, most regular undersiders take about fifteen years to reach a master level, mostly because they don’t dedicate themselves as wholly as imperials do.”

“So… You’re saying Imperials would generally be faster earlier in their careers and that’s what gives them an insurmountable lead on the surface dwellers?"

"... yes? What are you twisting the words around for? I don't like that. You're scheming something. Stop that."

"So by that logic, assuming both practitioners of their respective styles were of equal speed, would the surface style come out ahead?"

Oh she didn't like that response. “No! Not one bit! Each of these movesets needs to be honed and practiced in order to be used with any amount of speed. Your surface style was not made to work with the iron-body technique! Too specific movesets, too many precise counters, too much improvisation on the fly - there’d be hundreds of moves to perfectly train. The imperial style was deliberately made to flow from one movement to another, the counters wide and generic enough that you won’t need to train so many years. Saying two knights of equal speed would be completely igno-”

Wait.

I sat up, suddenly having a bright idea, and began to make my way directly to the hospital wing.

“Where you going?!” Cathida squawked in my ear.

“On thinking about it further, I think I do have a method of getting that skill without the work.”

“Why are you like this?! Who raised you? I need to scream at them.”

“Oh, that one’s a long story.” I said, already making my way out of the courtyard with a single minded goal in mind. “Ultimately, what I need to do is find a way to order my body to move and have it not respond to me. Right? While I could train up that skill for four years like you mentioned, I think there’s a faster way to get immediate results.”

“And what way would that be?”

I chuckled, reaching the medical wing and opening up the pantry. “Why, drugs of course. The people who raised me knew all about those, specifically poisons. I think one of my old cousins has just the right thing for me...”

Next chapter - From blood to iron

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