Spring 1, 119
Sjal stood waiting for class to start. She had arrived early and nobody else was there yet. When she finally got tired of waiting around to wield a sword, she made her way to the back where the training yard was. She climbed over the fence and landed gently in the yard, where she found a dummy staring down at her with an expression that belied its lack of intelligence and a practice sword clenched tightly in one hand.
She laughed softly to herself, "I've been here long enough to start calling these wooden dummies my brothers and sisters in the sword."
The laughter, though, was fleeting, as soon as she began striking an imaginary enemy's "thighs" and "arms" violently in an effort to paralyze them. Only the strong-willed, would be immortalized in her thoughts. While she had no problem killing if her life depended on it, she did not wish to take the life of another person who was undeserving of being permanently ingrained into her conscience.
Time passed quickly as she practiced sword form after sword form, from single opponent-based stances to multi-attacking ones. Eventually, Sjal took a break because her biceps and shoulders were sore from overuse.
She watched the clouds from the base of a dummy, imagining what it would be like to be free to roam the heavens without being constrained by the small allegiances and associations that man was so often bound by. It would be pleasant to live any way one chooses, free from moral obligations or concern for the repercussions of every action. She sat up and tried to imagine some more illusory opponents to fight with. Her childlike imagination had no difficulty creating them.
Quickly rolling to her feet, she assumed a stance with her center of gravity lowered to the ground. With a powerful, quick thrust, she shook the dummy until it seemed ready to break free from the ground. her demeanor was half serious, half playful. she used the practice sword to attack the dummy left to the one she had initially attacked, but the movement felt strange, and she realized instantly that in a real situation, the last attacker would have time to not only flank her but also deal a fatal blow. For some reason, she had an epiphany and spun on her heel.
Finally, it started to feel like a challenge. When any of the fictitious opponents had a chance to attack Sjal, she would suddenly launch an offensive from the base of the middle dummy, trying a number of combos to hit all three enemies. However, each time she failed, either because her motion wasn't fluid or because her actions gave an enemy an opening.
She attempted to give another cut, but discovered that going beyond the slash-and-thrust attack produced an unbalanced core, meaning she wouldn't have time to counterattack if any of the three blows she delivered were parried or completely avoided. she practiced well into the late morning, until at last she gave in to tiredness and made the decision to rest to think things through more thoroughly before putting her body to the task. It had seemed like a silly whim at first, but she could already see the benefit of being able to deal with three opponents at once in combat.
All she had to do was figure out how.
Later Sjal even invited a few students to play the role of enemies for her, thinking that working with real people would help her find a weakness she had overlooked with the dummies alone. The students were eager to ask Sjal for advice. At first, the exercise seemed to benefit both parties, but Sjal soon became weary of their persistent questioning, and the students started to realize she was not interested in teaching.
They couldn't have helped her because, in any case, they were amateurs. Sparring with them was a waste of time so she sent them home and worked on the same three dummies for another day, putting her skills to use with thrusts, slashes, hilt strikes, punches, kicks, and even a head-butt once or twice to subdue the last attacker, but that only gave her a splitting headache. She was unable to find a simple answer for her problem.
Then a boy named Caleb showed up in the practice yard. This was the third time Sjal had seen the other during her time at the dojo, and just like the previous times, it was an unpleasant surprise. The boy refrained from commenting, expressing his curiosity about what Sjal had come up with in the time he had been away.
Before they could spar, their teacher showed up and announced that the next day they would be making a trip to travel through the dense, verdant forests outside the city. Wild animals among other things made it dangerous to leave the safety of civilization. It was a trip meant to bring them closer to nature.
This was a coming of age test would test whether the students would be able to survive the adventure but also bring back the head of the largest game they encountered, whether it be a man or a beast. The instructor alone would determine whether the prize was significant enough to make the participant pass.
After the announcement was made, they started their meditation training. Sjal took the time to think about a lot of things after opening her mind. Her soul was quieted more than ever by her meditation today, even though training should have been her top priority before facing Caleb and. She was floating in a sea of calm and relaxation for the moment. Even though she was aware that she was still seated in the practice yard, she could see herself in her thoughts, wielding a sword and switching between different sword forms with ease.
With a dance-like grace, her feet moved over the ground, and the earth returned the favor by giving her buoyancy in a way that seemed unattainable in reality. Her heart leaped as she leaped into the air from a kneeling stance, her weapon vanishing from sight as it moved with unnatural speed, and her fingers twitched as if they truly gripped the practice sword. The landscape changed quickly, ranging from grasslands to forests, marshes to deserts - the setting was irrelevant. For a fleeting instant, she thought she felt the "heartbeat" of her sword.
Upon opening her eyes, Sjal's lips felt strange. When she touched them, she discovered that they were grinning, and she realized that this must have been the case for a while because her jaw hurt so badly. With a calm exhalation, she stood up and forcefully struck the closest dummy's head with her sword without turning to face it. She was motivated to continue by something that was primal inside of her that had surfaced again from her introspection. With the practice sword flipped to her left hand, she spun fluidly and sliced a diagonal path across the neck of another dummy. she then bounced into the air, creating a wound on the dummy's crown, and came to her feet.
Her heart was pounding a little harder by now, but it didn't matter because her decisions were now driven by a childlike joy. She was motivated to attack in a different way by the new type of target that the next practice dummy offered. Carelessly, she brought the practice sword over her head in a swift slash that, because of its power and speed, painfully pulled on the muscles in her buttocks and core, but she didn't back down.
Breathing out in time with her movements, she cut upward and downward again, causing the shoddy wooden depiction of a man to bob violently until it cracked each time it shook. Breathing heavily from her exertion, Sjal attempted to remember why she had chosen to use that form and what it was. She hazily recalled witnessing her teacher employ a comparable tactic at a demonstration she went to at the instructor's request.
Even though Sjal could not remember the name of the form, she recalled feeling jealous of the boxy man's ability to move with such grace while she, Sjal, appeared to be moving so rigidly when brandishing a sword.
When the day finally came to an end, she sighed as she cast a last look up at the sky. she pondered this as she packed up her belongings from the dojo and left the practice yard, thinking, "tomorrow I beat Caleb and the day after, I take another step towards my destiny."
Caelb confronted her as she left. After giving Sjal a stern look, there was a brief moment of tension that verged on pure evil. The thick-necked trainee then grinned wearily and shook his head, saying, "You weren't planning on leaving before sparring me, were you?"
Even though they were only carrying practice swords, there was an air of death about both of the swordsmen as they stood facing each other at a distance of about 5 feet, their body postures alert and wary of the other's motions in case haste and feline quickness were required. Sjal shrugged her shoulders.
She knew she should have brushed off Caleb's challenge.
"You're going to lose. You've never even come close to defeating me once," Caelb added, his thick eyebrows furrowed. Sjal did not say anything, but her left hand was tightly holding the handle of her practice sword.
The two entered their stance simultaneously, precisely to the second. While Caleb leaned heavily forward on his left foot, his body similar in shape to Sjal's, giving the impression that his body had somehow become harder to hit.
Sjal was lightly set into her stance. That made her just as hard a target for an attacker to hit and allowed her to use more forceful cuts. She knew she had to make sure she kept out of her reach before counterattacking, or else he'd finish her off with a single blow. There was chaos after the students' bodies remained still for a while, resembling garden statues.
Caleb was the one who moved faster, and in an instant they had bridged the gap between them, meeting at a middle ground that was suitable for both of them. That fact infuriated Sjal, and she became uncharacteristically careless as she pulled out her weapon and used her sword to weakly slash at the inside of Caleb's left thigh.
Just as she had anticipated, Caleb countered with an almost reflexive kneel, leaned aside, and drew her sword in a rising cut that, if it had been a real sword, could have split Sjal from the crotch up. "No!" Sjal thought to herself.
Sjal spun out of the way and whacked Caleb on the arm with her sword as she did so. It wasn't a strong hit but Caleb growled as the first blow went to Sjal, sending the larger trainee toppling onto his back. The sudden shift from attacking to defending proved to be too much for Caleb. Happiness was short-lived, as Caleb leapt to his feet and began bouncing up and down as if nothing had happened.
Sjal scanned the battlefield, looking for anything she could exploit, never taking her eyes off her opponent. The outcome was a little depressing. They had both decided that the fight should take place in an area that is neutral and out of sight of onlookers… however, their chosen location seemed to do a better job of remaining neutral than the others. The ground was fairly firm, though a little muddy from the morning drizzle, and the grass was at ankle height. The rocks she could see were deeply embedded in the somewhat muddy ground, and there were no trees to hide behind. When Caleb attacked with newfound vigor, Sjal thought there must be something.
Sjal dropped to one knee at the exact moment the other boy did, for some reason able to predict Caleb's move. They drew, hacked at one another in a rising motion, then tried again, this time with a downward stroke that caused them to both sheathe and glare at one another while taking shallow breaths.
Sjal winced as pain shot through her jaw; she had been struck on the ascending cut and had forgotten that a proficient swordsman would easily defeat her every single day of the week. Caleb knelt down again, sensing Sjal's concern, and this time Sjal was unable to keep up with Caleb's rapid changes in body language.
Caleb's practice sword snapped free from its sheath with two swift slashes, becoming blurry as soon as its wielder launched his attack. Even as she took the practice sword's hilt in two hands and deflected both slashes, Sjal sensed the other trainee was not being entirely sincere in his swordplay.
The broad shouldered Caleb rolled along the ground like a gigantic bowling ball until he was facing Sjal's back. Sjal's body instinctively adjusted as she twisted on her left heel, disrupting Caleb's next attack with the final thrust to her right hand, completing her own defense. She didn't need to look to know a second attack was going to come.
Caleb became enraged and threw his shoulder into Sjal's chest, sending the girl reeling through the mud. Caleb then let out a bellow of frustration. The muscular boy, not one to let an opportunity pass him by, lunged to finish off her opponent with a final blow, only to stumble when his foot slid into the foot-sized hole Sjal had made in the mud, unbeknownst to him.
Then, there was silence. All that fighting just to arrive at a tie.
