Chapter 12 #2
I watched his match first, letting Breaker monitor the others.
He’d become my unofficial assistant, despite the fact that he was supposed to be part of the team.
This was all a bit remedial for the both of us, and our time was better suited for raising the level of those below us right now, considering no one knew what kind of time we had before it would be full crisis mode.
Many of our active soldiers were deployed to different stations, but at least at present, they’d not had to pull in third years or professors.
It was more important that we help reinforce our numbers.
Vann ducked below a swing, then sidestepped a follow up attack.
He moved with unexpected adeptness, and picked up the lesson quickly.
Actually, he picked it up without any stumbling at all.
He read his opponent with well-practiced ease, and I hadn’t remotely expected that after his abysmal physical performance.
He’d read my guard unusually well when we’d sparred that first day, too, now that I thought on it. Though he’d been pathetically unsuccessful at landing anything, I had to keep in mind that I was hardly a fair first opponent for anyone, but most certainly someone like him.
Interesting.
“Good work. Switch partners.” I called to the whole group.
A silver haired soldier stepped onto the mat with Vann next.
We had quite a few station-born among the recruits, though they all had characteristics in slightly different shades of grey or off-white.
Vann’s hair and eyes were completely void of any pigment though, which stood out in its own right.
He was pale with coloring as white as snow, from his hair to the silver ring that created the only demarcation between his crystal colored irises and whites of his eyes.
With his diminutive size and stature, he looked similar to a Japanese Snow Fairy—just as weak and just as nonthreatening.
But once he started his next match, once again I watched his expression and shifts in his gaze as he calculated movements in milliseconds.
He was fast, observant, and actually quite good at sparring.
The only thing I couldn’t speak to was how well he could take a punch, on the basis that none of them were connecting.
How could a man with a double digit bench press, who looked like he was working hard when he curled ten pound weights and couldn’t even manage a single pull up, be so advanced at what’s usually the most difficult skill of them all?
As I glanced around the sparring mats, no one else was pulling off that level of flawless calculations.
I gave them all five minutes, then asked them to switch again. Another five, another switch.
I didn’t get the impression he knew any of the other men in the unit, but on the extremely unlikely chance that he did, I wanted to continue to rotate his opponents and see how he adapted.
Yet, as I was coming to suspect, time and again his read on his sparring partner was near instant.
I’d grant that none of these men were impressive fighters by any stretch, but he shouldn’t have been either.
Weekly training rarely translated to observational skills on such a minute level, especially when trained with the same predictable fighting styles.
Not only was he paying close attention to body language in a way that seemed innate, but he was monitoring multiple signals at once, splitting his attention as needed and reacting in kind.
I had them switch twice more to the same results, then I decided to give him a test.
“Snow.” I accidentally slipped on his name, my mind wandering as I watched his snow fairy-esque hair flopping around with his movements.
Since we were in front of everyone and it was too late to take it back, I opted to own it like a drill sergeant demeaning his soldiers.
That was what Father would do. If you must make mistakes, play them off to look purposeful, so even failure won’t bring doubt upon you, he’d once said.
That probably applied to accidentally imagining your subordinates as fluffy animals.
I really wasn’t meant to be a leader.
I made eye contact with Vann, who was quick to figure out I meant him, to my fortune. He was the most colorless person I’d ever seen, so it wasn’t a hard connection to make.
“Join me on the mat. The rest of you, switch partners again.”
“Yes sir.” Vann nodded to his opponent as he stepped off one platform then tentatively joined me on the blue, impact regulating surface at my feet.
His gaze flickered with his nerves, and his step reflected guarded caution.
While I’d beaten him effortlessly before, that was while he was attempting to land a hit on me when I had no obligation to fight back.
Dodging and fighting may not have been to his strength, though I’d made it intentionally difficult during the evaluation.
But what about now? Could he read my movements like he had the others, or was it their sloppy technique that he was able to follow?
I didn’t preface the match with any instruction. I wanted this to be as raw as possible. So with little more than a tip of my chin, we began the exercise.
I started easy with a forward palm strike directly to his face: something anyone should be able to anticipate and follow.
All warmed up, he saw the thrust easily, and just as I suspected he would, he leaned backwards to avoid the blow, creating enough distance to prevent connection.
I went for his side, and he caught on quick, dipping left, then right, then back again.
He was dodging well, but there was an easy hole in his guard in the way he strung his movements together.
I leveraged his unbalanced stance to take out his ankle and send him onto his back.
That shouldn’t have worked. His eyes had tracked the movement, and his reaction time was fast enough to evade or counter, but he hesitated for a fraction of a second too long, giving me the chance to connect and execute a takedown.
Nerves.
He was intimidated by me more so than he was the others. While that made sense, it was unhelpful.
“Relax.” I spoke calmly. “Engage with me as you would anyone else. This isn’t an evaluation.
It’s simply an exercise.” I reassured him.
I wanted to experience his full capabilities, and learning to present a strong front even against authority was a lesson he’d need to learn.
I had to long, long ago. “Fear won’t help you in any situation, least of all in a fight. ”
With a swallow and a brief close of his eyes, he nodded, then reset. “Yes sir.”
I shook my head. “When we’re on the mat, I’m not your superior. I’m an opponent like any other. Address me by my name.”
“Yes, Sebastian.” He said, as if my name burned on his tongue, and he wanted nothing more than to spit it out. It was my own discipline that kept me from sighing loudly. If I was scary, then what would war look like to him?
“Deep breath. Now, let’s try this again.
On your guard.” Once again, I lunged forward, and once again he dodged beautifully with an unusually coordinated fluidity.
He was somehow both smoothly elegant and desperately animalistic in the same breath, as though his natural grace had been compromised by a need for survival, and there was something almost feminine about it.
We moved into a simple flow of strikes, and this time, he was fully keeping up.
Active and alert, he was following every micro-movement I offered, and now he was even dodging my more covert and crafty strikes.
Impressive.
My own attention was split between picking the next move and observing his gaze, while his attention darted about my body, rapidly processing data in real time.
He took a hit to the jaw, but then dodged the next time I attempted the same swing.
He wasn’t as flawless against my movements as he was against the others, but the longer I let him observe my strikes, repeating movements to test his recollection and adaptability, then adding in new techniques with similar lead up to test his anticipation and predictions, the more adeptly he figured out what I was going to do, fractions of a second before I did it.
Change up the process. See how quickly he adapts.
I switched my tactics from straightforward blows to feints and fake outs, leading with one punch, only to execute a knee strike instead.
I started to catch him again, the pull of his attention in opposite directions being enough to disrupt his process.
He took a punch, he took another kick. I wasn’t fighting to kill, but I was hitting him hard enough to hurt.
He wasn’t the toughest built man I’d ever faced by any stretch, but he took the blows he failed to dodge, and he never buckled.
His endurance and pain tolerance were noteworthy. He was good at dodging, but he was also good at persevering through injury.
I distracted him high, then threw a knee into his side.
This time, he anticipated the hit, and while he didn’t dodge completely, he’d caught on soon enough to dissipate the momentum by moving with the blow.
That was the turning point yet again. Vann figured me out, starting to read the switch hits and feint moves with 86% accuracy.
He picked up on the changes in my stance as I hopped back and forth between fighting styles, and he reacted accordingly.
I could still get a hit on him, but he could crouch low with unnatural flexibility, and shift his weight with surprising agility.
Limber with solid core strength, his slight build was an asset as he made himself a smaller target by turning to the side or tucking into himself.
Truly we engaged in a dance now. He hadn’t struck me back even once, but I’d become obsessed with this game of cat and mouse, simply seeing how well and for how long he could evade me.
How could he read me this well? What were my tells?
Would he be able to vocalize it if I asked, or were these reflexes and reactions an innate function of his brain chemistry, muscle memory, and thinking patterns?
He couldn’t win a fight this way, but he would be an invaluable distraction if he could evade an enemy’s strikes as well as he could evade mine.
Though we weren’t currently accounting for weapons, this foundation would be easy to build on.
“Now attack me,” I commanded, switching to the defensive without a break or a hitch.
He switched gears, and he came at me. Having now had the time to learn my techniques, I wondered how well he could transition his mindset to find the same tells in my defense as he had in my offense.
Dodging his attacks took little effort at first. He was sloppy and wholly unrefined, with a fighting style that seemed to have been developed reactively instead of with intentioned, controlled training.
I didn’t see this often among recruits these days, with so many years of Mictlan rule and structured fighting arts, but I knew at least one other man who had adopted from a similar style.
What was Vann’s background?
Remaining on the retreat, I ducked another punch, side stepped another, then he guessed my next movement when I was too late to reconsider. He at long last finally managed to connect a blow, knocking me square in the shoulder with a thrust of his palm.
This was where he was weakest. He could read me, sure, and with enough time to observe, he could even catch me.
But he couldn’t easily cause lasting or halting injury.
Compared to taking a punch from Elio, this was like a pillow fight among children.
At best, his punches stung and might leave bruising, but they wouldn’t floor an opponent or break their bones.
With such limited power, he needed to work on targeting more vulnerable points of the body, rather than places where his swing strength was little more than a mildly uncomfortable nuisance.
We could work on that though. His frame was currently slight, but in time, he’d get stronger. I wasn’t exactly a monster of a person myself. I simply knew how to leverage the strength I had.
“Now dodge.” I didn’t give him the chance to catch his bearings before I flipped the script again.
I caught him by the shoulder before he had time to get away, and I took him to the ground hard and fast. I pinned him definitively, then stood as he got to his hands and knees and heaved in lost breaths.
The sound of a single man’s applause caught in my ear, and I turned to see Breaker, along with the entirety of my unit, standing around the mat. How long had they been watching us?
“We’re ten minutes into lunch hour, but that was worth getting stuck at the back of the line for,” Breaker said, still clapping.
Ten minutes? We should still have plenty of time left on the clock…
I glanced at my CHRONO to see I’d somehow spent an entire forty minutes sparring with Vann. It was then that my brain caught up to my own heavy breathing and the sweat on my brow. I’d been so fixated on him, I’d completely lost track of… everything else.
“You’re all dismissed,” I stated, quick and authoritative. Breaker waited for everyone to disperse, while Vann got to his feet. “You’re dismissed as well,” I told Vann, who responded with a stiff salute.
“Thank you, Sebast—I-I mean, sir.”
“Sebastian is fine when we’re not in active training,” I assured him. I shouldn’t encourage such casual behavior, but I was even less comfortable being called sir. That title was for a general, not me.
A hint of pink colored his otherwise snow white cheeks, before he awkwardly took a bow and flitted off. He was truly a small bird of a person.
“That was… interesting,” Breaker said once it was just the two of us. “I guess he’s not completely worthless.”
“I guess he’s not.” I was too dumbfounded to say much else. Strange as he was, he’d certainly gotten my attention now.