Penitent-Chapter 14: Hand

Kline pointed at Davi who’d had his hand raised for nearly five minutes. It had taken quite some time to earn another free hour of questions after what had happened with Xiu, but Kline had finally allowed another one that morning.

“Why don’t you have a ton of guns?” he asked.

That was a very good question, thought Michael. They had access to people from other worlds, and their society didn’t seem exactly backwards when it came to innovation. With their focus on the military, firearms were an obvious choice. He already partially knew the answer, thanks to what Marcus had told him, but he still wanted to know why they weren't more widespread.

“We do have guns. It took several takers who’d overestimated their engineering abilities blowing themselves up to accomplish it, but eventually we had rudimentary firearms. Unfortunately, they do not work well with Magicka. The more complicated a machine is, the more trouble it has when someone has magicka, and we found that even very simple firearms were more prone to misfires, or worse when someone with even a low magical potential uses them. There are very occasionally those who are born with no magic affinity, and they are recruited as sharpshooters.” He nodded at Marcus. “Dwarves, who have no magic channels, also use simple firearms. It’s one of the reasons no country in the Humelands has ever tried to invade them.”

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He pointed at Michael.

“Are the Humelands the only place with humans?”

He shook his head.

“There are humans on every continent as far as I know. It is believed that we are the largest concentration of them here, though if that’s true or not was lost during the cataclysm.”

Michael nodded, that made his admittedly foolish dream of maybe locating his wife when she died, or even his kids when they passed even more foolish. They could be anywhere in a large new world that he didn’t even know the scope of. That was assuming they could only reincarnate as humans, or that they would reincarnate at all.

The Cataclysm was something Kline had mentioned before. Some kind of event that destroyed the Humelands capital and caused massive rifts and monsters to appear. Before it had occurred, the Humelands had been a single country. Stent claimed to have held the true heir to the old throne, but apparently so did every other country.

Kline pointed at another person, Ogun, he thought.

“Do you have holidays here? Special days you celebrate?”

“Yes,” Kline answered simply before pointing to someone else.

Michael had noticed he did that a lot when the questions were cultural or recently historical. Marcus and Davi both believed it was to keep them from being able to fit in too well. If they did manage to desert then they would be easier to pick out as Takers and so easier to round up and hang if they needed to. Far away historical events didn’t seem to matter as much, as they were such common knowledge that a few others had already known about the cataclysm before the question had even been asked.

“What are these Tusinians we are to be fighting like?” asked Prakash.

Kline’s relaxed smile that had only recently returned, faded. “They are savages. They dress in rags, indulge in slavery and serfdom. Their women have no rights, and their men are treated like dogs. They claim that they are owed Stent’s lands due to a marriage more than three hundred years past. They have mercenaries do their fighting for them, because they are cowards.”

Michael raised an eyebrow and exchanged a glance with Pyotr. They both knew propaganda when they heard it. That didn’t mean they were immune to it, but this was a bit less subtle than it tended to be in their own countries of origin.

After that, Kline’s appetite to answer questions seemed to fade quickly and he only answered two more with quick responses before everyone was shuffled to their next class. Magic class was next, and at this point Michael had learned all of the spells he was required to, so he was instead shuffled early to help Dugan.

Once Dugan had realized his knack for paperwork he’d started to have him fill out and correct the majority of the basic forms. When he wasn’t filling out paperwork he was helping him to load wagons and move supplies from one area to another, sort out freshly arrived goods, or even help with the maintenance for the weapons and armor. Michael very quickly became an adept hand at sewing buttons or patches onto uniforms, polishing brass buttons, and even hemming pants. When they were working, Dugan indulged Michael in answering the occasional question, though for the most part he seemed very wary of what he said, and didn’t seem like much of a conversationalist to begin with.

Since their first meeting, Michael had noticed a number of people with strange features he wouldn’t have recognized before. Oddly wide eyes, slightly pointed ears, fingers just a bit too long, even patches of hair in unnatural colors. Whatever had happened to the aelves in Stent, it was long ago that their traits were only minor in their descendants.

“Do you know how long Tusinia has been fighting Stent?” Michael asked as he threaded a fresh needle.

“Long time.”

Michael sighed at the non-answer. “Do they have a lot of dwarves there?”

“No. Only a small mountain range there. Most of us that live below the Humelands are in Swandia.”

Michael nodded, he’d heard of that country a few times. It was apparently some distance to the East. “Do dwarves worship the divine?” he asked.

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Dugan snorted, startling Michael a bit.

“Our gods still have names. They live beneath the earth, carving our homes and leaving behind what is needed for us to live. We can touch them, they are not merely floating words of gold and blessings given by some wispy priest.”

Michael raised an eyebrow, that was the most he’d ever gotten Dugan to talk. He was about to ask a follow-up question when Dugan stood up and walked away, returning with a stack of papers for Michael to work through. He sighed. The work wasn’t too dissimilar to what he’d done for a living in his last life, which made it easy, but left him feeling a bit jealous of Ollie being able to spend his time learning magic.

When he was done he was shuffled back in with the regular group and the rest of the day was normal until it came time for combat training. It was spear practice that day, but instead of being given one, he was instead given one of the no bladed swords and told to stand to the side and wait by Kline. Shortly after, Teft and Ollie appeared.

“Ollie needs to start more practical combat training,” said Kline as he gestured for Michael to stand across from him. “He’s been learning his shield spell, possibly the most important spell in a combat mage’s repertoire, but it needs training in active use. You’re going to be attacking him.

“Oh?” said Michael, brandishing his sword a bit and smiling shamelessly. He was more than a foot taller than Ollie at this point, and while his swordsmanship wasn’t quite at Pyotr’s level, he was able to hold his own against everyone else very well.

Ollie just shook his head at him. “Brains over brawn.”

Michael shrugged. “I’ve got both over you, so that should be fine.”

“First we’ll establish a baseline,” said Teft gesturing to Ollie. “Form a shield a foot in front of you and to the side.”

Ollie nodded, and muttered “oh fuck,” under his breath in english.

Michael raised an eyebrow.

Ollie smiled through his concentration. “I figured it’s the focus phrase I’d most easily remember when I needed to bring up a shield in front of myself.”

Michael chuckled. He knew Ollie’s flame spell focus phrase was ‘barbie’, so this wasn’t much of a leap. If he looked closely he could see a slight shimmer of purple light floating to Ollie’s side, and if he reached out with his channeling, he could feel vaguely that something was there, but not ascertain its exact shape. He hadn’t been able to do that before he’d started forging a few channels every night before bed.

Kline gestured to Michael, “Give a swing at his side, a little to his left. Half strength.”

Michael took his stance and swung. He hit the purple haze in the air, and he could feel it start to give, but his blade bounced off of it.

Teft looked at Ollie. “Okay, adjust it based on the fact that was half strength.”

He nodded and a bit more Magicka flowed from him.

Kline looked at Michael. “Full strength this time.”

Michael inhaled, took his stance again, and exhaled, this time putting his full force into the strike. This time his blade smashed into it, but he felt no give at all.

Teft nodded. “Good. I think you have an idea now, though keep in mind his strikes are going to vary in strength, but your shield shouldn’t. You always want it prepared to take the strongest possible strike your opponent can muster.”

Kline nodded. “Okay. Simple movements, start striking. Keep it slow to start, but put what force you can into the strikes.”

Michael nodded, and started attacking slowly, just as he did with the others when they practiced sparring. His slow attacks were met with Ollie’s shields each time, and they fell into a rhythm quickly.

“Speed up,” said Kline as he started walking in a circle around them.

Michael did so, though he kept his movements simple, Ollie kept up with little difficulty, raising a hand quickly in front of each blow.

“Those hand movements are unnecessary,” said Teft. “They may act as a minor focus, but with your magicka reserves you shouldn’t need to rely on them for basic attack shielding.”

Ollie gritted his teeth a bit, but slowly stopped raising his hands to move the shield to intercept Michael’s blows, though his hand kept twitching.

They were sped up a few more times, and Kline encouraged Michael to slowly add complexity to what he was doing. He was getting tired, but he kept up a consistent series of blows that he moved to random points of attack.

Ollie, on the other hand, was growing more confident, his fingers no longer twitching to block every blow and his eyes slowly stopped focusing on just Michael’s hands, and instead seemed focused on his chest, from where he could see all of his movements in his peripheral vision.

“To make things harder on a warrior attacking you, you should add some pushback to the shield whenever he makes contact, as if it were a real shield in your hand. This hurts their arms over time, and can throw off their balance,” said Teft, scratching his chin.

The shields Michael was striking quickly shifted from annoying to painful, as he added a pushback to each blocked blow. Soon his arms were screaming at him, but he kept it up.

“Break,” said Kline.

Michael lowered his blade slowly, trying to slow down his breath. The first few times someone had just dropped their blade, they’d been rewarded with a swift smack to break them of the habit. He placed the sword in the temporary scabbard and got himself some water, drinking greedily from the ladle, though his hand was shaking terribly.

Ollie got some water too, though he seemed completely fine, and shot him a smirk. He then walked back to the instructors.

Kline met Michael halfway. “Remember, you have two hands. Don’t hold yourself back too much.”

Michael nodded, taking his place across from Ollie again and readying his sword.

“Start,” said Kline.

Michael moved immediately, sending out three quick strikes. Ollie was surprised enough that he actually raised his hands to summon the shield, just as he had been doing when they’d first started. Michael stepped closer to Ollie, and threw out a few more, though Ollie was ready this time and blocked all three of them, pushing the shields back at the point of impact to cause some reverberation. Michael did three more full strength over hand blows that Ollie blocked easily due to their predictability, and while he was focused on that, Michael took his offhand off the hilt of his sword, took another step forward, and struck Ollie directly in the middle of his face with a punch.

Ollie fell backwards, kicking up dust. He let out a pained groan as he brought his hands to his face. Blood was gushing freely from his nose, it was broken.

Kline bent down to look at him, then looked over to one of the young soldiers guarding them. “Go tell the infirmary to be ready for a broken nose.” He looked over to Teft, who nodded back at him. Michael would realize later that this was planned, a common lesson given to combat mages to be prepared for anything, as well as for others to attack them in unexpected ways. At that moment though, Michael found that he wasn’t seeing Ollie hurt in front of him, he was seeing his son Vick, the time he’d misjudged a jump from the swing and broken his arm.

Michael walked toward him, feeling a familiar heat growing in his right hand. He took several steps toward Ollie.

Kline and Teft turned to look at him and their eyes widened.

Michael knelt down next to Ollie, and raised his hand in front of his face, over his broken nose. It was glowing gold, and Ollie didn’t even wince as it touched him. Michael felt suddenly tired, and the glow of his hand faded. He removed it from Ollie's face, to see his nose completely restored. Only a bit of still wet blood showed that it had ever been damaged in the first place.

Michael looked at his hand, where the heat lingered still. He recognized it, it was Sara’s hand, the same feeling he’d had when holding it in the hospital as he’d died.