“Awake? Oh, Gawd . . . Aeson, cut it out,” I say with a pained smile, slapping his arm lightly.
“She’s beating you already? When did this start?” Ker chuckles as I open my mouth and pretend-frown at him, holding back a smart retort. Yeah, I’m still not entirely comfortable joking around with Aeson’s friends, who are also my former Atlantean Instructors and Fleet superiors, even though our positions are now reversed.
Meanwhile Xelio nods at Aeson with a little smile, without making eye contact with me, and helps Erita—a curvy Atlantean girl, taller and more muscular than Oalla, with medium brown skin, very short metallic hair, light hazel eyes, and full sensuous lips—carry a large chest filled with equipment, setting it on the bench closest to us and the sparring floor.
“I know you have a well-equipped gym here, Kass, but we brought some additional things,” Oalla says with a crafty look at Aeson and me, moving another bulky item, this one a sports gym bag, onto the long bench. “And this—you might call it my personal collection.”
Aeson watches them begin to unpack, while Keruvat stands next to us and looks at me. “Gwen, we’re going to begin warm-ups.”
I look at Aeson. “What about the weights? Shouldn’t I do that first?”
“What do you think, Ker?” Aeson says. “I’m concerned about her general endurance in this gravity.”
“Warm-ups first,” Ker says. “I think she’ll last longer if we stretch, do weapons training, and then do the weights.”
Aeson nods. “All right, let’s do it that way today.”
And we begin.
The warm-up exercises are familiar because we’ve been doing them in Combat classes for months. The only thing that’s different is the energy-leaching, ever-present heavy sensation in all my limbs caused by the stronger gravity.
Also, it occurs to me for one terrifying moment, as I do various knee bends, squats, and stretch reps—I’m surrounded by all these amazing athletic hotshot Atlanteans with super-toned bodies and impossible skills. Holy crap! Oalla is on my right side and Erita on my left, while Keruvat, Xelio, and Aeson are lined up in the row ahead of us, perfect masculine bodies strung tense as strings and yet pliant with grace, as they move in tandem. . . .
Finally, it’s time for weapons training.
Everyone looks at me. Aeson meanwhile stands aside with his arms folded, observing all. I notice his serious expression is back.
“So how does this work?” I say timidly, standing in the middle of the sparring floor.
“Gwen Lark, we dance with you. Who wants to go first?” Oalla says with a wicked smile and a wink at me. I get it; she’s trying to make me comfortable.
“Did someone mention dancing?” Xelio steps forward, flipping back his long mane of midnight hair. He gives me a long intense look accompanied by a playful smile, then glances at Aeson. “Allow me the honor, Kass.”
Aeson says nothing, and his expression does not change. He merely nods.
Xel responds with a slight mocking bow, and his dark unblinking gaze turns to me. “Swords,” he says, walking over to the equipment chest, where he retrieves two long slim training blades made of wood, with blunt edges. “We begin with baby swords.”
Xelio and I exchange a few basic blows and parries, very similar to what we’ve been doing for months on the Fleet ark-ship when Xel helped me train. In a few seconds, Xel knocks the sword out of my hand, and the wooden thing goes flying with a clatter against the polished floor.
“Great . . .” I mumble, as my face flushes with embarrassment. “At this rate I just might be able to cause some harm in the Games arena—to innocent bystanders, or the floorboards.”
Aeson’s expression is grim indeed.
But Xel calmly motions for me to retrieve the sword. “Pick it up,” he says.
I do as I’m told. “At least I can spar okay. . . . But this? Ugh. . . .” I say with a bitter smile. “Admit it, you’ve never had a worse swords student than me.”
Xelio makes a sarcastic sound. “Likely not. But, it doesn’t matter. What I’m going to teach you today is not good swords fighting skills—that would take far too long for someone at your level of abilities to master, and you would never improve sufficiently in time for the Games. Instead, we’ll practice more unconventional methods involving bladed weapons.”
“Such as what?”
“Such as temporarily disarming your opponent. Confusing and surprising your opponent. And finally, using your sword for something other than fighting.”
“How exactly is all that going to help me?”
“In the arena,” Xel says, “it will give you just enough time so that you can begin to run.”
On that scary note, he starts showing me some moves that I have never seen before. We clash our sword blades together, sliding them close near the hilts and Xel shows me how to twist the grip so that the opponent’s grip becomes unsustainable.
“Move in closer and turn your hand like this inward, so that your opponent’s wrist starts turning inward also,” Xel tells me, breathing close to my cheek, while everyone watches us. “Even the most muscular, strong hand cannot maintain this kind of bend properly, because it is completely wrong.”
“It’s really weird and uncomfortable,” I say, straining hard against his rock-solid grip, and maintaining eye contact with his dark fierce gaze.
“Keep turning it,” Xelio says in a hard voice. “In moments both of us will no longer be able to sustain it. As soon as you feel the opponent start to lose the grip, you push your hand down, hard, to extricate yourself from the block—”
As he says it, I feel his hold on the weapon loosen. At once I push down, and suddenly Xelio’s sword goes flying while my own is still in my hand, and my arm is down at my side.
“Good!” he says, as I stand panting. “And now, what did I tell you you’re supposed to do?”
“Run?” I say.
“Correct. You never continue to engage your opponent if you can help it, even if you seem to have the advantage. Always abandon the fight and run.”
I nod. “Got it.”
Xel narrows his eyes at me. “So why are you still standing?”
“Huh?” I say.
“Run!”
I make a small squeal of surprise, because in seconds Xelio has retrieved his sword, and now he is literally chasing me around the dojo.
Oh. My. God. . . .
I run and stumble toward the wall, past benches, past equipment, while Oalla claps her hands and urges us on. “Go, Gwen! Go, Xel!”
Keruvat and Erita start clapping also, continuing with hoots and whistles, loudly in time.
Only Aeson stands silent and motionless. . . .
As I fling myself forward, I continue to squeal in a crazed hyper-state. I cross the length of the room, double back, retreat behind an equipment barrier, and yet Xelio is right behind me. Gaining on me, he slaps my side and my rear end with the flat of the wooden blade. And I mean he slaps me hard! It hurts!
“Too slow!” he exclaims in strange cold anger, striking me again. “Move! Move! And—you are dead, Gwen! You cannot let yourself be caught! Bah!”
“Ouch!” I cry out.
But he has cornered me against the wall, and as I try to strike his hand away with my sword, he comes around and grips my other arm, twists me, and pushes me down. . . .
I find myself sliding onto the slippery floor, ending up on my back, while Xel falls on top of me. We tussle momentarily, but now his knee is jabbing against my ribs, and the tip of his blade is pressed painfully against my vulnerable throat.
“Enough!”
Aeson’s voice comes hard, and the next moment I feel the lightening of Xelio’s weight against my body, as Aeson grips him from the back, and roughly pulls him off me.
Everyone in the room goes silent. The clapping stops, and they stare, while Aeson and Xel stand above me, facing each other. Aeson’s hand is still holding Xelio’s upper arm.
Xelio is breathing fast, and his eyes are narrowed.
Aeson’s face is a dark terrible mask. He too is breathing fast, and yet there’s no apparent reason for it—unlike Xel who’s been exercising with me, Aeson has been standing still all this time.
So, why is he breathing hard?
The long moment, the strange silence . . . it is unbearable.
And then Aeson releases Xel’s arm slowly, without breaking their stare. “Don’t touch her like that,” he says in a very quiet voice of a serpent.
Xel blinks. And then he inclines his head just as slowly, and says, “Understood.”
It is then that I too finally understand what just happened.
Aeson is jealous.
I can see it in the entire stance of his body, the possessive way he stands between me and Xelio, the strange elevated breathing, the sudden bizarre reaction to our physical contact during the exercise. . . .
I pick myself up off the floor and stand up between them. “Hey!” I say. “What’s wrong? I’m okay, Aeson! Aeson?”
I place my hand on Aeson’s arm, and he shudders suddenly, as though coming awake.
He glances at me, and then back at Xel, and shakes his head. “Enough,” he says again, this time more mildly. “Enough of this. I don’t like this.”
“But—” I say. “This is kind of important! I think Xel was only showing me what might happen during the Games—”
“He’s right,” Xel interrupts me softly. “I overstepped my bounds.” And then he glances back at Aeson with a strange, hard-to-read expression. “My apologies, Kass.”
Aeson continues staring at him, then finally breaks the lock of his gaze and says, “No need. . . . I overreacted.”
Oalla makes a whistling noise and exhales loudly. I notice she exchanges a troubled glance with Keruvat, and looks back at Aeson, then me.
Erita steps forward. “Look, you may not like this, and neither does Xel, or Gwen, or any of us. I get it. And yeah, you don’t want him touching ‘your woman,’ I get that too.”
At the mention of “your woman” Aeson blinks.
“But the reality is,” Erita continues in a calm solid tone, “your woman is going to get mauled and she’s going to be beaten and be all kinds of hurt, and yeah, she is going to die unless we help her. Xel is being hard on her because everyone is going to be hard on her in the Games.”
“I know,” Aeson says softly.
Erita slaps her hands together, rubbing her palms. “In that case, let’s get back to it, Kass. Big breath now. All right? My turn.”
He nods silently.
And Erita turns to me. “Gwen, it’s time for you to learn advanced defense techniques of the Green Quadrant. Swords and guns and nets and cords are all good when you can use them. But when you’re cornered and there’s nowhere to run, your only hope for survival lies in knowing how to defend yourself with the body armor that’s already on you. And when that fails, you must know how to use whatever’s around you as a shield.”
Everyone makes room for us while Erita and I take the sparring floor. Erita places an equipment bag down on the floor between us and opens it.
“Go on, look inside,” she tells me. “You already know most of what’s in there from your basic Combat classes.
I bend and rummage through the bag. I find several vests made of silvery metallic material, in addition to hand and arm sleeve-like braces, pants, shorts, leg-braces, neck guards, and ski-mask style helmets. There are also wrist guard bands, special reinforced gloves, and even protective socks. Everything is made of that same Atlantean silvery fabric which I know is an orichalcum-based alloy and called viatoios. Most of the shielding is made from it, and it can stop bullets and blades.
“This type of common body armor is permitted to be worn underneath the official uniform of the Games. You may wear any of these protective pieces, as long as they do not show.”
I nod. “Okay. What about the actual uniforms, what are they like?”
Erita bends down and digs out a two-piece folded outfit. She shakes out the loose long-sleeved shirt and pants. “This should look familiar,” she says.
I see a plain off-white two-piece that looks like a service uniform, or even a military uniform. “Fleet uniform?”
“As you can see, very similar.” Erita turns the shirt front and back so I can see the button-up collar and the seams. I notice a large black circle right in the middle of the back, and a smaller one on the left breast of the shirt in the front. “This particular piece is from last year’s Games, and the color white is the Entrepreneur Category designation.”
I take the shirt from her, running my fingers against the thick orichalcum-treated fabric. “So the Games uniforms are different colors?”
“Oh, yes,” Erita says with a snort. “And believe me, they make a huge deal out of these colors every year so they reflect just the right amount of light—not too little, not too much, and yet the hues must be slightly different each year. There’s a whole industry that makes proper Games-compliant color fabrics—really cutthroat. Anyway. . . . The colors are very important because they help the Games audience know the Categories of the participants at a glance. There are four colors plus white, and two Categories share each color. Let’s see if I can remember all the color combinations, okay—”
“What about this black circle?” I ask.
“That’s the Category symbol or logo,” Keruvat says, from the sidelines. I turn around to glance at him.
“Right.” Erita looks in his direction also. “Okay, help me remember, daimon, what are the symbols and colors? I always seem to forget half of them.”
“White is for the most rudimentary skill Categories,” Oalla says. “And that would be Entrepreneur and Vocalist. Their symbols are a solid circle and a mouth, respectively.”
“A mouth?” I raise my brows.
“Yes, a Vocalist uses their mouth, so the parted lips. Not very original, but then none of them are. Incidentally, these are very ancient insignias,” Ker says.
“Then we have Red, and the two Red Categories are Warrior and Athlete. Their symbols are a fist and a weird little star-shaped person figure. Next, there’s Green, with Entertainer and Animal Handler. And their symbols respectively are an eye and an animal head.”
“Am I supposed to be memorizing these?” I say anxiously.
Erita makes another snort sound. “Don’t worry, by the time we’re done with you, you’ll know them by heart—and so will I, at long last, since I’ll be repeating them with you.”
“Okay, moving along,” Oalla says. “We have Yellow. What are the Yellow Categories again, Ker? Xel? Anyone?” She glances at me with a sarcastic smile. “You’d think I would know my own Yellow Quadrant designations here, but I hate the Games of the Atlantis Grail so much that I manage to dismiss all things related to them from my mind. Yes, it’s quite intentional.”
“Yellow Categories are Inventor and Artist. The Artist symbol is a spiral . . . the Inventor symbol is a crescent with a dot on top—or wait, is it a bowl with a circle inside it?” Keruvat drawls.
“Yes, something like that,” Oalla wrinkles her brows in effort.
“Finally the Blue Categories are Scientist and Technician,” Keruvat says. “And their symbols are an atom cloud and a sine wave.”
“Yes, that’s it.” Erita looks at them. “Are we done?” And then she turns back to me. “All right, Gwen, now that we’ve gotten the uniform colors and other branding junk out of the way, let’s get back to the armor and shielding.”
The others once again grow silent, while Erita picks up her instruction. “What will you do, Gwen, if you are cornered and you have no weapons left, and your armed opponent is about to kill you?”
“Um . . . I die?” I mutter with a little sad smile.
“Bah!” Erita exclaims, shaking her head at me in frustration. “Not necessarily. You may be unarmed, but you still have options. You always have options.”
I fold my arms at my chest. “I’m listening.”
And then Erita nears me
and takes hold of my t-shirt sleeve. “You have this,” she says, looking into my eyes with her pale hazel ones.
“Huh?”
“Your shirt—your clothing, your underclothing, any of your body armor underneath, your pants, your socks, your shoes—”
“Your shoelaces,” Xelio says suddenly.
I glance at him, and he’s smiling.
Then I quickly glance at Aeson, but he appears calm and does not react at all, only watches me without blinking. I notice however that a shadow smile has appeared at the corners of his mouth at Xel’s comment.
Okay, phew . . . the tension’s dissipated.
But Erita ignores the amusing aside. “Yes, shoelaces,” she repeats. “And also your hair ties or clips or bands, the buttons on your shirt, and any junk you might have in your pockets that can be strategically thrown. And finally, your hair itself, if it’s long and can be used as a distraction to flip into your enemy’s face—”
“Wow,” I say.
“Now, assuming that whatever you have on you is all unusable, and you’re running out of options,” Erita continues. “What else is there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think! What’s all around you?”
I frown and suddenly recall the weird moment, months ago during the Earth Union and Terra Patria hostage situation on board the Imperial Command Ship Two, when we were stuck in a hallway with nothing to protect us from enemy firepower. That’s when Aeson started ripping the ship’s wall panels apart to create levitating barriers that saved our lives. . . .
“You can use wall materials, if they’re orichalcum,” I say.
Erita nods. “Yes, good! And even if they’re not, and you think you have a chance of breaking the walls around you, take the chance, do it! Use your feet to kick in wood or gypsum, rip off a chunk of paneling and use it as a shield in a hurry! What else is there?”
“Floorboards,” I say. Yeah, I think I’m getting the hang of it now.
“Sure!” Erita stamps her foot against the wooden floor underneath us. “In the coming days as we train, I’ll show you how to quickly test the materials in the environment around you for defensive feasibility. Some walls like stone cannot be broken, while others are easily chipped or cracked and may be used. Same thing for floors, doors, posts, low-hanging ceiling panels and light fixtures, anything and everything around you!”